Home rule has a price, especially when you have 500 plus municipalities. Cops per capita and classroom sizes are not outrageous or out of the ordinary. The administrative overlay is. How many chiefs of police compared to NYC which has a similar population to the garden state. School administration duplication is also over the top because of home rule. Unfortunately merging and regionalizing has been an ugly process here. Look at the games when Wallington and Carlstadt were discussing regionalizing with East Rutherford. It’s still about who is the king dog and who is willing to give up on some levers of power.
or just watch the July 4th Parade. Do HoHoKus, Allendale, Ridgewood, Midland Park, etc. all need duplicates of the same multi-million dollar fire trucks?
If you knew anything about firefighting or the fire service you wouldn’t have asked that question. Try to educate yourself before you make such foolish comments please.
8:00am is all for regionalizing the Fire Dept until his house burns down.
Then he is first on line to sue RW for providing inadequate services.
Lots of towns have volunteer fire departments. They do fine.
James. Please educate us. Why do all these towns need multi-million dollar fire trucks?
If regionalization was done properly, it would save a lot of money and it wouldn’t reduce service. However, there’s New Jersey regionalization, which regionalizes in theory, but still maintains all the unnecessary management that it was meant to dissolve. This is why there are never any savings.
The truth is most volunteer fire departments rig the bidding system to get the fire trucks they want. Most elected officials are afraid of limiting the purchase of those toys because the department is volunteer. If you want to see what trucks are actually needed to fight fires look in Paterson and NYC.
http://www.state.nj.us/sci/pdf/Firetrucks%20Final%20Report.pdf
Sorry I at July 7, 2017 at 1:48 pm
It’s not my job to educate you. Take a ride to your local fire Department and speak to the firefighters there. And while you are there get yourself an application to become a Volunteer Firefighter.
The response time is critical and having a paid fire department is the key. I think it would be logical for the paid fire fighters to have dual responsibility such as staffing the ambulance (I know they show up on medical assist calls with an engine ) and supplementing the police with traffic duty, just like a special officer. They would be in town ready to respond with the equipment if there’s a fire.
For those in other towns complaining about fire engine equipment costs, would you be willing to get up in th middle of the night to rush into a burning building? I say give the volunteers whatever apparatus they want. They work for free