The following are comments that I made at the West Windsor Township Council meeting on December 12.
I would like to address the Township Council regarding the budget for the WW-P School District. The last time that I was in this room was in early May when you conducted a special meeting on the school budget. The voters in West Windsor had rejected the budget and you had the opportunity to force changes to the budget. Your decision that night was to accept a trivial cut of $503,000 that was proposed by the district.
Since that time, the district has closed the June, 2011, fiscal year and released the audited results. My schedule starts to peel away the deceit that the district uses in developing the budget. It is a comparison of the 2010-’11 actual results versus the budget. That shows that the district underspent the budget by $10.4 million or 7.3 percent. One can always debate whether this favorability was due to effective management or a sandbagged budget. I feel that it was an inflated budget. In addition, the district received an additional $1.6 million of state aid, which was not reflected in the budget. My understanding is that the district knew about these monies before the budget was submitted to the taxpayers but they did not reflect them in the budget.
Putting these numbers together, the district was favorable by almost $12 million.
To put this favorability into perspective, the district reports that the average West Windsor taxpayer pays $7,161 for the school tax. Based on the actual results, only $6,575 was used to run the schools and $596 was excess. So, in these difficult economic times, each taxpayer was overcharged almost $600 by the school district.
My final schedule shows the actual 2010-’11 actual results versus the budget that you approved for the 2011-’12 year. Rather than a moderate increase in spending it really represents a 10 percent increase in spending.
I hope that the West Windsor Council will be more skeptical and proactive in their oversight of future school budgets. We need the district to stop inflating the budget and to reduce the burden on our taxpayers.
Quentin Walsh, CPA
4 Petty Road, Plainsboro
Walsh’s wife, Ellen, is a member of the WW-P School Board. The comments above reflect his views, not hers.
