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With garage sale season upon us, and knowing from past experience the
Maplewood much-too-high $10 garage sale permit price, we decided to do some
checking to see how it compares.
Guess what? It doesn't. Maplewood is among the highest in the area for such
a fee placed on those who are often just
trying to make a few bucks selling
old stuff.
A check of nearby towns found that only South Orange and Springfield
charge
a similar rate. Union requires a $7 fee, while West Orange charges $5. But
Millburn and Livingston have
no fee at all.
Maplewood also limits the number of garage sales per year to two.
"One of the
reasons is that people make a business out of it, so we limit
it," said Township Administrator Joe Manning. "Otherwise
people turn it into
a business."
Still, for this township that has sky-high property taxes, a needless
$175
sewer tax on top of that and a lack of such essential services as garbage
pick up, to charge among the highest
for garage sale permits is offensive.
For most people having such sales, as we did years ago, you have the cost
of
a newspaper ad, signs and, with the $10 fee, that can run $40 to $50. Tough
to make a profit on that old Nintendo
set or those playskool toys your
college student once used.
And if you don¹t have a permit, that $10
becomes a fine of between $25 and
$100, and a potential for 10 days in jail.
Township Clerk Liz Fritzen
said the township usually makes only just over
one hundred dollars per year from the fee.
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