We write articles all the time about the budgets of towns and school districts. This is the season for these kinds of stories. Usually your taxes go up. Occasionally they go down. But that’s not necessarily good news.
When fuel, insurance, salaries and other expenses go up every year, you should be skeptical if your taxes go down.
Sometimes, your town is using one-time revenues to protect taxpayers. There might be a windfall that is helping out. The town might be using their surplus from the previous year. They might have won a lawsuit.
None of these are bad things, but they are not sustainable. Eventually, those windfalls will blow away.
Probably the best fiscal policy is a small tax increase every year. Nothing too drastic. Nothing to scare anyone away. Just enough to cover your employment contracts and make the trains run on time. And have a couple nice, quality of life things for residents, like recreation. You can’t put a price on that.
The most common reason, in this area, for taxes to go down is development. The more houses there are, the more people there are to spread the taxes around.
Towns like Toms River, Jackson, Howell, and Barnegat have seen huge developments recently. So, there are more people to spread the taxes around. That means your taxes will go down. For a little while, anyway.
Those people will need police, garbage removal, and other services. Twenty years from now, that new road will need repaving. For a while, some of that cost will be absorbed by existing town staff and programs.
And then families move into those homes. And their children enter the school district. Your municipal taxes might go down, but your school taxes go up.
Next time you drive by a huge development, think about how many kids are going to enter the school district. Most districts around here are pretty much done with school construction. There shouldn’t be a new public school built for a while. Not even an addition. But the kids will need teachers, teaching assistants, support staff, and more. You should also realize that a few kids in that new neighborhood are going to have special needs. Most won’t cost anything and they can be mainstreamed in the public school district. However, some will have challenges that the district is not in a position to solve. Schools for special needs students easily cost $50,000 or more per kid. Four or five special needs students will increase taxes by a quarter of a million dollars. This is not to demonize special needs, not by any means, but it’s something to consider when there’s a large development.
If the kids go to private school, the district will have to either provide busing for those kids or pay the families $1,000 per kid. This is a state law. Again, this is not to demonize private schools. This is just a fact that you need to be aware of because often the people running your towns aren’t thinking about it.
So, if you’re ever lucky enough to have your taxes go down, ask what you will be paying in the long run.
Chris Lundy
News Editor
