Mayoral candidates discuss consolidation

Candidates for Princeton Borough mayor spoke out on issues of municipal consolidation, the upcoming Valley Road School decision, and ways to reform the Borough’s budget management in a community forum on Tuesday evening. In an overwhelmingly Democratic Borough, this November’s election is the first competitive race for mayor in decades.

Jill Jachera, the Republican candidate, is a retired attorney and former president of the Princeton chapter of the Young Women’s Christian Association. Yina Moore ’79, the Democratic candidate, is a member of the Princeton Regional Planning Board.

Both candidates expressed their conflicted opinions about the consolidation referendum facing both communities. If the referendum passes in both the Borough and the Township, they will become one municipality.

Jachera said that while she “personally would like to see the communities consolidate,” she has doubts over whether the consolidated municipality can be counted on to achieve the savings predicted in the report.

“There is research out there that says that even if you consolidate and have some efficiency, that you don’t actually save what you thought you were going to save,” she said. “How good has government traditionally been at dialing back the needle on spending? I think most of you would agree that it typically doesn’t happen.”

Jachera said she would be more likely to vote for consolidation if others in the Township government assured her that the new municipality would create a fresh budget.

“It means that we start from scratch. We don’t just take the two budgets, lump them together and hope for the best,” she explained.

Moore is also “not convinced” on consolidation and said she would like to see more data on the consolidated municipalities’ budget. She asked whether the commission had considered all of the Borough’s revenues, including revenues it will be receiving from new properties in the future.

“What consideration was given to the Borough’s $3.7 million non-tax revenues during this process? What consideration was given to almost $2 million in property tax revenues that would be realized in Palmer Square and the former non-taxed hospital site? These ongoing and upcoming revenues are, in essence, our dowry,” Moore said.

She also would like to see the first five years of annualized budgets of the proposed new municipality, to see the year-to-year impact on the taxpayer as the full consolidation is implemented.

“These seem to be the steps that we need to make more accurate the projections of, more or less, the prenuptial agreement, and it has not happened. That’s where we need to outline our future together,” Moore said of the requested data.

“The commission failed to perform any of these analyses or ask any of these questions that I asked over the year of 2010,” Moore said.

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On the issue of the University’s plan to move the Dinky southward to make room for its Arts and Transit Neighborhood, Moore said that she supports the Council’s summer resolution to oppose the Dinky move. Jachera said that while she does not want to see the Dinky moved, she is interested in working with the University on their requested zoning to allow them to build in the area requested

Another matter discussed was funding for predicted construction at the former Valley Road School site. Princeton Regional Schools will decide next week between a plan to replace the school building with a new building to house emergency service agencies (to which the municipalities would contribute funding) and a private organization’s plan to convert the school into a community center for local nonprofits.

Both candidates expressed skepticism over the Valley Road School Adaptive Reuse Committee’s capacity to fully fund the project and the necessity of funding the emergency services plan for the building.

When asked whether they approved of the past several years’ budget management, both candidates said they felt a detailed reexamination of the budget was necessary.

According to Jachera, previous municipal leaders have let expenditures rise too high and have been using surplus to hold down property taxes, at the expense of the Borough’s bond rating.

Property taxes, Jachera said, “have held steady, so to speak, the past two years, but actually it has been a farce. Expenditures have gone up. What they have done is that they have spent surplus the last two years in order to avoid raising the property taxes.”

“One of the reasons that we’re rated AA rather than AAA is exactly because we’re spending surplus. That’s something that costs us money every year when we go to borrow funds,” Jachera said.

Moore also spoke of looking more closely at spending, seconding Jachera’s call to reexamine the budget from scratch.

“In the past few years, we’ve had a fixed budget, a budget that has not increased. I’m not sure that is something we should necessarily praise or something we should look further into,” Moore said of the unchanging property taxes.

“I think we’re going to have to look more carefully at all of our management systems to, in some cases, possibly reduce our spending to deal with issues of potentially a loss in voluntary payment from the University. I think we have to look at shared services that we assume are being run efficiently,” Moore said, referring to the $1.2 million payment the University made to the Borough’s operating budget last year as part of an agreement that has not yet been renewed.

At the end of the forum, the candidates were asked what experiences had shaped their desire to become mayor.

“I have for a number of years been unhappy in the trends of what was going on downtown both with our taxes and with the relationship with the University,” Jachera said.

After gaining governing and planning experience through her work at the YWCA, “I wanted to give back even more to the community [beyond working with the YWCA] and provide them with that leadership and that experience so that we could make Princeton the best it could be.”

Moore said her affection for the community comes from growing up in Princeton and from a long family history with the community, which began when her grandfather moved to Princeton in 1896.

“My family and my life experience have brought me to this point,” she said.

Returning to Princeton after working elsewhere, “I saw things that needed to be done, I worked with many different efforts. It began with one Communiversity and a plan for the Arts Council that spurred my interest to take it forward,” Moore said.

The forum was hosted by the League of Women Voters at The Jewish Center of Princeton. The questions came from residents’ online submissions.