Let's Talk Barnegat

The Master Plan with the Barnegat Master Plan!

2011-11-23T19:15:00.004-05:00

Is it just me or does this Master Plan update seem like it's getting a little financially "excessive"?

Here are the facts. In May 2010, our committee passed a resolution to appropriate $250,000 of "emergency" money to update the Master Plan. All 5 committee people voted in favor of spending the money. Reading this bill list is very interesting. It seems that in June 2010, a month after the emergency funds were passed, we started cutting checks to Birdsall for work that was done in 2008-2009. Such as the natural resources inventory to the tune of $19,000 and reinstating a coastal center (whatever that is) for $56,531. What is amazing is that Birdsall did $152,877 worth of work for two years and did not get paid until the "emergency" money was passed. Why wasn't he paid for all of that work as he did it? Check out the bill list from Dec 2010, the town (the taxpayers) wrote him a nice check for almost $78,000 on Dec 31. Did the committee ask all the necessary questions about this study. Did anyone ask if Birdsall could do it for less? So now he says he needs $190,000 more? For what? That is a total of $440,000 in 2 years. Figuring at $120.00 an hour for our engineers time, that comes out to 3,660 man hours. Is that possible? Is this how business is done in our town?

I hope that on the second reading of this resolution at the December 5th Meeting, one of our "full-time" committeemen will ask this question or at least get a detailed explanation from Mr Hess about why we need $190,000 more. Maybe that's how it goes here in Barnegat, we will just accept it. I have included copies of the bill lists for you to see where the money went. It is really amazing! Endless money!

Read for yourself, it is all in chronological order starting in June, one month after the "emergency" appropriation was passed. You won't find this information on the Township website. It doesn't take long for a "professional" to go through $250,000, does it!
Click on the list, it's easier to see.

Congrats to the winners and to the other candidates who had the guts to put their name on the line.

2011-11-09T09:19:00.000-05:00

Well, my run is over. I can say that I am proud in what I accomplished. Running virtually a one man campaign, with some financial and supportive help from a few residents of our town, I saw it through to fruition. I fully support the winners and will hope that they see that something has to give in our town to make it more affordable. The next year will tell. Will I still be blogging? Will I still attend meetings? Of course! So, for now, thanks to all that voted and availed themselves of the right that we have in our great country. It's striped bass season, that's where I'll be!

November 8th push 5C for Effron. I am ready! Change in politics is good!

2011-10-31T21:20:00.000-04:00

Well the debate went well for me. Watch it here: Click here for the link. Was I nervous, absolutely! I think I got my points across. So I am going to go out and do some door knocking.
I am sure by now you all know what you will get if you elect me. You will get a hard working committeeman who will not take benefits, will get your town meetings televised, will ask all of the questions in public that needed to be asked about this budget before it was passed. I will work with this committee to better the life of our people and my main objective will be to LOWER, that's right, I said lower your tax rate next year. How? Maxine had a stat at the debate that interested me. She said that for every 1,000,000 you lower spending from the year before, you save the taxpayers 125.00 in their bill. How bout that for a goal! You think you can't cut a million dollars out of a budget, I beg to differ. And when I am a committeeman, I will let everyone know at each meeting my ideas on how I want to get it done. I truly believe that if you really want to get into this budget and make the hard cuts that no one wants to make, you could make 1,000,000.00 cuts and not affect services or quality of life. I truly believe that we waste that much money. Look at this fact, in 2009 "the total amount to be raised by taxes for the support of the municipal budget" was around $11,600,000. In 2011 it is now $16,000,000. so they have asked us to pay almost $5,000,000 in three years and CUT services. Explain that to me. The way they play with numbers in a municipal budget is simply a shell game. The rest of the committee will tell you it's the states fault, I don't believe that. The state doesn't fill in those blanks, we do.
So, on November 8th it is simple. Push button 5C for Effron. The make up of the committee will be the same for one year no matter the outcome of this election. The republicans will have a majority. Mr Morano has been up there for many years. He has served the community well but I believe he has become ineffective in offering solutions to the problems. Just voting no is not good enough. Mr Lisella has been there for 3 years, he has let the system dictate to him. He has told me, wait to you get in and see how government works. I can't wait myself, because if it is what he says it is, a slow moving machine, where decisions take much longer than the real world. I will expose every person who is making it that way and make them explain why. But we all know why, government has become a career for people and people in government like to keep it that way. Government has no real boss, the real boss is the taxpayer. They can only speak at election time. So make a big statement to Barnegat this election and give some new blood a shot. Give me a year and you will see someone up on the dais that won't accept politics as usual and will work to change it because the only one that gets the short end is the taxpayer. 5C Effron on November 8th, just give me the chance, you will like the change.

Candidate's Debate October 27th at 6:30 pm - Russell Brackman Middle School

2011-10-20T06:32:00.000-04:00

The debate has finally been approved to be held at the Russel Brackman Middle School. The start time will be 6:30. This is a must attend.I will be squaring off with the other candidates in a 2 hour debate format. Questions, rebuttals and comments from the residents. Please attend, and bring your friends and families. See you there!

Why did this come with my Barnegat Tax Bill? Check out the side by side tax bills.

2011-10-17T08:11:00.000-04:00

So I get my preliminary tax bill and I see this piece of paper in it with the facts about how we saved money this year. Not only did this cost taxpayers money to mail it in postage and printing fees, but what if I was one of the 1/3 of the property owners in this town that had their taxes raised this year, is this supposed to make

me feel better? All these facts might be true, but isn't that our town's job? After going through our budget, there was also lots of numbers that were not positive for the taxpayer, why weren't they included in this report? We are all intelligent people here, and we all know why this came. It is as follows:

$2,000,000 later, the bills speak for themselves

You should not get any argument from the present committee as to where this all went wrong. Just look at my tax bills from the past 6 years and the real estate assessment related to them. Re-valed in 2007, assessment went from $88,000 to $238,000. Market takes a dump that year. As Jake Taylor says, I don't want to beat a dead horse, but our committee needed to get a plan in place by at least 2008-2009 to make sure that we can get yearly assessments. So they are doing that now, that's good. I would like to be a part of that planning team, because I would have never taken no for an answer from anyone in any government office that would tell me that as a public official, I can not do what is right for the taxpayer. Oh, yes, my taxes went down this year, but that was because I was over assessed by $ 70,000. Here are the tax bills, check out each portion for actual numbers and you can compare for yourself where you took the hit. Oh, and by the way, if anyone would like to comment on anything that I write here, feel free. I'm always open for another opinion or idea, positive or negative. Just hit the comment button at the bottom of any article.

2011 Assessment - $163,900

2010 Assessment $238,200

2009 Assessment $238,200

2008 Assessment $238,200

2007 Assessment $238,200

2006 Assessment $88,400

The Brighton at Barnegat and Pinewood Estates Meet and Greets

2011-10-13T07:26:00.001-04:00

It was nice to actually get out and talk to people about what I want to accomplish for our town. It was also good to be on an equal playing field with the other candidates in this election. I was invited to a couple of meet and greets at the two communities on rte 72, Brighton and Pinewood Estates. All of the candidates were given some time to make opening statements.

Maxine talked about what she had accomplished in her tenure as committeewoman, I’ll admit, she has tenacity and has agreed not to take health benefits. Now that says something! I don't hide my feelings in my writing, so if I had to pick a running mate from the other four candidates, it would be her.

Marty talked about his accomplishments, but after the meeting, he and I had a little sidebar discussion about health benefits and the fact that I will not take them. He also had a problem with my proposal to introduce a resolution that would make all committee people log hours with what was done in those hours to have a check and balance on the 35 hour a week law. Now I tried to explain to him that if he worked 35 hours a week doing township work, than this should not be a problem. I told him that this method of logging hours is to weed out the people on the committee that don’t put in the hours, but collect the benefits. My proposal is all about transparency and our commitment to the taxpayer. We are not talking about a little money here, benefits are not cheap, and if the law says you must work to collect, than we must have a way to prove it. The government is not viewed by the people as honest and transparent, but we must make it that way so that there is no question. I'm pretty sure Maxine would be on board with this proposal, the others, I'm not to sure. I can tell that this health benefit issue will be a sticky situation to tackle, I have other ideas to make it work. If the rest of the committee does not want to support a resolution to log hours, then I say, make it a local ballot question for the next election and let the people decide.

After we all made our opening statements, the moderator had a couple questions that the audience wrote down. One in particular had to do with running the towns “checkbook”, like the residents run theirs. They wanted to know why the town runs on anticipated revenue rather than spending only what they have like the rest of us. I know that you can’t run a town like that and you must “anticipate” revenue is necessary, but I thought the question had merit. I had to agree with this question and used an example from our 2010-2011 budget that had to do with our much praised “shared services” agreement with Little Egg Harbor and Waretown. I explained to the crowd how you can over inflate budget revenue with “anticipated” funds. In 2010 we anticipated collecting $150,000 from Little Egg and $25,000 from Waretown in building inspection fees. That was in the 2010 budget, in the 2011 budget the money realized was $0. Now who makes up the difference for the loss of anticipated revenue, the taxpayer, one way or the other.

The most telling issue of the day for me, was when I was approached by three ladies after the meeting. They were very excited to hear that I was proposing to get our meetings televised. That seemed to be a very big issue for them, seeing that some of them don’t drive, or for one reason or the other, can’t make the meetings. These are people who want to see how their money is spent, and how the people who are spending it conduct themselves in public. I told them that this has been in the works for 3 years now, but if they elect me, I will “get it done”. They asked me what was taking so long and I directed them to ask Marty or Lenny, after all they have served for the last 3 years. I’ll be honest that it was a little disheartening watching Lenny tell this woman, “don’t worry, it’s coming”, and when she asked him when, his answer was, “it’s coming”. It’s not an acceptable answer for me and certainly not for her.

Here is a copy of my opening statement to the residents of Pinewood:

I would like to thank the people of Pinewood Estates for inviting us here today. My name is Howard Effron. I have been a Barnegat resident for 21 years. I am married and have one son in Barnegat High School. I am an executive chef and in charge of the kitchen operations of 2 restaurants on Long Beach Island with combined food sales of 2.5 million dollars per year. I believe that our committee is lacking a person with experience in finances. When I sit down to look over my profit and loss (or my budget) every year, I can’t fudge numbers to make things look good. My boss, the owner of the restaurant, can tell how we did that year, all he needs to do is look in his bank account.

I need to talk about our budget. Our committee has voted on, and passed this budget without going over it with a fine tooth comb. That is un-acceptable. I believe that as a committee person, your top priority is to look out for the taxpayers (our boss’s) money. And it all starts with the budget. The committee praises this budget for saving 400,000 dollars. That is easy to do when you under budget items by that same number. They claim to have saved us 2,000,000 dollars on a trash contract. I don’t see it. When I question certain committee people as to the discrepancies in these figures, they tell me “I don’t know, you’re asking the wrong guy”. A committeeman’s job is the liaison between the public and the town. I would expect a committeeman to know the answers to these questions. And if they do not, it means that they themselves do not understand how the finances of our town work. And that is not good for the taxpayer.

For anyone here who is interested, you can see me after the meeting and I will show you what I found. Just for example, our construction code department has operated at a loss for the past 3 years, amounting to a total of over $1,000,000. How can you operate a business like that and expect the taxpayer, to absorb that loss? It should not happen.

3 years ago this committee made a deal with our cable provider Comcast that would allow our town meetings to be televised. I’m sure everyone in this room would like to have the ability to turn on the TV and see what is going on at town hall. But 3 years later, we are still talking about it. I’ll get it done, I’m sure that all of these 4 people sitting here would vote yes for that, after all it’s for the good of the taxpayer to see how your money is being spent.

Our committee gets taxpayer funded health benefits that cost us between 14 - 20,000 per person. They are entitled to them by law, but the law states that they must work at least 35 hours per week. When elected, I will propose that all committee people log hours, it’s not that we don’t trust them, but they should be accountable for their hours just like any other employee of the town that we are paying. I’m sure I would not get any argument from anyone of them about this if proposed, after all, it is for the good of the taxpayer.

You may ask how can one person get these and other things done when you need a vote of three, because my ideas are non partisan and are for the good of the taxpayer first, not for my good as a committeeman, not for the good of the lawyers or engineers or contractors that work for us, not for the good of our employees, because they know, if the town is not financially sound, they won’t have a job. I will guarantee that if you can turn on your TV and the committee knows that the whole town is watching, these ideas that I propose will be passed unanimously. After all, why shouldn’t they, they all look out for taxpayer first, and as a committee person, isn’t that my job. Put a new face up there in November and watch it happen. Thank you.

That was my statement with specific goals set. It was a great experience for me, as I hear the other candidates tell the residents that they are "looking into things" or "government works slowly", I get more infuriated and want to get elected to see for myself. The residents are as tired as I am listening to excuses as to why things can't get done or will get done, at a snail's pace. So give me your vote on November 8th and you will have a friend on the inside. Push button 5C for Effron.

** As a note. Maxine Blumenthal sent me an e-mail that she would like to have posted on this blog. What other candidate would do this, post another candidates opinion or statement on their own blog. Well, as I look at it, she wants to make a statement on here, I guess she reads it, and I'm sure she would believe that alot of my views make sense, common sense. So here is what she sent me word for word. I will just say this about her opinion on the Health Benefits. The problem with this is now, this is a law. This law was put into place to protect the taxpayer from paying part time elected officials from collecting expensive, taxpayer funded health benefits and not earning them. As I explained to Marty at the meeting, this resolution would be put in place to protect the taxpayer from fraud. Let's not be naive Maxine, you might not be able to speak for your fellow committeemen as far as thier 35 hr work week, but you do have a voice for the taxpayer. The more that I hear the committeemen not want to prove to the taxpayer that they work 35 hrs (which I highly doubt that they do consistently, and if I get in, I'll probably be able to prove it), the more I think that they are hiding something. Otherwise, why wouldn't they agree? I'm sure all 5 committeemen or women, could figure out a way to do it.
So here is Maxine's statement:

As a resident of Brighton Mobile Home Park and knowing how often Brighton and Pinewood are forgotten as the "other Barnegat", ( unless I speak up for them publically), it was a pleasure to have all 5 candidates be there to show interest and to allow them to meeet us personally.
Their concerns are unique. It was evident frorm Mr. Morano's tax remarks that even he does not know how they are taxed differently than the rest of Barnegat homeowners. As a former Committeewoman in 04-06, I worked to bring about change in town and posted my photos as evidence of accomplishments. We need more action, results, and fewer words; my mantra! On the medical benefits issue, any candidate doing his or her job easily puts in 35 hours as my diary/calendar form those years can attest. I did not take the full medical benefits; paid my own Part B and BC/BS and will not take these if elected. Each one has to make that decision on his own so can't speak for anyone else. As to getting the job done; yes it takes determination and tenacity to work within the government regulations which is why the employees in 04 began calling me, "THE BULLDOG"! I did and will work with whomever the voters choose to put on the Committee if elected. Maxine "Bulldog" Blumenthal
You may post on your blog.

Town Meeting 10-3-11 "Open space" fund- here is where the money goes!

2011-10-03T21:11:00.005-04:00

Jake Taylor had this document in hand that showed how the township has used our open space fund. A very interesting document. The township contends that when the tax was passed that these uses were permitted uses. Dave Breeden contends that the decision in interpretation lies with the town and committee. Mayor Jeff said during Jake's discussion that if we did not have this dedicated fund that we would have to raise taxes to pay for these "essential" items. I ask you to check out these "essential" items like trash bags, salt for roads, Dixie chopper mower, etc. It all makes sense after you see it on paper. They are just using this fund for every little recreation project they can until they suck it dry. Looks like the only open space they ever bought was Meadowedge (or the Gerken property) The rest was for things like fountains, Barnegat banners, push boat rentals for fireworks. Check out 9/3/2010, they removed $190,000 from the open space fund and called it Anticipated Revenue from Open Space Fund. Where did that go? Well Jake, now it's up for all to see, and if I get elected, this document and many like it will be on the newly designed Township website. And why shouldn't it be, it's our money and we just want to know how you spend it, right?

First is a copy of the 2 page ordinance that was passed in 2001, next is a copy of where the money goes. Read the ordinance, see what we bought, and you decide if the funds were spent correctly. Remember that the committee supports the spending on how they "interpret" the ordinance.

Another case of closing the barn door after the horse is out.

2011-09-29T13:48:00.002-04:00

The assessment problem. It's too late now to get back the back the 2 million dollars that it cost us to reassess the past two times. This problem should have been taken care of 2 years ago when I brought it up, not swept under the rug by the committee. If they find a viable solution now, it should have been done before. And I'm not buying that the reason is because we are withholding tax payments, it's because someone decided to do their job. Be it the committee, the administrator, the tax assessor or the county. Just my opinion. The committee needs new blood, I would never have taken no for an answer when the county told me we could not assess in house. Never. Click here for my post from Feb 11, 2010. I will guarantee that the idea that the county or the town will come up with will be similar to this plan, if they would have enacted this back then, we would have saved a ton of money, just saying'.

Note*
So I'm reading the Patch article about how Marty and Dave went to Toms River and met with Carl Block and Carl told them that if another Township in NJ does in house assessments, it's because they have met state guidelines. Well did it occur to anyone on the committee to immediately pick up the phone and talk to someone from Lower Township to find out what they did? Probably not or they would have known that it was " a state problem" as Carl said.

The Election. What do I want to do in Barnegat?

2011-09-28T19:53:00.003-04:00

I'm going to make this easy, here is what I want to accomplish my first year.
1. Committee meetings need to be televised or streamed on the web for all residents to see.
How? I don't know why but as I reported back in December 2009 (yes, almost 3 years ago) the township made a deal with Comcast and that was the last you heard of this. Here is what I wrote: click here This really steams me, if I took this long in my business to get things done, I'd be out of business. I will make this my first priority.
Why? Because this would be the first step in letting our residents see and hear what goes on and is said at these meetings. After I get the committee meeting web casts down, I truly believe that the zoning board and planning board meetings should also be televised or web casted.
2. Get a resolution passed so that the committee must have a method of logging hours. The public should know that they are working 35 hours a week. It is required by law to collect health benefits that cost taxpayers between 14-20,000 dollars a year per committee person. I do not see a problem with getting this passed, after all either you are working or you're not!
3. Update the website so it is easy to navigate and put in more public information such as contracts, up to date minutes and agendas. I will do this within the present budget that we have now between the police and municipal webmaster, or we could go out to bid for this project.

So these are the first 3 things that I would like to accomplish. Will this save you money? A little if we get that health benefit resolution passed, because I will go on record as saying that the 5 people on our committee do not put in 35 hours a week, every week and that will include me if I get elected. I was not going to take the package anyway, but Christie's law took care of that and for that I applaud him. Now we just have to get our committee to follow it.

I believe that the updated website and the televised meetings are the first step in bringing total transparency to our government and that is a first step in having our government "do the right thing" for ALL of our town.

These aren't election time promises, these are things that I have talked and wrote about for 3 years now on this blog. So I am asking you for your vote in November, give me a shot at getting these things done, I guarantee you that I will or I will let you know who is trying to stop me and why. Barnegat needs some new blood. With your vote, you will see a whole new viewpoint.

The travel baseball team still has no home. Talk about not right!

2011-09-20T21:10:00.000-04:00

So I am on Facebook the other day and I went on the Barnegat Bombers travel baseball team page. I see that John Harashinski, the coach of this travel baseball team, is going to have a meeting with Dave Breeden concerning the usage of the Little League field. You remember this problem don't you? Well our gutsy township committee who was talking about this in March, still has not come to a decision! Absolutely unbelievable! After a lengthy conversation (my first time talking to this man) with Coach Harashinski, I asked him how the meeting went with Mr Breeden. He told me that Dave said all the right things, with a smile on his face, (yes he said this) and that he thought that Dave was between a rock and a hard place with this. Of course he was! I asked John if any other committee people were in the meeting and he said no. I distinctly remember that at a previous committee meeting in which Ralph Adorno stood at the microphone and asked about the travel team using the fields, Committeeman Cirulli was adamant about saying that the travel team "will be using that field if he has any say in the matter". Ralph more or less stated that the Little League does not have a legal leg to stand on and Al agreed. So were was Mr Cirulli at this meeting? Remember that the committee must work 35 hours a week to collect benefits, it's the law, this would have been a perfect time to put in some well earned hours on this subject. Mr Cirulli seemed to be the one on the committee who would want to chair this cause, but he was not present.
I asked John (the coach) some straightforward questions. When you want to use the fields, are there any conflicts with any other team? He answered no. I asked him if Little League was over, he said yes. I asked him if he would maintain the field when he used it, he said of course. So it seems to me that there is a perfectly good baseball field owned by the taxpayers of Barnegat, and leased to the Little League for a dollar who does not need the field until the spring. It seems that there is a travel team, with the majority of the 10 kids Barnegat residents, with a coach who is a resident of Barnegat who loves to teach kids to play ball and have a little fun. And it seems that the wheels of government are moving slowly again and not making a decision so they don't upset anyone.
It seems to me that someone on the committee needed to put politics aside, get some guts, and do the right thing which is to allow these kids to play on that field. So what if you piss off the Little League voting block, I'm sure the rest of the non-Little League voting public can see what is right. You talk about shared services, well this is the ultimate in that idea. And the keyword is "Share".
I asked John if he would mind if I wrote about his problem that has been swept under the rug for 6 months. He said no, he has nothing to hide and he is supposed to get a desicion on Friday from the Little League. Hopefully it goes his and the kids way because he said if it goes any longer it will be too late.This was originally about being able to practice in the fall under the lights. We'll see where this goes.

