By Jacqueline Durett
Correspondent
SAYREVILLE — The Borough Council is ready with its 2016-17 budget, it could not officially adopt it at the April 25 meeting.
At that meeting, which also was when the borough held the budget hearing, Chief Financial Officer Wayne Kronowski explained that the borough was still in queue to receive state approval.
He said he was told by state officials that there is a backlog, but that the borough should hear back by its next council meeting on May 9. A vote is anticipated for that meeting.
The borough’s $56.7 million budget for 2016, up from $56.2 million last year, comes with a 3.1 percent tax increase, from 1.257 cents per $100 of assessed value to 1.296 cents. The impact of that on the borough’s average assessed home of $144,000 equals $56.16 annually. The borough plans to raise $29.6 million through taxation, and is anticipating a $3.5 million surplus, up from $3.2 million last year.
The budget elicited few resident comments, but Barbara Kilcommons said that she felt borough officials could have done a better job with it. She said that she felt there were plenty of areas that could have been cut further. She pointed to both public works and parks as areas that didn’t undergo enough scrutiny. Those categories are getting a 6.77 percent and 2.98 percent increase, respectively.
Kilcommons also took issue with capital improvement spending and the level of bonding the borough had taken on. She pointed out the borough would be spending more than $4 million of its appropriations for principal debt repayment this year.
“To me,” she said, “bonding is nothing more than a credit card, and we have to pay the price of all this bonding.”
Mayor Kennedy O’Brien asked Kronowski about the status of the borough’s bonding. The CFO pointed out the borough has about $30 million outstanding in bonding, with a capacity of more than five times that.
O’Brien said responsible bonding was necessary to properly run the borough; doing so on a cash basis would be impossible.
“We’re very prudent and conservative in our borrowing,” he said.
Kronowski also pointed out that this is the first year the borough has increased in value since before superstorm Sandy in 2012, as the borough lost ratables, particularly in the Weber Avenue neighborhood, where the state offered buyouts and has created open space where the homes once stood.
“It took four years basically to come back from the storm,” he said. “This year we finally got back to where we were.”