Cary Africk: The Township Needs To Prioritize Its Spending

Departmental budget hearings got underway Tuesday night, with Township Manager Marc Dashield putting forth what he called a solid municipal budget of $74.2 million that would result in an $89 increase in taxes for the average homeowner.

Councilor Cary Africk wrote the following op-ed piece following Tuesday night's hearings:

Many township council members and the township manager have been speaking out about the excellent job that has been done in keeping spending down to minimal 3% or so increases each year for the last four. We have "accomplished" this by "only" cutting 10% of the municipal staff, or 40 people they say.

This is like a hospital saying "we've cut oxygen usage in the emergency room by 10% and we've only lost 10% more people."

During last night's budget presentations, I deliberately took the conversation in another direction, namely "what are the effects of losing all these people?"

I don't believe we should be proud of having reduced departments to the minimal staffing necessary just to be able to get their administrative work done, or in one case not even entirely done.

And I don't believe that you lose one or two key people in a department and justify it by saying "the other people are working harder" and there is no impact. There is a negative impact.

Janice Talley is our new director of planning. With superb background experience she took over for Karen Kadus, a woman of tremendous impact and ability. A woman able to focus on the critical work of planning for the future of Montclair, the "30,000 foot" overview of where we're going, as well as the day-to-day administrative tasks.

Part of the reason she was able to do that was that she had a superb assistant planner, Patrick Franco.

Karen and Patrick left, and Janice was given their work—and even more work as we cut other areas—including the funding for HomeCorp.

All this has been happening when we're trying to consider massive redevelopment throughout the town, as well as seriously address the multitude of housing-related issues (not just whether we should build on Wildwood Avenue).

As I said last night, planning is crucial for Montclair. As we look to address the sustainability of the town, planning will lead the way. Cutting back, not investing, is the absolute wrong thing to do!

We next heard from the municipal court last night. Again from two superb people. Again from a department that has had deep cuts in personnel.

And again we heard about the difficulty in keeping up—the backload of work.

And in some cases we lose revenue by not being able to follow up on ticket enforcement. Perhaps we are losing more money than we would by hiring additional personnel?

And even more important is our less-than-adequate ability to execute on some basic rights, i.e. expungement of records. By not doing so in a timely fashion we threaten people with terrible consequences. Theoretically, when an inquiry was made by an employer, a landlord, or a bank as to whether the person had "a record" or not, we would answer "yes" while in reality the answer should have been "no," i.e. the record had been expunged by our data base and hadn't been updated due to lack of staff. Oh, and we also subject the town to a huge liability of lawsuit by not giving out the correct information.

We've heard from two departments so far. I expressed great concern for two departments. I am not asking for massive increases in personnel. I am asking that we PRIORITIZE our spending. That we consider the tradeoffs.