By Greg Forester, Staff Writer
A proposed $153.5 million school budget that had the support of West Windsor-Plainsboro Regional School District school board passed muster with the district’s voters Tuesday.
Voters also supported the current Board of Education with their votes, as both incumbents running for re-election won back their seats.
West Windsor voters supported those two incumbents — Michael Kaye and Randall Tucker — over challenger Mindy Fox-Heifler.
With absentee ballots collected, the official district election numbers had Mr. Kaye receiving 986 votes, Mr. Tucker 926 votes. Ms. Fox-Heifler finished with a total of 534 votes.
For the single Plainsboro seat on the board, candidate Alapakamm Manikandan received 459 votes.The BASF software manager ran unopposed for the seat being vacated by Dr. Patricia Bocarsly, and will now take a seat on the Board of Education at its reorganization meeting Tuesday.
West Windsor voters rejected the budget, 831 to 730. But a Plainsboro vote of 463 to 221 in favor resulted in an overall 1,193 to 1,052 approval.
The difference corresponded to the spending measure’s financial impact on each township.
A West Windsor homeowner with a home assessed at the average value of $556,973 will see the portion of the property tax bill going to the public schools increase by around $289 dollars, to $6,692, due to a 5 cent increase in the tax rate, to $1.25 per $100 of assessed value.
The average Plainsboro homeowner, with a $397,720 residence, will see the school tax bill shrink by about $342, to $5,369, as the tax rate drops by 8 cents, to $1.35 per $100 of assessed value.
This year’s budget represents the last year where each town’s share of the school budget will be based on the assessed value of property.
Voters in a referendum conducted in 2007 supported a switch to budgets in which each municipality’s share would be based on the number of pupils living in each township, starting with the 2009-2010 school budget.
The current system has resulted in sometimes wild fluctuation in tax increases and decreases, year to year, as school officials noted during hearings for this year’s budget.
School officials said per-pupil based system would result in much less of that fluctuation, as those numbers have remained much more constant than the value of property lying within each town’s borders.
This year’s election numbers mean that voter turnout has decreased for the fourth consecutive year, down to 9 percent, according to district officials.
That number represents a decline of more than one percent from the 2005 election, where 10.6 percent of registered voters came out to the polls, according to district spokeswoman Gerri Hutner.
