A history of home rule

And why is the overwhelming majority of the cost borne by property owners, who pay far more than their Pennsylvania counterparts?

Historically, New Jersey has been a home-rule state, and the tradition persists, said Ernest Reock, professor emeritus at Rutgers' Center for Government Services. In the early 1960s, he said, "we were the empty place between Philadelphia and New York."

Now the void is chockablock with local governments.

Alan J. Karcher, speaker of the state Assembly in the 1980s who died in 1999, wrote that the tangle of town boundaries looked like "a web woven by a spider on LSD."

Of the 567 municipalities, one-fifth have fewer than 2,500 residents, according to the state Department of Community Affairs. And nearly every community has its own school system.

Local governments have no choice but to tax real estate. State law prohibits them from imposing any other levies.

In Pennsylvania, since the mid-1960s, municipalities and school districts have been allowed to also use earned-income and "nuisance" levies. The tangle of local taxes adds to the chaos and confusion that are hallmarks of the Pennsylvania system. On the other hand, the extra levies do help hold down property-tax rates.

New Jersey offsets some property-tax costs with grants to towns for rebate checks. Last year, the rebates knocked about 15 percent off the average bill. But with the fresh cuts, that reduction will be lower next year.

"We ask local jurisdictions to do an awful lot and give them access to only one revenue source," said Henry Coleman, a Rutgers public-policy expert who authored a seminal study on New Jersey's taxation system.

Municipalities claim 20 percent of the average property-tax bill - three times as much as a typical suburban Pennsylvania town does. For instance, of the DiMedios' new $26,000 tax bill, Haddon Heights gets $5,720, or 22 percent.

Education gets 58 percent.

New Jersey schools rank second in the nation for per-pupil expenditures, outspent only by New York. But at the same time, New Jersey ranks in the bottom half of the pack for the portion of school costs picked up by the state: 44 percent.

Despite Corzine's changes in the subsidy formula, state aid is still targeted to high concentrations of low-income students.

The Moorestown Township School District, for instance, gets minimal money from Trenton - about $6 million, or 8 percent of its budget - and that contributes to hefty property-tax bills. The Camden district receives more than $300 million, or 85 percent of its budget. But there, as in other poorer communities that get substantial state aid, the property levies are high anyway because their real estate tax bases are so meager.

New Jersey's 21 county governments are wholly dependent on the property tax, virtually their only money source. In Burlington, Camden and Gloucester, 22 percent of the average bill goes to the county - almost double the portion in the four Pennsylvania suburban counties. That amounts to an extra $500 per household in the Garden State.

In 1996, when his wife landed a new job, Jerry W. Cantrell sold their home in the Wayne area of Upper Merion Township, Montgomery County, for $190,000. They moved over the Delaware River to a comparable community, Randolph Township, Morris County.

There they bought a home for $268,000, or 41 percent more. But their tax bill nearly quadrupled, from $1,700 to $6,200.

"It's stopped making sense over here," said Cantrell, who went on to organize the New Jersey Tax Association, an activist group of about 3,000 members.