Support Municipal Compensation for Hosting a
Prison
By Albert B. Kelly
In the hoopla of campaign
season, you may have missed the fact that some important legislating was
getting done courtesy of Assemblywoman Celeste Riley.
On September 11th,
Assemblywoman Riley introduced Bill 3597 which calls for a “prison host benefit
payment” to certain municipalities hosting State prisons, County jails or
related ancillary facilities.
This bill would have a positive
economic impact on Bridgeton along with other municipalities hosting county
jails in the 21 counties and those with State facilities like Leesburg and
Delmont, (Maurice River Township), Wrightstown, and Rahway to name a few.
In a nutshell, the bill
proposes that each of these communities receives some compensation for having such
facilities within their borders. The formula for arriving at a compensation
figure would come from one of two options.
The first is $300
multiplied by the number of residents or inmates (whichever provides the lower
payment) at the start of each year.
The second would be “20%
of the total amount raised by taxation for municipal purposes in the previous
fiscal year in the host community multiplied by the percentage of all
correctional facility inmates and residents as of January 1st of the
current year that are also inmates or residents of a correctional facility
operated by the correctional facility operator”.
Understand that this is no
small thing. To begin with, there’s the “not-in-my-back-yard” or NIMBY factor
that always rears its head. For the most part, communities don’t want these
facilities within their borders and you can understand why.
No town or city wants to
be known as a prison town. Try as one might, there’s simply no way to spin it
into a Chamber of Commerce selling point. It is what it is; a scary and
desperate place and there’s always the prospect of escapes and violent
incidences.
Beyond what happens within
the walls of a jail or prison, there’s what happens out in the community. Families
relocate to the area to be near incarcerated loved ones and while there’s no
official stat on it, they’re here and they require all the services that
communities must provide to residents.
Then there’s the
unintended consequence. Because the county jail and courthouse are located in a
specific city, the “dateline” in news stories lists that city even though a
good number of the crimes may have occurred elsewhere in the jurisdiction.
The end result is that
most readers unfamiliar with the area assume that everything originates in that
community. While not obvious, it helps create a negative perception that has to
be baked into the cake.
But there’s more. The fact
of the matter is that jails and prisons do not routinely get located in the
wealthier towns and high end zip codes. It’s usually a place that is struggling
with low and moderate income issues that end up hosting these facilities.
They are tax exempt and
they remove a huge amount of land from any future use with no growth potential
going forward. In the case of Bridgeton, the prison took 96.28 acres of land in
a redevelopment area off the table for future growth.
Being landlocked at 6.2
square miles, that’s a lot of redevelopment with the corresponding PILOTS that
will never happen.
When the idea of a prison
in Bridgeton was raised, it came with a narrative about numbers of jobs for the
locals and talk about a new group of homeowners relocating to be near the new
facility, thus stabilizing the housing stock.
It never happened. Most employees
live somewhere else and work here. Most of their consumer spending happens
elsewhere and little effort was made to include a housing component as part of
the employment package to expand our ratable base.
For Bridgeton, and perhaps
for other host communities, the promised PILOT that we were to receive every
year for hosting the prison was rolled into what’s called CMPTRA (Consolidated
Municipal Property Tax Relief Aid) and it’s been cut every year. Before long there’ll
be nothing.
The bottom line is that
this proposed legislation by Assemblywoman Riley gives some revenue back to
host communities and it is a way to offset the costs and unintended
consequences that come with these jail and prison facilities.
This is an opportunity for
Bridgeton, Leesburg, Delmont, and our county to be heard on something that can
provide some property tax relief to our residents and is long overdue. I
encourage everyone to communicate their support for this bill to their
legislators and create some positive pressure to help move it out of committee and
on toward the Governor.