That sounds like a real pain. New Jersey is famously divided into extremely small towns and it leads to lots of redundancy and waste and probably unhealthy comp

That sounds like a real pain. New Jersey is famously divided into extremely small towns and it leads to lots of redundancy and waste and probably unhealthy competition between the towns. To be honest, the problem may be the dividing of the cities as such. The solution may instead tax and run all of them as a single block (e.g. minimize city government in favor of county) or even combine into a single city. This is moving the goalpost of the conversation above a bit, but my point is that the problem may not necessarily be "cities compete," the problem may be with the local bureaucracy. This can manifest in lots of ways like you describe.