Borough budget contains no tax increase

Borough Administrator Robert Bruschi presented the Borough Council with a revised version of the 2011 operating budget at the Council meeting on Tuesday night. The new budget contains no tax increase.

An earlier draft of the budget, presented to the Council on March 8, included a tax increase of one cent per every $100 of assessed property value. Since then, the staff of the Borough’s Office of the Administrator has decreased the amounts of certain appropriated funds so that the current budget draft contains no tax increase.

Bruschi stated that modifications to expenditures included eliminations of staff positions, but that the Borough would not yet disclose which positions were eliminated or which programs were cut.

“Some of it’s staff reductions. It’s probably a dozen different budget [expenditures that were cut],” Bruschi said, stating that the cuts had only marginal impact on the budget’s programs.

“You’re looking at a dozen divided into $300,000,” he added. “Three hundred [thousand] sounds like a lot of money. In a $25 million budget, it’s not a whole lot.”

Borough administrators believed four weeks ago that they needed to reduce spending by $206,000 to avoid the tax increase. After learning two weeks ago that property tax revaluation appeals had led to lowered assessed property tax revenues, administrators found that the required reduction would in fact be just over $300,000.

“People appealed their ultimate values because of the revaluation,” Bruschi said. “They got a lower appeal granted, and that took the overall assessed value of the Borough down.”

The budget, which appropriates $25.7 million in spending, includes an $800,000 surplus despite the reductions.

Next Tuesday’s Council meeting will include a formal public hearing on the budget at which community members are invited to give their feedback. A second public hearing, intended to end in the adoption of the budget, is tentatively set for April 26.

At the meeting, superintendent of schools Judy Wilson also gave a report on the Princeton Regional Schools’ budget.

Revenue for Princeton Regional Schools comes from taxes levied in the Borough and Township. The amount of revenue drawn from each municipality depends on the municipalities’ current assessed property value.

The tax impact, the dollar amount of levied taxes that can be attributed to Princeton Regional Schools’ 2011 budget for the average household, came out to $98 in the Borough and $103 in the Township.

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School board elections for Princeton Regional Schools will be held on April 27. Three school board positions, one reserved for a Borough representative and two for Township representatives, will be voted on. Candidates for all three seats are running unopposed.

In addition, the Arts Council of Princeton made its annual report to the Borough Council.

Arts Council executive director Jeff Nathanson said that the past year has been one marked by financial turnaround for the organization, which did not have a deficit this year due to a successfully implemented plan of aggressive fundraising and fiscal discipline.