Fanwood Looks to Trim Budget in Absence of Extraordinary Aid

Now that Fanwood knows that it won’t be getting extraordinary aid from the state this year, the borough council must take a good, hard look at its budget to see where additional cuts can be made.

Mayor Colleen Mahr told Patch on Monday that she and the rest of the council will be getting together within the next few days to discuss how they should adjust the borough’s budget now that they won’t receive any part of the $398,000 they applied for to help with property tax relief.

“We’ll be looking at where we go from here, and where we could make any reductions to the introductory budget,” Mahr said.

Fanwood has applied for the extraordinary aid from the Department of Community Affairs for the past three years. Last year, the borough received $425,000 in state aid, but this year, no Union County municipality received an award. The DCA announced last Friday that only 39 municipalities were given the funding, down from 62 in 2008.

Mahr said that Fanwood applied for the additional aid hoping that it could help relieve some of the tax burden on residents this year.

The average homeowner in the borough is expected to see a $130 increase this year in their municipal taxes, Mahr said. County taxes are expected to increase by about $100. The Board of Education has the heftiest increase at $400.

“We looked to extraordinary aid because we understood the burden that was being placed on taxpayers, and we wanted to see if we could get additional aid based on that, and the fact that 90 percent of our tax base is still homeowner tax,” Mahr said. “Any increase I understand is unacceptable, but most of that $130 increase is really driven by things we don’t have control over—utilities, health insurance, pension costs. Our department budgets came in flat, so we’re not spending more this year.”

Mahr said that because most of the borough’s cost increases this year came from mandates outside their control, it will be difficult to make additional cuts.

“There’s not a lot of fat on the bone of municipal governments,” she said.

That said, she acknowledged that it’s been a tough year for everyone, and that there were other municipalities that had a much greater need for the extraordinary aid than Fanwood.

“While we have been very lucky to have received aid in the past several years, I also understood that there was never any guarantee that one gets it,” she said. “I think where our circumstances were much more dire over the last several years, and we made some tough decisions with layoffs and workforce reductions, this year we are in a much better position, and I think they saw that.”

Most years, Fanwood typically adopts its budget by mid-July. But because the resignation of Department of Community Affairs Director Joe Doria delayed the announcement of extraordinary aid, Fanwood had been waiting to move forward with the process. Now, Mahr says it’s likely that the borough will first have to hold a public hearing on the changes they’ll make to the budget, then adopt it sometime in early September.