Hightstown Borough in Mercer County, in the center of New Jersey, has been designated a Town Center. It is one-square mile with a diverse population of 5,300 and has been praised over the years by DCA for its efficient and effective operations under very extraordinary difficult times.

Now, the States budget plan proposes to "penalize" Hightstown by severely cutting it's state aid. Our town, along with other towns with less than 10,000 population, is being punished for modeling "excellent government" practices. We have reached out to our neighboring communities to develop shared services; in fact, we have contracts with six of them. This "broad brush, paint by the numbers" approach is terribly unfair to smaller towns.

I sincerely thank the NJ League of Municipalities for bringing all our towns, both small and large, together to protest the budget proposal and to lobby all our state legislators to act in our behalf. I continue to support a State Constitutional Convention to address the funding method for our public schools. Hightstown's municipal budget is not the reason for our high property taxes. It is approximately twenty percent of the entire property tax structure. The lion's share, about sixty percent, is school taxes. Our small towns should not be the solution to solving New Jersey's problems. We have been practicing the right way of governing and running a business through shared services, a consolidated school system, bare-bones budgeting and volunteer participation.

Hightstown and all the other small towns that are targeted in the State\\\'s budget proposal need the League's help!