Council should look next door for fiscal help
Hightstown Borough Councilman Patrick Thompson has called for the formation of a group of former borough leaders and local businessmen to study the borough’s spending and specifically how to prevent taxes and fees from continuing to climb. And he says potential cuts in staff and services must be weighed.
While we fear such a committee will never be formed especially given Mayor Bob Patten’s personal and critical response we applaud any idea aimed at trying to address Hightstown’s fiscal situation.
The bottom line is the borough is in a financial crisis.
Borough Council keeps approving tax hikes and hundreds of thousands of dollars in new spending on such things as a fire truck, a trash truck and emergency medical services. And it is poised to OK a significant water/sewer rate increase. All this, while it continues to rely on extraordinary financial aid from the state the same entity it blames for many of its troubles.
Some borough officials also have begun to publicly place some of the blame on their neighbor, East Windsor. We hear comments about how the township doesn’t help with this or didn’t respond to that.
We’re not ready to make any judgment on those claims. But, in addition to Mr. Thompson’s call for a meeting of a new study group, we think it would be wise to quickly nip in the bud the he-said, she-said and begin meetings between the governing bodies of both municipalities.
We hear all too often from Mayor Patten about private meetings with other community leaders but there are no formal reports of these meetings for Borough Council and, more importantly, the public to learn of any plans or progress.
At a time when the two communities are discussing police merging and the state is studying community consolidation, formal public meetings between the two governing councils, perhaps every other month, seem like a no-brainer to us.
Likewise for inviting local Planning Board and Economic Development Committee members, whose ideas are critical, to such meetings.
Meet with East Windsor before you decide to spend about $600,000 for a new fire truck.
Hold another session to get ideas on how to diminish the impact on the public of a water/sewer rate hike. Put trash pickup as the topic for one meeting rather than having a local employee tell Borough Council that he talked to someone with the township about possibly getting help and got the brush-off. East Windsor Mayor Janice Mironov says she was unaware of the informal request until contacted by the Herald.
Perhaps working out a plan to share a trash truck or a fire truck could be an intermediate step taken before tackling bigger issues like police.
At the very least, the meetings could improve and start relationships.
Some in the borough are reticent to do this because of the very strong personality of Ms. Mironov, and we understand this. The borough could help ensure its voice is heard by not only making sure these meetings are public but also by alternating the leadership of the sessions.
If the borough simply acknowledged it could use the help, Mayor Mironov, a smart person and a smart politician, would be hardpressed to ignore the request.
Unlike some borough leaders, we can see that "one square mile of paradise" could fast become a laughing stock of a borough nickname if Hightstown doesn’t reach out for help from the 16-square-mile township that surrounds it and which happens to be more financially sound.

