WeLoveMillburn offers congratulations and urges

vigilance moving forward.

Millburn, NJ — April 21, 2010 — WeLoveMillburn congratulates the three members elected to the Board of Education. WLM is also disappointed that a small minority of residents voted to approve the school budget. [More]

New Jersey School Boards Association Voters Reject

Most School Budgets

     TRENTON, April 21, 2010 — For the first time since 1976, New Jersey voters rejected a majority of proposed school budgets. Only 41.3 percent of the 537 proposed budgets received voter approval in yesterday's Annual School Election, according to unofficial results released this morning by the New Jersey School Boards Association. That figure compares with a 73.3 percent approval rate last year.
     [More]

WeLoveMillburn Urges a NO Vote on the 2010-2011

School Budget

SUMMARY: WeLoveMillburn (WLM) does not approve the proposed school budget for 2010-2011. We encourage you to vote "NO" for the budget, and to carefully evaluate the criteria for the 5 candidates running for 3 positions on the Board of Education.

BUDGET: The past year has been especially contentious for the public and the BOE. Lack of clear information, undisclosed "pockets" of excess cash, untimely and insufficient presentation of budget information and unwillingness to make appropriate and sufficient changes in current expense base force us to the conclusion to VOTE "NO" on the proposed 2010-2011 school budget. If the budget is defeated, it will go before the Millburn Township Committee, which will specify additional expense reductions.

CANDIDATES FOR BOARD OF EDUCATION: There are five candidates running for 3 seats on the BOE: 2 incumbents, Lise Chapman and Michael Birnberg, and 3 Newcomers, Manish Shah, Amy Justice and Rona Wenik. As a matter of policy, WLM has not specifically endorsed candidates for any position, but we do encourage you to read the publicly available information about the candidates.

DETAILED ANALYSIS: Please take the time to vote on Tuesday, April 20, 2010, from 7 am until 9 pm. In addition to the school budget, you will be asked to vote on candidates running for the Board of Education.

Below we present our rationale for not being able to support the proposed school budget.

We understand that many of our fellow residents are busy and cannot keep up with the school's financial issues, and some perhaps just assume the school board and the administration have done the right thing. In this case, however, all nine members of the Board of Education stated as they voted on March 31, 2010 that they reluctantly supported the budget. We cannot blame them for their reluctance, inasmuch as Superintendent Brodow and the Administration did not provide the BOE with adequate information or real budget cuts in light of losing all state aid.

Our town has nearly 13,000 registered voters. Nevertheless, over the past three years, the number of votes cast on the school budget has dropped from 2,933 in 2007 to 1,302 in 2009. In each of those years, the budget passed by a margin of between 239 and 432 votes. School funding represents over 50% of our property taxes, and this important decision should not be decided by so few.

On Tuesday, April 20, 2010, voters will be asked to select members of the board of education and to approve the 2010-2011 school budget. We urge you to take the time to read the material below on why we can't support the budget and urge you all to make your voices heard, and Please Vote.

Board of Education Candidates

WeLoveMillburn, historically, has not endorsed specific candidates. This year, there are five candidates running for three open seats: Two incumbents — Michael Birnberg and Lise Chapman — and three new candidates — Amy Justice, Manish Shah and Rona Wenik.

We encourage voters to check the local news sources for information on the candidates. All the candidates participated in two public forums covered by the press, and each candidate had an opportunity to express their views on a variety of school topics. We've included web addresses to the news services at the end of this report.

Our review of the 2010-2011 School Budget

This year's budget process was much more contentious than prior years as the school board struggled to address the over-taxing and deliberate over-budgeting that has occurred over many years, resulting in an enormous excess surplus, and the sudden loss of all state aid. Indeed, at the March 31, 2010 Board of Education vote on the budget, none of the nine board members enthusiastically supported this budget. BOE President Noreen Brunini said she would have voted no because the Administration hadn't fully laid out its plan for the reduction in supervisors. And many BOE members said they were not satisfied with this budget because it left too many issues unresolved and left the district facing a large budget hole for next year. In the end, most said they were "reluctantly" voting to send the budget to the taxpayers because, in our view, they had to get something on the ballot.

On this year's ballot, you are asked to vote yes or no on a school tax of $70,487,758, a 2% increase over the prior year. This tax will go towards funding the school's operating budget for 2010-2011. Although the BOE and Administration claim to have "cut" items from the budget, most of the cuts are illusory because they merely cut the phantom items that were used to generate excess surplus. In other words, most of the so-called cuts come from items that were over-budgeted to begin with. Perhaps most important, this budget continues to propagate the old tax-and-spend policies of the past when it is clear that they can't be sustained.

