A bill passed yesterday in Trenton pending a signature from Gov Murphy will allow some school districts including Lakewood to raise property taxes more than the current allowed 2% tax cap. The bill allows the district to do so, starting this coming year through the 2024-2025 school year. Gov Murphy is expected to push back.
The measure would apply to school districts that have lost aid as the state shakes up its funding formula, allowing these districts to make up their losses by exceeding the 2-percent cap on tax increases.
Based on current deficit, taxes would have to rise 40% . Then 20% every year to cover annual shortfall. So if taxes are 10k now. It will go up to 14k now and then increase over 2k per year. And this is just for the BOE part. The township is now also starting to raise taxes to cover all the extra houses being built.
ReplyDeleteFormer BOE member (so I know these numbers to be true)
The problem is the state funding so the answer is raise municipal taxes and leave us, the state alone??? Chelm at work!
ReplyDeleteMarijuana yes! plastic bags no! Raise our gas tax. Vote all the bumbs out.
Why can't we just shut down the public school and become a right to choose township.
ReplyDeleteThere are apx. 30,000 private\6,000 public pay $10,000 = 360,000,000.How much for special needs? No busing or after school arts. How much is the budget, will it save any $$$. Someone needs to find out before saying that.
ReplyDeleteLakewood's local fair share last year was $111,534,172. It will go up in 2020. The tax levy was $102,844,033. The state monitor has the authority to raise taxes to the maximum under the law. Should this bill become law, you can expect at least at a ten million dollar tax increase.
ReplyDeleteI am told that the people want the status quo the stand. Good riddance.
I will quote from page 2 of the 2002 Lakewood BOE Task Force Report after the BOE lost in the Bacon case:
"In actuality, the Court did not render its decision until the fall of2002, and the decision was highly unfavorable to Lakewood. At a Task Force meeting held last fall, the District's Assistant Superintendent, Ed Luick, and its General Counsel, Michael Inzelbuch, Esq., made a presentation regarding the Court's adverse decision, and the reason the Board elected not to appeal. In brief, the Court's standard for a district obtaining special state funding included an element that measured the amount of a school district's property wealth per pupil. The Court set this property wealth per pupil threshold at a very low level, so low, in fact, that several current Abbott districts would not meet this criterion if they were being
evaluated for eligibility today. Since the Court was within its discretion to set these low standards, and since the Court did not make any obvious errors of law in making its ruling, Lakewood did not have a solid basis for appealing the decision. In sum, Lakewood's hopes of being designated as an Abbott or a quasi-Abbott district had been eliminated."
The lion's share of my petition in June 2014 addressed the mistakes of Bacon yet the people were told "the Court did not make any obvious errors of law in making its ruling."
http://lakewoodlaworg.ipage.com/documents/Amended%20Petition.pdf
I wrote Mr. Luick on April 3, 2008 explaining the mistake of the Bacon Court.
I pled with the members of the BOE in 2013 to join me in filing a new case to correct the dismal record and mistakes in Bacon. I told them to stay away from that case. Instead, they joined with other districts in reviving Bacon in 2014. It was finally laid to rest, dismissed with prejudice in January 2015 by Judge Jacobson in Trenton, the same judge that I had to go to in order to get the BOE to allow the superintendent and business manager to testify in January 2018.
So for 18 years, the Lakewood BOE did not try to litigate the funding with a new case, did not appeal the WRONG decision in Bacon, did not set the record straight. The the BOE blindly joined other districts in reviving Bacon. Even had the Bacon districts prevailed, Lakewood still would have lost.
Par for the course in Lakewood. The public good is sacrificed because of HaKaros HaTov towards the most incompetent and pusillanimous, as long as they do favors for "us."
Aaron Lang