Clearing up some misconceptions about Hamilton school referendum

I am compelled to set the record straight about Ileana Schirmer’s misleading Op-ed on the Hamilton Township School referendum, published on September 23. I congratulate the Hamilton public on passing the referendum.

Ms. Schirmer is quick to criticize me and other state officials who have been grappling for years with decreased school aid that has resulted not from our inaction, but from the actions of a Governor whom Schirmer has supported every step of the way in the form of numerous letters to the editor, while he made those school aid cuts not in the interest of taxpayers, but in his own shameless selfinterest during his failed bid to occupy the White House.

This is the same Governor who did an end-run around the Legislature and single-handedly pushed through a $300 million State House renovation Schirmer now finds she can conveniently oppose and attempt to blame on some of Governor Christie’s strongest critics, including myself.

Furthermore, Schirmer’s own actions during her short five-year political career in Hamilton Township have demonstrated a callous disregard when it comes to spending taxpayers’ hard-earned dollars.

While she missed nearly two dozen votes on the Hamilton Township Council, she did step up to vote to give pay raises to top Township officials, including the Mayor, all the while maintaining that “an $18,000 pay raise is minimal.” Show me a single taxpayer in Hamilton who feels an $18,000 pay raise “is minimal” and I’ll show you an out-of-touch Council member by the name of Schirmer.

As if that weren’t enough, she topped this off by voting to OK a spending spree of hundreds of thousands of dollars on new office furniture for town officials, rather than advocating for new school supplies or equipment.

Perhaps most misleading among the whoppers Schirmer tells in her piece is her lack of distinction between state operating aid (used for day-to-day expenses like salaries and utilities) and capital improvement monies, where residents vote on whether to borrow funds to be paid back over many years for school construction or rehabilitation. On September 26, Hamiltonians voted in favor of capital improvement borrowing.

Now, the state will step up to cover at least 40 percent of the cost, something Schirmer either doesn’t know or intentionally left out of her letter.

Deciding whether to spend large sums of money to improve Hamilton Township’s schools was not an easy decision for hard-pressed taxpayers to make. Ms. Schirmer did Hamiltonians a disservice by her attempts to score cheap political points with misleading rhetoric that was really aimed at boosting her own political fortunes.

— State Senator Linda Greenstein

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