municipal management maybe that's what we should ask you if you have an interesting story i have always since high school one of the be a witness had a project in school where we were to look at the  what did you want to be and you had to write a report and i went through the list of occupational titles and i found one the time the ministry and i looked at it and i wrote a report and from that day for wanted to be an administrator my mother was a community activist and i knew i wanted to serve the public service and i wanted to find a way of doing the administrative sounded like a perfect perfect match for me but then you had to figure out what really was that's right and how to get there and how to get there right and i've actually had the opportunity to always be in government and in fact it's got some time in the military and had the unique experience in the military to be part of a civil affairs unit and my job responsible if there was public administration officer leave or not even in the military if they would find a position that related to public administration so i've always been able to find a way to kind out and i did some community service and hold community meetings and provide services to the community in terms of pride in getting them connected with services rather than with some now i've met you first when we worked on a project that part of community affairs we're going to be talking to mark by first increasing fears later did looking at good management and how do we judge what is good management and you were very much involved in finances in franklin occurred to me at the time that that's a really important what is it skill understanding and you were really seen as the person who had the insight into how towns manage their finances or didn't mean that right so how did they how did that happen i mean that's a real professional skill what i did my first interview for a job as an assistant administrator and i didn't get the job but the administrator called me back again and we had a long conversation about what are the skills that i would need in order to kind of become administrator something and one of the things that he mentioned was finance so what i did was i begin to take the courses in finance and really got into learning as much as i could about finance went to my manager and said look i want to volunteer my time to work on budgets and work through that and that's how i really got to do my material i mean one thing that i always encourage particularly young people getting at the field the field is we need more people in that area that have those skills for communities a lot of people think because you have or a budget officer that you don't really need to know about that and that's probably the biggest mistakes that you can make because you've got to be able to understand numbers but understand what are the impacts and what they mean and if you're a manager and you don't have that understanding you're not doing the best for your community and i think that's one of the things that i think i join about working in this field is  the things that i try to press upon elected officials is to do the long term planning and it came from actually the study which we did was you know in new jersey there is a lack of the long term financial planning for communities and i think that's really an important piece in a way it's an interesting example of how a law can really undermine long term planning because you might remember as mayor that you had to list like this capital projects over the next six years and so people would fill out the list and send it in without having any really understanding of what you mean by capital projects what you mean by planning in that that involves money and you got it we're doing it right but most towns just simply did what the law said and that's not very helpful that is absolutely particularly mayor of capital we had conversations about that because there is a form that says you have to fill it out and the for in fact is just a planning document and everyone understands that it takes a bond or we're going to actually initiate those people spend very little time dealing with those and that is a mistake you really need to do the long term planning which is one of the things that princeton been doing since you came here when you think in the newspaper about the projects that you are undertaking that's an absolute that's one of the things that we've been working really hard it is really looking at doing a comprehensive long range plan for our  capital and really building the way we do capital market over the long term like one of the things that we're doing is looking at asset management facilities looking harder so he's doing a long range plan for those so that we're planning for major  components of our facilities when they will run into useful life so we're planning early and we're not hit with huge expenses in out years and we plan for those in the future before we get too wonky i think i w then they're actually doing these things and the truth of the matter is as well they're not doing those things that is the job of the to spend ministries so you talk a little bit about what you do and why you're there and how do you work in concert with the elected officials well i like the kind of break it down for people in two ways or is really the kind of policy side which is what what direction this is time going in and that's a lot of what the elected officials do really give the direction and then there ministration really making those policies take action and that's really what my job is to make sure that the policy takes moves into action steps so you know a lot of things what i do in terms of  the ministration day to day personnel ensuring we have the appropriate people and the talent to get the job done the projects done monitoring the finances and making sure on a daily basis that you know we're moving in the right direction organization chart organizational leaders myself i have a deputy administrator and then the partner heads and it's interesting in princeton there's an interesting kind of organizational structure that came out of consolidation  there's what we call department heads and they're in charge of major organizational fire department police department and then underneath them what we call our management team and our management