It was little more than a month ago that a 50-year-old sewer pipe burst and raw sewage spewed from a manhole cover at Old Hickory Road and puddled in the street.
But that wasn’t the worst. Just ask several residents who found the muck bubbling up in their basement.
And chances are, residents here can expect a lot more of the same in the near future, thanks to some bumbling township officials, past and present, who choose to ignore problems waiting to happen over the years.
Much of the blame can be placed on some members of the 2005 Township Council.
This is the council that withheld final municipal budget numbers from the public until nearly Christmas, numbers that meant a double-digit increase in the municipal tax rate.
The fact that the numbers weren’t available until after four of them were re-elected to their council seats is probably not a coincidence.
The 2005 council consisted of then-Council President Parag Patel, Councilman and now-Council President Robert Diehl, and council members Anthony Massaro, Salvatore Pizzi, Joan Kapitan, Charles Tomaro and Peter J. Barnes III.
Barnes, Tomaro and Kapitan voted against that budget, to their credit.
And what many residents didn’t know is that when the council majority approved the budget, they also quietly siphoned $1.6 million in surplus funds from the township sewer utility account to use as revenue in the already bloated budget.
That move cut the projected increase in the municipal purposes tax rate from 13 cents to 11 cents for each $100 of assessed valuation.
That idiotic move also left a pathetic $300,000 in the sewer utility account for maintenance and repairs to the sewer system.
Since the price tag for the latest sewer pipe implosion was $145,584, it’s a sure bet the sewer utility surplus will be gone soon. Very soon.
So what was the Township Council’s dimwitted solution to nearly draining the utility surplus?
Unbelievably, council members voted 5 to 2 last week to jack up the residential sewer rates by 56.7 percent. The increase takes effect in April.
Councilman Anthony Massaro, who voted for both the budget and yanking the sewer surplus funds, had the most inadvertently humorous take on the matter.
No one objected at the December meeting to “increase taxes further,” Massaro said.
It’s almost a sure bet most of the residents who attended that meeting didn’t realize the council was preparing to plunder the sewer surplus.
Acting township Business Administrator Gregory Fehrenbach was right on the money, pardon the pun, when he said using the sewer surplus to lower taxes was a “short-term benefit for a long-term problem.”
The council members who choose to ignore the condition of the sewer pipes for years, then voted for this travesty, should be ashamed of themselves.
And Edison residents will pay the price for their stupidity.