Sept 19th Barnegat Committee meeting highlights! Not too much.

2011-09-19T21:53:00.000-04:00

Boy, Rose Jackson was upset! More lip service from our committee on why the special Thursday budget meeting wasn't on Nixle or advertised in 2 newspapers as required by the Sunshine Law. I think that they might have gotten it now or as she stated, she will personally sue them! I have to agree with her, it's a word called transparency.
One committeeman report that was pretty interesting was by Mr. Lisella. Call this what you want but this was complete grandstanding (I didn't say political) at it's best. He calls up to the floor the lady that runs the food pantry. On the easel is a large white board with nothing on it. He reaches into his pocket and produces a check in the amount of 700 and something dollars and hands it to the lady. She then sits down and he turns over the white board to expose a very large copy of the check (kind of like the one they give you when you win a golf tournament) so that all of the audience could see. Then he proceeds to tell the audience "the story of the check". The story was that this check was the commission he was paid when the Van Dyke Group (his employer) sold the Down the Hatch or the trailer park property to the town or Walters, or somebody. But the interesting thing was that Dave Breeden said that that property was just closed on a couple of weeks ago. I'd love to follow the money on this deal. Now couldn't Mr Lisella just go to the food bank and hand this lady the check, after all it was his own money and I suppose he did it for his own satisfaction. So why the pomp and circumstance.
Mr. Lisella also talked about the re-assessment. He had a great idea to hold back our payment to the county until the county helps Barnegat with a better way to reassess property. I stood up in public comment and pressed the committee to tell me why the County assessor would not go along with their plan to reassess our town. Their answer was that he said he was the boss and that was that. Now isn't that professional! I also told them that they need to get their heads together and come up with a plan to present to the county, now that is professional! Here is a link to a couple of Blog entries that I wrote in February of 2010 concerning the tax assessment problem. I would have been on this problem until it was resolved. Why are we just talking about it now again. Click here for the link. This is what needed to be done almost 2 years ago.
Public comment was pretty tame. Phil Checcia got up to talk about televising meetings, boy have we heard enough about this. If I get elected, I swear these meetings will be televised or streamed on the web within 6 months. That is of course if the rest of the committee will agree that this needs to be done and works with me. But why wouldn't they, it's for the good of all of Barnegat to see and hear what their elected officials are saying.
Rose Jackson was mad about the lack of public notice as stated above. I sent an OPRA request to the town requesting documents relating to the sale of the two properties on Rt. 9. I was interested in this after what I discussed in my previous post of Lets Talk Barnegat about these properties. We will see what comes up. I'm not saying anyone did anything wrong, I just want to see the documents and understand how the deal went down.
And thanks for the apology Mayor Jeff, accepted.

Summer is over, time to write. Some Tuesday night committee meeting thoughts.

2011-09-08T20:54:00.001-04:00

I know it has been a while since I have written, but summer was busy! I missed the August meeting. So I was anxious to get back to see what was up in town. Sometimes when things are quiet in town, that is a good thing. But we all know that as we come closer to election day, things will get more, should I say, interesting.
I have been invited to a meet the candidates night at Horizons development. It will be nice to answer questions from the people and talk about what I plan to accomplish in Barnegat. I guess this is just for the residents of this community, so hopefully there will be either a debate or some other event where the general public can see all of the candidates in one venue and pose their questions.
But now to the meeting. Of course the hurricane talk was the top subject. The council was giving everyone their due, and rightfully so. Everyone did a great job, from the top down. The town council from Waretown was there also, Mayor Joe and the other two committee members. Many photo ops with the full council and the boy scouts, Mayor Jeff, (I like that) and Lisa Becker, Waretown and Barnegat, the whole nine yards. Funny though, not one photo of the man that everyone said made it all happen, Dave Breeden, oops! Be careful committee, when you keep praising these guys on how great they do the job we expect them to do, they might start asking for more money!
The committee had all barrels loaded for this meeting with a blow up of a NJ Monthly magazine proclaiming Barnegat as a town where you get "bang for your buck". They also spoke about our new 60 foot flagpole at the dock and our new American flag, was there something wrong with the old one? They also spoke about Pirates Day and the 10-12,000 people that will come into our town that day. They also stated how that day was very labor intensive for the town from the police to the DPW and other employees. Are you thinking what I'm thinking? Don't forget to visit the Democrat Club and the Republican Club booths, they will tell you what they did for you and how they were responsible for all of everything that is good in Barnegat. Will that count as part of the 35 hrs that they need to work for the town to collect benefits, just asking.
Vague Laws
During the public session, Rose Jackson asked a question about the cancelled township meetings and questioned our lawyer if the town needed to give a reason why the meeting was cancelled. Mr. Dasti said that he knew of no such law. I was looking at this so called "Sunshine Law". Here is a synopsis: Click here
As you can see on page one under Public Notice it states "A 48-hour written notice must also be given for any regular, special, adjourned or unscheduled meeting giving the time, date, location and as complete an agenda as known at time of notice. The notice must be prominently posted in a public place, usually in the municipal building, and delivered to at least two previously designated newspapers." So did they do that, you tell me. It also talks about minutes, and it states " Minutes must be promptly made available once the necessity of the closed session has passed." Remember that word, promptly. Looking at our website you will see that not all of the minutes are available and they are definitely not posted "promptly". So check out this report, it really uncovers the fact that this law is vague in some of its wording, and probably done like that for a purpose by our lawmakers who passed it. Here it is, it has some great facts: Click here
Another law that was passed with vague wording by our lawmakers is the one that states that part time elected officials who work less than 35 hrs a week are not eligible for health benefits. They left out the part that says how they will determine that and leave it up to the people who get the bennies to decide, nice.
Don't think that the wording of these bills are done because someone forgot, these bills are written in these ways for a reason. So when it comes time to question our government on these items, they will be within the law, because who is to say, as in the sunshine law and minutes, how long is prompt? And in the law about the 35 hrs and bennies, it doesn't say how to keep track, so you will just have to believe us!
The Clustering Ordinance
This did not sound like a big deal when it was looked at on paper, but after Jacqueline Rhoade of the Pinelands Preservation Alliance told the committee and the public about a certain "bonus" house that can be built if the builders follow the ordinance, it all seemed to make sense. It seems to me that this ordinance was written in good faith to put houses on large tracts of pinelands together on 1-2 acre lots. But this "bonus" lot or lots are completely unnecessary and go against all that I believe in when I state that you should never allow more building or houses in an area that it zoned for a certain amount of homes. As I have stated before, it is the only legal way that you can prevent over-development in our town. Click here for ordinance Jacqueline from the PPA tried to explain to the committee that they could adopt the ordinance without the bonus involved, thus preventing the extra units from being developed. But Mr. Hess (the board engineer) strongly advised against it with an excuse that Ms. Rhoade, upon my discussion with her today, said was completely nonfactual and as Frank Pecci called it, a scare tactic. So after a quick education on the subject today and talking to a couple of experts and using a little common sense, I would have voted no, and given an explanation.
Township Website Update
So I guess they are listening. After a couple of years of pushing, the town adopted an ordinance to spend $3,900 to update the township website. Can't wait to see what they do. I'll wait and see!
This seems strange, doesn't it?
So I am at the Township building the other day and I decide to go into the tax office and look up the purchase and sold history of the old trailer park next to Down the Hatch. Now weren't we told that the township bough that tract of land a couple of years ago and after the affordable housing debacle with Walters, we sold it to him to build his development. Well it seems that that tract of land is still owned by Jackal Development and has not changed hands since 2000 when it was purchased by Jackal. Here is the link to the public records: Click here It shows that Jackal bought the trailer park in 2000 for $268,000. It also shows that Jackal bought Down the Hatch in 2002 for $600,000, which included a liquor licence. Nowhere does it state a purchase by the Township or Walters, mind you, these are public records that are up to date. According to this, the deed for this property that was bought by us and sold to Walters, has never changed hands. What's up with that?

The New Jersey Best Practices Checklist - an interesting concept! The August Committee Meeting Tomorrow 8-1

2011-07-31T22:44:00.000-04:00

The committee will still be on that summer schedule, one meeting a month, but I'm sure you can find them at the Town Hall putting in their 35 hrs a week.

Here is the link to this checklist (from the Barnegat Patch) that went out to all the municipalities in NJ from the Governor's Office: Click Here
Here is a few that interest me:
General Management -
#3 Does your municipality maintain an up-to-date municipal website containing, but not limited to: past three years adopted budgets; and the current year proposed budget including the full adopted budget for current year when approved by the governing body; most recent annual financial statements and audits; notification(s) for solicitation of Bids and RFPs; employee contact information; and meeting dates, minutes and agendas for the governing body, planning board, board of adjustment and all commissions?
#8 If your municipality assigns employees with vehicles that can be taken home after work hours, is there a written policy in place to prohibit personal use and does that policy ensure that the commuting miles are reflected in employee W-2s?
#9 Does your municipality sell personal property (fire trucks, road equipment, confiscated items, etc.) through an approved online auction system to broaden the market area for increased revenue?
*Note I see that we have a resolution on the agenda for the August meeting to dispose of surplus property, there is no link to it, but hopefully it will be by an online Government Surplus Auction Website which will allow for a widespread amount of bids and more revenue for the town. We'll see what Dave says tommorrow.
Health Insurance -
#3 Does your municipality perform an annual review of health benefit covered lives in an effort to delete employees, spouses or dependents who should no longer be receiving coverage?
Personnel -
#1 Does your municipality make available to the public free of charge, either through an internet posting or on-site review, documents that show the current salaries of all personnel and additional documents that would allow the public to understand how your municipality’s aggregate salaries have changed over a three year period?
#4 (and of course this one) Does your municipality limit health benefits to full-time (35 or more hours weekly), employees and exclude from coverage all part-time employees, elected or appointed officials? *Note - At the July meeting I asked the committee about this and they all insisted that they work at least 35 hours a week doing official township business. I will make a prediction here and say that they will not continue to take these benefits for long, they will admit that they do not work 35 hrs a week, 52 weeks a year. I know that there is one guy up there with a conscious, and can not knowingly break this law, eventually he will speak. This law was written to save the taxpayers of these municipalities whose part time elected officials were getting very expensive taxpayer funded health care plans and maybe working 10 hrs a week.
Municipal/School Relations
#1, 2 and 3 all apply
I guess we might get some info from Dave on this tommorrow.

There is also a couple of resolutions that will oppose a couple of bills in the legislature that have to do with transparency, the League of Municipalities has opposed these saying that the time and finances that it will take each town to fullfill these obligations will be a financial burden to the taxpayers. Here are the resolutions:
Resolution 2011-388

Resolution opposing Senate Bill S-1351 which would revise the law concerning public bodies to provide greater public access to meetings and to information about meetings
Resolution 2011-389
Resolution opposing Senate Bill S-2765 which would require state, regional and local authorities, boards and commissions to establish a website and post information related to each entity’s mission, finances, meetings and employees
It will be interesting to see how the vote goes on this one.

Thoughts on the post office consolidation.

2011-07-19T08:33:00.000-04:00

Our committeeman, Al Bille, a former post office postmaster and employee has been talking about the possible consolidation of branch offices. He tells us how we need to keep an eye on possible branch closures in our town or surrounding communities that could affect the services that the post office supplies to the community. I asked myself why is the post office doing this and decided to investigate for myself. What I came up with was what I thought, it is just another government program that is losing money by the billions each year.
Now from what I understand, the post office does not depend on taxpayer money to survive, it is run like a private business that depends on showing a profit by the sale of it's services. Now if the post office is losing revenue it should find a way to rectify the situation. I know that I have learned that the post office does not depend on tax-payer money to survive, but I can't understand if they worked at a 8.5 billion dollar loss last year, where did the money come to fund the business and pay the employees? Taxpayers?
This is an interesting article in the Asbury Park Press discussing the post office situation and how the USPS is attempting to turn around it's losses. Click here for the link. Personally, I believe that the post office is antiquated and can be brought out into more retail outlets where we spend more of our time shopping, like food stores, convenience stores, Walmarts, Targets, for example. It sounds like a good idea. How many times have we waited in line at the Barnegat post office, when we could have taken care of the transaction on-line or at a kiosk at Staples or Office Depot? NOTE** Before I am labeled a postal worker hater, please understand that I have been going to the Barnegat post office for years and I must say that the Postmaster and all of the clerks are some of the hardest working and friendly people I know, doing a job that most people would loathe. Working with the public is the hardest job in the world, so hats off to them.
The more I read about this, the more I see a law that was enacted by congress in December of 2006 which requires the USPS to fund the health benefits for it's retirees 10 years in advance. It seems that this law required the USPS to make over a 5 billion dollar payment each year over a ten year period to fund, in advance, it's future retirees health benefits. The USPS contends that this has taken them from profitability before 2007 to losing almost 8 billion dollars in 2010 alone. There are also claims of tremendous amount of waste at the upper management levels of the post office, top heavy with administration. So as they slash and burn the local post offices and the carriers, clerks and local postmasters suffer, the big boys at the top stay safe. Typical government business.

Committee meeting highlights.Our committee members are full time, for the benefits, that is.

2011-07-06T13:06:00.000-04:00

So let's get right to it. I get the ruling from the Office of Legislative services and from Senator Connors office concerning the committee benefits eligibility question. Now understand this, I really never started to push this until I heard that the committee was going to take Jake Taylor's advice and finally save us some money by switching to the State Health Benefit Plan. Now I didn't pass this law, the Governor and legislator's did because they felt that these part time elected officials should not have the taxpayers paying the health insurance for them and their families. So what does our committee do? In the late May committee meeting when I brought this up they told me that they will not be going on the State Health Benefit Plan (SHBP) and they will be staying on the old plan. Now we all know that that was so that they could keep the benefits, apparently they read they same law as me.
So we move on to last month where the state tells them that the whole town needs to be on one plan so they make the move to the SHBP with the rest of the town. So last night when I brought it up that all part time elected officials who are on the SHBP need to have a work week of 35 hrs or more to be eligible for taxpayer funded health benefits, their answer was that they all put in at least 35 hrs a week doing the towns work. So they want all of us to believe that they put 5 hrs a day, 7 days a week into this job. Now we all know that is a total joke, and I would like just one of them to prove it. Keep a log book of your town business meetings, phone calls and I'll even give you computer time, guaranteed you'll be padding the hours to make 35. So the bottom line is, law or no law, they ain't gonna give them up, so we'll live with it, I guess. But, if I get elected, there will be a resolution introduced so that the committee members can log their hours, because, according to the law, their health benefits depend on it. How stupid do they think we are?
In other news, the budget. This was priceless. They open for public comment on the budget, what budget, was there a full breakdown of the budget to be seen last night at the meeting, was there a full budget (not the simple one page version) on the town website? Jake, Frank P. and Phil all had questions concerning a little public participation in the budget process. Another gentleman had an idea to have a meeting where the public could sit in while the committee discussed the budget with the certain department heads present, great idea, what is there to hide? Will it ever happen, not with anyone up there now. Transparency, key word.
Then we had the usual Dave Breeden love fest. Does he do a good job, yes, but he is paid well for it. Jake wasn't buying it and neither was I. From what I heard this guy works like a horse, but lets be real, you can't do it without the people around you. Oh, and lets not forget that hard working committee putting in those 175 man hrs a week. (35 hrs x 5 committeemen = 175) Maybe some of them can pick up a rake or a broom during the week and cut down on some OT for the public works or other departments.
Listen, I'm not all negative, I know Jake didn't like the Open Space money used for the Lower Shore fields, but I'm OK with that. This town needs the fields and the townspeople that enjoy playing ball should have that opportunity to do so, they pay enough in taxes. The dock is great, as seen by the crowds on the 4th of July weekend. And it looks like we could have a positive decision on the travel team using the Little League fields. So it's not all bad with the committee, I feel that they are very reactive, where they should be more proactive. Just my opinion.
Most people who live in this town are doing just that, living. Do they care about the committee benefits, public input into the budget, more government transparency? Probably not, they are in this town to raise a family or to enjoy their retirement or just live in this great little town of Barnegat. Us "political extremists" are the watchdogs for those people who just don't have the time to get involved. An as Jake said last night, "anyone who feels the need to stand up and ask a question of the committee should do so without the fear of being singled out as "an extremist'. I agree.

Finally, Real Tax Relief for N.J.

2011-06-16T16:52:00.000-04:00

Want to hear your legislators in action? This should be a great hearing to listen to: the Senate Budget and Appropriations hearings on bill #S2937 dealing with pension and benefit reform for all state employees including, legislators, public and municipal workers, teachers, fireman and police.
This is a huge step forward for real tax relief in our state. I believe that Governor Christie had everything to do with getting this done, and he deserves all of the credit.
Yeah, he's made mistakes along the way, but this is the only way that you will get these unions to give up a little to the N.J. taxpayer – by making it a law. The taxpayers need help and any amount of money that they can save will be big.
I think that the increases in pension and health benefit contributions that the legislature are proposing are fair. The public workers will still be far below the private sector averages that most taxpayers are paying for their benefits.
Here is the link: http://www.njleg.state.nj.us/media/live_audio.asp
Go to the bottom of the page and click Senate Budget and Appropriations to listen at 10:00.
Update:
It is amazing to listen to these hearings, I've heard the unions say how this kind of change can't be legislated and should be done at the bargaining table. I've heard mayors from towns around the state say that they praise the legislation and welcome it, because they need across the board givebacks and taxpayers are losing their homes at record numbers. Nobody talked about laying off workers, they talked most about saving jobs. Very interesting thoughts from both sides, vote to come later to move it out of this committee for a vote on the bill on Monday. There is also a larger majority of union representation at this meeting, saying that this legislation will destroy the rights of the workers of this state. The cries of "Kill the Bill" and "Workers rights are Human Rights" were echoed by the union members in attendance for a good minute before the audio was shut off to attain order. (I'm assuming)
I would urge everyone to click the link and listen to the audio (it will be available after it is over) and make your decision.
This media is how public information needs to be brought to the people, without the proper information, an educated and intelligent decision can't be made.
This is an issue that is going to cause some feedback.
Bill passes committee 9-4 with 4 Democrats voting affirmative, they might not get voted in next time they run, but according to them, they did the right thing for the taxpayers. Good to hear that from a politician. Full Senate vote on Monday and Assembly Budget and Appropriations hearing committee also on Monday.

Mr. Reality asks a question about Health care reform in our state.

2011-06-12T06:21:00.001-04:00

I thought I would post this on my blog also for all to read: The question from BeyondReality was this:

Howard,
Curious to get your stance on more of the benefit reform. You say that you support the 30% increase for the chief who makes 150 grand a year, of course you do. Anyone would say they support an increase for someone making so much money.
But the chief is not the only public employee and certainly does not represent the average in salary. Now lets think of someone like a clerical worker, town hall employee or dispatcher who make 30,000 a year. And they have to pay 20 or 30% out of their pay. You said the benefit package is 18000$? So that is 3600$ a year from their pay at 20%, and thats at the low end. So thats 150$ out of their already low pay every 2 weeks. (Assuming they get paid Biweekly).
Do you still support the benefit reform from the highest to the lowest? Knowing that their pay is low and almost all I have talken to say the benefits were the only real benefit to the job and the reason they kept it. What is your stance on this?