team are people who have specialized  together and you mentioned well mark shields came in here after consolidation so what was the good side of what was the bad side of that i think the best part of being new into consolidation with fresh eyes to look at the organization moving forward that part about it is i mean i did miss a lot of the details about what happened during which is good bad but one of the things as i moved in the organization is the opportunity we now have a real a new organization it doesn't happen very often in local government doesn't change make such a radical change in the organization so we have a new organization and we have an opportunity now to do organizational development within the organization one of the advantages of going through consolidation also is we have an extremely talented workforce  in which we talked about you know how do we see ourselves as the administrative function of the government moving forward from there we developed a mission statement for and this is just for the administration of the government that we are to have many are and what we expect of ourselves and we develop what we call our pillars and our vision statement moving forward and then we move that to our management team and sat down with them and had a mini retreat with them to talk about those issues and really the point of that is to say we want to let people know who we are as an organization that we're a great organization we're striving for excellence and to put that in front for both to the citizens and to ourselves so that we can achieve really bring this organization moving it fo quite different one of things that i enjoy about prince and it's a very very open organization an open government a lot of citizen participation i thought i had a lot it was great about it that's what i realized is that the involvement really creates better solutions you know sometimes it takes time you get more people involved but the other day i think we've come up with some very great solutions because of that that process and i would say that's probably the biggest difference is really good citizen participation in government my second question has to do with the canteens now you're immersed or county which is a totally different animal from essex county which is a lot more have to deal with the politics of the environment and there's definitely a different environment i've been in i says county new county the rough and tumble i mean it's a different it's a different way you have to operate in the way  those pressures change how you kind of manage government i've found working with mercer county it's been a lot smoother process it's not such a kind of rough and tumble kind of process which i enjoy i mean i question as you sort of get is that mercer county leans toward the administrative proficiency correct model with politics i don't listen to it w you know you look at the finances about how how does the town understand why it is able to use in effect spend less money on you know simple administrations drop in the by from the total tax bill of the consolidation all of those stations came from personal cost in terms of just merging them as poker the one thing if you look at those numbers and it's about two point seven million dollars net savings that does not include a number of savings that we achieve that are ministre if there's a number of things that came with consolidation that saved money including one of the things is really a change in attitudes towards finance and one is moving towards  not capitalizing employee cost and again what we did was we cost that once were being paid through the capital bond being in debt more now consolidation which you don't see in those numbers on a daily basis that really i think are trying to the one term impacts of the consolidation but that comes up in the annual operating budget right then so for you if you think about other towns that like consolidate there really is duplications that costs money that people will say oh it doesn't make any difference if we combined we still need the same amount of space th and it doesn't fit every community and i think people should do the analysis in time and whether you can consolidate your community a lot of cases and i believe there's a lot of opportunity out there out there for consolidation because there is there's a lot of duplication of services out there that can be combined one of the unique things here is that was recognized early was a lot of shared services that were already being done in princeton but there are definitely words in that i'll just kind of think where there could be some true sort of savings but you have to have the willingness i guess to make some tough personal choices it's if you want to be there we have less people working for us we have left we have and so i'm very interested in making sure that that they come out and out together and intact and happy and feeling the feeling good about this and that's something that takes time one of my questions was about the police department because that's the big ticket item  right twenty four hours a day seven days a week three hundred sixty five days under current law and it ended up here is just because i know a lot of the people who are in the police department that we have a there's a lot of transition there so there's been hiring and retire said and how is that especially in this national environment where their police are under so much scrutiny how how were we to know how was that how was that transition into a consolidated department working from your perspective your management perspective this is one of the areas in which when i came to princeton i was really surprised at how well the police department has transitioned to me that would be the place in which you would have the most problems but the leadership there is done an outstanding job of really transitioning people creating a new culture that that's what has to happen in the police department is really change the culture so that you have one to two cultures are about one  and that has happened in the police department now i think we've gotten past where we have a kind of a one organization now we're dealing with the challenge of the workforce we have a number of members of the workforce will be retiring in the next completeness quite a bit one that's great for the town