New Jersey Municipal Consolidation

[Cubby]

While I agree that New Jersey has too many towns, I don't think the number should be reduced below 300. Most people want local control of their towns, and places of over 50,000 are too large. Getting rid of county government hasn't caused any problems that I know of in CT/MA/RI, but that decision led to an increase of local gov't units, not a decrease.

Neighboring states all have average town sizes larger than New Jersey's 14,866. But they aren't much larger.

Connecticut has 169 Towns and Cities: Average population in 2000: 20,151
Rhode Island has 39 Towns and Cities: Average population in 2000: 26,879
Massachusetts has 351 Towns and Cities: Average population in 2000: 18,088
New York has 994 Towns and Cities. Average population in 2000: 19,091 (without NYC: 11,045)

Pennsylvania at first glance seems to be 2,561 (cities/townships/boroughs) which equaled only 4,795 on average in 2000. I'm not very familiar with the PA method of organizing local units (1st class, 2nd class?) so that could be a misleading number. Of course PA and NY are much bigger in land area so they might not be the best comparisons to NJ.