By Tara Nurin for NJ Spotlight

Big changes could be ahead for the Meadowlands District regional planning area if state lawmakers pass a bill to merge two quasi-governmental agencies and redesign the way the district supports its sparsely developed communities.

Under a bill announced yesterday by Assembly Speaker Vincent Prieto (D-Secaucus), the New Jersey Sports and Expo Authority (NJSEA) would effectively be subsumed by the New Jersey Meadowlands Commission.

Hotels in the district would collect an additional 3 percent nightly tax that would allow the district’s densely developed cities and towns to stop sharing their property tax revenue with those zoned for lighter development. The new hotel tax would raise the total to 18 percent, one of the highest rates in the nation.

Prieto says his bill would streamline oversight and ease the property tax burden in the district, which comprises 14 municipalities in Bergen and Hudson counties. The bill would change a tax-sharing system that’s been in place since 1969 and consolidate two independent agencies that have distinct land-use missions generally within the same 30-square-mile territory.

The Assembly established the Meadowlands District to spare the fragile wetlands along the Hackensack River from destruction by overdevelopment. In founding the Meadowlands Commission, lawmakers sought to strategically plan for development by taking a regional approach. They zoned half of the district’s participating municipalities for commercial, industrial, and residential development that produces property tax revenue. The other half was zoned with environmental preservation as the goal.

Read the rest of the article here.