And here is the answer:
Dear Mr. Reality,

The original question asked by Ray was that if I support the high earners paying 30 % of the health benefits, my answer was yes. When the legislature knocks out the details of the health care and pension reform bill, which as I read, had Christie wanting all municipal employees to pay up to 30% of the health benefits in 4 years, you will get a more precise answer. It seems that Christie has changed his position with discussions and will support public employees paying a percentage based on salary which will allow lower earners to pay less toward their health benefits vs higher earners.Go to this link to see the plan that Senate President Steve Sweeney has proposed: http://www.njsendems.com/Docs/Health%20Benefits%20Reform%20Package%20Overview.pdf. If you look at the chart on page 2 you will see that the lower earners will pay less than the higher earners phased in over a seven year period. Check the other charts on pages 3 and 4 and you will see that in the private sector a family health care plan costs an employer around $14,000 and the employee will contribute around $4000 a year to that plan for an average of around 29%. In the world of the public employee, a family health benefit plan costs the taxpayers an average of $19,000 and the employee only contributes an average of $850 a year toward that plan for an average contribution of 4.5%. Public employees will also get health benefits until they are medicaid eligible,and a pension payment for life.

So if you want to feel bad for the already low paid municipal clerical worker or police dispatcher, please read this report by Senator Sweeney. You should really feel bad for the NJ resident in the private sector that has to pay 25% more for a plan that costs about $5000 less. This report contains facts that all New Jerseyans should read. Why does our NJ employee health plan cost $5000 more than a private sector health plan. As I have said before, the inequity of public employee salaries to private employee salaries does not exist anymore. In the real world, (just check Craigslist or Monster.com job postings), entry level clerical workers are making 12- 15 an hour for an annual salary of $25-$30,000 a year also, but they pay far more for their benefits, as do I. What I find interesting when dealing with our own Barnegat Township committee is that I never hear one of them pushing hard how important healthcare and benefit reform is to the taxpayers of this state. This is the only way that you will see real tax relief. The system needs to be fair for the taxpayer, as of now, it is not and the Sweeney report proves that. This should apply to all public employees fom the police chief down to the janitor, even the janitor will get a pension, the majority of New Jerseyans will not. I hope I answered your question.

I'm putting my money where my mouth is. Independent Candidate for Barnegat Township Committee!

2011-06-09T21:45:00.000-04:00

I'm throwing my hat into the ring this November as a Independent candidate for the Barnegat Township committee. After at least 15 years of following and participating in Township business as a member of the zoning board, the Economic Development Committee and the Climate Action Committee and attending many, many, town council, zoning and planning board meetings, it's time to take the next step. This campaign will be a grassroots, publicly funded campaign, yea, it's going to take some money if I really want to stay competitive against the GOP machine and the lesser Democratic machine in town.

I really think that the time is right for someone who is not affiliated with any political party, club, or group to be elected by the people of Barnegat. Someone who can bring viable solutions to problems and not have to worry about who in their party will be upset or supporting people just because they belong to a certain party. The voter apathy in our town, state and the country proves that nobody can trust either party anymore, and I tend to agree with them. The two parties have morphed into one, each looking out for the other to stay in power and do what is right for themselves and their party first and the people they serve second. This is evident with special interest lobbyists, party lawyers and professionals who donate money to campaigns in return for political professional appointments and benefits, that net them millions of dollars in taxpayer money. In my opinion, it has really gotten bad.

The phrase "the wheels of government move slowly" is true for a reason, doing nothing is better than doing something and upsetting people. Locally it has been, no televised town meetings, no decision on the baseball travel team, no e-mail responses from committee people to residents e-mail questions, no community budget ad hoc committee, no updated website and especially no tax relief for the last 3 years.

Sometimes you have to stop saying "I could do a better job" and actually put yourself in the position to prove it. Politics is a funny game, it's not always the best qualified that will get the job, it's usually the one with the bigger bankroll. But, hey, I like games and I also like to win. So if there are any other people in Barnegat who think like I do about the way our town and even our country is heading, hire me in November. You will get a committeeman who will take the job very seriously and one who will be beholden to no party bosses, my only boss will be the residents of Barnegat.

Tonights Town Meeting - I finally get an answer to the committee benefit question.

2011-05-23T22:53:00.001-04:00

The budget presentation, it did not happen. Up until 4:30 pm this evening a power point presentation was ready to be given by our administrator, David Breeden, but it was postponed until, are you ready for this, 3 pm, May 27th, the Friday of Memorial day weekend. Let's see, people might be going away, kids are being picked up from school, half the people are still at work, and as Frank Pecci said, alot of the seniors might forget there is a meeting. Hey, Frank said it, not me! I know I won't be able to make it, I'll be a little busy working. I mean really, why can't you just postpone it until the regular meeting June 6th, what is another 8 days. A very well spoken resident named Morris also asked if we could get the power point presentation up on the website before the Friday meeting so that the public may view it. Morris and I share exact views on the power of the internet for delivering updated and important information to the people of our town. But I guess the present administration does not share the same views and believes that we as the public have all of the information we need. He was assured, very adamantly by Mr. Breeden that the complete budget will be on-line after the budget is passed. So the bottom line is, if you can't make it to the meeting at this inconvenient time, you are going to miss a budget that is, according to our committee, loaded with savings! I'm pretty sure that the tax rate will increase, so hang on, but if it goes down, I'll be the first to say, kudos!

Now for the benefit question. I asked tonight straightforward to Mr Breeden, "if the committee goes on the less expensive health benefit plan that all of the employees in the township are going to go on (the State health Benefit Plan or the SHBP) will they be covered according to this law that was passed by the legislators of our state and signed by the governor called NJ Chapter 2, P.L. 2010. I have been waiting for an answer for almost 2 months to this question and have never got one from our township lawyer or administrator, and now I know why. It seems that I was correct in assuming that the legislators and the governor all believed that our part- time elected officials that work less than 20 hrs a week are not eligible and should not be given taxpayer funded health benefit packages if they are covered by the SHBP. They feel it is just not right, and as legislators, they got it right, we should not have to pay their health insurance. So here is what our committee did in Barnegat, every other employee in our town is going on the less expensive SHBP but the 5 committee members are going to stay on the old plan, that Mr Breeden told me is less expensive than the SHBP (if it is less expensive, then why are we changing?). So the committee figured out a way to circumvent legislation by our state that could save the taxpayers money, they will just stay on the old plan! Genius! They want to keep the benefits for their part-time committee jobs. So there you go, they answered my question and the question of many other residents in this town. They will continue to take the bennies. I will be honest, I figured this is exactly what they would do and I was right. This does not look good.

A very reserved and soft spoken Phil Checcia also brought up a good point that I re-iterated in my comments to the committee. When a committee changes from one insurance provider to the other, should a vote occur? I asked for a clarification of this from Senator Connors but he really could not give me an exact answer, I mean the law says they should vote or they don't have to. That's all I wanted to know. Phil wanted to see the figures of the savings, the co-pays, etc. I would have liked to see that myself. It's funny, usually when Mr Breeden makes a deal that will save the taxpayers big money you get a nice presentation. None given tonight. I guess that will be a part of the Memorial Day weekend budget meeting.
Other stuff:

In the mayors report Mayor Melchiondo singled out Marianne Clemente as disrupting pet day by walking around and talking to people about President Obama's policies. Now this has nothing to do with my like or dislike of our president's policies or Mariannes for that matter. This has to do with the proper decorum of being a mayor. I would say that that is pretty unprofessional and very unmayorial (is that a word) to do. The mayors personal and political relationship with a resident should be kept behind closed doors. Apparently you spoke your mind to her at Pet Day and that should be that, there was no reason to bring it up in the mayors report, what were you trying to accomplish by doing so, embarrassing her in public? Marianne has every right to speak her mind and this is America, try not to forget that.

Rich Fiermosca from Mariners Marina on the bay queried the committee about some help to dredge his channel that has been shoaling for the past 10 years. His livelihood is suffering by not having a deep enough channel so that his customers, most who own sailboats, cannot get out of their slips safely without running aground. He told them that he wishes he could get a little help from the town in return for the $107,000.00 in taxes that he pays every year. After a long winter and 5 years of letter writing and calls to the legislators and Trenton, he will go into another summer season of less slips being rented because the boat owners can't get out at low tide. Less customers, less people in town, less revenue for all. If someone can help him with any ideas for disposing of dredge spoils, let him or the DEP know.

Vince Greene asked for a police dog financial report. He did not get the answer, just the fact that the dog graduated from school. Good for the dog, lets get him to Settler's. On that note, I really felt bad for a lady from Settler's landing, she spoke with passion how her neighborhood was riddled with drug dealers and she very rarely sees a police car. This lady was very upset with the situation in her part of town, it's hard enough trying to raise kids right and being surrounded by this bad element does not help. She sincerely was pleading for help, I really felt bad for her, I hope she gets the help she needs from the police. I hope they go in there and clean up the drugs and the dope dealers. I'm no professional in law enforcement, but the way she speaks, they do this out in the open all day long. She also asked about getting the skate park reopen for the kids. We have alot of kids in this town that love to skate and bike, the fact that this skate park sits closed while we expedite a baseball field at Lower Shore is just wrong. This skate park should have been a priority over that field, these kids need that park, they love it, they meet friends there and socialize and skate! Hey, it's 2011 and that's what kids do, not everybody plays baseball!

So this is the report of what went on, with a little of my own opinion of course, check out the Barnegat Patch more on tonight's meeting.

FYI - Monday's Barnegat Township Committee Meeting "postponed" until May 23.

2011-05-14T06:27:00.000-04:00

Just thought I'd give you a heads up! You really have to be on top of this meeting schedule now, you never know when they will pop up. Have a nice weekend, go fishing! Oh, but before you go, make sure that you sign up for the free saltwater fishing registry or the government could fine you $3000.00! So we have created more government paperwork and more government jobs so that the government can print out surveys and mail them to you so you can tell them about your fishing activity. What does all of this cost the taxpayer in salaries, printing, postage, waste, who knows. I believe that every new government program should come with an easy to read budget stating just what the program is costing the taxpayer. I know as a taxpayer in this state, that's the first thing I want to know. Now we all know that the bulk of the surveys will be tossed. Our recreational fishing industry is much less than it used to be with catch limits decreased and seasons shortened, it has gotten too expensive to fish anyway. Just ask any party boat or charter captain about how hard it is to make a living in the fishing business here in NJ. What's next, metal detecting license?

Still Waiting for Response on Healthcare Benefits

2011-05-11T17:06:00.000-04:00

Here is the deal. I have been asking Mr Breeden for about 5 weeks now for information on the new health care plan that the town is going to go on, the State Health Benefit Plan or as it will be known from now on, the SHBP. According to this excerpt from this law that Governor Christie signed on March 22,2010, called NJ Chapter 2, P.L. 2010, it states, and I quote:
General statutory principle: Effective May 21, 2010, to be eligible for health benefits coverage under the SHBP, full-time appointive or elective officers are considered an “employee.” In this case, the law defines an employee as (P.L.2010, c.2, s.9):(i) a full-time appointive or elective officer whose hours of work are fixed at 35 or more per week, a full-time employee of the State, or a full-time employee of an employer other than the State who appears on a regular payroll and receives a salary or wages for an average of the number of hours per week as prescribed by the governing body of the participating employer which number of hours worked shall be considered full-time, determined by resolution, and not less than 25.
I'll be honest, Dave has been very diligent on answering my questions through e-mail, except this one. I'm sure he has talked about this to Mr. Dasti, and I think the public and I should get an answer, do you? This answer could either end the health benefits that the committee gets, or, I would like to hear from Mr. Breeden how and why we will continue to insure the members of the committee. I'd like to know if I am splitting hairs on this subject, this has been an expensive perk that some of the public has been calling for an end to, and I think we deserve and answer.
Here is how I figure it. Mr. Morano gets his health care from the Barnegat school district (taxpayer funded), Mr. Bille gets it from the federal government post office job (but don't quote me on this – taxpayer funded), Mr Cirulli gets his from the Pinelands school district (taxpayer funded), so I guess this would just affect Mr Melchiondo and Mr Lisella, correct? Would they give it up? Dave, how bout some clarity on this one?
I would like some reader feedback on this one: Should they get this perk or not?

I've been approved! To blog, that is.

2011-05-11T17:04:00.000-04:00

You know what they say, that and a $1.50 (it used it be a quarter, but this is 2011) gets you a cup of coffee. I started blogging as an outlet of my frustration with local, state and federal government. Mostly local, because Barnegat is my home town and I've been following our elected officials for years. I've seen our government change from democrat to republican and back and forth. But one thing remains constant, the taxes keep rising. This is not a local Barnegat problem, this is a NJ problem. So I'll keep writing how I feel, and try to back it up with facts.
For instance, at last night's committee meeting (which I could not attend for personal reasons), it was reported by the Patch that the town renegotiated three-year contracts, and the employees will defer scheduled raises until December of 2011 and switch to the state’s health care plan. Employees will receive 2 percent raises each year, offset by their 1.5 percent health care contributions. Now please make sure that I understand this correctly, very bad economy, so we ask our employees to give back a little, namely 1.5% paid to their healthcare, but I guess our committee feels that that will be a hardship to them so we give them a 2% raise to offset the 1.5%. So in essence they got a .5% raise. Is this correct? How about this for an idea, economy stinks, you pay 1.5% for your healthcare, you get no raise and you thank your lucky stars that you are still working! And I will say this, this deal was struck between a union rep and the committee lawyers, and I will guarantee you that if you gave our municipal workers and police the choice between taking the 1.5% healthcare contribution increase and no raise, or no job, everyone would agree to stay employed. Now this is not anti worker or police talk, this is "the taxpayers can't take it anymore, we are broke" talk. So spending for the next budget has been increased, is that a good way to start?
How about that for a first post, but that's why I blog – I just write what most people think.

Marianne is upset, and she has a point! The cancelled town meeting.

2011-04-30T16:18:00.000-04:00

So my former running mate Marianne Clemente writes an e-mail to the township committee. Her and I don't see eye to eye on all of the issues, she is more passionate about certain things than I am, I like to pick my issues carefully before I comment. Not that she doesn't, but with her it's alot of times a republican, democrat thing, I find it more a personal thing with the individual. Just recently, I have left the Democratic party and am registered unaffiliated, because I truly believe that both parties are one in the same. I believe in America now you have two parties, but they are the politicians and the taxpayers.
So here is a copy of her letter: (word for word)

To the Barnegat Township Committee:
Thank you for your advance notice a week ago Friday of cancelling the April 18th Township Committee meeting. I'm glad to see that you are finally utilizing Nixle to communicate with the township. Needless to say I was extremely upset that this meeting was cancelled. I gave myself some time to reflect on this issue in order to write my response to your action. The only statement that I can conjure up is - how much more arrogant and disrespectful can you be to township residents, taxpayers and VOTERS of Barnegat?
Cancelling the second Township Committee meeting of the month of April 18 - after you voted at our last meeting on April 4, to table the issue of reducing our committee meetings to just one a month - is a disgraceful and reprehensible act on your part, especially considering the number of township residents who spoke up against this resolution. I have seen our Township Committee meetings go from 4-a-month, to 3-a-month, to 2-a-month in just a few short years - and now you want to have just one meeting a month. How "transparent" do you think that is?
Also, cancelling a meeting without providing a reason is irresponsible, and certainly not transparent. In most towns, there would be a reason given as to why the meeting was cancelled. However, I can understand why you continue to engage in this practice since I was made to understand that the second meeting in March was cancelled because Dave Breeden was on vacation – and after all, Dave and the professionals seem to be the ones who govern Barnegat. You, as our Township Committeemen, were all elected by the citizens of Barnegat to govern, and I see the act of cancelling a meeting under such frivolous circumstances as unacceptable and unprofessional.
In my opinion, shouldn’t the Township Administrator, who is probably the highest paid employee of the Township, take his vacation AFTER the budget is completed? Does the Township’s business not continue without his presence? Are you, the Mayor and Township Committee, that inept that you cannot run a meeting without the Administrator?
Budget season is not a good time for the Township Committee and/or Township Administrator to "take a vacation." The budget is the single most important responsibility of any elected official. It is the guiding document for all decisions for the year. It is upsetting and discerning to see the disregard with which you, our current Township Committee, handle this responsibility. Most municipalities have double the amount of meetings and workshops until the budget is introduced and adopted. In Barnegat we have not heard one single word on the status of the budget. Are we going to adopt our 2011 budget at the end of 2011, like we did with the 2010 budget?
You have continued to show your disdain of the public's right to be involved in and to comment on issues important to the citizens of Barnegat. Since you got your fourth Republican back on the dais, your condescending attitude toward the public has not gone unnoticed. Your attitude toward the public must improve. I sincerely hope I will not be disappointed at Monday’s Township Committee Meeting.
Marianne P. Clemente
Barnegat Citizen, Taxpayer and Voter

Well, I have to agree with her on this one and her main point, you want to save money by not having professionals at the meeting, then tell them to stay home for one a month. But you committee people are still getting paid and taking benefits to more or less run a town meeting so that the people can question the government. So the right thing to do would be for you 5 to show up and field the questions by yourself, we don't need the 3 pros there, you should know what is happening in this town without always having to have them answer all of the questions. The question of ineptness arises and her point is legit. You should not need the engineer and lawyer present to answer questions from the public. The administrator should be enough, and I'm sure you have it in his contract that attending town meetings is part of his job, (I hope). I'll be honest, sometimes I hear you ask the 3 pros questions about our town that I really think a well educated township committee should know the answers to. It is at times embarrassing. You have been elected to govern and that means educating yourself on the issues and the running of this town.
If you agree, hit the button, if you disagree, hit the button, but send me a comment on why you disagree, I'll post it, unedited. Maybe I'm missing something here, I'm never too old to learn.

The budget passes, BPQ out BPO in. "Seniors' vs "parents".

2011-04-28T07:38:00.000-04:00

It is now BPO, Becker, Pilovsky and Olker. I believe you will not see a big change in the ideology of the board, but who knows, Ms. Alice Olker might have some new and exciting ideas to bring to the board from her background in the private school sector. I am sure the the present board will put this election aside and be open to any new ideas that Ms. Olker might want to offer. The budget passed, not by much, but it passed and the people have spoken. The only thing that troubles me is the talk on the message boards, The Patch and Facebook about the "seniors". It seems that they are being vilified for not being in favor of the budget, but the fact that they are being singled out is not fair to them. Yes, a good majority of them voted no on the budget, but some of them voted yes. So it seems that it is more of a personal preference thing than a "senior" thing. We talk about the divide in this town between the seniors and the other people (I don't know what name to give them, the B of E was calling them "the parents"), it is talk like this that needs to stop. I need to see the district by district results so that I can see how many "seniors" voted yes for the budget. They also need a thank you from the B of E for helping the budget pass, they were parents once too.
In our state, we can only vote on the school budget, so that is what people use to show their dis-pleasure with the current high taxes that we pay in this state. Could you imagine if we were allowed to vote on our municipal budget, I believe you would see no divide between the two groups as every tax increase that was given by the Barnegat Committee would be voted down in a large majority. So let's let this senior vs parent thing go, people from both sides of each group voted yes and no, and it was their right as an American to do so and not be vilified for it. It is a shame that we do not have the right of initiative and referendum in this state to show these politicians how we really feel on many issues. Maybe the seniors, the parents and the juniors (young voters over the age of 18 who have no kids, there I made up a new category) can get together to get that done in this state. Wouldn't it be great if we could vote on how the politicians spend "our" money?
Well congrats to BPO and let's good luck to them in the coming years. I'll be getting back on the subject of the solar school initiative, which I believe is a big decision that needs to be made by the board. Keep reading.

B o E election on Wednesday.

2011-04-24T15:21:00.000-04:00

So I just received a nice red, white and blue shiny mailer from BPQ (Becker, Pilosvky and Quiroz). I have a child in the district and I believe that his teachers are giving him the education that is needed, as I've always said, the rest is up to my wife, myself and especially my son to use that tool to it's fullest. So is the current B of E doing a good job in that department, yes. The next thing that I will evaluate is how they spend the rest of my money. According to the mailer they show that every year they have reduced the percentage of school taxes in relation to my complete tax bill. From a high of 60.79% of my tax bill in 2008 to a current low of 52.82% of my tax bill in 2011. It's funny how the municipal portion has gone up from a low of 21.52% in 2008 to a high of 31.77% in 2011. Do the figures lie, is this some kind of fuzzy math? If it is, please tell me where I was duped. The challengers contend that BPQ gave the superintendent a big contract, maybe they did, they also contend that gave 28 % pay raise to the Tech Coordinator this year, if they did, I don't agree. Did they appoint a 19 year old who is the President of the Democratic club in Barnegat to fill a vacated Board seat, yes they did. The voters will decide that one and I'm sure B and P will live with the decision either way. But what I do agree with is that the numbers are what they are and they look good. We all know that the state and the unions hamstring the municipalities and school boards with mandates, rules and regulations, that in the private sector would be enough to bring any business to it's knees. So BPQ might not be doing everything right, but they are doing alot right as reflected by the numbers. Numbers don't lie, and the municipal numbers do not look good.
As for the challengers, if you have ideas, let's hear them. No one likes a tax increase, but we would love a decrease! So what do you have for us?
Any candidate can comment here and I will publish it, un-edited.

