Spotswood rejects school referendum Superintendent says district may not have had enough time to promote the plan

Staff Writer

By vincent todaro

Spotswood rejects school referendum
Superintendent says district may not have had enough time to promote the plan

By nearly a 2-to-1 margin, Spotswood voters rejected a $19.4 million referendum Tuesday that would have provided additions and renovations at the borough’s schools.

Borough residents voted 974 to 499 against the Board of Education’s proposal.

"Basically, the Board of Education and the Strategic Planning Committee put out a proposition that they saw the need for ahead to 10 years," Superintendent of Schools Anthony Vaz said Tuesday night. "Obviously the public saw it in a different light."

He said the district can now either redesign the plan, reduce its size or resubmit it to voters. Due to state law, the earliest the board could hold another referendum would be March.

"We need to analyze why it was defeated, and come up with a plan to remedy the needs of our district," Vaz said.

The referendum may have been rejected because the district did not have enough time to promote it and educate the public about its impact on taxes, he said. It was only about a month ago that the district learned it would receive $5 million in state aid toward the project, as school officials had protested a lower amount offered previously by the state. The late word left the school district with little time to discuss a finalized plan with voters, he said.

"Maybe there wasn’t enough time [for voters] to digest that we were getting $5 million from the state," he said.

If passed, the referendum would have raised school taxes by about $400 on the borough’s average assessed home of $70,500. The increase would have lasted 20 years. Local politicians, including Mayor Barry Zagnit, said the school board was asking for too much, and that such a tax hike would hurt senior citizens, as well as young families struggling with mortgages.

Vaz responded to those statements by saying that most seniors in the borough would see no tax increase from the referendum. According to the Property Tax Relief bill signed into law by acting Gov. Donald DiFrancesco, tax increases for seniors meeting certain income criteria would be reimbursed by the state. In 2002, the income limit for a married senior couple will be about $47,000.

Members of the school boards in Spotswood and its two sending districts — Milltown and Helmetta — all said the referendum improvements were necessary and that the current conditions in Spotswood schools were troublesome. Even those who opposed the referendum, such as Zagnit and Spotswood Councilwoman Judith Ruffo, acknowledged there was a need for more room in the schools.

If another referendum is held and again defeated by voters, the district would have the option of appealing to the state, in which case it could receive the go-ahead for the project, despite the local vote. In that scenario, the district would appeal to the state commissioner of education, who would offer guidance on the project. Once a model project is devised, the commissioner could authorize it to go forward with the project.

Zagnit and Ruffo said they supported the idea of a referendum to expand schools, but that the proposal presented to voters needed to be scaled back.

Due to state law, the sending districts, Milltown and Helmetta, could not be charged for any of the costs for school expansion — with the exception of a portion of interest payments on the principal.

The referendum asked for approval to construct major additions and renovations at Spotswood High School and at the Memorial and Schoenly schools. Additionally, the Appleby School would have received some renovations and improvements. Parking lot improvements at all the schools were also included in the package.

The district, which expects to see an increase of 375 students in the coming years, would have reconfigured its schools so that the Memorial School would house grade six instead of the Appleby School, which would then have housed second through fifth grades.