You may have noted that WeLoveMillburn publicly (and privately) asked many questions about this budget to understand better where we stand as a district and where we're going. We come away even more unsatisfied than the BOE on this budget. For the reasons summarized below, we have decided not to support this budget and ask that you vote no.

Budget Analysis

Spending on school operations has increased from $71.1 million during the 2008-2009 school year to an estimated $73.9 million (see Note 1) for the current school year (a 3.9% increase over last year) and a proposed $75.5 million for 2010-2011 (a 2.2% increase over this year). The current year's spending would have been higher, but the district lost state aid during the year and instituted a spending freeze. Unfortunately, we don't have more detailed information on school spending this year to provide a more specific comparative analysis on the areas of the budget that are increasing. Some BOE members — two of whom sit on the Finance Committee — have expressed utter frustration with the Administration's inability to provide clear comparative data.

(We should also point out that the Administration had originally projected a $1.5 million surplus for this year, but then over a four-day span "found" an extra $1 million in surplus money in the current year's budget, bringing the total expected surplus — or over-budgeted and over-taxed items — to $2.5 million. This kind of fiscal management should be unacceptable to our community.)

You may have noticed that the proposed school tax is $70.5 million and the proposed school spending is $75.5 million — a $5.0 million shortfall. This is a big problem that obviously can't be sustained. In the past, surplus funds and State aid have made up the difference, but in the opinion of many BOE members, those funds won't be available in the future.

In the proposed budget, the district plans to use $4.1 million in surplus funds to close the hole. We should not have even had that much "surplus" if the district had been strictly complying with a law that capped any excess surplus to 2% of the tax levy. In other words, we should have had no more than $1.4 million in surplus. In addition, we had previously received financial aid from the State ($3.5 million for this school year) to reduce the tax levy. Therefore, if we had total surplus and State aid of $7.6 million, our tax levy would have been $67.9 million — a 1.7% tax decrease from this year! But because of the loss of all of our state aid of $3 million, the Administration has proposed to make up the difference by using surplus and increasing our taxes instead of actually cutting wasteful spending and finding ways of economizing.

Where Are We Heading?

As we said earlier, we're concerned about underlying $5.0 million budget gap. We've been told by the Administration and the BOE not to expect any significant surplus funds in the future because, as many BOE members have now acknowledged, we have been over-taxed for many years, which created unusually large surpluses, and because the Administration has been forced to create a budget that does not deliberately include excess amounts that never get spent. We also believe it would be irresponsible to assume any material State aid given the current fiscal situation. Yet the current course of taxing and spending has become, as some on the BOE have said, "unsustainable."

In this budget, we're funding through taxes only 93.3% of the operating costs. What does this mean for next year? Governor Christie is proposing a 2.5% cap on property tax increases (there's a 4% cap today), so higher taxes alone won't close the gap. In addition, the school district has contractual salary increases for teachers and administrators, and rapidly rising healthcare costs. Even if the administration can hold all these increases to 2.5%, matching the increase in taxes (which, in our opinion, will be difficult), we will still have a $5 million hole!

Millburn is not the only school district facing these problems. A large number of school districts lost State aid. However, in our opinion, Millburn is doing less to address these issues than other districts. Other districts have asked for teacher pay freezes and contributions to health-insurance premiums, have had substantial cuts in their workforces and have eliminated wasteful items. Although our Administration has proposed eliminating some supervisor positions and some aid positions the state says we should not have had, we are likely to have bigger problems next year while other districts will have had the benefit of reacting early. In addition, we have a new school superintendent starting on July 1 who will have to face these issues in his first year. Even though he'll inherit these problems, he won't be very popular if he has to make material expense cuts to close the budget gap. Simply put, with this proposed budget, our BOE and Administration have only kicked the can down the road.

Conclusion

We still have many questions about our school district's lack of fiscal restraint. Unfortunately, we believe the path we're on will force the new administration to make very deep and disruptive cuts to our school system next year. We don't see how this can be done without adversely affecting our school children. We would have rather seen a "soft landing" approach whereby more spending cuts were enacted this year so the impact could have been spread over two or three years. Truth be told, we have serious problems on the horizon.

For these reasons, we cannot support this budget as proposed and ask that you VOTE NO on April 20, 2010.

