are traveling down the long lonesome road again to try to get towns to merge. This time, they want to merge “doughnuts” with “nuclei”.Doughnut is their term for the larger towns that surround smaller towns in New Jersey. Bridgewater and Somerville. Freehold and Freehold Township. And my own town of Flemington, surrounded by Raritan Township.
Nucleus is my term for the center of those towns.
The problem, I think, is one of perspective. The Trenton folks think of the center of these towns as the empty “hole in the doughnut”.
I think of those towns as the nucleus of the cell.
Wikipedia defines a “doughnut” as “a sweet, deep-fried piece of dough or batter.” Pronounced “doʊnət”. I don’t know what those symbols are either, but it means “doughnut”.
The average doughnut has about 385 empty calories. And it takes about 28 minutes of walking (4mph) to burn the calories in one plain doughnut. More if it has custard or jelly in the center.Now, a nucleus is the control center of a cell, which contains the cell's chromosomal DNA. It’s where it’s all happening. The center of activity. The vibrancy. The brains, baby, the brains.
And that is the point here: nucleus versus doughnut. The center of all activity versus the empty calories of fried dough.
Their perspective needs to change.
Perhaps the bill being passed around Assembly committees requiring ‘doughnut’ towns to merge with their ‘empty’ centers, should itself be forced to merge, and placed in the center of another bill.
Maybe one that establishes a constitutional convention to deal with the way property taxes are determined. Yup, that’s a good idea. And tasty, too.
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