Cut would mean a 1-cent tax reduction
By: Courtney Gross
The Princeton Township Committee and the Princeton Borough Council are poised to cut more than $1 million from the Princeton Regional School District’s 2007-2008 budget, offering a 1-cent tax break to residents of both municipalities.
After a 2½-hour closed door session Wednesday afternoon, subcommittees from both governing bodies as well as representatives from the Board of Education appeared to reach a consensus on how much the budget would be cut after its defeat last month, although the specific line-items have not been identified, officials present at the meeting said.
The district’s tax levy budget, proposed at nearly $56.2 million, would have posed at 10-cent increase on township residents and a 16-cent increase on borough residents if it had been approved on April 17. Voters in the township narrowly approved the proposal, but borough voters decisively rejected it.
According to officials that were present at the closed-door session, the full governing bodies will consider a $1.03 million budget cut at a joint session meeting on Tuesday. Councilman Roger Martindell said the new budget number would reduce the tax rate in both municipalities by one cent.
"We had a discussion with (the school board representatives) that it was quite likely the budget would be cut to some degree, because that was the voters’ expression," Mr. Martindell said. "The question was how much and what’s the process."
That process was unsatisfactory to Mr. Martindell, who claimed the closed-door session was "arbitrary," lacked public involvement and skirted a substantive discussion of what was being cut and where. The councilman said he would not vote for the cuts at Tuesday’s joint session because of this.
The school board also scheduled a meeting for Wednesday to consider the budget revisions.
If the budget reduction is approved, an average borough resident’s school taxes would decrease from $6,585 to approximately $6,550 for a home assessed at $348,413. That rate would hold at $1.88 per $100 of assessed value.
For township taxpayers, the cent break would bring the rate down to $1.71 per $100 of assessed value. Under that rate, an average homeowner whose property is assessed at the township average of $427,900 would pay approximately $7,317 as opposed to the $7,360 initially proposed.
Under state statute, the governing bodies have until May 21 to approve a revised budget. Although the council and committee must approve a final tax levy budget figure and submit specific line items to Mercer County, the district is not bound by each individual cut only the total amount.
Because line item reductions suggested by the governing bodies are nonbinding, Councilman David Goldfarb, who also attended Wednesday’s meeting, said municipal officials directed the school district to prepare certain line item cuts to be considered by the committee and the council.
The process, Mr. Goldfarb said, was vastly improved since the school budget was last defeated in 1991. On Tuesday, the councilman added, he would be prepared to vote for the total cut agreed upon this week.
"There is just no way we could have made the progress that we made if members of the public were there," Mr. Goldfarb said of the looming deadline mandated by the state. "There would have been oohs and aahs."
Other officials were reluctant to discuss the budget process until the joint public session scheduled for next week.
"As far as I’m concerned the meeting was a negotiating session, and I don’t really feel like its appropriate to comment on it," said township Deputy Mayor Bernie Miller, who attended Wednesday’s closed-door session.
Together the Township Committee and the Borough Council solicited professional assistance for the budget process at a cost of $11,000.
The certified public accountant, Mr. Martindell said, helped guide the negotiating process among the municipal and the school board representatives, which led to the tentative agreement on the total cut. If an agreement had not been reached, he added, the accountant would have proposed line item cuts for the governing bodies to consider.