20 Ways To Shift 566 Municipalities: #20 - Cape May Point -> Lower Township

In New Jersey, we have 566 municipalities, some of which don't need to exist, and some of which should be made from large communities within the larger townships. A lot of the problems of why we have 566 is because of boroughitis. Yes that may be strange, but in 1905, the state went nuts having boroughs made left and right through Trenton. This as a result has caused quite the redundancies and we waste our tax money on towns that don't deserve it.

On the other hand, there are many booming communities within township governments that deserve to be promoted to full sized municipalities. The way I determined the twenty locations was by a number of things:

- 1: Population (as of the 2010 Census)
- 2: Location
- 3: Reason for forking in the first place
- 4: Diversity

And now we begin our hillarity.

#20 - Cape May Point
Cape May Point is a small borough of 291 people in Cape May County. This area represents the southernmost end of New Jersey on the tip of Cape May. The chartered municipality makes up for only 3/10 of a square mile of land, and unfortunately, only 201 of those are permanent residents. The other 90 are part-time residents. The only real notability to Cape May Point is that it has Cape May Lighthouse in its geographical area.

Now the question of why it was made. Cape May Point is actually on its second lease of life. It was actually started first as a borough in April 1878 via a referendum to fork from Lower Township. In August of 1891, the borough, then known as Seagrove, was reincorporated. Low and behold on April 8, 1896, nearly 18 years after the borough was started, it was merged back to Lower Township. On April 8, 1906, ten years after the merge, yet another referendum was held, and just 13 days later, the boroughship was reinstated. It has remained split from Lower Township ever since.

Here's the problem however. We pay our tax money to fund these municipalities, but when we do, you have to assume they should live in the town they get funding for! As I mentioned before, only 201 of the 291 are actual year-long residents of this small bayside community. The other 90 are vacationers who spend time there. Besides the fact that these 90 shouldn't even be counted in the Census, what does 201 people have that we need to fund them for? If its a commune that work together in helping their community, why not help contribute to Lower Township? We waste our money to fund a borough of 201 people who want to live by themselves and 90 more people who don't even stay part of the year? Lower Township can have it.