Just give her the documents she has asked for.

2011-04-22T09:05:00.001-04:00

Check this out on the Barnegat Patch. Michelle Rosen is at it again, but she has every right to get what she has asked and paid for. http://barnegat.patch.com/articles/freeholder-candidate-wants-prosecutor-to-probe-boh-deal

Politicians, B of E elections and the truth, "you can't handle the truth"!

2011-04-19T22:17:00.000-04:00

With the arrival of the Barnegat Patch, this website, the local paper media, the internet, Facebook and on and on, you would think that when someone from the public asks an elected official a question, you would get a direct answer. Not, "I'll look into it', not, "I'll get back to you", not "I have to ask my campaign manager", and certainly not, "sorry, but I'm not on that committee or I'm too busy". With the age of all of this electronic instant communication available for the public to ask any elected official any question at any time, these officials are becoming exposed for what most of them are. Most of them, especially the lifers like our senators and assembly people, freeholders, committeemen and women were used to the way politics was. The public was more or less left in the dark about what went on behind the closed doors of the political scene in our town of Barnegat and in our state as a whole. If you did not go to a town meeting, you were more or less oblivious to the goings on, and believe me, most of us are too busy to care anyway. Truly amazing how the township committee cancelled the meeting this week, less transparency. After attending meetings myself off and on for 15 years, I've never seen more cancelled meetings than with this administration.
Well, elected officials, those times are over and it's time to give the people what they want, the truth. Take for example our upcoming school board election. A big point of contention is the salary that the present school board gave the superintendent, Jason Bing. One side says one thing and one says another. Here is what the people want to know: If Jason Bing did not resign and he worked through his present contract, how much would his monetary compensation be including salary, health benefits, car allowance, school tuition, sick days, personal days, etc. etc. You know, the whole enchilada as they say, what would be the bill to the taxpayer if he used every perk to the max. There is the question, what is the truth?
To the Sarno team: "why didn't you show up to debate the present B of E candidates? What is the truth?
To the township committee, how much are we saving with all of these great "shared services" deals. Just the truth please. You told me at a meeting that it was your responsibility to provide services to Pinewood Estates, which you are, if you are obligated by law to do that for them, why aren't you doing it for Brighton at Barnegat? Just the truth please. Didn't Marty Lisella state at a meeting that they weren't taking anymore enrollees into the State Health Benefit Plan, but now we are going to enroll in it? Just the truth please. Why won't you allow the travel team to play on the Little League field if there is nothing in the lease that states they legally can not. Just the truth please.
To all elected officials, you can't hide anymore. There is too much information out there available to the public and rightfully so. It is much easier to tell us the truth, you'll save us all lots of time and money. How about this for an answer to an often asked question at the committee meetings:
Public: Committee, why did we have to pay our lawyers and engineers 1.25 million dollars to oversee the repairs of 450 homes at Mirage while the cost of the actual repairs were paid for by the builder.
Committee Answer: Well, our lawyer told us that we better do it like this and rack up lots of bills, you know, kind of like a slip and fall lawsuit where the lawyer sends you to all of these doctors and therapies to rack up huge bills to make it look like you were really hurt. But I guess we didn't know it would get up this high, but they guaranteed us that we will win the case. Hope we do or "Oops, shame on us".
Remember officials, the truth will set you free, and it's easier than remembering all of your lies.

I'm Back! Lots to talk about.

2011-04-18T22:25:00.000-04:00

Despite cries from the public and Len Morano the committee meeting was cancelled.

Committee meeting cancelled tonight. Saved $1000.00 according to Mr. Lisella. Didn't have to pay the lawyer or the engineer, kept the lights off, the heat lowered, didn't have to buy milk and cookies for the public. Didn't have to listen to Frank Pecci, Phil Checcia, Marianne Clemente. Didn't have to field questions from the pesky public, (they will have their five minutes in two weeks). Saved film for the many pictures taken of the mayor and the awardees. I guess that adds up to a grand. Not really much going on around here that people need to know about, right? I guess I'll have to wait until the May 2nd meeting to get my answer to my question about switching the public workers to the State Health Benefit Plan. I sent Mr Breeden an e-mail asking him flat out if he or the committee was aware that if they change over to the SHBP that the committee would be ineligible to get taxpayer funded health benefits. he said he would forward that to Mr. Dasti (our lawyer) and he would give us an answer at the next meeting. I will be waiting. It will have been almost 4 weeks to find the answer. Will we get an answer or not, take the poll and cast your vote!

The candidates have been chosen, well, four have and one says he's running anyway!

The Democrats have chosen Len Morano and Mr. Howard. The Republicans have endorsed former committeewoman Maxine (the Bulldog) Blumenthal and Marty Lisella. And Phil Checcia has endorsed himself as the "real" republican! This could get interesting.

And of course, the school board election.

I guess I'll say it here first, Sarno, Olker and Oden have no shot at winning. They started off on the wrong foot, came out in attack mode and totally embarrassed themselves. They did not show up for 2 debates against Becker Pilovsky and Quiroz. By the way, what the heck is this 19 year old kid doing running for office, shouldn't he be playing video games or sports, this guy has some nerve! But really Armando, good for you. Get into politics young, you can retire when your forty! I think he'll do a fine job. Back to the challengers, do you think we'll get anymore mailings from them, personally I think they ran out of money. If they do have any left, maybe they should save face and donate the rest of their campaign fund to Bernie's "Barnegat High School Digital Marquee Project."

Good Luck BPQ, but you won't need it!

Shared Services

2011-04-04T17:16:00.000-04:00

The buzz phrase going around lately is "shared services". You've all heard it at the committee meetings. But I would like to know exactly how much money each one of these agreements actually saves. We all know that when you share a service with another municipality or school district, you are "supposedly" doing away with a position or a job that someone was duplicating anyway. Did you ever wonder what happens to that person or job that is no longer needed. Do you think that he or she gets laid off or gets hours cut to actually save real taxpayer money? I think that many committees or governments overuse the term. For instance we are entering into a shared services agreement with Dave's other town for code enforcement and construction code enforcement. Explanation on how this saves us money please.
Just wondering.

Have we changed to the State Health Benefit Plan? Solar school thoughts.

2011-04-02T21:18:00.000-04:00

Check out the agenda for the 4-4-11 Township Committee meeting. Click here for the agenda. Resolution 2011-216, a Resolution authorizing participation in the New Jersey State Health Plan. Very interesting, I guess I'll have to take a look at that one at the back of the courtroom by the door because Mr. Breeden won't put links to these resolutions on the website. If it means what I think, then the committee is enrolling in the cheaper SHBP and it also means that future elected Barnegat officials will not be eligible for health benefits. Now does it also mean that the present officials who have benefits from our more expensive provider will also not be eligible for the benefits under the SHBP? We'll see how this plays out on Monday night, Dave please give an explanation of this resolution in your administrator report. Thanks.
I sent extensive e-mails to the school business administrator and the school board having to do with running some numbers having to do with our solar school initiative. I ran numbers having to do with the PPA (power purchase agreement) in which a solar or energy company comes in, puts all of the solar equipment (panels, racks, canopies and inverters) on our school's roofs, at no cost to us. In turn the company will reap the benefits of SREC's and the electricity that their panels make they will sell back to us at a discount of the present electric rates. I also ran numbers based upon a referendum that the people of Barnegat would vote on allowing us to build and own the system ourselves, thus allowing the district to take advantage of the SREC revenue and also owning all of the free electricity that the system will make. The numbers were based on information from very reliable sources and the results were very interesting to say the least. I am still waiting back for an answer from either the board or the administrator, I want to know if they agree or dispute the numbers that I provided them. It was more or less the cost comparison numbers between the district owning the system or a PPA. The timeline, as I was told, is that on April 6 the bids will be open and that is when the school board will be able to compute the "true savings" of the solar initiative. Hopefully I'll hear something after the 6th from either the board or Mr. Allison. I am dying to see what kind of a deal that these PPA providers are willing to give our district.
Well the school board election is coming down the pike, hopefully it won't get nasty. The incumbents will tell us what they have done and the challenger's will hopefully tell us what they will do different. I'll be the bad guy here and say this, the largest part of a school budget is the big three, pensions, benefits and salaries. Until they are brought under control, meaning the employees need to contribute more to the benefit package ( like paying 20-25% of the health care premium) and more to pension (I say change to a 401k plan) and take a couple year salary freeze, cutting $1,000,000 from a $50,000,000 budget will do nothing for property tax relief. And that's what we are looking for here in NJ, property tax relief, we need to keep more money in our pocket. Let me hear one of the candidates tell us how when it's time to negotiate contracts, these are the changes that they will propose, I doubt you'll ever hear it though. Oh, by the way, I would propose this for every legislator, state, county and municipal employee. It wasn't my idea in the first place, Christie thought of it!

Check out this law about part time elected officials and health benefits, bet you didn't know this existed. Why aren't our municipal employees enrolled in the State Health Plan like the School employees? Could this be why?

2011-03-29T17:38:00.000-04:00

In a law that Governor Christie signed on March 22,2010, called NJ Chapter 2, P.L. 2010, it said to be eligible to enroll in the State Health Benefits Program (SHBP) and the School Employees Health Benefits Program an employee had to work more than 25 hours a week. I've heard at many meetings Jake Taylor talk about the fact that the school health insurance plan is thousands cheaper than the plan that the municipality is on. It seems that if the municipality were on the SHBP everyone who got elected to a committee position would be ineligible by law to enroll in the Health Benefit program. Very interesting, could this be why our committee does not want to make the change to the cheaper SHBP program, the full time employees would be eligible but the elected officials would not. Here is the exact wording from the law:

General statutory principle: Effective May 21, 2010, to be eligible for health benefits coverage under the SHBP, full-time appointive or elective officers are considered an “employee.” In this case, the law defines an employee as (P.L.2010, c.2, s.9):
(i) a full-time appointive or elective officer whose hours of work are fixed at 35 or more per week, a full-time employee of the State, or a full-time employee of an employer other than the State who appears on a regular payroll and receives a salary or wages for an average of the number of hours per week as prescribed by the governing body of the participating employer which number of hours worked shall be considered full-time, determined by resolution, and not less than 25.

Very interesting.
And of course here is the link to the law (get a lawyer to read this): Click Here
Now I could be wrong, but this looks pretty cut and dry, if you are a part time elected official that works less than 25 hrs per week, and your municipality is enrolled in the SHBP, you don't qualify for the taxpayer funded health benefit package. Correct me if I'm wrong.

No committee meeting tonight,and the school board elections.

2011-03-21T16:29:00.000-04:00

I'm sure you already know, but the Township committee meeting has been cancelled. I hope it was put on Nixle, and it is on the Barnegat Township website, just not on the homepage.
The school board elections are upon us and the 3 sitting board members up for re-election, Lisa Becker, Denise Pilovsky and Armando Quiroz are up against 3 newcomers in Sarno, (that name sounds familiar) Olker and Oden. We know what the incumbents can do, they seem to hold the line on finances (as much as the state will allow with their mandates) with no tax increase this year. We need a new super, with Mr. Bing's departure (I'll cast my vote for Dr. Saxton, if he's in the running), they are about to commit our roofs to a solar project (make sure you check the figures), and I believe that teachers contracts will be coming due this year (that will be big). We know nothing about the three challengers, but I will guarantee you that their campaign will be nasty and filled with everything that Becker, Pilovsky and Quiroz (I will now refer to the incumbents as BPQ from now on) have done wrong, without one iota of what they will do to make it right. That is just my opinion, if I'm wrong, let's see what ideas they have for the future of Barnegat education. I believe that voters are smart enough to see through a mudslinging campaign and if BPQ doesn't get sucked in to that, takes the high road, and concentrates on accomplishments and their passion for a good education for our children, that will be enough to prevail.
Just my thoughts on public education as it is now, the government has made education into a business, on a higher level above our local schools, it's not about the kids, it's about the money. The more money you throw at kids or schools does not make for a better education. How much of the money actually makes it into the classroom, ask any teacher, they will tell you, not much. How come when the kids do great in school, it's because of the school and the teachers and the administrators, when actually it's because of the parent's instilling the proper values of hard work and the value of an education to succeed. For every child that excels in school, there is one that is just getting by or even failing.
As a wise man once said, it is the law in NJ that the state provide for all children the right to access a free education system, whether the kids or the parent's choose to use it is up to them. You can't make someone do something they don't want to. As a parent, I take responsibility for my child's actions, and if he is doing bad in school, I look in the mirror first. Public schools have become our child's babysitters, not necessarily in Barnegat where we have many caring parents, but around the country on a whole.
So get ready for a nasty election, the message boards will be hummin' with propaganda from fake name, gutless aliases, who for some reason believe that if they were exposed, bad things will happen to them. News flash people, this is America, freedom of speech is alive and well. Come out from behind your keyboards, let the world know who you are, it gives what you are saying much more validity.

The baseball field issue heats up, on the message boards!

2011-03-14T17:17:00.000-04:00

Click on the Barnegat Patch website link and see the back and forth about the baseball field issue. I've even added my own two cents. Spring is here and it seems that everybody has a field, for now. Come fall, a different story. The travel team would like to use the lighted field, let's see what the committee decides. Cast your vote on how they will vote. They have had about a month now to look over the lease, get the legal opinion of our lawyer, try to work out an amicable solution between the two parties involved and decision time should be soon. Hopefully they will have some news at the next committee meeting. You have heard nothing from the committee, they don't like to show their hand.

The Certificate of Occupancy ordinance is updated and Senator Connors responds about health insurance benefits for part time elected officials and employees.

2011-03-09T12:44:00.001-05:00

I had a question from Morris who wanted an update on the CO ordinance. As it was written, Barnegat was required to provide a new CO every time a home was sold in town. It has been repealed and rewritten to exclude that requirement. here is the link to that new ordinance: Click here. The ordinance was passed by a 5-0 vote on Jan. 12, 2011. It seems that Committeeman Morano said he voted to fast without thinking and if he could he would have voted no. It also came to the attention of all in attendance last Monday that Mr. Morano does not own a computer, thus cannot receive e-mail or read any other town related matters that might be on-line. That is fine, but in this world, they are a necessary evil. I would suggest that he read all ordinances through before voting.
I got an e-mail response back from Senator Connors from my response to his response, confusing, isn't it! Read the Feb. 24th entry on this website. It seems that his stance is that he is not in favor of removing the taxpayer funded health care benefits that part time elected officials and appointees get. Fair enough, that is why I love America, everybody can have an opinion and they all must be respected. And I respect his, do I agree with it, no.
Here is an exact copy of his response:
Dear Mr. Effron:
This is in response to your February 24, 2011 E-mail to our 9th District Legislative Office regarding A-2800, which provides that persons elected to a State office, including the Legislature, or appointed by the Governor to a State office or position whose hours of service are fixed at fewer than 35 per week, as well as persons elected to a local public office or appointed to a local board, commission or authority whose hours of service are fixed at fewer than 32 per week, are not eligible for enrollment, or the accrual of service credit, in the Public Employees’ Retirement System and the Defined Contribution Retirement Program for service in an office or position for which the term commences after the effective date of the bill.
The bill is clear in what it sets out to accomplish. Your position on the bill is clear. Our position on the bill, as explained in our prior correspondence, is clear.
Thank you for the opportunity to respond to your concerns on this legislative matter.
Sincerely,
Chris Connors, Brian Rumpf and Diane Gove

I thank them for their honesty.

The dog stays, the travel team goes to Waretown, and if we lose the Mirage case, it's Phil Checcia's fault!

2011-03-08T20:19:00.000-05:00

A recap of last nights committee meeting of 3-7-11
In a 3 to 2 vote with Mr. Lisella the decider, only because he went last, the committee voted to keep the canine. From my viewpoint it sounds like when we need the dog to work, and the dog and officer are not on a regular shift, the officer will be called in and receive overtime, right? Now as I also understand the dog can only perform one function, he is a tracker or a drug dog, which is it? Hey, you know this is about not compromising the public safety. And that's that, done deal. It could have gone either way.
Al Bille is making a statement, he's getting stuff done. In his committee report he talked about respect, he doesn't like the way some people address the committee and he wants it to stop. In my opinion Al, please put away the egg timer, that really irks me. As the public we saw a ten minute "discussion" between Len Morano and Marty Lisella about a whole bunch of nothing, you should have started the timer then. What will be next, the giant 5 minute timer movie that they play at the Board of Education meetings, I hate that. Whoever is running the meetings should be in control, no timer needed, you know when the speaker has said enough and respectfully ask him to step down. Seems like Jake Taylor and Al; might have some trouble down the line, Al is moving into Jake's territory at the food pantry. Look for more of that in the future.
The great American past time. Baseball. The travel team has been given the field in Waretown to practice, it has no lights, they will need lights. Our baseball fields in Barnegat have lights, they aren't in use when the travel team needs them, but the travel team was denied the use. It seems the sticking point is the lease, and according to the Barnegat Little League, who cares if the travel team wants to play ball, we got a lease! It seems there was nothing in the lease that prevented the Travel Team from playing there, the committee would not allow it. I mean really, this is totally ridiculous, the committee should have allowed them to play there on Sunday, and if the Little league didn't like it, they could take their dollar lease and go find another field. It's horrible when adults get involved in a kid's game.
And last but not least, it seems like the township attorney, Jerry Dasti is setting up his alibi if we happen to lose the Mirage case in court. Are you ready for this, it's going to be all Phil Checcia's fault! Phil destroyed the case strategy, I'm sure it will have nothing to do with the fact that maybe Barnegat overpaid all of the professionals who had a piece of this case. $1,250,000.00 to inspect 450 homes? Seems a little pricey to me. But as I always say, I'm no lawyer.

Solar School Project and School Board Frustration

2011-03-08T10:13:00.000-05:00

On April 12, our school board will unveil the winning bidder on the "Solar Initiative". Sounds good, doesn't it? The truth of the matter is that our school board is making this decision without educating themselves on the other possible options available to achieve this, or what the financial gain or loss will be for the people of Barnegat.

A little background on the Barnegat schools solar initiative. To put it simply the Board of Education has decided that they will enter into a Power Purchase Agreement (PPA). What this means is that a solar company will install solar panels on the roofs of all of our schools, they will also pay to repair the roofs that will need reinforcing to support these panels. The company will also pay all of the expenses associated with the construction, materials, legal, engineering and architectural aspects of the project. In other words, as residents we pay nothing! Sounds great, doesn't it? Now you ask yourself what will each party get in return? Here is how it works. The company will receive the revenue that will be generated from a product called an SREC. An SREC or Solar Renewable Energy Certificate is based on the output of energy that the system makes. The first year that the proposed 2800 KW Barnegat system is installed, that revenue would be approx. $1,400,000.00, that's right $1.4 million dollars. Now that part is easy to understand. This next part is a little more confusing and I tried to look at a copy of the Bid Specs for this job, but I was told that I had to pay the $125.00 like the rest of the bidders had to. I might just do that, that is how interested I am in what is in that proposal. I did ask many members of the school board about what was in there, but the consensus answer was, they weren't really sure. Kind of like a Nancy Pelosi, we'll pass it first, than find out what is in it. Back to the confusing part of this proposal, the company that owns this system will sell us back the power that it makes at a discount of the actual rate with an annual increase, that is our piece of the pie. That is the other revenue stream for the company that will install and own this system, the panels will produce electricity for free and the owner will sell it to us at an escalating cost per year.

Don't get me wrong, I am all for not putting our town in another bond mess. But this is different, the school board is jumping the gun without all of the information. A well designed solar system in today’s market of rising energy rates and the SREC market can be used as a revenue stream not a drain. There is still money out there that can be gotten in the form of rebates and grants to further offset the cost of a solar installation. When was the last time you could say that bonding for something will make you money? The bottom line is this, before we sell our roofs to an outside company to profit from, we should get the facts of owning it ourselves. Here is my contention, if all the facts lead to the result that if it makes more sense (and dollars) for the Barnegat Taxpayer to own this system, present it to us in the form of referendum and let us decide. There is no hurry to get this PPA now, the first year savings could be a couple hundred thousand dollars, but by ownership they could be more than that and the savings could increase as the electric rates rise. As I spoke to Denise Pivlosky, Ralph Adorno and Lisa Becker last night at the committee meeting, my question was straightforward, did you ask for or look at a report from Spiezle (the school architect) about comparing the revenue stream of ownership of the system by Barnegat against the revenue stream of the PPA scenario. The consensus amongst the three was, no. So how can you make this decision without that information.