because it will bring us to the numbers of which in terms of savings that we anticipated but that makes the challenge in terms of how do we make sure that we have we're getting people the ri individuals and positions and moving forward so that's really been the task that we've been working on for the last year or so is really developing a plan for succession in the police department to use the word we align and i  think that impression is that the police not not just princeton but in general the police department operate on their own and don't see themselves as part of this service or  out i like the way you kind of phrase it which is it is quite different from any organization i've been in where that the police chief here is part of the management the department head team really part and we work together not only even  just day to day operations he's involved when we have our department had meetings not just in police matters but he hopes to deal with you know problems in other departments and it's very unique and that's one thing i will say here and i've been when they need advice they go to limits traffic will definitely the police department so there's a lot of integration of the police in day to day operations versus in most areas there's a police department in the over here and they do their thing it seems to be in human services because we have people on perfect that it's really amazing the young people that are taking leadership but also a new way of looking at how you can solve human and just just agreement since we really are supposed to focus on new jersey broadly we we do like to give examples of what happens in new jersey so just princeton maybe you could just say a little something about how the department of community affairs or the division of local government services has any relevance to what you do in princeton we hear that there's not much outreach today anymore under the christie model  very self contained but do you have have to make efforts to stay in touch with them or were they influence the laws and the policies and practices influence what happens in princeton i will say so i really really don't have that interaction and we've understand it's been coming for a number of years and got it we know what it is and it's the regulatory body the one thing that that has changed also has done a lot more telling  has what to do the best practices checklist of things which are there ok but it's not the best way to improve in a civil services because we're very rigid what we should be is promoting  some of those best practices in different ways than just the checklists because those are effective you know so we would we've had a mild winter so far what kind of if this continues if we're lucky enough to have a mild winter what kind of budgetary impact of that and i always look towards the future so whatever i would like to see mild winters and my philosophy is what you do if you take that reviewing borrowing and so it all of that has to be reviewed by the division of local government are how much actually all they care about is that you have the six year plan you fill up that you ok we're going you know above and beyond that and there are maybe there are maybe one question on the checklist that says do you do it other than that and that's i think one of the weaknesses of the right and i've you know done research in other states where they take a more proactive role in providing assistance tools for local government to do things like they're really promoting it where we can see that new jersey  really it's a it's a matter of who your manager administrator is in your elected officials are they promoting or pushing this long term way could i bring up one other topic because i've been working on this in new jersey although we have a counties required ethics training finds that are meaningful assistance puts people for people to call it their concern does princeton do anything on its own on ethics training and is that part of what you see is we don't typically do individual training on it but that's something that's really important to me in terms of making sure that we your conflict of interest and again i think that's something that's just kind of part of the culture already here which is a nice thing right because i do know that the elected officials have an ethics statement that they sign but resonates with me is is if you use the word excellence several times and clearly you're you're leading us in that direction and we're so glad you took the time to come and visit with thank you they have open invitation to come any time  glad that mark is here today to give us a broader picture of what's happening with municipalities some of the research that he's done and he comes out of knowing municipalities very well as deputy director of the division of local government services and a lot of other positions in state government and he's friends with municipalities and mayors and so on but it also is appropriate to have him here as we celebrate the third anniversary  so well i see i have this summer this past summer of two thousand two thousand and fifteen i celebrated in some way forty years of public service in new jersey working with local governments  of the mara school district which was the only district that was combined for racial reasons no more time to morris township it's a big deal back in the seventy's and when i went to college i didn't know what i wanted to do my family was were or accounting major because i did that in high school and i said ok that may be a pathway to other things and i took it all back to the cold introduction to urban affairs with a great faculty member there by name of dave amidon and i fell in love with it he said this is what i want to public ministration from n y u going tonight and that will lead to other positions in man all of his assistant administrator an acting administrator washington township in bergen county his business administrator for four and a half years then down to wildwood and the tour of the first appointed business administrator really didn't last as one is right one but it had its own unique challenges there and then leaving a position straighter things changed they had some skills that i thought that they thought were going to be useful or develop some new skills and public policy technology and my management skills