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Mount Arlington sits nestled in Roxbury. Some residents of the two towns say they should become one.

(Louis C. Hochman, using Google Maps)

Mount Arlington School Board member Gene Paradiso said he doesn't know whether it's a good idea for his borough to merge with the neighboring township of Roxbury.

But, the former councilman said, he wants to find out.

"That's my key objective — to really gather all the information that would be pertinent to decide if consolidation is even a remote possibility," he said. "We'd need to go through all the different contracts — money from the school, to the town, debt, differences in state aid, in classifications. There's a lot of open questions."

Paradiso was one of the figures behind a petition that's gotten a consolidation effort to the point it's at now. Thursday night at Roxbury High School will be the first of three hearings the Department of Community Affairs will use to help decide whether the communities should create a commission to study on a possible merger.

"A lot of it is going to be saying, This is what our differences are. What tools does the state provide if we can determine if we can consolidate?'" Paradiso said.

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The commission would ultimately decide whether to put a possible merger before voters in each municipality.

Physically, Mount Arlington sits north of the center of Roxbury, wedging into it its bigger neighbor. Mount Arlington is mostly surrounded by its neighboring community — like the blank space in a letter U. Roxbury has about 23,000 residents — more than four times as much as Mount Arlington.

Mount Arlington Borough and Roxbury Township each have their own municipal administration and their own school district. They've each got their own police force — and talks about consolidating those into one have failed twice in the last decade.

"That police merger was not a merger," Paradiso said. That was going to be Mount Arlington paying Roxbury to police our town. it ended up being nowhere near a consolidation. There was going to be less control over that arrangement than we would have here."

Municipal consolidations have been picking up support over the last few years, including from Gov. Chris Christie, who has often cited his own hometown of Mendham Township as a prime candidate for a merger with its neighbor, Mendham Borough.

Princeton Township and Princeton Borough formally combined into one municipality at the beginning of last year. Proponents had touted expected cost savings of about $1.6 million, not counting certain one-time costs. An updated analysis after the merger showed the figure at more like $3 million.

"I think there's more openness to seeing if there is a solution," Paradiso said. "People have a lot of common sense. People realize you can't be paying the part-time staffers in all these municipalities full-time pensions and benefits and everything else. You can't continue with all this overhead. You need to streamline it. You've got an attorney for every single town, for every department you have a board for. You've got to look at where you can save money."

Paradiso said he understands reluctance from some people that the character of their towns will be lost as they merge with others. But he said that doesn't have to happen.

"My guess is it's going to be like anything else that's a change," he said. "You're going to have people who already have their mind made up that they don't want to do anything. But for anyone to make up their mind right now that they don't want to do anything, that should be held off. You've got to make an educated decision here, minus emotion. It's not about the town changing. It's going to be how you operate he town.

Mount Arlington Mayor Art Ondish told the Daily Record last year he's open to exploring the idea, but doubts "the numbers are going to show a merger is beneficial to Mount Arlington."

"I believe smaller is better and in a small borough like Mount Arlington you have more accountability and more control," Ondish told the paper at the time.

The first of three public hearings on the possible merger will be 7:30 p.m. on Thursday, at Roxbury High School. The next will be April 2 at 7:30 p.m, at Mount Arlington High School. The final hearing will be April 3 at 7:30 p.m., at the Roxbury Recreational Gym.