Here is an excerpt from the copy of the e-mail that I sent to Lisa Becker (our school board president) She told me last night that she did not receive it, I will say on her behalf that she has been very responsive to me on this subject but I personally think she has her mind made up on the PPA and will not waiver:

"The point I am trying to make is this, when someone from the outside comes in and uses our roof to make money while giving us a little taste of the actual revenue, you might be better off not doing it at all.

Please do not rush into this without getting all of the facts, please give me your figures as you told me yesterday on the phone. Once you sign that contract for the PPA there is no going back, Spiezle gets his cut, the lawyer gets his cut, the owner of the system makes money and Barnegat gets the smallest piece of the pie. (But at least it is something and we are green!) Like I said, once the system is on the roof and pumping energy, and the price of SREC’s goes through the roof, which many people think it will, we will wish we owned it. Lets be real, why would all of these companies be investing in these PPA’s and ready just to put 20,000,000 dollars worth of equipment on your roof if they thought the SREC market was going to crash.

By the way, if we owned it, whoever installs this system would give you a service and material guarantee for at least 10 years on panels, inverters and other system components, we would insist on it. The maintenance on these systems are very minimal, no moving parts.

This technology is nothing but a guaranteed revenue stream, once you got over the initial number of $20,000,000.00 and it was up and working, and those SREC checks started to come in, and the Electric bill was cut in half, you will be more of a hero than you are now. I believe not owning this system is being fiscally irresponsible. Like I said before, you might as well not do it. Again, please send me your figures or the report from Spiezle, if there is one."

Why do I say this? It is out of total frustration that I must. I have tried for weeks with many e-mails and phone calls to our elected School Board Officials, administrators and even the architect in charge of this huge project (this will be one of the biggest in the state, 2800KW) to get an answer to a simple question. The question is "did the members of the school board look at the financials to the District of owning the solar system as opposed to the PPA agreement that they will enter into. From all of my conversations, it seems they did not. Of course this is one mans opinion, what is yours?

New links up top and some Mirage lawsuit comments.

2011-02-27T21:06:00.000-05:00

I put some useful links about municipal finances at the top of the page. There you can find factual information on salaries, budgets and contracts of municipal, county and state employees including teachers. The Township administration has put the contracts and past 3 budgets online as required by law. Here you can spend some time and see how much our employees actually make. These are true figures and are posted as required by state law. I thought it would be more convenient to have all of these links in one place.
   About the pending Mirage lawsuit. I sat at the last committee meeting and listened to the presentation by our administrator, Dave Breeden. He said all of the right things to make it seem that the town was helping these homeowners who were hoodwinked by this sub-par builder, Menk. The cost to the taxpayer from the previous spreadsheet provided at the Feb. 7th meeting was around $2,000,000. The spreadsheet provided at the Feb 22 meeting had that cost down to around $1.25 million very close to the exact amount that the committee passed a resolution in 2009, (maybe they should have passed a resolution for around $750,000, we could have saved about a half million) now that's some good figuring. From what I understand is that the builder paid for all of the repairs, this $1.25 million dollars is for administrative and professional fees. We are suing Ocean County because their building department passed all of these defects on these homes, flooded crawlspaces, attic stairway problems and electrical problems years ago when these homes were built.
    The bottom line is that these people got their homes fixed after going through years of hell. Dave Breeden said that no one would help them. Why they did not hire a lawyer to take this case on a contingency basis is beyond me. Did these homeowners not have a homeowner warranty, weren't these defects the builders fault? Did the town jump the gun too fast in helping these people with their personal problems? Didn't these homeowners have a beef with the County inspectors and not Barnegat Township? These are questions that I have heard asked over the years to our committee, and some have been answered. But at least these people got their homes repaired, they deserved it.
   Now to the lawsuit. I guess Ocean County feels that they do not owe us the $1.25 million that we paid our professionals, otherwise, they would have settled this already, as Mr. Breeden stated in his presentation. Hopefully someone on the committee asked our attorney who is handling this case if we have a shot at recouping the money. And if so, hopefully the attorney gave us a better than 75% chance of winning this case. If not, than when is enough, enough. There will come a time when you have to cut your losses and go on. The longer this drags the more these "professionals" will bill us. This $1.25 million could very well become $2,000,000 before it is over.
   Winning this lawsuit seems to be based on Ocean County admitting to the fact that their building inspectors were blatantly not doing their job in inspecting these homes. These were inspectors who were hired by Ocean County administrators. Were they someones friend or relative, that's were it gets hairy. Have these inspectors personally had to answer for their obvious disregard of a job that needed to be taken very seriously? I don't know, it is a question that needs to be asked. Maybe we will see them in court and they can reply. Bottom line, we should be paid, but than again, I'm no lawyer.

The Senator responds and I respond back.

2011-02-24T07:44:00.001-05:00

I just wanted to say that I finally did get a response to my e-mail from my District 9 legislators, Senator Connors and Assemblypeople Diane Gove and Brian Rumpf. It went like this:

Dear Mr. Effron:
This is in response to your February 9, 2011 E-mail to our 9th District Legislative Office in which you ask our Delegation’s position on A-2800, which provides that persons elected to a State office, including the Legislature, or appointed by the Governor to a State office or position whose hours of service are fixed at fewer than 35 per week, as well as persons elected to a local public office or appointed to a local board, commission or authority whose hours of service are fixed at fewer than 32 per week, are not eligible for enrollment, or the accrual of service credit, in the Public Employees’ Retirement System and the Defined Contribution Retirement Program for service in an office or position for which the term commences after the effective date of the bill.
In response to your inquiry, please be advised that our Delegation conceptually supports A-2800 and intends to vote in favor of this measure passage if and when it presented on the floor of our respective Houses for final consideration.
Thank you for your continued interest in this matter.

So that was the response but they failed to address their positions on the part of the bill that states:
“Elected and appointed officials whose hours of service are fixed at fewer than 35 per week will be ineligible for health care benefits after the effective date of the bill.”
So I have sent another e-mail to them, and here it is:
Dear Legislators,
Thank you for the response. It seems that this bill was written with the wording about part time elected and appointed public servants also not being eligible for the very expensive taxpayer funded health benefit package that they now receive. It seems that this is the sticking point that does not make this bill move out of committee. I guess that my previous e-mail did not make it clear, but I would like to know your feeling on this idea to get rid of the health benefit package that these public servants receive. In this “new normal” of NJ that the Governor talks about and wanting to do away with government perks that are unreasonable in the private sector, don’t you think that getting rid of healthcare for part time officials and appointees would be a perk that could be eliminated? According to the wording in the bill A-2800 as introduced by Mr. DiCicco “Elected and appointed officials whose hours of service are fixed at fewer than 35 per week will be ineligible for health care benefits after the effective date of the bill.” if this bill were enacted would this include assemblymen and women, freeholders and senators? If your answer is yes, then of course I see why this would never get out of committee as written. Telling part timers that they can not enroll in the pension is not the real taxpayer cost savings in this bill, it is the removal of the healthcare benefits at a cost of $10,000 – $15,000 per year per part time official and appointee. Just curious as to how many hours a freeholder and an assembly person work every week. I don’t expect my legislators to work for free, but I also think that the tide is changing in Trenton and the healthcare package must be changed, it’s too expensive of a plan to be funded by the taxpayer. It looks like some of your own legislators also agree or they would not have introduced this bill with the idea in it. So I guess my question to you again is, do you support getting rid of the healthcare benefits for part time elected officials and appointees? Thank you for your time.
Howard Effron

I'll let you know the outcome.
By the way, I have a little opinion on the whole Mirage lawsuit that is on-going and I'll write that soon.

Christie lays it on the line in his budget address. No response from my legislators, what a surprise.

2011-02-22T16:51:00.000-05:00

I especially like the part about "The time to change this system is now. We must bring this system into line with comparable public systems. I propose that by 2014, the state should pay 70% of the cost of employee health benefits, and the employee should pay 30%." If that is the case, the Barnegat Township officials will have to pay $6,000.00 of the $20,000.00 plan that the get. At the average salary rate of $4,500.00 per committee member, they will have to pay $1,500.00 out of pocket. Still a pretty good deal for them. They will probably give themselves a raise to cover it.
By the way, no response to an e-mail sent to a couple of legislators about the part-time health benefit legislation, I guess they are to busy.
See you at the meeting tonight.

Couple of Updates - Barnegat Budgets online, response from Senator Connors on the health care legislation and the poor guy on Woodmansee Road.

2011-02-10T07:34:00.000-05:00

After bringing to the committee's attention the law about 3 years worth of municipal budgets having to be posted on the municipal website, Barnegat has done that. Click here for the link. By the way, it is buried on our website on the committee page with no link on the homepage. Maybe they will fix that. Now about the budget, do I understand what it all means and why all of the x's all through the budget, no. Maybe I can get one of our knowledgeable townspeople to decipher it for us. I'll work on that.
About the legislation concerning health care coverage for part time elected officials. I personally talked to Assemblywoman Dianne Gove, sent e-mails to Ms. Gove, Assemblyman Rumpf and Senator Connors. I also called the office of Assemblyman Domenick DiCicco Jr. (the main sponsor) and asked all of them what is next with this bill, will they be moving on it? The result was no response from Mr. DiCicco and a pretty vanilla response from our 3 legislators from our district. Here is what they said:
RE: A-2800
Dear Mr. Effron:
This acknowledges receipt of your January 27, 2011 E-mail to our 9th District Legislative Office regarding A-2800 and its status. As we share a unified office, our Delegation always strives to work cooperatively on behalf of our constituents living in Ocean, Burlington and Atlantic counties.
As you are aware, A-2800 would make part-time elected and appointed officials ineligible for pension credit and health care benefits. The bill provides that persons elected to a State office, including the Legislature, or appointed by the Governor to a State office or position whose hours of service are fixed at fewer than 35 per week, as well as persons elected to a local public office or appointed to a local board, commission or authority whose hours of service are fixed at fewer than 32 per week, are not eligible for enrollment, or the accrual of service credit, in the Public Employees’ Retirement System and the Defined Contribution Retirement Program for service in an office or position for which the term commences after the effective date of the bill.
As you are further aware, at its October 10, 2010 meeting, the Pension and Health Benefits Commission recommended enactment of A-2800, provided that amendments were made to the bill. According to information provided on its website, the Commission recommends “a more consistent approach to the number of hours worked for the eligibility of health benefits” in the bill.
Presently, A-2800 is lodged in the Assembly State Government Committee. As of this date, no action has been taken on the measure. Bear in mind that the final determination as to what bills are posted in Committee and on board lists are left to the Senate President, Assembly Speaker and Committee chairpersons.

So the bill is "lodged" in the logjam of Trenton politics, I sent our legislators a response asking them how they stood on this issue, it went like this:

Senators Connors, Assemblyman and woman Rumpf and Gove,
Thanks for the response. This bill has come up twice, once in 2007 and now. I know many part time legislators and elected officials would fight tooth and nail to not give up this very expensive taxpayer funded perk. The answer that you gave me was pretty much everything I knew already. It is lodged in a committee. What I would like to know is your feeling on the bill. Do you believe that the NJ taxpayers should pay these benefits for these part time employees?
Thank you
Howard Effron

We'll see what happens, I think it is only fair that my elected officials let me know how they stand on an issue. As I learn more about the number of bills that go through the legislature, the more I see that the idea of Trenton is to make it so bogged down that nothing really gets done in a timely manner. More on that later.

On the Woodmansee Road problem for Mr. Johnson. it was brought to my attention by a letter from Barnegat Township saying that the flooding problem on this road might have been caused by Mr. Johnson severing or blocking off the storm drain when he bulkheaded his property. This was back in 1994. Just reporting it both ways. Bottom line is, you got to do it by the books. If he severed the storm drain, he should have fixed it, if the town didn't enforce it, who's fault is it?

Last nights committee meeting notes. Garvey races, police dogs and the poor guy who lives on Woodmansee road.

2011-02-08T09:01:00.000-05:00

Last nights meeting was very well attended. The hot topics were the July 4th weekend garvey races, the continuing of the police K-9 unit, budget talk, Mirage talk and Mr. Johnson from Woodmansee Road pleading (again) for the town to fix this heavily flooded and pot hole ridden road by the bay front area of town. Now I have heard Mr. Johnson plead his case to the Barnegat Twsp. committee for at least 3 years without any satisfaction. This is totally unacceptable for this taxpayer to have to live on this road in this condition.

This is a picture from Mr.Johnson's deck looking down his street towards East Bay Avenue. He complained last night that he can not park in his own driveway and he has to walk to get to his house. As I said, this is nothing that the town doesn't already know about, this gentleman has been asking for help for at least 3 years. Enough already, fix the man's street!

The garvey race fiasco pitted two racing garvey clubs, East Coast Boat Racing Club against the newly formed Jersey Outlaws Racing Association. Here's how I heard that it went down. The East Coast club (who has been sponsoring the racing here for years) went to the Dockmaster Phil Greco and told him that in order to alleviate the chaos of running a racing show on the 4th of July weekend at the dock, that they would change the date to the 17th of July. Phil liked the idea because he is the man in charge of coordinating the activities and not having the headache of 1500 more people at the dock on 4th of July weekend appealed to him. But it seems like Phil never informed the committee or administrator of this conversation and the new club (formed from disgruntled members of East Coast) put in an application to hold 2 races, one on the 3rd of July and one on the 4th of September, leaving East Coast one date on August 14th. So it seems like the Mayor had some Tobacco Road meetings with both parties and they all agreed. Moral of the story? Make sure when you want to get something done in town you go right to the top. Apparently the committee left Phil out of the loop or vice versa.

My thoughts on the police dog. I am in favor of the dog, I think it is an important part of police work. From what I heard last night from the chief is that he understands that the town does not want this dog to cost the taxpayers any money. All expenses incurred by this dog will be offset by donations (which the Mayor seemed to make his priority to secure) and seizure money. I totally agree with this, as long as this dog earns his keep, there should be no problem fiscally. The only questions I have are, is this dog going to be cross trained to track and to sniff drugs? And it seems that the dog and his handler will only work a 4 day on 4 day off shift, 10 hours a day. What will happen when we need the dog to track or scent a drug stop when the dog has the day off? Does the dog and handler get called out and paid overtime? Hey, I'm just playing devil's advocate, you know someone will ask this question. I will e-mail the chief and see what he says.

There was also an interesting and colorful presentation by resident Phil Checcia concerning the expenses of the Mirage Development home repairs. He was right that when the committee has been asked, "how much is Barnegat into the Mirage debacle" the answer would be about one million dollars. Phil produced a document that he OPRAed from the town that had Mirage expenses approaching two million dollars. I took a quick look at it and I would really like someone to explain it to me when cooler heads prevail. I'll work on that. I have always been an advocate of lesser fees for engineers and lawyers, which is a big part of these Mirage expenses.

Along this same line of engineer and lawyer fees the committee stated that all non-essential projects and studies on the list would be suspended. Hopefully this will include the redevelopment study that is ongoing for the 2 sand pits and the downtown area. Total waste of taxpayer money. This whole idea smells of somebody making out very well on the taxpayer dime, be it lawyers, engineers and developers. Just my opinion.

Health Benefits for part time elected officials? Apparently some Trenton legislators say "not a good deal for the taxpayer".

2011-02-03T19:20:00.000-05:00

A hot topic that keeps rearing it's head in our town and all through NJ is the practice of paying lucrative health care benefits to our part time elected officials. These health benefits can be over $20,000 a year and in some cases more, because not only do we offer them to the elected official, but we will also offer them to the family of that official. With the taxpayers getting wise to the percs that were given out by our legislators to our legislators, I decided to do a little investigating and see if there might be an end to this practice in sight.
We all know that when someone has something such as free health care for them and their family, and I'm talking the Cadillac plan with low co-pays and low deductions, it's hard for them to give it up. So after doing some searching on the NJ Legislature website I found that on September 18th 2006, Senators Steve Sweeney and Senator Joseph M. Kyrillos Jr introduced Senate Bill 2178 that would create stiff rules for part time employees and officials (including elected) from enrolling in the State Pension system and prevent them from receiving taxpayer funded health benefits. The bill was written in good faith, I presume, because why should the taxpayers of NJ fund pensions and health benefits for people that don't work for us full time. It only makes fiscal sense. Well, as it goes in Trenton, the bill went away quietly as it was referred to the State Government Committee and on 6/21/2007 was withdrawn from consideration. Why? I'll have to ask Senator Sweeney.
So we will fast forward to June 10, 2010 when first year assemblyman Domenick Dicicco Jr. and Assemblywomen Nunez and Angelini introduced Assembly Bill 2800 that more or less addressed the same problem as the previous bill from 2006. It covered eliminating pensions and health benefits for part time employees and elected officials.This bill even spells out the fact that a part time employee is one who works less than 35 hrs per week. That could affect some of our legislators and freeholders among many others. Back to the bill. This one made it to the Pension and Health Benefits Review Commission on October 1, 2010. The Commission liked the part of the bill that deals with reducing the incidence of the abusive pension practice of tacking and boosting. They also discussed "Additionally, the elimination of pension and health benefits for part-time elected and appointed officials will reduce the aggregate annual employer benefit costs. The Commission recommends a more consistent approach to the number of hours worked for the eligibility of health benefits."
They made a motion to "Recommend to enact with the amendment to eliminate the provision that elected and appointed officials whose hours of service are fixed at fewer than 35 per week will be ineligible for health care benefits."
It looks like this bill could go somewhere with a little more work from the assemblymen and women who introduced it. I would personally not recommend removing the "health benefit" part of the bill and passing it. This is just a case of taking something from somebody that they have had so long, they will hold on to it as tight as they can for as long as they can. The passage of this bill would be a huge savings to lots of local municipalities who are in this situation. Some municipalities have given up these percs voluntarily, but many have not. I'll post updates as I get responses back from our assemblymen and women.

The Governor speaks to a policeman on salaries and benefits.

2011-02-01T07:36:00.003-05:00

This is not a knock on police whatsoever. This is Christie talking about reality. Listen and decide. Click the link below.
http://www.app.com/section/VideoNetwork?bctid=763052194001&odyssey=mod|video||news

Christie signs another law concerning transparency. Bill A2844 - posting all municipal budgets on-line.

2011-01-29T08:41:00.000-05:00

Taken from the NJ Statehouse Bureau from 1/26/11:

All New Jerseyans will be able to review their municipality's budget under legislation signed into law by Gov. Chris Christie today.
A 2007 law requires that towns post their budgets online, but not every town and county has a website.
The law requires the Department of Community Affairs to post the budget of any municipality or county that doesn't have its own website. The new law also requires towns and counties post the last three adopted budgets on their websites, or the DCA website.
The legislation is intended to improve government transparency, sponsors said. Currently, if a town does not have a website, a resident would have to go to the library or a government facility.
"I see no excuse for not posting local budgets, which are the most basic public information and a key part of the tax bills in every community in this state," said Assemblywoman Pamela Lampitt (D-Camden), one of the co-sponsors.
Here is the link to the full bill: Click Here.

So, to put it simply, it is now the law that Barnegat Township post their Budget's online in addition to the previous three years budgets. There is one provision in the bill that says "it should be made available online and in print as required by this section in a "user-friendly" summary format using plain language." I believe that some towns will use this provision to cut alot of information out of the budget and say "it would be to confusing for the layman to understand". So I believe that in addition to the "user friendly" version, the complete version should also be available online to be viewed by the Barnegat residents.
We all know that in this town we have people who know how to read and understand exactly what is in the full version of these budgets it can give insight as to where the money goes.
This law is a step in the right direction for all government. The public wants information, the more information available, the less time we will spend trying to acquire it. When people stand up at a committee meeting and ask the same question over and over concerning salaries, spending, bonding and what certain resolutions mean, and get the same vague answers from the committee members, it is just wasting time. If people could spend less time OPRAing information because everything the need to see is online, that is a positive. I'm am a big advocate of information being made available to the public, and the interenet is the most cost effective and user friendly way to do it. Barnegat has a website, we pay someone to maintain it, lets make full use of it. After all, it's the law!

