CRANBURY: $10.8M budget would include 2-cent tax rate hike
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PostPosted: Tue, Mar 15 2011, 2:23 pm EDT    Post subject: Re: CRANBURY: $10.8M budget would include 2-cent tax rate hike Reply with quote
Guest wrote:
By cutting aid and capping tax increases to 2%, Gov. Christie is doing the right thing for the state and the town budgets, but it is a long term plan and most towns had to increase local taxes last year to deal with the big cuts in state aid. I believe the average increase in NJ municipal taxes last year was 4% state wide. Based on the unknown impact of these coming changes, we should not use our surplus at all, especially to fill in gaps on a budget that has either not enough revenues or too many expenses.

NJ is about to undergo a big change in how much we spend, which is totally necessary, and Cranbury should have an ample surplus to ease through that change without deteriorating our schools and township services. We are a premier town that has been run extremely well for a long time; people have no idea what other towns are going through right now. If we have to do a modest tax increase to get through these changes, it is unfortunate but seems necessary. If we get more than anticipated state aid or increased revenues from our ratables, those will be good problems to have, but I don’t want to “hope” they happen in the future and deplete our surplus to solve our current problem.



When Christie cuts the state mandates, I will agree with you. Until then he has just shifted the burden to municipalities. I would call it gutless, but I still hold out hope he cuts the mandates.
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PostPosted: Tue, Mar 15 2011, 4:00 pm EDT    Post subject: Re: CRANBURY: $10.8M budget would include 2-cent tax rate hike Reply with quote
Agree with the above poster. Christie cutting state "aid" but not reducing state mandates is just smoke-and-mirrors politics. Even calling it "aid" is George-Orwell-speak. Where is the money from this state "aid" coming from? Local taxes. It is not aid -- it is a round-trip re-distribution of local taxes. So right now the state as not meaningfully reduced its expenses or need for revenue from local taxes and has not reduced its state mandates on local taxes but set a cap on spending, which means the state receivables from local taxes and mandates on local municipality and school budgets represent a larger and larger percentage of overall costs. Combined with a declining tax base that means Christie expects local officials to somehow make up all the difference with only a slice of their total budget to work with, while he does nothing to comparably reduce the burden imposed by the state.

It is actually the height of cynicism.
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