Union County, New Jersey has a populaiton of 526,426 and has been under one-party hegemony for 15 years. Here are the results:
DEBT
DEBT SERVICE
DEBT SERVICE BREAKDOWN
TAXE
Union County: Debt and Taxes
DEBT DEBT SERVICE DEBT SERVICE BREAKDOWN DEBT DEBT SERVICE DEBT SERVICE BREAKDOWN
Posted by Gene Albritton on February 21, 2011 at 2:28 pm
Take a look at the commentary regarding Union County in the December 2010 Fitch rating of certain UCIA bonds (at http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20101207007229/en/Fitch-Rates-Union-County-Improvement-Authority-NJs ) :
“The tax base is sizable at $24 billion or $149,799 per capita, and has yet to experience a contraction during this current economic cycle. However, data available to Fitch indicates the county housing foreclosure rate is 214% of the national average.”
Fitch doesn’t mention the County’s overall property tax situation, just the existing debt levels which don’t bother Fitch since the County Bonds are entitled to the first dollars taxed and the County pledges to raise taxes if it needs to.
But with the County’s tax burdens being as onerous they are, it is not surprising that Union County’s residents are suffering to the point where they lose their homes MORE THAN TWICE as often on average as other US counties.
(P.S. John –Check with Peter Scull on this latest outrage:
The 2011 Union County Golf fee schedule now allows non-county resident to pay only a total $50 more a year to benefit from the lower fees and to reserve times equal to residents. As a resident, however, I pay currently many thousands in property taxes to live in this County, and now will almost certainly be crowded out by golfers from Middlesex and other counties. This is no doubt all part of an effort to render the County golf operations profitable for KenperSports and to salvage the failing golf operations “tunaround” plan the County Manager instituted in 2008-2009.
But the effect of this latest move will be effectively to complete the destruction of what was for many decades a golf program primarily for the benefit of the County’s residents who paid and are paying for the courses with their tax dollars — and who received and will receive no property taxes on the land devoted to those County golf courses. Clearly, the Freeholders in approving this new fee schedule had no regard whatsoever of the interests of County resident golfers whom they claim to represent.
And if this plan to open up and fill the County’s courses with non-County golfers made any sense at all, it would have made more sense to try it in 2008, BEFORE Oak Ridge Golf Course was closed and destroyed.)