By Katie Wagner, Staff Writer
ROCKY HILL — The borough is facing the prospect of receiving no state aid under Gov. Jon Corzine’s 2009 proposed $32.97 billion budget, which calls for a $500 million reduction in spending from this year’s budget.
The governor is proposing to reduce municipal aid to the approximately 300 municipalities with populations under 10,000. Under the plan, state funding would be eliminated for towns of less than 5,000 residents like Rocky Hill and be reduced by 50 percent for towns with populations between 5,000 and 10,000.
For Rocky Hill, which received $155,284 in state aid as part of its $968,000 budget last year, any reduction in state funding would be devastating, Rocky Hill Mayor Ed Zimmerman said.
The borough has estimated that making up for this loss in state aid would require an approximately 30 percent increase in taxes, which goes against the state’s 4-percent cap on the local tax levy.
”They’re putting us in a very strange position because they’re asking us to increase taxes by 30 percent, which is something I certainly don’t want to do and am not even sure the state would allow us to do,” Mayor Zimmerman said.
”My big complaint is if they were going to make cuts, they should have talked to us about it,” he said. “We weren’t given any notice. It was just sort of sprung on us a week before the deadline for submitting your budget to the state.”
Mayors of several municipalities with populations of less than 10,000, including Rocky Hill have said on the New Jersey League of Municipalities Web site that they see the decreases in state aid as the governor’s attempt to force them to merge with other municipalities.
For Rocky Hill, merging with another municipality is unlikely to produce cost savings, as an estimated 80 percent of the services the borough delivers are already either shared, outsourced or done by volunteers, Mayor Zimmerman said.
And its discriminatory to cut aid based on the number of residents in a municipality, the mayor added.
”Cutting funds to towns with populations under 5,000 as opposed to looking at the towns who have not engaged in shared services is just too arbitrary,” he said.
Like other mayors that posted comments on the league’s Web site, Mayor Zimmerman said he thought his municipality should be held up as an example for its history of keeping spending down instead of being punished for its small size.
We’ve done everything we’ve been asked to do and there isn’t much else we could share,” he added.
Currently, Rocky Hill uses South Brunswick’s health department, Montgomery’s schools and recreation facilities and South Bound Brook’s police department for traffic enforcement. It also jointly owns a sewer system with Montgomery. Rocky Hill outsources to the county for public works projects and to the state’s Department of Community Affairs for construction and receives New Jersey State Police assistance for two hours a day.
For Rocky Hill, a “small village where everybody knows everybody by their first name,” to merge carries with it more burdens than increased taxes, Mayor Zimmerman said.
”We have our own identity, where everybody knows each other and helps each other,” he said. “There’s also the home rule issue. We have a borough government with an elected mayor. Because we are so small and because of our form of government, voters have a huge say in determining who runs the borough.”
Another portion of the proposed 2009 budget Mayor Zimmerman said would causes tax increases is additional charges for use of State Police services.
”The question is what’s a fair price,” he said. “The truth is if at the end of the day we’re going to have to pay, we may look at alternatives.
Mayors of municipalities with populations under 10,000 will be meeting with state Department of Community Affairs Commissioner Joe Doria and representatives from the governor’s office in Trenton on Thursday to learn about possible alternative funding sources and procedures to secure funds to help them cope with the state’s cuts.