Wait, it's back! Health Benefit Reform.

2011-01-27T16:53:00.001-05:00

As I was looking around the NJ Legislature website I did a search for recent health benefit reform that might be upcoming this year. Lo and Behold, it's back!. Roughly the same bill that I wrote about in my previous post has been introduced as Bill A2800. Here is the link: Click Here.
Here is the statement that summarizes the bill:

This bill makes part-time elected and appointed officials ineligible for pension credit and health care benefits. The bill provides that persons elected to a State office, including the Legislature, or appointed by the Governor to a State office or position whose hours of service are fixed at fewer than 35 per week, as well as persons elected to a local public office or appointed to a local board, commission or authority whose hours of service are fixed at fewer than 32 per week, are not eligible for enrollment, or the accrual of service credit, in the Public Employees’ Retirement System and the Defined Contribution Retirement Program for service in an office or position for which the term commences after the effective date of the bill. Elected and appointed officials whose hours of service are fixed at fewer than 35 per week will be ineligible for health care benefits after the effective date of the bill. The bill takes effect on the 90th day after the date of enactment. (end of statement)

The only way this gets done is by law, the part time elected officials are not going to give this up. It is up to the people to call their assembly people and tell them to support this bill. Keep a close eye on this and make sure it doesn't disappear like it did back in 2007. Maybe our Barnegat committee will pass a resolution supporting this bill and send it to the legislature. Maybe?

Give up the Health Benefits. If it was a law, they would have to do it.

2011-01-27T16:24:00.009-05:00

Found an interesting fact about giving up health care benefits for part time elected officials. In the 2006-2007 NJ Legislative session this very idea was introduced by the Senate and the Assembly as Bill S2178 and A3509.
Here is the link to it: Click Here. As you can see on 6/21/2007 it was withdrawn from consideration. Do you really think that a couple of do good senators and assemblymen are going to ruin it for everyone else. Do you realize if that law went through how much money that would have saved some municipalities?

This excerpt is taken from the meat of this bill and says it all:

In addition, the bill clarifies that part-time public employees are not eligible for health care benefits that are paid in full or in part by the public employer. Currently, to be eligible for coverage under the State Health Benefits Program as an employee of the State or a public employer other than the State, a person must be a full-time employee or an appointed or elected official. This bill clarifies that the appointed or elected official must also serve full time to be eligible for enrollment by the employer.
In addition, this bill provides that a board of education or local government unit that does not participate in the SHBP but does provide health care benefits to its employees through other means, cannot pay, in full or in part, the cost of such coverage for employees or officials who serve part-time.

Interesting, isn't it. That's politics.

A comment on a comment. Drop the Committee Health Benefits.

2011-01-25T16:24:00.000-05:00

A reader of mine named Night, (the link to it is on the right sidebar) posted a comment about an entry I wrote about the township committee telling us that the budget cuts are coming. He wrote that instead of the committee concentrating on cuts to the employees benefits and salaries, they should first cut their own benefits. He also wrote about committee members double dipping on health benefits and people in business that sit on the committee benefiting from being on the committee. This idea has come up before, and I'll give you my opinion on it.
I will agree that the job of Barnegat Township committee is a part time job. This all depends on what kind of committee person you will decide to be. What's the least you can do if you are on the committee, show up every 1st and 3rd Monday of the month for five hours at the most. That comes out to 120 hrs a year. At an average committee salary of $4300.00 that is $35.00 per hour. Not bad. Factor in the $23,000 a year health care benefit and that hourly wage rises to $227.00 an hour. Wow!
But if you just got elected for the benefits for yourself and not the residents, it's a pretty good deal. What you do when you get elected is up to you. You can show up every other Monday, bitch and moan about all of the problems, and not offer solutions. Or, you can be a committee person that will become involved and educated about what it really takes to run a town efficiently. We have certain committee members that are on certain boards and commissions, they are liaisons and the go betweens for many different departments. To do the job of committee person correctly takes time.
Do I think you should be paid to be on the committee? Yes. Do I think that a committee member should get a health benefit package like they get. No. Cirulli and Morano are employed by two different public service departments, the School Board and the Twp Committee. Did they take the monetary payoff for dropping one health plan, I don't know. Should they have taken it. No. What will new committeeman Al Bille do? I believe he was a federal employee with the post office. Does he have health care for life? I don't know. Should he take the money in exchange for not taking the committee health care plan. No.
So, Night, I guess you see my stance on this issue. I totally believe in leading by example. It would be a bold and strong statement-making move for the Township Committee to drop their health care plan. Federal employees pay for 1/3 of their health care plans, NJ state and Municipal workers pay nowhere near that amount. When it comes time to negotiate contracts and initiate cuts in benefits and salaries at least the people proposing the cuts can say they started with themselves. There you go, you just saved over $100,000. Let's see who's got the guts up there to propose this. Do I hear a resolution?

What to look for in Barnegat this year.

2011-01-24T08:18:00.001-05:00

The beginning of this year is turning into a whirlwind of activity in Barnegat. Here is a short list of happenings in this town that will affect all residents in no particular order:

The School Resource Officer story, to have or have not. ( it's all about safety, but how much is too much)
The subpoena of Barnegat Board of Education records concerning insurance dealings with Federal Hill Risk Management, the broker at the center of the bribery case involving Michael J. Ritacco. (where did they go)
The quick departure of our superintendent of schools, Jason Bing. (so much for Barnegat School pride, show me the money)(Update - I read in his e-mail to the parents that he was moving for health and logistical reasons, so I retract my show me the money statement and wish him good luck)
The search for a new super (Dr. Joseph Saxton maybe ,this local guy loves Barnegat, move him into the super position, promote a high school assistant principal to principal, and only have one assistant principal instead of two) Times are tough and this is a perfect opportunity to trim a high administrative salary.
The upcoming police, dispatcher and civilian police personnel contract negotiations. (might get ugly, might not)
The decision as to what should be done with the Edwards school site downtown. (got to be careful with this one, someone could get rich)
The redevelopment "study" of the downtown property and two privately owned land parcels being targeted by the town officials. (this one's easy, it's all about money here, someones definitely going to make some big dough on this deal)
The new tax rate that will coincide with your new assessment ,I got mine, did you get yours? (oh, you'll get yours)

So there you go, just a quick heads up. I'll be commenting on each story as it develops, but for Jerry Springer type entertainment, click here, and check out all of the comments from some of our esteemed residents as they maturely and calmly discuss thier thoughts on the hiring, or non-hiring of our school resource officer. Have a good day!

There is a new Barnegat news website in town, Barnegat Ocean Acres Patch

2011-01-19T17:24:00.000-05:00

Check out this new website called the Barnegat - Ocean Acres Patch, it covers news from our town concerning municipal, educational and local businesses. The link can be found at the top of this page. Enjoy!

As per state law, the contracts are now on-line for public viewing.

2011-01-19T17:11:00.000-05:00

As per state law as I wrote before in this blog, I was contacted by someone from NJ Public Employee Relations Commission telling me that the contracts for the Public employees and Police are up on their website. Here is the link to that website: Click Here. Go to the second page and toward the bottom under the Barnegat Township heading you will see the contracts for the Police, Public Works, Office and Administration. Seems like the Police, Dispatchers and civilian police employees are the only ones up for renewal this year. Looks like the Blue Collar (Public Works) and the White Collar (Office and Professional Employees) are up for renewal in the coming year. You will also see that the updated contracts from the Barnegat Board of Education concerning the Administrators, Aides, Bus Drivers, Cafeteria Workers, Clerical, Custodians, Other, Security Guards, Teaching/Professional Staff have not been submitted to NJ PERC.
Remember, this is public information that is required by law to be submitted at the ratification of all public employee contracts for public viewing.
By the way, I was away this week and could'nt make the Committee Meeting. It is usually held the first and third Monday of the month. I went to the website to see what was on the agenda and lo and behold, no announcement as to if the meeting was cancelled and the last link to an agenda was a special Jan 12 meeting.
Maybe someone can leave me a comment on if they had one or not. Thanks!

Tax Talk - 2010 to 2011 comparison

2011-01-05T07:54:00.000-05:00

Just a quick comparison from last year to this years taxes. I got my little yellow tax bill and card with my preliminary 2010-2011 bill. Comparisons are as follows:

2009-2010 (all rates per $100 of assessed property value)
County Tax .239
Library Tax .028
Health Tax .011
Open Space Tax .011
District School Tax .919
Local Tax .409
Local Open Space Tax .010

2010-2011
County Tax .242
Library Tax .028
Health Tax .011
Open Space Tax .011
District School Tax 1.001
Local Tax .592
Local Open Space Tax .010

Change for Year
County Tax + .03
Library Tax - same
Health Tax - same
Open Space Tax same
District School Tax + .082
Local Tax + .183
Local Open Space Tax - same

I'm sure these numbers are not news to anyone. A new assessment of property values are coming this month, so be prepared to have these numbers change. In most likelihood your property value will decrease if you have not filed a review for reassessment, and the present tax rate of $1.895 per hundred will rise to reflect the loss of property value in the town. So your home value decreases but your tax rate will rise. In the end you could still be paying the same money in taxes, in some cases, people will also end up paying more or less. That news will hit your mailbox soon this month according to the Breeden report from the last December town meeting.

That should be easy to follow, any questions, leave a comment.

The big snow and other tidbits of interesting information.

2010-12-29T20:58:00.000-05:00

Well, that was some storm, to say the least. I can't wait to hear the numbers at the committee meeting from Mr. Breeden. We will all get an interesting insight (yawn) as to how many man hours, inches or feet of snow and tons of salt and chemical were used in a storm of this magnitude. And of course the committee will be patting each other on the backs saying what a good job they all did. Hats off to the public works department though, I was satisfied with the job. I'm sure they all got plenty of overtime which will help them pay for those holiday bills. I have no problem with paying people for doing their jobs. This was a freak storm like no other we've had in a while and the roads were done in a timely manner. I'm sure you'll have some residents who felt it just wasn't fast enough. You can't please everybody.

On the subject of public information and transparency in government, did you know that there is a law in NJ that says:
34:13A-8.2. Filed contracts in public employment.
The commission shall collect and maintain a current file of filed contracts in public employment. Public employers shall file with the commission a copy of any contracts it has negotiated with public employee representatives following the consummation of negotiations.
L. 1968, c. 303, s. 11, eff. July 1, 1968.
Here is a link to a PDF file that explains this little known law to the State municipalities:
Click here

So I find this website that has the contracts on-line and Barnegats current contracts are not on there. I emailed the head of the NJ Public Employee Relations Commission to find out why and he e-mailed me back this response:
Mr Effron,
Despite the law requiring the submission of contracts it appears we have not yet been provided with an updated contract from Barnegat Twp. You might try contacting the township directly.
Neal
So the way I see it, Barnegat does not follow the law and the NJ Public Employee Relations Commission is not doing their job.
This is a great law, it's a shame that they don't think it is that important to uphold. Imagine all of the money and time that would be saved if we could view all of these contracts on-line. No OPRA necessary!
This is all about transparency or the lack of. I for one would like to view these contracts, I really can't believe what the committee or the administrator tell me, I'd rather see the complete contract. With negotiations coming up and the largest part of our municipal budget being salaries and benefits it would be great info to give the people who will be paying those salaries, the taxpayers. How do you feel about this?

Condolences to Marty and Angela from Sweet Jenny's Restaurant

2010-12-28T16:25:00.000-05:00

Barnegat lost a great restaurant and business last night. I felt the need to say how sorry I feel for the loss by fire of Sweet Jenny's restaurant. I had the pleasure of meeting and talking to Marty and Angela, the owners of Sweet Jenny's over the years when I owned Gunning River Herbs. They were very dedicated and hard-working people who truly put their heart and soul into the restaurant. Judging by the amount of business they had and their sense of community, it looks as if they had a successful venture. Being in the restaurant business myself, I feel for their loss. I also feel for the loss of jobs for the workers and their families. Hopefully, they will rebuild.

Please Barnegat, somebody fix the township website!

2010-12-23T20:07:00.000-05:00

This has been a pet peeve of mine for years. Bottom line is, our website stinks. I want to see more public information. I want to see the minutes from every meeting and workshop posted after they are approved. This is not hard, check this link to the Barnegat Township Board of Ed for the meeting minutes. Click Here.
See, isn't that simple. Information, who said what and when. It's important to have to let our town fathers remember what they said because half the time I don't even think they remember.
This is a verbatim e-mail that I sent to all of the committee and David Breeden on December 9th concerning this lack of information on our website. Here it is:

1. Who voted yes and who voted no on the budget?
2. Is it possible to have a link to all of the resolutions on the agenda on the website before they are passed. It will save you time by not having to explain what is in each resolution and give the public important information before the meetings. I do see that if I go to past agendas that you do have the links to the complete resolutions. I'm just asking that you provide these links before they are passed so that the public may ask questions if need be. If you were to go to the current meeting agenda from the 6th of December there are no links at all. This is just echoing the thoughts of one resident Morris (I forget his last name) who, like myself view the Internet as a powerful tool that if used correctly can save time and money. The more information you can give the public, the less time you will need to explain the answer to the same questions you get at the meetings such as, "how much are we paying this new hire or, what is in the resolutions". This is a very simple process that requires a scanner and a few minutes to do.
Thank you,
Howard Effron
Here was my answer from Mr Breeden:
In response to your email, let me offer the following comments:
1. The governing body approved the 2010 municipal budget by a vote of 3-2. Mayor Melchiondo, Deputy Mayor Cirulli and Township Committee member Dorothy Ryan voted for budget adoption, while Township Committee members Lisella and Morano voted against adoption.
2. As stated in your email, the Township provides links to all resolutions after approval by the Township Committee. Links to ordinances are furnished after first reading. The rationale behind not linking a resolution prior to the meeting is that the resolution could be tabled, voted down or modified based on Township Committee action at the meeting.
3. Regarding reviewing certain agenda items during the meeting, even if the Township was to link to resolutions prior to the meeting, I would still take the time to explain certain ordinances and resolutions to the public during the meeting. I have found over the years that taking time to explain certain items on the agenda is a valuable educational tool that greatly helps the audience understand and appreciate the workings of local government. I believe that I furnish much more information during my review of agenda items then members of the public could achieve by simply reading the resolution. Just because you read something does not mean you understand it. There is no doubt that the Internet is a powerful tool that raises the level of public awareness, but it does not fully nor can it ever replace a person taking the time to explain a particular agenda item.
Thanks -- Dave
David Breeden
Township Administrator
Township of Barnegat, New Jersey

Just one bit of contention with his answer. "Just because you read something does not mean you understand it.", not true Mr. Breeden. We are all pretty intelligent people here and a resolution is clearly written and is usually self explanatory.
Also I urge you to go to the link to our township website that I have provided at the top of this page and poke around trying to find agendas and resolutions, its a chore.
Here is a link to a great article about what the best municipal website should offer. Click Here
Hey, Morris, I'm trying!

The difference between what you want and what you need. Public Ad Hoc budget member?

2010-12-23T11:53:00.000-05:00

I heard some talk on the radio this morning about how people in this state are having to downsize their life to afford to live in NJ. They have to start to differentiate between what they would like to have and what they actually need to have. The host of the program equated that statement to local government. This statement could be no closer to the truth these days. What you want from your government and what you really need from your government are two different things. As I have written before in this blog, I am a low maintenance resident. I want to have safe streets to walk on, pick up my garbage, good water to drink and a good school for my children. That's about all I really need from my government. I don't need the government to provide entertainment, day care or other extracurricular activities that I can get and pay for elsewhere, if I so choose.
As resident after resident stood up at the last town meeting and told the committee, we can't afford to live here anymore, each speaker was applauded as he or she finished. It was refreshing to see the new faces, the rest will be up to the 2011 Barnegat Township Committee. Much talk was also about members of the public being present as the committee talked to the department heads about the coming year and what needs to be done to "get the taxes lowered". We will see where that goes, I for one would like to be a member of that public committee. But who knows. What Jake Taylor said made sense, having a member of the public around gives the committee person something of a back-up when discussing matters related to cutting spending. It puts a face from the private sector in front of the person that they are talking to when discussing health care plans, pensions and benefits. Just a thought, we'll see how receptive the committee is to that idea.
Good to see more public comment coming into this blog, most of the committee reads this, so it is also a way to express any opinions you might have. I publish all comments, as long as they are kept civil.
Thanks for reading.

Lots of cutting coming, or that's what they tell us.

2010-12-20T20:35:00.002-05:00

A pretty well attended meeting tonight with the emphasis on the rising cost of living in Barnegat the main subject. I also spoke about the lack of e-mail support from the township committee w/ the five of them more or less telling me, it's not their job, it's Dave's (Dave Breeden the administrator) job to answer the e-mails from the residents. After the previous meetings plea from a resident for a little e-mail respect and it just so happens that another resident, Charles Johnson, from the flooded plains of Woodmansee Road, also said that his e-mails don't get answered, I guess the committee felt it was not that important.
Resident after resident took the microphone tonight asking for tax relief, and the committee seems to know what they need to do to get that, it's not going to be pretty but it needs to be done. Contracts are coming up for renewals for all major departments of public workers including police, and the talk from the committee is that they will be playing hardball. I personally believe that our employees are real people who understand how lucky they are to be working and concessions need to be made, and will be made to benefit everyone in this town. This will be an interesting time coming up in the committee's tenure as they tussle with the unions and the employees trying to make them see how really good they have it. I would think that the first negotiation should start with Mr Breeden and he should set the tone for the give-backs that we will be expecting from our employees. We will see what they are made of, somehow I'll have to see the positive results to believe them.
Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays!
Let me know if you want me to post the audio.

Public comment session...the public has their say. With audio!

2010-12-09T22:11:00.001-05:00

Lets start with my past running mate, Marianne Clemente. Just listen as she slyly embarrasses the committee about the secret budget meeting, but the problem is, I really don't think they get it. She is a political activist, gets involved, and makes alot of sense.
Click for Mariannes comments.
Morris gets up and talks about things that are dear to my heart. Our so-called township website and the fact of getting information out to the public short of snail mail. Marianne had a great point, we have a system in place called Nixle which alerts residents who sign up about various happenings in town. Wasn't it amazing that a public comment meeting on our inflated budget was not advertised to the public on Nixle or the front page of the website, but what was there was the route Santy Claus will be taking. I guess we know where their priorities lie. Morris seems to think that more pertinent info should be on the website as I had said for years, including full links to all resolutions so they can be read in their entirerty by the public. That way educated comments and suggestions can be made pertaining to new ordinances. Less information makes for an uniformed public and a non-transparent government. Go to the Tuesday October 19th post where I reported on Morris standing up at the public portion and asking for the same thing he asked on Dec 6th. Relax Morris, it's only been 2 months. He also rails on them about not responding to e-mails, not even an acknowledgement. Of course the mayor has an excuse, too much spam. But really Morris, thanks for bringing this up. And be sure to listen to the Mayors doubletalk about township board appointments.
Click here for Morris' comments
Jake Taylor rants and raves about the usual; paving jobs, professional fees, health care costs and then jokes with everybody afterwards. He has good points and spends lots of money OPRAing documents, but as Marianne says, they just don't seem to listen! Listen as Al Cirulli and Jake get into a heated discussion about, as Jake calls it, "the dog cop", it's good stuff. Apparently the dog will pay for itself by finding drugs and contraband. Len Morano was pissed (sorry mayor for my language) that he knew the dog would get overtime and that he wasn't included in the desicion to bring a dog on the force. What's the problem, shouldn't all committee members be aware of hiring desicions made in the town? I think so.
Let's hear Jake, click here
It gets better, Phil Checcia, a regular at these meetings since I can remember, gets on Dorothy about her absentee yes vote on the budget. I'll save the audio, but he more or less said that what she did was not legal. And from what I gather, if she did not vote that day, the budget would have been split with 2 ayes and 2 nayes. That is why I e-mailed the committee and asked them to give me the rundown of the budget vote. Still waitng for an answer. Then he got into a heated discussion with Al Cirulli about cutting personell, seems like Al took it personally. Phil is the best, pretty smart guy, a little long-winded, just has a bad temper.
Click here for Phil's and Al's freindly discussion.

So there you go, I would advise all of you interested parties to go to our meetings the first and third Monday of each month. Before you go though, check the website to make sure they haven't been cancelled, it's under Township Committee heading, under current agenda. But if your into yard sales that will be found on the Home Page, ahhhh, priorities.

Mondays meeting report continued...with audio!

