BY DAVE BENJAMIN
Staff Writer
Jackson JACKSON – Township Committee members have begun the process of reviewing the Board of Education’s proposed 2006-07 school year budget.
That task fell to the members of Jackson’s governing body after voters on April 18 rejected a $61.1 million tax levy to support a $127.6 million budget for the coming school year. The vote was 3,755 against the tax levy to 2,181 in favor.
The budget would have increased the school tax rate by 15.95 cents per $100 of assessed valuation. The owner of a home assessed at $200,000 would have seen his school taxes increase by $319 next year under that proposal.
The budget will now be reviewed by the committee which can leave the spending plan as the board proposed or negotiate with the board for an amount by which the budget can be reduced.
As they have in past years when the budget has been rejected, the committee members hired Frank Marlow, a retired superintendent of schools, to review the spending plan. The payment to Marlow will be capped at $8,500 plus expenses.
On April 24, committee members Mark Seda, Josh Reilly and Ann Updegrave, and Mayor Sean Giblin voted to hire Marlow. It marks the fourth consecutive year Marlow has been hired to review a defeated Jackson budget.
Committeeman Michael Kafton was not present at the meeting.
“As you are all aware, the school budget was overwhelmingly rejected by the voters,” Reilly said. “We are now charged by statute and by civic obligation to examine the defeated budget and implement reduction in the tax rate, if the opportunity exists. Once again the voters mandated this. It cannot be ignored.
“It will be very interesting to track [Marlow’s] suggested cuts over the last three years and see how they actually played out,” Reilly said. “This will have a major impact on the final committee action.”
He said it would not be prudent to comment on what the committee members’ final action will be until both they and Marlow have had a chance to review the defeated budget.
“We all recognize that the largest portion of our property taxes goes to the funding of our school system and that property taxes in this state are not based on the ability of taxpayers to pay and are unfair and are applied in an inequitable and non-uniform manner,” Reilly said. “Property tax revenue increasingly fails to cover the full costs of infrastructure needed to serve new development.”
Reilly pledged to help offset the property tax burden by fighting for the institution of developer impact fees. He asked for the committee’s support for state legislation in that regard.
In a prepared statement, Giblin said he believes a fair balance must be struck between the needs of the children, the teachers and the taxpayers.
“I strongly feel that money going to classroom instruction must be protected. I also believe that we must support our teachers and the commitment they exhibit each and every day. With a [multimillion dollar] budget, I still hear stories of teachers spending their own money for classroom supplies. That is a situation that should not exist.”
Township Administrator Andrew Salerno said the budget review takes between three and four weeks to complete. He said that in each of the past three years, the committee’s review process has taken almost all of the time allowed by state law. A decision by the committee on how much, if anything, should be cut from the 2006-07 budget is expected by mid-May.
“We try our best to get through this in as short a period of time as possible,” Salerno said. “Everyone must remember that this budget takes the school board months to prepare and that we basically get three weeks to review it and make recommendations.”
The board’s budget for the coming school year includes all start-up costs associated with the planned September opening of Jackson Liberty High School, the district’s second high school. It is expected that Jackson Liberty will open with freshman and sophomore classes. School officials have said the opening of the new high school will relieve overcrowding at Jackson Memorial High School.