Torricelli

March 15, 2007 - 4:25pm

Newspapers fight to keep their taxpayer subsidies

There was a curious omission when the Legislature presented 98 proposals for lowering property taxes. It wasn't a new idea but it was an obvious one.

Thousands of dollars in local taxes are spent every year on legal notices. Every community is forced by law to buy advertising in local papers. The purpose is sound. The community needs to be informed of meetings, bankruptcies and other legal proceedings.

It's a remnant of a time when we wrote letters with quill pens and communicated with friends abroad by telegraph. The ads have the added disadvantage of being unreadable and inefficient but, curiously, they remain a part of every newspaper and a burden on every local town budget.

My former home in Bergen County is a great example. The number of homes that are Internet connected is overwhelming and rising. Subscription to the county's only newspaper, The Record, represents a minority and is falling. No commercial advertiser intending to reach Bergen County homes would choose to advertise exclusively in The Record. So, why are we mandating seventy communities to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on unreadable legal notices in The Record or even smaller shopper papers that lie discarded at the end of suburban driveways?

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March 11, 2007 - 9:14pm

Property tax relief won't work

When the Legislature passed the Property Tax relief legislation it enacted about half of the 98 recomendations made by the four special legislative committees this past summer and fall. So that's forty odd reasons to believe that property taxes will decline. I've got one reason to suggest that they won't. 

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