worked out well and i wound up staying there for twenty five years spending the last fourteen as deputy director of the division and sometimes actor director so i left the state government in two thousand and twelve where i have to a little time of and i became the blasting local government research center and that's been a place where i can do and support my colleagues in local government still work on state government policy issues health professional associations i do a little consulting on the side and you know how waves are questions that anybody has about local government and you have the answers i if i can i'll make them up off like a map just to see if we should do a little promo do you work with the people who do the legislat government general but sort of if you want to compare yourself to other places what's right there what's happened is that they've taken this great resources called the legislative their data book which was this be by fourteen very meticulously compiled by  free they've got a couple years worth of the most recent years of data in there and they're working to load back information it's got a lot of municipal government information property tax information political information there's a lot of information there that's very very useful and if you just do away with search for new jersey center for government services or n j c g s will probably get you there you'll find a link there for the new jersey patch the great recession really caused some serious financial economic problems we still have our challenges to our municipalities in new jersey or very unique creatures and we're really unlike most other states dr caprio and i did a report two years ago called size size may not be the issue it was addressing the question that i had when i was with the state because one of my responsibilities was i was the guy in charge consolidation and if you look at for the twenty years that i was kind of in charge of that the fact that we only consolidated that happened it's hard it's and i was fortunate actually is that i've lived in princeton for a little while and i had left princeton in about a year or two after and of princeton the consolidations commission that  impact we have foreclosures property tax collection rates dropped however from the municipal government standpoint there's two aspects to it one there's the technical accounting side said ok we're getting all the money that we're supposed to generally yes because when people don't pay their property taxes the legal process is that there is a lien placed long on the property and that lien gets sold and there's always an active market for those so we did ok there but that doesn't translate well to the problems that residents were facing because jobs were lost because they were they lost their homes there was a wad of pain there and property taxes were high and one of the things we found that that dr caprio and i found when we  data that talked about the the pace of income of growth in personal income versus property taxes and one of the things we found and when you think about it it actually makes a lot of sense but the numbers definitely show it is that during the two thousands of if you started you know two thousand and four two thousand and five property taxes were going up at a relatively the steep at her steep grades they were going up you know six seven eight  percent here but starting with two and up until two thousand and seven incomes were generally tracking that was always taxes were going up people's incomes were going up so there was a reasonable connection when the recession hit and incomes flattened out and property taxes kept going up that created a real serious problem and gobo it wasn't the points of foreclosures he clearly was an added pinpoint for people's whose families were undergoing significant physical stress that was a challenge it still was a challenge a governor christie i think his in his administration gets a lot of credit in two thousand and ten to tighten up the levee cap going from four percent cap with exceptions that resulted in  about a seven or eight percent cap which wasn't all that much it was better than ten percent which is where we were but it still wasn't enough the two percent cap with the before it exceptions was one component that has helped the property tax cities were were starting to suffer but we've stepped starting to reverse and we're seeing some real good growth in in those areas suburban where we haven't seen growth that's another problem but it wasn't just the levee cap that made a difference we started in two thousand and ten and then in two thousand and eleven where we started to say alright we need to recognize that public employees really should be reflected or should have some of the burdens of the rest of the economy and start paying for their health benefits and that was a huge issue started in state government and records on two thousand and seven two thousand and eight when all state employees started pay want to have percent of their salary toward their toward toward their health benefits in two thousand and eleven we had a thing called chapter was of two thousand and eleven chapter seventy eight said put the same position on all public employees and change from one and a half percent to a swiping percentage of the cost of your benefit based on your salary that was a big deal and it was phased in over four years so starting in two thousand and eleven through two thousand and fifteen two thousand and fourteen and now into two thousand and fifteen and sixteen municipalities  schools and counties save money on their health benefit costs because employees were starting to pay a larger share a larger share that was a big deal the third big point that happened for peculiar particular form lesser extent for counties is that there were reforms to interest arbitration which is binding arbitration for police and firefighters off or you will believe police and fire fighter contracts lead salary increases over the years because if you many folks including including myself sort of that the the way the wars were written is that the boy unions were favored over management and that was an interesting problem the legislature i think was in effect yes it was recently extended until now or i guess to the end of two thousand and seventeen yes and we're still hearing