In booming Washington Township, Gloucester County, state aid is only $79 per person. In Washington Township, Morris County, municipal aid amounts to $98 per person. In Robbinsville Township, Mercer County, which until last year was known as Washington Township, municipal aid is $142 per person.

State aid to New Jersey's 566 municipalities, slated to be cut in Gov. Corzine's proposed budget, is not evenly distributed among the towns and cities. Instead, it varies widely, reflecting a legacy of many different municipal taxes that have been combined over the years and shifted to state collection.

By now, the original purposes of many of the taxes have been lost in the mists of time and politics. The money sent by the state to the municipalities today is more a reflection of past taxation than of current needs.

Lower Alloways Creek Township in Salem County, with about 2,000 people, is to get $4,052 per person in state aid in Corzine's budget.

At the other end of the scale, Victory Gardens Borough, a town of about 1,500 in Morris County, is to get $25 per person, and Audubon Park, a town of about 1,100 in Camden County, is to get $26 per person.

All told, municipalities are slated to get $1.58 billion from the state under the new budget, down from $1.74 billion this year, a cut of about 10 percent. The proposed municipal aid, if it were distributed equally among the state's 8.7 million residents, would amount to about $200 per person.

Many of the steepest cuts in municipal aid are aimed at small towns, as Gov. Corzine tries to persuade them to merge or consolidate services to reduce costly duplication. Local officials have criticized the cuts, saying they would jeopardize services and threaten to push the nation's highest local property taxes even higher.

Most of what is now called "municipal aid" is a replacement for money that used to be raised directly by the municipalities with local taxes.

Over the last 40 years, the state took over collection of municipal taxes on utilities, banks, railroads and other businesses and promised to send the money back to the municipalities.

And the state also agreed to pay municipalities for land set aside for preservation purposes, to reimburse the towns for lost property-tax potential on that land.

So, today, communities with large electric-power facilities or lots of parkland get much more in state aid than their neighbors.

Lower Alloways Creek Township, for example, is home to about 2,000 people - and three nuclear reactors. So, with a $7.7 million Energy Tax Receipts payment from the state, it gets more aid per person than any town its size.

Washington Township, in the Pinelands of Burlington County, has only about 650 people, but more than half its land is off-limits to development, so its municipal aid includes $1.1 million from the Garden State Trust fund and $22,500 from the Pinelands Property Tax Stabilization fund.

"The aid was devised by formulas over the last 50 years, all responding to various circumstances and needs of the time. As a result, certain municipalities receive more in aid than others," Chris Donnelly, spokesman for the Department of Community Affairs, said in an e-mail. "It is important to note that this is not discretionary aid, but formula aid that has been determined through a series of statutes and legislative initiatives. Some municipalities benefitted from the State's Domestic Insurance Premiums Tax or Urban Aid and its related elements, while others with more public utility property in the municipality (like a nuclear power plant) would receive higher aid through Energy Tax Receipts."

"It's startling," Collingswood Mayor Jim Maley said of the disparities. (His Camden County town of 14,000 is to get about $110 per person in municipal aid.) "It's obviously not fair, but whether it has to be that way to make things work, I don't know."

Maley and other mayors are up in arms over Corzine's plan to cut municipal aid, especially to towns of fewer than 10,000 people. Corzine proposes to eliminate property tax relief aid to towns of fewer than 5,000 and to cut in half the property tax aid to towns with populations between 5,000 and 10,000 people.

"The state is basically taking an old formula and superimposing a new, almost arbitrary, reduction that is difficult if not impossible to explain," said William Dressel, executive director of the New Jersey State League of Municipalities. "There's very little logic to it."

"It is stunningly not well thought out," said Maley. "When you take the money away from the small towns, there's no reason for larger towns to share anything with them because they can't afford to pay for it."

Maley said Collingswood would end its new program of providing police protection for neighboring Woodlynne, if Corzine's municipal-aid cuts are enacted. Woodlynne had saved about $200,000 a year by paying $600,000 to Collingswood to provide police protection.

But now Woodlynne (population: 2,800) faces the loss of $139,000 in state aid from a $2 million budget.

"They can't pay us, so we're not going to do it," Maley said of sharing police services.

Corzine has said towns that share services will be eligible for money from a $32 million fund. But Maley said the fund doesn't pay for the biggest costs associated with shared services, such as severance payments to laid-off police officers.