Hamilton Council expresses concern with mayor’s 2016 budget plan
HAMILTON >> Members of Hamilton Council on Tuesday foreshadowed they will take a careful look at Mayor Kelly Yaede’s proposed 2016 fiscal plan before adopting a municipal budget this year.
“All of the information has to be gathered on this budget,” Councilman Dennis Pone said at Tuesday’s Hamilton Council meeting. “This is a difficult budget this year. We have to talk with the CFO about keeping our bond rating intact,” Pone added, referring to Hamilton’s Chief Financial Officer and Finance Director John Barrett.
Hamilton Council voted 5-0 on Tuesday to introduce Yaede’s budget. The council members said they will hold a series of open-public budget workshops in the weeks ahead to review the budget alongside high-level Yaede administration officials before adopting a final budget.
Yaede’s 2016 budget proposal seeks to fund the township’s municipal operations and increase spending on public safety and debt service without raising the relative municipal tax rate. The mayor’s 2016 fiscal plan calls for $100.7 million in total spending, which is $2.8 million higher than the 2015 budget. Her plan to hold the line on taxes this year is heavily predicated on using $5.7 million of surplus as revenue.
The township last year used $3.2 million of surplus as revenue and in 2014 used $2.4 million of surplus as revenue, according to budget figures. Yaede in a statement last month said she “believed that it was important to hold the line on municipal taxes for our taxpayers in this year’s budget” due to the impact of property revaluations.
The Mercer County Board of Taxation mandated Hamilton Township to conduct property revaluations this year — a revenue-neutral process that equalizes the tax burden in a way that generally causes homeowners with highly appreciable real estate to pay more in taxes while homeowners with lower appreciable home values pay less in taxation.
Councilman Ed Gore said he supports the concept of keeping the tax rate flat but expressed concerns with Yaede’s proposed solution for avoiding a tax hike.
“I am looking very much forward to get to the bottom of things,” Gore said at the meeting about the budget. He later suggested the councilmay have to consider spending cuts, saying, “I look forward to working with the mayor in effectuating this no-tax-increasing budget.”
Council President Ileana Schirmer said Hamilton Council will do its part on the budget “to make it as healthy for the township” as possible.
The five council members and Yaede are all Republicans. Former Hamilton councilman Vinnie Capodanno, a Democrat, gave public comments at Tuesday’s council meeting expressing he is concerned with Yaede’s budget, particularly with her plan to use nearly $6 million of surplus as revenue.
“I know you aren’t going to let anyone get away with playing games with this budget,” Capodanno told the council members in his public remarks. “Investigate this and see what is really going on, because I know you don’t play games.”
Pone said Hamilton’s Business Administrator John Ricci has been on sick leave recovering from an illness but noted that he expects Ricci and Barrett to be fully involved in the process when the council conducts its open-public review of the introduced 2016 municipal budget.
Council will “make sure we have Mr. Ricci and Mr. Barrett here to guide us” through the budget finalizing process, Pone said. “We will get this thing right. It will be a budget in the best interests of Hamilton Township when we are done.”