about yes it is in it is an interesting challenge it was a significant change but arguably it has forced a reset in those relationships and yes police officers and firefighters have families they are part of the economy as well they haven't had had significant raises for the last four or five years and they've been you could argue say over ten or fifteen or twenty years things have now started to balance out a little bit and come two thousand and seventeen we see where that will goes at that point and how things start to reassess themselves so economically we were coming back because of the it's not growing as fast as some people would like but there is growth to it it's in pockets it is forcing municipal officials to continue to think about ok how can we do our job better and how can we share services better we don't see for consolidation like the princeton it is a solution in a lot of places it's being talked about one or two places and it must happen but in that things online so perfectly that prop the average property taxes in both municipalities would go down as a result of consolidation or at least not go up and i think that has pretty much been the case it's hard to measure that exactly because you have change in course and you can't predict where things would have gone but generally thinking i think the there's been exceptions that nobody really got hurt on in a lot of other places and we saw this a couple years ago in the chesters  patrick did a consolidation study did it all little bit differently than that the princeton's did but the numbers at the end of the day said that well if you consolidate average residential property taxes are going to have are going to go up needs to be reform was that we did it had a provision in it that said that if average property if taxes go up on a homeowner because of consolidation we did a little formula for that but if property taxes go up the state would provide them a property tax credit equal to mattapan increase and that would stay there is wong as the only person owned the property and would come out of income tax the property tax refund he didn't think it was going to be a lot of money it's chester never got a guarantee that that was going to happen so they couldn't vote for it and effectively the whole idea went away it's still on the books by princeton not have trouble collecting what the state had promised them that was just that was just one time transition tight right now and that was hard so you know we had this bad confluence of the economy puts into his consolidation with the state didn't have resources that you know discretionary resources if you were to be able to f if we consolidate a bunch of them were state property taxes that pompous ass as it were we said ok let's take a look at that is that true so dr caprio and i put on our academic tatts and we started to do we doing research and we discovered a couple things that yes well new jersey has more municipalities per square mile than any other state that's great however if you look at the number of governments per ten thousand people looking at government on a particular basis we're about thirty fifth in the country the pentagon having limit tell me that in plain language the number of people per government all right the number of people in the average government to ten thousand you know we look at that ten thousand number density makes the difference we dropped to thirty fifth when it came to number where thirty fifth ranking when it came to how many governments are serving more people that makes a difference density makes a big deal right and  we've looked at that we looked at a couple other ways and we thought when you point population into it the people surveyed it's different so we said ok let's look at this and then let's look at cost of government and we said ok let's break let's take the average cost per capita the cost per capita in each municipality so we did a little formula that we took part you know from a temporal sample to appropriations less what we call the reserve front collected taxes because that's basically a allowance for bad debts that doesn't provide services but pays your bills and that's not related to really anything and it's mostly driven by just by what my school costs in most places anyway we added in fire district costs for and we saw not necessarily very surprised and pleased that the highest cost per capita was at the low end right and we said whoa what's up with this then we mapped it and we saw that and we found a much more logical curve and we saw that the the cost per capita only varied from the smallest from the the lowest cost municipalities which were about fifty five hundred population to the largest meanest to the highest courts municipalities it was about two hundred fifty dollars per capita from about seven hundred dollars to thirty fifth ok the difference that was the difference between this ok why what are the variables at work here and so we did with this that is this was called the tests sensitively test to see ok what makes the difference here what makes spending per capita spending in some towns significantly larger or smaller than other patterns we looked at fifty five zero different variables and we didn't fully anything that was due to statistically significant we looked at income we look at school district factor groupings which are the watchable thing on those none of them were statistically significant across all of that there were pockets where we saw some significance some of the things that showed the most positive correlation was property value if you had more value you spent more money surprise right so in the mi to spend more money there some anecdotal evidence that we found that early react from center for government services did years ago found that elected and appointed officials in border populations tend to focus on providing more services to  smaller places tend to focus on how much money they're spending all right can only spend as much money as they have and do minimal services and part that was also because of demographics are right you have very homogeneous reversing all of those things just doesn't happen and your study was only on the cost of running the municipal government yesterday which is a small percentage of the property tax bill correct and we had that conversation going to have to ha