BY SUE MORGAN
Staff Writer
WEST LONG BRANCH – People are wondering why the Shore Regional High School District waited until late July to announce its plans to float a nearly $50 million bond construction referendum on Sept. 26.
Board of Education President Anthony Moro says that residents in his hometown of Monmouth Beach, one of the high school’s four sending communities, have actually accused district officials of holding back news of the $49.8 million building plan for as long as possible.
“People in Monmouth Beach are saying we dragged our heels in letting them know [about the referendum],” Moro told his district officials, colleagues and members of the public in attendance at last Thursday night’s board meeting inside Shore Regional’s library.
If residents are wondering what the holdup was, they need to look to the state Department of Education (DOE), which first had to sanction the board’s referendum plan and secondly figure out how much of the total construction tab could be picked up by the state, Moro explained.
The board did not want to notify residents in the district’s four sending towns – Monmouth Beach, West Long Branch, Oceanport and Sea Bright – about the referendum until the state DOE had given the plan its blessing and committed to sharing 36 percent of the total cost, the board president said.
“My response is that we didn’t know how much money we were going to receive,” Moro said.
On July 27 the state DOE notified the board that it would kick in about $17,835,162 of the total $49,797,221 price tag, leaving taxpayers in the four sending towns to pick up the remaining $31,962,059 over the life of the 30-year bond, Moro went on.
“We didn’t know what our bottom-line number would be,” Moro said. “We didn’t know those figures until July 27.”
At that point, the district sent out a newsletter to residents of all four towns announcing the scheduled date of the referendum, its costs, the state contributions, the rationale behind it, and a description of how facilities at the 44-year-old high school would be updated.
Another newsletter will be forthcoming after Labor Day and prior to Sept. 26, Moro noted.
Superintendent/Principal Leonard G. Schnapphauf agreed with Moro.
“There was nothing we could do until the state came out with the figure of $17 million,” Schnapphauf said.
A Community Facilities Task Force, which was composed of faculty, students and their parents and business leaders from throughout the sending towns, was the entity that recommended putting up a referendum after holding four meetings between September and December 2005, Schnapphauf pointed out.
During those meetings, the task force decided that any tax hike of more than
$300 per year would be burdensome to most district residents, he added.
“The task force decided this,” Schnapphauf said. “They talked about what people could reasonably afford.”
To date, officials in Sea Bright and Oceanport have publicly complained that they, and their residents, were kept out of the loop on the plans for the referendum that was recommended to the board by the task force in December.
Both Sea Bright Mayor Jo-Ann Kalaka-Adams and Oceanport Mayor Lucille Chaump have stated that they found out about the district’s building plan in the middle to latter part of July and through second-hand sources, not through the district itself.
At an Aug. 2 Sea Bright Borough Council meeting, Kalaka-Adams said she only learned of the referendum after Borough Clerk Maryann Smeltzer was notified by the Monmouth County Board of Elections about a special election regarding Shore Regional.
Meanwhile, in an Aug. 17 interview, Chaump stated that she learned of the referendum through the county office and through a letter sent to the borough by the Oceanport Board of Education, which also has a construction referendum vote for its own K-8 district scheduled for the same date as Shore Regional’s.
Both towns, which have representatives on Shore Regional’s board, are trying to get the word about the referendum out to voters.
Without telling constituents to vote against the referendum, as has been erroneously reported in another local newspaper, Kalaka-Adams and the borough council are urging Sea Bright residents to get out to the polls and decide for themselves on Sept. 26.
In Oceanport, Councilwoman Ellynn Kahle, that governing body’s liaison for education, recently reported all of the details of both the elementary school’s and Shore Regional’s building plans.
Officials in both towns are also urging the public to attend information meetings scheduled at the high school in West Long Branch at 7 p.m. Sept. 12 and Sept. 21 as well as a building tour set for Sept. 16 at 9 a.m.
Figures released by the district indicate that if the referendum is approved, Monmouth Beach property owners would see district taxes go up by 3.87 cents per $100 of assessed valuation That amounts to an annual tax increase of $255.78 on a home assessed at $584,000, the borough average.
In Oceanport, district taxes would be hiked by 4.02 cents per $100 of assessed valuation, which comes to $232.87 yearly on a home assessed at the borough average of $580,000.
Sea Bright property owners would see district taxes hiked by $4.91 cents per $100 of assessed valuation. The district tax hike on a home assessed at the borough average of $383,000 would amount to $188.14 per year.
For West Long Branch property owners, district taxes would increase by 5.30 cents per $100 of assessed valuation, amounting to a tax hike of $250.63 yearly on a home assessed at the borough average of $473,000.
During the meeting’s public portion, none of the 10 persons in attendance addressed the referendum issue.