The school election polls closed at 9, the clerks E-mailed out voting results at 10. WW-P News reporter Cara Latham tweeted the results at 10:10 and filed a full length story at the website — www.wwpinfo.com — by 11:15 p.m. By midnight the first online comments had been posted.
“Mr. Marathe just doesn’t get it,” proclaimed one. “Rather than insult voter intelligence, as Mr. Marathe does here, maybe it will take his ouster in the next election cycle to get into the guy’s skull that voters have had it with WWP board arrogance and lousy budgets.”
Referring to a quote from the school board president in the WW-P News website article, in which he said “People don’t tell my why they voted against the budget,” another poster said “Mr. Marathe, people don’t tell you what you don’t want to hear. Have you thought about the fact that your comments on others’ comments can come across as intimidating?”
Another web viewer wrote that “the School Board really does not get it. They blame lights and voter ignorance rather than facing the 800-pound gorilla in the room: In order to have a 1.7 percent increase they cut janitors, lunch ladies, buses, sports, and the list goes on. But they gave the teachers a 5 percent raise in a miserable economy where most people have had either pay cuts or minimal if any raises and a lot of layoffs.
“They consistently argue that if the teachers don’t get raises they will leave — where are they gonna go?”
The reason people didn’t share their negative feelings with Marathe, this reader theorized, is that “they don’t want to rail against the teacher increases in pay, and have little Johnny looked down upon by his teachers. I am not saying cut the teachers or their salaries — just stop the big raises.”
But even in the online crowd, the school board did get some support online. “In my opinion the School Board did a decent job with the budget,” wrote one online visitor. “The budget was doomed by the yearly home re-assessment process. I believe that if the school tax burden was to only increase by 2.5 percent for each homeowner, the budget would have passed.
“However, West Windsor homes with stable year-over-year assessments, would have seen school tax increase by 6.7 percent. My understanding is that the township can reassess up to 20 percent of the housing stock each year. So in a broadly declining housing market, 20 percent of the homes will be favored (from a taxing standpoint) at the expense of the other 80 percent.
“A professional reassessment of the entire town was completed several years ago. I think the town should have simply used those assessed values as a baseline, and decreased all home proportionally. Of course individual exceptions should be made where the original assessment egregiously erred. Doing so, the school budget increase would be directly reflected in each homeowner’s school tax increases. Then voters could fairly determine the merits of the budget.”
“The yearly reassessment of different neighborhoods is to blame for the budget’s failure. If the townships simply assessed all homes down proportionally from the township wide assessment completed a few years ago, we wouldn’t have pockets of the community bearing the bulk of the school budget increase. I don’t blame West Windsor residents facing a 6.7 percent increase for opposing the budget. But it’s not the School Board’s fault. The town and county seem to be at fault.”
Added another: “I am not asking for an end to unions or anything unrealistic like that but raises in a recession not related to recruiting and retention are moronic. We don’t need to spend more, we need to spend smarter. I hope that message was delivered loud and clear to all of the politicians that don’t get it.
“The voters got it and then told you no. What is your next step WW-P?”
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