Why Are Your Municipal Taxes Going Up? From The Desk Of The Mayor

- By Manchester Mayor Robert Arace

Greetings residents,

I wanted to address this year’s township budget and explain to everyone how we got to where we are today.

This year, we were handed a difficult budget with increased expenses due to inflation and the previous administration’s irresponsible allocation of federal grant funds. From an inflationary standpoint, we were hit with several increases in healthcare, fuel, and recycling costs increases.

As an example, here are some of the per- cent increases:

• Healthcare – 22.4% increase

• Gasoline – 20% increase

• Recycling – 17% increase

In addition to the inflationary pressures illustrated above, last year, the previous administration used our American Rescue Plan (ARP) money, which was a grant provided by the federal government for covid relief, as a supplement to our township’s revenues, and they used it to cover township salaries. The issue with this is that they used the money to artificially deflate the tax increase that was necessary to sustain the township, and they did this during an election year. It is highly recommended that the ARP money be used for one-time expenses, such as police vehicles or fire apparatus (which the township desperately needs). The previous adminis- tration used $1,500,000 of grant money for salaries, knowing that those salaries would be required to be funded in the following year’s budget. They did this knowing the grant money would not be available in the 2023 budget, leaving us with a $ 1,500,000 budget shortfall. After months of diligently looking for creative ways to overcome the budget shortfall caused by increased expenses in healthcare, gasoline, recycling, and the $1,500,000 gap left to us by the previous administration, we looked for ways to reduce the burden on our taxpayers, looking to protect them, especially in a poor economic climate. We have introduced a budget that allows for the minimum allowable tax increase to the taxpayers. Initially, when we were developing the budget for 2023 and assessing the additional revenue needed to keep critical services in the township running, we faced a 7-cent tax increase, which would have equaled a $150 increase on average per household per year. Realizing this increase was unacceptable to our residents, we looked for ways to lower the necessary increase. Our administration decided to lessen the burden on our taxpayers by spending a greater amount out of surplus than initially planned and was able to project additional revenues from our EMS service. This enabled us to reduce our tax increase to 3.8 cents, equaling $83 per door per year, 44.6% lower than the initially proposed tax increase.

While any tax increase is frustrating, we believe that this budget is the best outcome in a challenging budget year that corrects the mistakes of the previous administration and sets us up for better budget scenarios for years to come.

As always, I welcome you to please reach out to my office with any questions or concerns about the budget or any other issue.

Federal Funds Will Help Schools Provide Maps To Police

Phil Murphy

TRENTON – Building on last year’s investment in a statewide initiative to collect and digitize blueprints of K-12 school buildings throughout New Jersey to improve school security on behalf of students and staff, Governor Phil Murphy announced an additional investment of approximately $5.79 million in federal funds to further assist with critical incident mapping efforts.

Accurate and uniform maps help law enforcement swiftly and effectively respond to emergencies in unfamiliar environments. These efforts first began in New Jersey when Governor Murphy announced $6.5 million for critical incident mapping efforts in August 2022, and later signed legislation to require all public and non-public schools to submit their mapping data to local law enforcement agencies. Through that funding, the New Jersey State Police was able to contract with a vendor that has been working to collect the updated school maps and upload the electronic format of that information to a database.

“In the face of our country’s ongoing epidemic of gun violence, both in and out of schools, this information is unfortunately yet undeniably necessary to help ensure the safety of our students and educators,” said Governor Murphy. “This additional investment will advance our state’s ongoing efforts to map every school throughout New Jersey to equip law enforcement personnel with the information they need to rapidly respond in the event of a crisis in order to keep our children safe.”

These federal funds will be allocated to the New Jersey State Police to support critical incident mapping in the remaining schools to ensure consistent mapping across the state, and to maintain the statewide database to ensure operational security of this data and provide access to

(Government - See Page 27)