Sincerely yours,
WeLoveMillburn

Notes

Note 1: The 2009-2010 operating budget is $76.4 million but the school administration projected excess funds of approximately $2.5 million by the end of this school year. Therefore, the estimated operating expenses are $73.9 million.

Note 2: The expected tax levy of $67.9 million plus $3.0 million to cover the lost aid would have produced a tax levy of $70.9 million. The actual proposal is $0.4 million lower due to an item labeled as "Miscellaneous Revenue from Local Sources." It is not clear what this amount represents.

Millburn Board of Education Approves Preliminary School Budget

on 4-0-3 Vote With Two Members Absent

     By The Alternative Press Staff, March 24, 2010

     MILLBURN, NJ — The Millburn Board of Education, with two members absent, approved a preliminary school budget on Tuesday night with only four yes votes and three members abstaining.

President of WeLoveMillburn, Ralph Inglese, said, "The proposed Millburn school budget leaves sustainability in question." He added, "With questionable ongoing access to state aid and the requirement to utilize the district's surplus, WeLoveMillburn recommended that the school board prepare a multi-year strategic plan to bring costs into alignment with revenue. If the district doesn't act quickly, they run the risk of accumulating a deficit of nearly $50mm over the next 5 years according to our analysis. We are in a crisis now, but the surplus covers the problem for this year. Unfortunately, we'll have to face a worse problem next year."

     Millburn, NJ — March 8, 2010 — At the regularly scheduled Board of Education meeting, conducted at Deerfield School, the President of We Love Millburn (called WLM after this) delivered a strong and fact-filled ultimatum to the nine members of the Board.[More]

     January 13, 2010

     In the past ten years, K-12 enrollment has grown by 27% while the budget has grown by a whopping 101%...from a budget of $43 million to the projected budget of $86 million.

     The full statement was read at this weeks Board of Education Meeting by a parent in town with children in the public school system. Click on 'more' to read the full statement.   [More]

     Click to view the entire report and sort through all of the statistics
     By Tracy Ness — NJ.com
     December 17, 2009, 3:17PM

Millburn school self-assessment finds areas of concern

     By Gwen Orel — Independent Press
     December 15, 2009, 12:16PM

Millburn School Evaluation Raises Questions

     By Tina Kelley — The NY Times Local Millburn
     December 4, 2009, 7:40 PM

A new teacher for every two new students?

     By Andrea Hughes — The Item of Millburn and Short Hills
     November 24, 2009

Millburn Diversity Study Never Released

     By Tina Kelley — The NY Times Local Millburn
     November 17, 2009, 5:06 PM

TOWN

All municipal employees will get raises in Millburn

     By Patricia C. Kelley — Independent Press
     December 30, 2009, 7:50AM

Speed humps in Millburn are a last resort

     By Patricia C. Kelley — Independent Press
     December 22, 2009

Proposed Salary Ordinance

The Township Committee will vote on it on Dec. 15.

     By Jennifer Connic [email the author] — The Patch
     December 4, 2009

Millburn is hit with $1 billion in property tax appeals

     By Patricia C. Kelley — Independent Press
     November 24, 2009, 2:14PM

Millburn launches parking deck study

     By Patricia C. Kelley — Independent Press
     December 07, 2009, 1:20PM

When will the township give residents a financial report on

the Paper Mill Playhouse?

     Several WeLoveMillburn members have asked for this at Township meetings but nothing has been forthcoming. Millburn Township purchased the Paper Mill in May of 2008 for 9 million dollars. When is that report of progress or lack of it coming? [click here for Paper Mill Playhouse Daily Sales]

REGION

Parsippany might conduct student census

to ensure residency

     By Eugene Paik — The Star-Ledger
     December 02, 2009, 2:44PM

Essex County — After slew of tax appeals,

South Orange must borrow to repay owners

     By Richard Khavkine — The Star-Ledger
     November 29, 2009, 6:39AM

STATE

Slow population growth could cost N.J.

federal aid, House rep

     By Herb Jackson, Washington Correspondent — The Record
     December 23, 2009

New Jersey Leads Municipal Bond Downgrades as

State Aid Shrinks

     By Terrence Dopp — Bloomberg.com
     November 24, 2009

State's Financial Future Looks Bleak: Millburn officials

review their experience at the League of Municipalities

annual conference.

     By Jennifer Connic — The Patch
     November 24, 2009


Sign up now for email updates on town issues.   More>>

Help your friends and neighbors be informed about upcoming issues and opportunities we face together.   More>>