My Take on Monday's Packed Township Committee Meeting

I was so heartened to see so many concerned citizens attend the Barnegat Township Committee meeting Monday night, and I do hope they continue to attend this meeting every first and third Monday of the month.

I was, however, a little disappointed to see how little coverage Patch gave to those taxpayers who bravely got up to speak during the public portion. There were so many important points brought up by these good people. Instead there was a great deal of space given to the lame excuses to the tax increases which was provided by Breeden and the rest of the Township Committee. They continue to dance around all the issues and did not satisfactorily answer one question posed by Barnegat residents. Breeden & Co. continue to blame the tax increases on the revaluations, the large portion of our taxes going for the school budget, and the school funding formula – and none having to do with their own fiscal irresponsibility. 

Some of the issues brought up by the public and not reported on in this article are:

(1) the comment  to have the Mayor, as our elected official, answer directly on questions related to the increase in taxes and on the budget – with the Mayor unable to answer intelligently and repeatedly deferring to Breeden;

(2) the comments on how the township continually ignored the pleas of taxpayers during the original revaluation to address the incompetence of the company chosen for this task, and even to change the formula for this revaluation since the market had already dropped and this company was using old inflated property values. This all happened before the revaluation was completed. These “over-valuations” could have been stopped dead in their tracks and we could have had a more realistic valuation.  In fact, I can remember someone suggesting that since many of the valuations had already been completed, let’s just, across the board, reduce the valuation by 10-15% to account for the drastic drop in property values;

(3) a comment that the Township Committee continually contends that the school budget is the biggest culprit behind our tax increase is completely inaccurate and misleading.  In pure and simple terms, 3 years ago the school budget represented 60% of our tax bill – today it represents 52% of our tax bill. That is an 8% real decrease in the effect of the school budget on our tax bill.  I would say that that is fiscal responsibility in action on the part of the School Board. The Township, on the other hand, 3 years ago represented our municipal taxes as 24% of our total tax bill – today it represents 30% of our tax bill. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to conclude that this is a real 6% increase in the effect of municipal taxes on our tax bill;

(4) there was also a comment made on the fully-loaded salary of our Township Administrator being $200,000.  Breeden received approximately $40,000 in pay increases over the last three years – equating to roughly 13% per year.  Who gets those kinds of increases in these hard economic times.  I say that is fiscal mismanagement of significant magnitude.

I am not saying this to be so critical of Patch for not putting some of these substantive comments in the article.  In fact, Patch has been a breath of fresh air, being the only vehicle which has given us Barnegat residents a voice. Patch does cover some of what residents say at these meetings whereas our daily and weekly newspapers do not. I just think that Patch needs their articles to contain more of what we say in order to make it fair and balanced and succeed as a popular hyperlocal.