As a resident and taxpayer of West Windsor for the past 20 years who has attended several recent town council meetings I would like to take the opportunity to inform other residents of West Windsor about some issues that concern and disturb me. I first started coming to the meetings because of my concern over the loss of our Animal Control Officer. Now I realize that this is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the apparent mismanagement and waste of our tax dollars.
When I voiced my opinion at the council meetings, my words seemed to fall on deaf ears. At the last council meeting I brought forth to the mayor and council the fact that we have some excessive bleeding of money from public works, such as four “supervisors” taking home heavy gas guzzling trucks every night and two police officers applying for reimbursement of helicopter lessons at taxpayer expense. At this week’s meeting when I spoke, the council and mayor were more concerned with my allowed three-minute public comment time expiring than the questions I was really hoping would be answered but were not answered at all. Why wouldn’t they want me to stop talking? They either approved of these excesses, or they are totally unaware of what their own employees are doing. The more I delve into recent township spending, the more apparent it is that this administration is “penny wise and pound foolish.” They claim that they eliminated the ACO to save money, but the measly $45,000 ACO salary is a drop in the bucket compared to the amount of money wasted on vehicles and no bid contracts in which we pay for road/sewer repairs that should have been fixed five years ago (i.e., Wallace Road). The new councilman, Bryan Maher was the only one interested in addressing some of my concerns. He has been challenging his colleagues and the administration, whose standard answer is “we will have to get back to you on that,” because they cannot, or will not, answer the simplest questions. By the way, I am still waiting for Robert Hary to get back to me on some questions I had about the budgets from 2011 and 2012. I can only hope the rest of the council will follow Mr. Maher’s lead and understand they are supposed to be representing the taxpayers.
From what I have been told, other townships like Ewing and Hamilton have cut their annual budgets by considerable amounts and still are maintaining services to the taxpayer. East Windsor operates at two-thirds of West Windsor’s budget with the municipality handling in-house water, sewer, garbage etc. while also maintaining a full-time animal control officer — go figure. Whenever this administration is faced with having to cut a budget they will always try to scare the taxpayer by threatening us with loss of services. If someone in this administration had the managerial acumen to actually manage these departments and cut the waste, we could have far better municipal services at a greatly reduced cost.
I know we all live somewhat busy and at times hectic lives, but I ask you as fellow residents and taxpayers to attend council meetings or at least watch them on TV so you can see the problems of our administration, and please get involved any way you can, even if it’s just by making a phone call to the mayor or the administrator and letting them know the taxpayers are watching, and we deserve better government in our town.
Everyone in West Windsor has felt the sting of our current economy in one way or another. I think it’s safe to say Washington has failed us miserably. As if that weren’t bad enough our West Windsor administration has decided to follow Washington’s lead. This administration spends tax payer money without conscience or accountability.
Debbie Hepler
West Windsor