2010-12-09T19:40:00.003-05:00

As I said the Monday meeting came alive with talk of tax rate increases, contract talks, building department restructuring, health benefit costs and lots of tough talk from the committee on saving us money for the coming year. One comment that was uttered by Committeeman Al Cirulli rang true in my mind, we can do all we can on a local level, but if we don't get the school funding formula in this state under control or changed, our taxes will continue to rise. The school budget is 60% of your tax bill and until we get the spending, contracts, benefits, state mandates and all of the huge costs that go with education under control we will continue to see rising taxes in this town. This is not a knock on the Board of Education, they are doing all they can to keep costs under control and stay within all of the ridiculous state mandates that will supposedly make for more educated children. You will never convince me for one minute that the more money you throw at a system, the more efficient it will become. More money does not equal a better education. I'm old school on this, a better education is achieved by a commitment on the child's and parents part to become better educated. Enough about education "funding" in this state. That is a story for another day.
The committee reports:
Committeeman Lisella started his report by saying that the town is looking at different health care plans and reported that by the end of January the figures will be in and we will get a report. He also reported that the administrator is in discussion with the township labor unions and should be completed by the end of December. After his report on trying to streamline township operations he stressed that what cuts will be made will in no way affect the safety of our citizens and cleanliness of the town.
Click here for audio of the Lisella Report
Dorothy Ryan reported that she was present at the budget meeting via telephone conferencing from California and she voted yes, though she said she was not happy with the tax increase. She stated that she did not want the state to come here and stick their nose into Barnegat's business, which is what would have happened if the budget was not passed. Good thing or not.
Click here for the audio of the Ryan Report
Len Morano was up next with the news that he had voted no on the budget. He said he could not in good conscious make people lose their homes. He also said he will be looking hard at all departments and overtime.
Click here for the Morano Report
Al Cirulli was next with more of the same about streamlining government and township operations but without jeopardizing "your public safety", that is a great political catchphrase that elected officials use as an excuse when it comes time to cut personnel. Lisella used the same phrase. He also had some comments about the Patriot Flag visiting Barnegat and a heartfelt plea to the government to help the first responders and their families. I wholeheartedly agree with his sentiments. Those people gave their health and many gave their life, the least the government can do is help them.
Click here for the Cirulli Report
Barnegat Administrator David Breeden finished up with a report on the Brighton at Barnegat situation.
Click here for the Breeden Report

Just a note from myself to my readers. If you enjoy what I'm doing here, let me know. I believe I am filling a void left by the media on reporting on local government. Adding the audio is advantageous to the residents and the committee alike, it is a record, so to speak, of their thoughts and promises. It gives seniors or townspeople the ability to hear what goes on at these meetings. Without videotaped meetings or minutes available on our so called township website, information is scarce. Sometimes it makes you wonder if that is the way the government wants it. I enjoy doing it. Thanks!

*Just a note - all of the audio is stored on a safe and secure website, listening to the audio on LetsTalkBarnegat.com will in any way affect your computer.

Barnegat Township residents come alive at last nights meeting.

2010-12-07T22:45:00.002-05:00

After a few uneventful and sparsley attended township committee meetings, last nights meeting came alive. It started with former committee member, Maxine Blumenthal pleading her case to the township committee as to the deteriorating conditions at the Brighton at Barnegat mobile home park. From what I gather it seems that they have new management who are absentee and unresponsive to the residents about some seriuos problems over there. Potholes the size of basketballs, illegal rent increases, threats of eviction, septic and flooding problems. It sounds like they do need help, it seems they have exausted all means of trying to resolve this on thier own and now the town will step in.
Click here for audio of Brighton residents
More reports of last nights meeting and audio to come.

Things to do to save money in Barnegat, or not to do.

2010-12-03T20:39:00.000-05:00

When the new tax rate of 1.91 per hundred of assessed value comes to fruition, Barnegat residents will be hit with a 17% tax increase. That is a substantial hit for the people to bear. What happened to Christie's Cap 2.5 proposal, from a 2.5 hard cap on property taxes to a real 17% increase, thanks Trenton.
With this increase looming you would think that any plans for future projects that where not essential in running the town would be put on the back burner. One such plan is the townships pursuit of 3 so-called re-development zones in town. One is Shoreline Sand and Gravel Pit on West Bay Avenue, one is Tanner's Pit which is in my neck of the woods on Gunning River Road and the other is the Edwards School . The Edwards School is owned by the Barnegat Board of Ed. or the people of Barnegat. The other two parcels are privately owned pieces.
So the story is that Barnegat, in this economic climate of higher taxes and unemployment is going to take our money and start paying lawyers and engineers to see if these parcels can be designated re-development zones. I'll start by giving you a link on Local Redevelopment and Housing Law, this is the same document that the pros will go by to determine if these properties fall in to the redevelopment category. Click here for the link. Why is Barnegat thinking of taking these private properties anyway? Does Barnegat need to be in the real estate business? This is how you save money, by not doing things like this that will result in professional fees for studies, surveys, title searches and the like for property that we don't even own! Sometimes I look at the things our committee has done and scratch my head, it's like they are all looking for something to do that will end up costing us money. I have an idea, if you run out of things to do, punch out and go home, sometimes you save more money not doing something. I urge all of the residents to look at the link for the redevelopment law and read it, it's pretty self explanatory, it really is. Look at all of the studies that must be done to make these determinations, (money) look at the layers of bureaucracy that must be created (more money). This is not a good idea to pursue, the real estate market stinks, large tax increase on it's way, and we don't need to be in the real estate business anyway. Let this property stay on the market and the market will determine when and if it sells. If Barnegat wants to have a say in determining what goes there, let them re-zone it. it will be way less expensive to the taxpayers.
Prime example of the town being involved in the real estate market; Walters Homes wants to build some affordable housing on Pennsylvania Ave. The town, after saying yes, says no. Town gets a knee jerk reaction and buys up prime commercial property on Route 9, the old trailer campground, and designates that to be affordable housing. So we pay some landowner taxpayer money and buy his property that he couldn't sell anyway, the property goes off the tax rolls and we lose money there also. Where is the value, bottom line is, stay out of the real estate business.
Town meeting on Monday, see you there. I'll provide a link to the agenda above in the Barnegat links section. Have a good one!

I've added a new feature to this blog. Barnegat related links.

2010-11-21T18:51:00.000-05:00

Above I have added a feature of Barnegat related links. The first one is the Barnegat Township Municipal Website. This website is very hard to navigate and very short on information having to do with public information on township business. It has no links to resolutions on the current agendas.It has no minutes of past meetings. It has no detailed information on public worker contracts or town budgets. It does have information on garage sales for the week and Ocean County College News!
If any readers have other links that are barnegat related, send me a comment, I'll post them.

Public meeting on the budget November 22 or 23rd. Keep a lookout if you are interested.

2010-11-16T14:07:00.000-05:00

If you want to hear a better explanation of why the state did not accept our budget as written, there will be a public hearing on the 22 or 23rd of November. Not sure as to what time or where. This was reported by Mr. Breeden last night, I forgot to write about it. Why they wouldn't have this explanation or public comment on the regular Monday night meeting on the 29th is beyond me. I mean we went this long without a budget, what's a couple more days. Or is it that the committee does not want a slew of townspeople asking questions, nah, that couldn't be it. Looks like Letstalkbarnegat.com is becoming your place to read about what happened at the committee meetings, you sure don't read about it in the local papers. You would think that one of the reporters would pick up on that new tax rate. Oh well, I don't mind.

Monday Nov. 15th Committee meeting. Tax rate reported at 1.91 per hundred. Tax increase of 28.3 cents.

2010-11-16T06:57:00.000-05:00

Seems like when the town brought the budget to the state to be approved, the state did not like the idea of Barnegat bonding 750,000 dollars to pay for a tax revenues lost due to reassessments and they refuse to approve the budget as written. Vince Greene (a resident) asked for the tax rate for 2010-2011 and the Mayor told him it will come in at around 1.91 per hundred. So just for sake of information I pulled out my little green card that I received from Barnegat w/ my 09-10 preliminary tax bill, lo and behold the tax rate was 1.627 per hundred. Lets do the math, 1.91 minus 1.627 equals a tax increase of .283 cents per hundred. I'll continue with the math lesson, your house is worth 400,000, in 2009-2010 tax year you paid 6508.00 in taxes, this year you will pay 7640.00. Increase of 1132.00.
The mayor blamed the assessment debacle on the state, now that is BS because everyone saw this coming 3 years ago as the real estate values plummeted and our town committee, tax office and administrator did squat. Everybody will blame everybody else but the fact remains that they did nothing and we got screwed with a substantial tax increase.
What happens next will tell alot about our committee, will they make drastic budget and personnel cuts, will they negotiate contracts and benefits for the good of the taxpayer in mind. A gentleman stood up during public portion and suggested that no employee needs to have a car paid for by the town, all of our committee nodded their heads in agreement. Look for all employees who take cars home to have that privilege revoked. I doubt it. Committeeman Morano said the the police do it all of the time and it's not in the contract, so Len, why are they doing it and why do you only speak now?
The problem with the tax increases are that the committee thinks that they are doing the right thing, why do they feel that way? They see that they get re-elected year after year, so they say that the people approve of what they are doing. In a way, they are right. When we elect the same people year after year, why should they change their ways, and according to the committee, tax increases are always someone elses fault and there is nothing that they can do about it.
Wondering when we will be getting the meetings televised, a reporter was asking me that at the meeting last night. I told him that it's coming, one of these days. That would be a great idea because it would give the committee the ability to go back to the videotape and remember what they told the people of this town, because, I swear, I don't think they remember. Wouldn't it be nice if we could get the minutes published on the township website also?
Maybe I'll check out a school board meeting tonite, talk about tax bills and contract negations, that's at the top of my little green card.

Thank you veterans.

2010-11-11T16:10:00.000-05:00

I would just like to thank all of the past and present men and women that have served in our military to keep us safe and secure. I thank you, it's because of you that this country has the freedom that gives all of us the ability to do what we want and achieve what we want. Nothing stops us but ourselves. Again, thank you to all of the war veterans and their families, please keep them safe.

Voters favor spending cuts over tax hikes, is this a surprise? No more public comment on TV in Stafford.

2010-11-11T13:25:00.000-05:00

Check out this link, click here. It is a Quinnipiac Poll about how the state residents feel we should handle our rising deficit. Overwhelming yes to cutting government spending, reducing the government workforce, pay freezes and furlough days. This is no surprise to me, it's something that needs to be done even at the municipal level. We will see if the Barnegat Committee will adopt the zero-based budget plan that newly elected Al Bille will be proposing. Lets see what happens when he gets his hands on the pulse of what really goes on in town hall, open those books Al and tell us how efficient we really are.
In another interesting but disheartening move against transparent government, Mayor John McMinemin (sp) has pulled the plug on the televised public portion of the Stafford Township Committee Meeting. That just does not seem right. I was a watcher and really loved to see the back and forth between the Mayor, the council and the residents, be they pro or con. Very sad.

Lets talk about the election.

2010-11-03T20:21:00.000-04:00

No surprise that Republican club selection Al (don't be silly vote for) Bille won in a convincing manner over Dorothy (your voice on the committee) Ryan. I can honestly say that Dorothy was not my voice, my voice would have had a few more questions about budgets, professional fees,unnecessary bonding and borrowing, union contracts, benefits and how to save the taxpayers more money. I'm not saying she did anything bad, as a matter of fact she had class and grace as she served her term, never raising her voice and treating all with respect. She always did her homework on issues but as the minority party she could have spoken more against some of the ideas of the majority party. After all, that is what she was voted in to do.
Let's look at this statement from Mr. Bille taken from the Atlantic City Press:
"A zero baseline budget should be implemented," Bille said. "What has to happen is every department has to justify their expenses and have to be accountable for every line item - every expense and every person they have. And it cannot be based on past performance. It has to be as if they are starting a new business, because our first priority should be to reduce spending where taxes are concerned."
I like it, it seems that Al thinks that the township can run more efficient with less people and costs. But he'll have a hard time convincing Mr. Breeden (the township administrator) and the rest of his committee buddies who, over the last year, have blown their own horn about how lean and mean they have made our township. How bout all of those shared services agreements, now there are some savings. How much? Well we don't quite know yet, but it has to be something, right?
We the people of Barnegat understand that the proof of that will be in our tax bill, that is the only way that we can measure how good the committee is doing. Taxes the same as last year? OK. Taxes lower than last year? Now we are getting somewhere. Taxes higher than last year? Not good!
I'll speak for myself when I say that I don't expect much from my committee or my town. I'm a pretty low maintenance resident. I want my garbage picked up, a police department, safe roads to drive and a good school to send my kid. What I do expect is being able to keep as much of my hard earned money in my own pocket. I expect my committee to give me the best value for my dollar by lowering my taxes. I challenge the Barnegat Township Committee this year to lower the tax rate. It's not going to happen in your next tax bill, you know the one you will get soon after this election was over. In fact I say hang on to your hat for this one, the school tax is already going up and you know the municipal end will rise also. Lets make this challenge for the 2011 bill. Come on guys, you can do it, ya think?

Committee changes proposals for town professional services. I guess they do read Lets Talk Barnegat.

2010-10-25T05:00:00.008-04:00

It seems that the requirements for the RFP's for professional services for the town for 2011 have been changed on my recommendation. Glad to see someone paying attention on the committee. Click here for my article on municipal attorney appointments for 2010. The years of experience requirement for various board attorneys and township engineer have been lowered to a more realistic level from 15 years for the township attorney to 8. According to the RFP those professionals with less than 8 years can also be considered for employment with other conditions. Click here for the 2011 requirements (scroll down to page 16)
What does this mean for the taxpayer? As I've written many times here, professional service fees for our town rise substantially every year. Last year between just the Township attorney, Jerry Dasti and the Township engineer, John Hess, we spent almost one million dollars. Click here for link to April 2010 post. When the RFP's went out every year for bids for our township professionals we usually got one bid. How is that taxpayer value? Now that the experience level for these contracts have been lowered, I would hope that our administrator, David Breeden will make this information available to other engineering and attornies firms who might be interested in doing business for our town. Committeeman Al Cirulli (seems that he's the outspoken one on the committee about these fees charged) should spearhead this effort and make sure that we get more than the usual one bid for these services that we always seem to get. Now comes the political part, these firms will contribute money to the campaigns of the parties in power that gave them these lucrative contracts.
I have a great idea, to level the playing field and make all professional companies comfortable about turning in a bid for services, let Barnegat Township take this pay to play bull by the horns and write a resolution stating this in the RFP: Barnegat Township will not accept bids from any professional services firms that have contributed monies to any political campaigns of any present members or those campaigning for the office of township committee person.
Listen, I'm not naive about this game of politics, there are ways around this such as Political Action Committees but at least it would make the residents feel better. I also do not blame the present attorney or engineer for this problem, they are here to make a living, it is up to the committee to get the best deal for the taxpayer. Do I really think that next year we will see a new township attorney or engineer sitting up there, very doubtful. But maybe the present ones, who have profited well off of this town for many years, will give us a discount!

The public portion...and oops, we forgot! 10-18-2010 Committee meeting.

2010-10-19T04:52:00.009-04:00

I've been going to these meetings for about 15 years on and off and the part I enjoy the most is the public portion. That is when the township residents are allowed to state their opinions and ideas to the committee. I figured I will write about these on the Lets Talk Barnegat blog every time I go to the meetings, so that we can see if the committee even listens to the public during "the public portion".
Here is the rundown of the topics covered in "The Public portion':
Jake Taylor (a long time regular and community activist, for those who don't know) was up first. He was back on the soap-box concerning the cost of the township employees health benefit plans, he said that Barnegat was paying too much compared to the school's plan and neighboring towns. I've heard this argument before and the explanation given by the administrator was, we might be paying more now, but as health costs rise for others in the future, our plan will stay level. Makes sense? Only time will tell.
Frank Pecci had his say as he read from an article about municipal bonding, the fact that it has become a way of life for towns. Very simply a buy now, pay later way of life. Why should we run a town like that, if you can't afford it, you can't buy it. When Frank addresses the committee he doesn't even wait for a response, he knows he will never get one. What he usually gets are blank stares and a cordial "thank you Frank".
A man named Morris stood up and addressed the committee on something that can actually be taken care of by the committee, but just doesn't seem to get done. That is, the website and an internet presence of Barnegat Township. Bottom line is the Township website stinks, it's very hard to navigate through and it is filled with lots of useless information. This has to do with a town being transparent in their business. The public should be privy to all township information possible, financial, contractual, resolutions etc. For example, if I go on to the website to check the committee meeting schedule for the night, I would think that every resolution should have a link that can be clicked, so that the public can read the whole resolution as written. It's been that way for years, maybe the committee will listen to Morris, maybe. By the way, when will the committee meetings be televised?
Phil Checchia (sp?) stood up and railed for 5 minutes about Congressman John Adler, calling him a lightweight and ineffective. He finished up telling all to vote for Runyan.
But to the most pressing issue of the night, one that had all of the committee up in arms. Dorothy Ryan informed the committee and the administrator that a resident had brought to her attention the fact that an employee of our garbage collector, Waste Management, was guilty of cutting the ropes on the garbage can lids that he had tied to the can. She said that this had been done on more than one occasion. Click here for video on committee reaction. But seriously folks, don't you think that this problem could have been solved by Ms. Ryan with a phone call to Mr. Breeden (our administrator)instead of at the public meeting? Oh well, it's election time.
And now too the oops, we forgot part. It seems that at the end of the meeting, after the public portion, Mr Breeden had to add a couple of resolutions that needed to be passed quickly that night. This was unbeknownst to the public before the meeting and certainly not available on the printed agenda or the website which did not allow for any questions by the public. One had to do with the fact that Barnegat had to bond (borrow) a measly $750,000 to pay for tax revenue losses due to tax appeals. Now I'm not saying that they did not need to do it, I'm just saying the way they did it was a little shady. Oh well, oops, we forgot!

So who are you voting for, and why?

2010-10-15T18:38:00.006-04:00

So Barnegat, who are we going to put on the committee this year? Dorothy Ryan, the incumbent democrat or Albert Bille the republican club choice for the ticket. Let's look at the candidates and where they stand on important issues in town.
I believe that in a campaign, the candidate should get their message to the people so that they can make an informed decision. How do you do this? Newspaper, mailings meeting and talking to them, e-mailing them, debates etc.
So today I check out the Asbury Park press on-line and I see a story that says "A Republican and a Democrat are vying for one seat on the Township Committee". So I read it and it was supposed to have a statement from each candidate. Maybe I can get some information that will help me make my selection on election day. Which of these two will be best to guide our town forward. I find it strange that Dorothy chose not to make any kind of statement to the voters, nothing. Who's running her campaign, free press is gold in politics, you got to say something!
So then I read Al Bille's statement, same old same old. Worked in the post office for 36 years, 30 years in management. Is that good or bad, we all know that the Government knows how to waste money and time. Just ask Barnegat about how long it's taking the county government them to get a traffic light at Barnegat Blvd and Rte. 9.
Back to Al,this looks impressive, Al Bille day in Bayonne, sounds like he is a real community minded volunteer and that is good. What else? Here is his vanilla statement "My main goals, if I'm elected, are to be available, accountable and responsible to the residents of Barnegat Township." Wow, I've never heard that before.
You know what people, to be honest, I don't want a "nice guy" running my town. I want someone to cut spending, I want someone to look at every bill that goes through town hall. I want someone who will tell me that the taxpayer funded pensions, benefits and automatic raises for our township workforce are going to be curtailed or tailored to the present economy. I want someone who has the guts to stand up to the people that have been living off the backs of the middle and lower class and tell them, sorry, we just can't afford it anymore. I want someone that everyone who works for Barnegat, be they lawyers, engineers, architects, landscapers, public workers, police, knows that they mean business, the people's business. And the people of Barnegat are looking for that person to step in. Is it one of these two, doubtful. Is it an ex-postal worker, is it a Barnegat small business owner (it should be but it's not), is it a school janitor, nope, a vice principal, a real estate agent? Three out of five are on the public payroll already, do you really think they will battle for pension and benefit reform. Until I hear something more dynamic out of one of their mouths it looks like more of the same in the coming year.
Oh wait a minute, I just read in the Barnegat Leader, Al Bille will reduce government spending and streamline municipal operations. That sounds like another way to say layoffs and less money for lawyers and engineers, right? Oh please say it's so Al. And to be fair to Ms. Ryan, according to her Barnegat Leader ad, she will still be my voice on the issues that matter. Yawn.
So the campaigns are gearing up, the mailboxes will be filling up, signs will be going up, and next year, guaranteed, my taxes will be going up!

