Officials in West Windsor are anticipating another tough year ahead as the township’s annual budget process begins.
Some challenges this year include the state’s mandated 2-percent cap on tax levy increases as well as contract negotiations for five of the township’s unions — including three uniformed unions as well as its white and blue-collar workers. Those contracts will expire on December 31.
Still, officials say that the biggest challenge will not be in limiting costs and expenditures; rather, it is in curtailing the declining revenue the township has seen in recent years.
“I have been examining every way we can increase our revenues,” reported Business Administrator Robert Hary during the Township Council’s November 15 meeting.
One solution is to revise its township fee ordinance to include increases in some areas, Hary reported. The revision to the ordinance will be on the agenda for the Township Council to vote on Monday, November 22.
Hary said he and other officials went through the township’s list of fees and found areas where the township could increase the fees within reason to help bring in more revenue.
“There is nothing major or large in there,” he said. “It hasn’t been looked at in a while.”
Councilman Charles Morgan said that the issue was a “classic clash between user fees and taxes,” he said. “I would encourage us to do whatever we can to maximize those fees” to help offset the tax burden.
However, Councilwoman Linda Geevers said she was worried that some of the fees in the ordinance seemed to have a high percentage of increase. She said she saw that in some areas, the fees increased by as much as 30 percent, and in a few cases, they doubled.
But Morgan said that the real question was whether West Windsor’s fee ordinance was in line with other neighboring towns.
Hary said it was. “We’ve looked at them all, and we’re not out of whack with anyone else,” he said. “We’re probably equal to or higher in some areas,” but in those areas, the township offers more extensive services than in those other towns.
Hary said officials are planning to include some suggestions in the budget from the efficiency study that is currently underway at the township.
The administration will have to have the budget to the Township Council by the state-mandated deadline of January 15, but Hary said the administration will try to get the budget to council as soon as it can.
Council members said the issue last year was that the budget was presented to them later in the year. Mayor Shing-Fu Hsueh explained that the state deadline was pushed back into the middle of March this past budget cycle because the new governor took over and needed time to provide municipalities with state information regarding aid and other factors.
Councilman Kamal Khanna said another issue the council faced last year was a confusion created by the terminology used when discussing the budget, including confusion over the difference between a tax levy and tax rate. Hary said the administration will include a breakdown of the terminology in this year’s budget presentation so that everyone is on the same page.
Cable TV Ordinance. Work continued on revisions to the Cable TV ordinance, as Council members Charles Morgan and Linda Geevers met with Steve Goodell (from Township Attorney Michael Herbert’s firm) this month to go through the ordinance and make revisions based on earlier discussions.
Morgan reported during the November 15 meeting that work on the ordinance had been done. The council is expected to review the revisions in December before introducing it in January.
Discussions on the Cable TV Advisory ordinance have been ongoing, but in October, the council voted to create a smaller Cable TV Advisory Board — shrinking it from nine to five members.
The current body consists of nine appointed resident members, but will be replaced in favor of a committee with more governmental influence to “streamline” the process for handling cable television-related policy decisions.
However, it will still maintain some public input. Instead of the current set up, the council voted unanimously on October 18 to create an advisory committee consisting of the mayor or his designee (a member of the administration), two Township Council members, and two members of the public — one appointed by the mayor, and one by the council.
Morgan and Geevers said that the decision was made to keep the “Cable TV Advisory Board” title for the body, rather that changing its name to a committee, as originally proposed.
Affordable Unit Acquisition. In other business during the November 15 meeting, the council also agreed to put a resolution on the agenda for Monday, November 22, that would allow for the township to purchase a unit in the Windsor Ponds development to keep it from being sold as a market-rate unit.
According to Township Attorney Michael Herbert, the township needs to acquire the unit because its affordable housing restrictions expire. According to officials, the purchase would allow the township to maintain the unit as a “moderate-income” unit, with a maximum sale price of $88,000.
“We do have funds available in our affordable housing account,” said Herbert.
Councilman Charles Morgan urged township officials to take a broader look at the township’s affordable housing obligations, as many of the 30-year affordable restrictions will be expiring in the coming years. “We’re facing a real problem when these restrictions run out,” he said. “It seems to me we need to be addressing this problem more broadly than just this one unit.”
In other business, the council also agreed to a put a resolution on the agenda for the November 22 meeting that would appoint a board of assessors — consisting of three residents — who would work with township officials to assess and distribute costs associated with the sewer project in the Heatherfield Development to property owners there.
According to officials, the costs are estimated to be around $15,000 per property owner for their own connections to the sewer lines, to be reimbursed to the township over a period of years.
