With pain and deep concern I see our next tax increase has been approved.
Taxes have a double bit axe effect on your pocket book. Not only do they take money from your monthly cash flow that you could use for other purposes, but they also decrease the value of your home. People set how much they will pay for a home based on the total house payment they can afford. For each $100 tax increase, the value of your home decreases over $1,700. So, for 2009 from a municipal tax increase alone perspective, your wallet is $20 lighter each month and you lost over $3,000 in home value.
You may be asking yourself why couldn’t taxes have been decreased or at least stayed flat year over year. How have our neighboring communities addressed the current economy? Comparison as follows:
Municipal tax increases for 2009: Princeton, 0 percent; Montgomery, 0 percent; West Windsor, 5+ percent.
Over the last eight years our municipal taxes have increased over 100 percent and the mayor projects an 11 percent increase for next year. Have your wages gone up 109 percent in the last eight years? What can be done? How about some of these ideas?
Make a clear distinction between what we need and what we want. The way our taxes have increased, it feels like a teenager at the mall with your credit card.
Push hard for service regionalization. All services that can be regionalized should be regionalized. Clearly large scale service delivery is far cheaper to deliver than what multiple municipal fiefdoms can achieve. Merge our school district with Princeton and Montgomery, start a county wide 911 and police dispatching service, provide integrated fire department support.
Use zero based budgeting. We must stop the cycle of spending increases just because we paid for something last year. Every dollar spent must be justified each year.
Push more costs for township services to groups that use them. For example, animal control should be 100 percent funded by the people who have animals, housing inspections, etc should be 100 percent funded by the people who use that service.
Assure all spending helps a wide cross section of our town. If some spending item has a small number of people who want it, they should pay at least the bulk of it.
Put the brakes on the transit village. It is clear to anyone who has looked rationally at the financials of this project that it will increase our taxes by $1,500 to $7,000/year. There is zero chance this project will meet the mayor’s campaign promise of tax neutral or tax positive. Absolutely zero. And, in the end, we will bear the pain of the “Oops, I guess the ‘experts’ (AKA developers and real estate agents) projection was wrong”.
Provide line item detail of all proposed budget items for taxpayers to review. And this needs to include detail and rationale.
Something is clearly fundamentally broken with our township government’s out of control spending appetite. Its unfortunate there isn’t a Biggest Loser TV series that works to cut municipal spending fat and waste, because as it is now, we taxpayers are the biggest losers. Mike Baxter
Princeton Junction
For a different view of West Windsor’s budget and its tax consequences, see story, page 1.
