It was a bad day for the WW-P school budget. And it wasn’t much better for the incumbents seeking re-election. The budget was defeated, 1,601 to 1,513, setting the stage for a review by the township governing bodies.
And in Plainsboro, voters seeking a change ousted incumbent Alapakkam Manikandan in favor of Rachelle Feldman Hurwitz, 506-411. In West Windsor, incumbent Richard Kaye retained his seat, but a challenger, Dana Krug, was the leading vote getter, 1,430 to Kaye’s 1,120. Challenger Scott Powell came in third with 835, according to the unofficial totals posted by the clerks’ offices about an hour after the closing of the polls on April 27.
It is the first time in more than a decade that WW-P voters defeated the budget (it was defeated by five votes in 1999), which was proposed at $158.55 million this year. The budget will head to a joint meeting between the West Windsor Township Council and the Plainsboro Township Committee, where officials will decide what to cut, if anything.
Leading up to the election, voters expressed frustration in letters to the editor and in online forums about large increases in the tax rate, despite an overall budget increase of 2.5 percent and a spending increase of only 1.7 percent.
The proposed $158.55 million budget represented an overall $2.7 million increase (1.72 percent) over last year’s $155.9 million budget. But the tax levy under the proposal would have increased to $147.12 million, an increase of $3.6 million over last year’s $143.5 million tax levy.
Breaking down the tax burden, however, was where some residents took issue.
In Plainsboro, taxpayers would have paid $60.9 million in support of the school budget — a 2.8 percent increase over last year’s tax levy. In West Windsor, the amount to be raised by taxation would have been $86.1 million, an increase of 2.3 percent over last year’s levy.
Further, the proposed tax rate in Plainsboro would have increased by 7.5 cents — from $1.55 per $100 of assessed value in 2010 to $1.62 in 2011. The tax rate in West Windsor would have increased by 8.8 cents — from $1.34 per $100 in 2010 to $1.43 in 2011.
Officials have said that declining home values had a significant role in the tax burden this year, as the value of the average home in Plainsboro fell from $395,000 to $389,000, and from $534,787 in West Windsor to $527,376.
The overall assessed property values declined by 0.6 percent in Plainsboro (from $3.72 billion to $3.70 billion) and by 2 percent in West Windsor (from $6.08 billion to $5.97 billion) — meaning the burden is handled by less value.
For the owner of the average assessed home of $389,000 in Plainsboro, the school tax bill would have been $6,317, up from the $6,119 the owner of a home assessed at $395,000 paid last year.
In West Windsor, the average school tax bill for the owner of a home at $527,376 would have been $7,536, up from the $7,171 the owner of a home assessed at $534,787 paid last year.
The school board had acknowledged the tax rate increases, but the state-mandated cap applies to the overall tax levy, which would have increased by 2.5 percent. As such, the tax rates for each community would collect taxes that accumulate to that 2.5 percent, although they would have affected residents differently to get to that number. School officials argued that because of this, a higher tax rate did not mean higher taxes in every case.
Voters did not buy into the idea, instead focusing on the individual tax rate increases in local reports.
When asked why he felt voters turned the budget down, School Board President Hemant Marathe said there are various reasons residents vote for or against the school budget. He pointed to a comment made by one resident at the school board meeting on April 27, in which she voted against the budget because of reasons related to the installation of lights at the athletic fields at high schools North and South.
“People don’t tell my why they voted against the budget,” he said. “But people are concerned about taxes — no doubt about it. The school board is the only tax they get to vote on. Any anger on any form of government, they take it out on the school budget.”
He said this was evident in comments made on the News’ website — wwpinfo.com — where one resident mentioned that his overall tax bill was increasing, mostly as a result of taxes coming from the municipal portion of his bill.
“A lot of people don’t even realize that because they don’t take the time and effort to look at their taxes,” he said. “A simple question that people need to ask themselves is why taxes went up. Spending has gone up by only 1.7 percent, but why have the taxes gone up by more than 1.7 percent? Last year, spending went up 0 percent, but why did the taxes go up by more than 0 percent last year?”
He said school officials tried to emphasize this, but it is up to the voters to make the connection. If they ask those kinds of questions when looking at their tax bills, “then people will understand there is a connection beyond what the school board can control.”
“I told people to look at their taxes and look at what the school district controls,” he added. “If the public only voted on our spending, they would have seen it has only gone up by 1.7 percent, .7 of which is the charter school funding. So essentially, our spending has gone up by 1 percent. If a 1 percent increase in spending over a two-year period is too much, there is nothing I can do about it.”
