‘TROJAN HORSE’
Council worries Trenton’s flat-tax budget could cost residents in long haul >>
What an odyssey.
Mayor Reed Gusciora said Wednesday that council members can do whatever they want to his new flat-tax budget after they seemed nonplussed by what he thought was welcome news.
“It’s their budget, and they’re free to increase spending if they’d like.” he said. “We have gone through extraordinary pains to ensure that our expenses would remain steady.”
At-large councilman Jerell Blakeley said he wasn’t saying the “Trojan horse” budget was a political ploy to get desperate and disgruntled Trenton voters back on the “Gus Bus” after years of discord and dysfunction between capital city officials.
But he didn’t have to go that far, as his colleague from the West Ward called the budget — which stripped hundreds of thousands of dollars from some departments — a failure of epic proportions that rivaled Homer’s poem about the Trojan War.
“We were already at the bare bones,” Robin Vaughn said. “We might as well shut the city down.”
Budget blues have become the norm the last three years.
In 2019, Gusciora, council and DCA ended up in court over the administration’s tax-hiking spending plan. It was ultimately adopted after a judge punted the case to an appeals court.
In 2020, council basically punted another tax-hiking budget to DCA in protest after it felt it wasted time slimming down the one the year before, only to see it nixed by DCA.
This year, council bucked Gusciora’s spending plan that would have raised the municipal tax rate by 10 cents amid the pandemic.
“That was the deal. If we did A, B and C, they were going to keep Trenton’s taxes flat,” Vaughn said in January, when the budget was introduced six months late.
The administration retooled the spending plan but didn’t win anyone over with the announcement that there’d be no tax increase, no layoffs but no increase in services.
Gusciora said the city managed that scenario by not filling vacancies. The state also kicked in $10 million in transitional aid and another $10 million in guaranteed capital city aid, he added.
He said he was at a loss to describe council’s reaction to the new budget.
“All tragedy,” Gusciora said. “It’s a tragedy when you actually offer a budget with no increase because council had requested that.”