Christie is right on with this one.

2010-10-13T20:38:00.003-04:00

I've often wondered as we all have why does government move so slow? I personally think it's because they are lazy, that's right, lazy. The NJ legislature takes summer breaks, Christmas breaks, they usually don't do much before election time for fear of making a mistake that will piss off the public and cost them their cake job. I want you to read this article in which Chris Christie tells the legislature "get to work". Here is an excerpt from the article w/ a link to the whole article.

Gov. Chris Christie accused the Democratic-controlled Legislature of sitting on its hands rather than advancing his pension and health benefits, education and ethics reform agenda. Christie told a town hall audience of about 100 people on Tuesday that the Legislature has 70 days to act before recessing for Christmas on bills he deemed crucial to help stabilize the state's highest-in-the-nation property taxes. He mocked the Legislature for having misplaced priorities - approving bills on pet sterilization and how to destroy confiscated tobacco - then scolded its leaders for failing to debate bills that raise the retirement age, create merit pay for teachers and require lawmakers to disclose more of their income and assets. "It's time to stop with the pet sterilization bills and the destroying tobacco contraband bills. It's time to stop with the foolishness," Christie said. "Is that what we're spending our time on when we have 70 days left to really reform the system and capture the momentum that we're feeling in this state and this country to change our course?" Christie said the legislative branch, over which he has no direct control, isn't working hard enough. "Maybe they just haven't been working too hard for a long time, and maybe they are kind of stunned to have someone keep pushing more and more ideas down the hallway for their consideration," he said. "It's time to get to work." (Angela Delli Santi, “NJ governor urges Legislature for quicker action,

Click here for the whole article.

So all you mayors, tell your freeholder, assembly and senate buddies to get a move on and get to work.

Who you voting for?

2010-10-13T08:59:00.002-04:00

Well election day is coming fast and the mailbox will soon be full with the usual "he said, she said" crap. I'm going to write about it as it comes in, candidates will be telling you their "visions" for the future of your town. Incumbents will be telling you what a great job they did and why they should be re-elected. Do they think we really read all of that stuff, let alone believe it? Take for example the Runyan - Adler race. Runyan legally ripped the system by having donkeys at his 20 acre estate and calling it a farm for a tax break, but then Adler turns around and recruits a secret tea party candidate to pull votes from Runyan. Oh my, it's so confusing, what to do, who do we vote for, where is Honest Abe when you need him?

Now to Barnegat, this will be an interesting race. In this corner we have incumbent Dorothy Ryan, a lovely lady who in her tenure as committeewoman has not really made any waves, but does do her homework on voting some important issues. For example she did vote no on the multi-million dollar recreation facility that the republicans were pushing for, and I personally liked her yes vote on allowing Walters to re-zone the Ocean Acres "pine snake" zone back to buildable. Why would I agree on that? Because Walters had a signed contract with the town and I truly believe that a contract is binding in a court of law. But we will soon see because Walters is suing us now, and we know who wins in a lawsuit, lawyers, not us. So thank god we will save that 10-20 acres of sacred land, now hurry up and clear that huge expanse of land so we can go shopping at Barnegat Crossing shopping center, there are no pine snakes there, yea right!

In the other corner we have Al Bille, the republican choice, he seems that he will fit right in with the rest of the team. I'm anxious to see what his vision will be for our town.

The rhetoric is getting tiring from all of these politicians lately. I was liking Chris Christie's 2% cap idea, that is until he excluded the cap on pension, benefits and raises for all of the public employees including police and teachers. What does this mean? Simple, the taxes are going to go up, probably more than 2 %. We will see.
So get out there and stump for your local candidate, the one that you feel will improve your life as we know it now in Barnegat. This election is a toss-up. Niether one will make a difference, it will be business as usual for another year. Until next time, watch your mailbox and remember to recycle the garbage.

Summer's over, let's see what's happening at Town Hall.

2010-09-21T18:16:00.002-04:00

Went to the meeting last night, sparse attendance. The usual suspects. One thing that stuck me funny as I observed was this. Jake Taylor got up at the public potion to rant about township engineering costs. He had a bill in his hand from Birdsall Engineers (the towns engineering firm). He cited some numbers from the bill such as 600.00 for traffic cones and 2,000.00 for a flagman. This project was a cul de sac. If you read this blog you will know that overpayment of "professionals" is a pet peeve of mine , and Jake's too! It seems that Al Cirulli feels the same as we do also. As I watch him and listen to him, you know that he knows that alot of these professional fees are bogus. He wants so badly to pull the trigger on Hess, that he can taste it. The problem is that he gets no support from anyone else on the committee. So sad. Al, you said it all last night when you stated that it would be cheaper to pay for these jobs ourselves than to jump through all of these hoops for that "FREE" state grant money. You know that nothing is free, the grant money comes from another taxpayer pocket. You know that before this"free" grant money trickles down to our town, every "professional" has to get their piece as proven by Jake last night in the form of traffic cones and flagmen. Al, why don't you make yourself in charge of a new sub-committee, bill auditing. This is politics in action, Al probably can't rip into Hess or Dasti because he's a member of the club. I could be wrong, but we'll see if he pushes this issue. Keep checking those bills Al, maybe the rest of the committee can help you out on that.

The Great Pine Snake Scandal...

2010-05-15T19:32:00.006-04:00

Check out the story on the right side of the blog under Barnegat News called "First Snakes than....". It has to do with a contract that Walters had with the town about 6 years ago. Read the article, it explains it all. I sat at the town meeting on May 3 and heard the vote of 3 against and 1 for go down. After the committee voted, and people applauded, my thought was "here comes another lawsuit"! True to my thoughts, the lawyer for Walters told the committee just that. I read the contract, it looked pretty straightforward, it definitely had a clause in it that could revert the preserved land back to buildable. Nobody made this up, it's right there in black and white, the committee voted on it back in 2004 (i think), even Al Cirulli voted yes on this exact resolution as written back in 2004.
So what has changed? Nothing much, just pressure from the majority of residents and "voters" in the area who have their piece of Barnegat, and now they want to shut the door on the rest of the legal landowners of that Phase 3 parcel. Critical Pine Snake Habitat. I like pine snakes and wildlife as much as anyone, but I also understand that if humans had bought a piece of land, with the intention to build their dream, as I did and as the other residents had, they should have that right to do so. They waited for years as their land which was taken away by the Pinelands Commission, went through the channels that it had to i.e., re-study of the habitat by Walters himself (yea, it sounds fishy), and than being found not a habitat, by the same Pinelands Commission. All parties involved did what they were asked. It was left up to the committee and you knew what they were going to do before anyone stood up for the public session. They voted it down, with Dorothy Ryan being the only vote to uphold the contract. She was the only one who thought that it was better to let a legal binding contract be her deciding factor, rather than emotion of what she thought was right. She also stated that she did not want to waste taxpayers money on a lawsuit that she thought we could not win. I probably would have done the same thing she did.
A little story. I own a home on Gunning River Road. Next to my house was about 40 acres of beautiful pine forest with deer, fox, turtle and probably pine snakes! I knew one day that the owner of that property would knock all of those trees down and build something. I tried for years to buy some of that land, but the owners would never sell. As beautiful as those woods were, I had to have respect for the other people that had put their hard earned money into that land with the dream of developing it one day. The day did come, the trees are gone, the deer and fox are gone, but there was nothing I could do about. I never thought about stopping another persons dream, just as I built my dream in Barnegat. Final thought, if you want to live in the woods, make sure you buy the woods around you.

Remember when...

2010-05-15T18:50:00.004-04:00

Remember about 3-4 years ago when we were asked to spend $8,000,000 on a ball field complex? Remember all of the politicians and the coaches telling us that if we didn't spend the money and build these fields, our kids would not have anything to do and become juvenile delinquents? Well fast forward to today, the ball fields weren't built, our little league is thriving, no one is complaining, and we didn't spend $8,000,000 to find out that we didn't need them anyway. We as a town, found a way to make it work.
What does this have to do with anything? Well, I'll probably be writing the same thing in about 3 years from now. It might say something like this;
Remember 3 years ago when Governor Christie made those cuts in aid to the school and other state agencies. Remember how people lost their jobs and programs were cut in the schools. Remember when all of the parents, teachers and concerned townspeople thought that our children will be ruined, emotionally, physically and socially? We fast forward to today and we find that our schools are stronger than ever, our children are smarter than ever and everything in Barnegat is just fine, and look at all the money that was saved in salaries, benefits and pensions.
Nobody wants to lose their jobs, but decisions had to be made. I still don't agree with the slashing of the lower level jobs, but it was a safe place for the board to cut. Hey, how much noise will a teachers aide or a bus driver make? 60 lower level jobs cut and not one upper level administrative position. With 60 workers cut, you think you might be able to get rid of a couple bosses?

You got to see this... the big mean bully!!

2010-05-14T12:53:00.006-04:00

This is a great video that will show you where our governor stands on EVERYTHING! He won't BS you, he's available, if you need to know why he hired more people in his cabinet, just ask him, he'll be happy to tell you. The other politicians hate him, but you better get on board because what he said is true, that's what he was sent here to do. He says he believes in less government, lower taxes and empowering local officials who were elected by their citizens to fix their problems. (we might have to keep an eye on that last one in Barnegat!) Really people, aren't you sick of politicians already, this guy is one of a kind. So far, so good. Yea, I said it!
Click here for the video link

Sorry loyal readers, committeemen and women and Board of Education members, I'm back.

2010-05-09T17:21:00.009-04:00

Pretty busy lately, the restaurants are gearing up for the summer, so not a lot of time or energy to write about the circus that is going on in town. If you think I'm kidding, check out this link to comments written by some of our citizens in town about an Asbury Park Press article about the school budget. It's pretty funny to read people having an argument with each other in cyberspace. Click here for the link. I put a comment on these things once in a while, but if you think I'll ever get in an anonymous battle with someone I never met on a papers message board, it ain't happening. These guys and gals will go back and forth for days, yea, I read it, I love comedy!
So the school board took the show on the road to get the people's opinion on budget cuts. I missed the first meeting, I really would have liked to be there to see the children with the "save our sports" banners and those mean and nasty senior citizens asking for more money to hit the chopping block. I will reserve my opinion on the outcome that I believe is on May 19th, but I'll give you the straightforward opinion on where to cut, no teachers, go for the administration. I'm sorry fellow administrators, secretaries, aides, directors, assistant directors of administrative secretaries, but your job is second to the actual job of teaching our kids. That's where it all happens, that is the essential job. Administrative positions are secondary. I was interested in having a complete copy of the school budget put on the Barnegat Twsp school website and my request was granted, thanks to Lisa Becker, the new president. Click here for the link. It is a great read of where all the money goes in our schools, I urge you all to print it out and go over it. I'm wondering if when our school board gets a budget, is this all that they have to go by or do they get more info? When I have a little free time, I'm going to play school board member and I'm going to see where I could make some cuts, I'll let you know what I find.
I'll give the teachers a pass on not accepting, or voting for, or whatever they did to not address the pay freeze, that, according to the Business Administrator, would have saved an additional $1,000,000 for this budget. Fact is, they have a legal binding contract agreed to and given to them by our school board, if they don't want to revisit it, that is their prerogative. Maybe if this state is still in the toilet when the next contract comes around they will agree to a couple of years without a raise, like the rest of the world. That will be up to the board, they are the one's that control our money.
Let's look at another facet of this whole mess, or should I say the two most hated words in school boards vocabularies, Chris Christie. He got voted in, I'll give him four years to lower my taxes. If he doesn't get the job done, out he goes, simple. As I see it now, I've been told by my school board that my school taxes will be raised by about $200 according to the new budget, the budget that was defeated by the voters in this town. I guess he's not off to to good of a start, is he. But did he raise my taxes or did my school board?
As far as my child in school, if the board cuts more spending will his education be affected,I've said this before, no. Because I consider myself a responsible parent and I won't let that happen.

Where will the axe fall in the next round of school cuts?

2010-04-26T20:46:00.004-04:00

After the failure of the budget I was curious to see what would happen next. It looks like according to the superintendents corner of the Barnegat Schools website, the teachers will be targeted. Click here for the link to the Superintendents Corner It looks like 5-25 teachers will lose their jobs, and who decides, the administration and curriculum supervisors. I guess they won't be laying off themselves. How about we flip this around and put the decision of who stays and goes in the laps of the teachers, do you think you would see some administration go? Did the school board do all they could do to try to renegotiate the contract of the teachers to get a pay freeze or a health care benefit contribution? Maybe they did and the teachers told them to lay off their union brothers and sisters, they ain't budging. Well, the bottom line is that the final decision will be in the hands of our school board, they can take the recommendations of the administrators, principals, supervisors and the superintendent and accept them or they can reject them. The teachers have no say who stays and goes.

I look at this situation like this. The school is a business, it lost revenue this year. People need to be laid off. Do you lay off the workers (the teachers) or the management (administration) It needs to be a combination of both. One managers salary could equal 2 workers salaries and so on. We know that the school board is angry with the governor, that is a known fact. I hope they use their heads and don't do something that they will regret just to prove a point. i.e. "See governor, look at all the teachers we had to layoff because of you". They still have a job to do, and up to now they have done it well. They have layed off administration in the past, we'll see if it happens now.

More school budget thoughts. Get informed!

2010-04-21T19:30:00.007-04:00

Here is a better link that describes what happens with a defeated school budget. It is put out by the NJ Department of Education. Click here for the link.

I guess that our school board is scrambling now and trying to figure out what to do. I have to be honest, I've talked to children and some parents who have kids that have said some of the teachers have told them that there will be no more sports, trips, etc. If this is true, that is totally unprofessional on any teachers part. How can someone say that to a child, school is not about that, this is something to be discussed by the adults. The decision on what more will be cut, if anything, will be made by our school board and the township committee, the teachers or administration have no clue what will happen. I will still say, I hope the cuts to come don't affect these programs, that's not where the big money in our schools are. Which brings me to my next point.

An interesting part of the above report is on page 2, #7, that says if either the school board or the township committee will have a majority at the budget meeting, it will need to be advertised as per the Open Public Meetings Act. I am wondering if that will happen. In my quest to become a more "informed" voter and resident, I would love to be at that meeting to see what the process will be like and to hear the ideas form each side.

I also think that in the name of transparency, I would like to see our school board post the complete budget (around 60 pages, as stated by the super at the budget presentation) on the Barnegat Township Schools website in a PDF format. It would allow concerned citizens to follow along with the process that is about to happen. I know some school board members read this blog, can you make it happen? I know that I can go and get a hard copy and pay per page, but let's save some paper and get into the 21st Century.There is one other thing that could happen to this defeated budget, absolutely nothing. The committee can look at it, say that it looks good to them, it goes back to the Board, and they pass it. Could happen!

The school budget did not pass, what happens next?

2010-04-21T08:11:00.005-04:00

In order to not be labeled as an "uninformed" voter, I like to find out the facts. What happens now according to the "Defeated Budget Process Presentation" click here for link, the school board meets with the township committee and they go over the budget again. Then the committee makes some suggestions and the school board agrees or disagrees. I will admit after reading this presentation, I have no clue what it means! All I need to know is what the bottom line is, can they do nothing and still pass the budget as written? What is the least they can cut and still pass? I have asked for an explanation for this by a school board member, I'm sure I'll get an answer.

The voter turnout was about double from last year, a good sign and the people have been heard. They want more cuts to lessen the tax burden that they pay. It is now time for the board to do the work of the people, I personally do not want to see teachers laid off. I would like to know if the board has met with our teachers union rep and asked for a pay freeze or the 1.5 percent health care contribution. Remember we were told that that kind of give-back from the teachers would save about $1,000,000 in the budget. It's time to go to work.

To all the school board members, don't take this defeat as a personal attack on all of the hard work that you have done in the past. This is only a beginning step in getting this state back on track fiscally. This defeat gives you carte blanche to now ask our governor (who like it or not, people are supporting his methods) that you need laws changed to make your jobs of slashing budgets easier for you to do. Binding arbitration needs to go, ability to negotiate fair salaries and benefits for teachers and all union employees is imperative. Let us as the voting public know what more you would need from Trenton to make your jobs easier and our taxes lower, we will make sure that the legislature knows what you need.

To all residents of Barnegat, this state is in a fiscal mess. Some one had to stand up and say, "we are out of money"! As a taxpayer, I'm glad the Governor did. I really think if we cut some administrative positions, or ask for some givebacks at the top level, my child's education would suffer. I will make sure of that. As a parent, that is my job to take the tools that they give my child at school and make him use them.

So, get informed, get involved, and don't worry. Some people will take this budget defeat as the end of the world, it's not. Love your children, get involved in their life, have dinner together as a family, and your children will get a great education in Barnegat no matter what.

My Mistake - Agenda was posted.

2010-04-19T20:09:00.001-04:00

I went to the meeting, and no one was there! Only me and about 5 people who didn't read the website correctly. My sincere apologies.

Waiting for the April 19 committee meeting agenda to be posted on-line. Could be voting on taking preserved land and reverting back to buildable.

2010-04-18T21:29:00.004-04:00

Am I nit-picking or I shouldn't wonder why tomorrows meeting agenda is not posted on-line yet. I believe that they will be voting on Ordinance 2010-05 which will re designate preserved pinelands back to buildable lots for Walters Builders. It has been talked about for months, so as a member of the public, I would like to be able to read the final drafted ordinance on-line. I would like to know ahead of time what is going to be voted on at the meeting and also would like to be able to read on-line, all of the complete resolutions (first and second readings and consent agendas). At least that way if I have something to comment on or a question to ask, I can go with the facts and save the committee time from looking it up for me. Also, how do the committee members know what they are going to be voting on if they don't even have an agenda to guide them. Hey, maybe I am nit-picking, maybe it isn't that important, that's a lot of paper to read! I guess they read it when they get there. As a member of the public, I prefer to read it before. Transparency. See you tomorrow!

Don't forget to vote on Tuesday.

2010-04-16T20:44:00.007-04:00

I have a feeling that this Tuesday's school board election and budget vote will have more than the 14% average turnout that school board elections have. This will be a telling vote with one incumbent and two newcomers on one ticket against the "bad guy". I'm not going to mention names but acccording to the "Barnegat Taxpayers Beware" flier that I got in the mail today , I better be paying attention. I support what the Board has done over the 2 years of taking control, do I think they could do more? Yes. Voting off the last remaining member of the old regime will do nothing to change the majority rule of the present board. If he wins his seat back, it will make no difference either. I personally like to see a board or a township committee that does not consist of just one party or viewpoint, as long as the minority brings something viable to the table. I don't like hearing from a minority on a board or committee disagreeing with everything that the majority says just because they are republicans and I am democrat, or vice versa.

It seems that our township committee has morphed into one, big, happy family. Committee reports have turned into love-fests, this one thanking that one for jobs well done, that one thanking this one for hard work, it's really getting old. All of these people getting thanked are making good money and doing what they are paid for. Hey committee, just a hint, when you start telling your employees every day how great they are for just doing their jobs, they tend to start asking for more money! Just a thought to ponder. Yea, I'm heartless!

Back to the vote on Tuesday, besides the election, we have the more important budget vote. What will your vote mean? This will be a very interesting vote, people will be voting for or against the budget for lots of different reasons this year. Lots of strong statements will be made for or against what our Governor has done. More work needs to be done by Trenton and more "tools" need to be given to the towns and school boards to get the work done. I believe that those tools will come.

I will tell you that as a parent with a child in our school system, I am not worried by the cuts that had to be made our board. I know that they will have to make more.
My child will get out of our school system all that he needs to become a complete citizen of this country, as a parent, I will see to it. School is one part of growing up, homelife, work ethic and family are also important. (Traits that seem to be vanishing in this world)

I will say that I still support what the Governor did. This state has become a fiscal disaster, someone had to have the guts to say "we just don't have the money!" He has only been in office for about 4 months, he has 3 1/2 years to go. I believe that if he keeps up the spending cuts, does not raise taxes, fixes the government employee pension and health benefit problems, forces consolidation and severely cuts the size of this bloated government, everything will be fine. See, isn't that EASY! Time will tell, he's got 3 1/2 years to prove to the voters that he means business in getting this state back on track.

To all of the school boards across the state, if your budget does not pass, take it as a message that the people want you to do more to lower costs of education. Don't take it personally, take it as that is what the majority wants you to do. It's OK. You know where the bulk of the taxpayer money for education goes, you got to slice and dice, and tell the governor, you need the tools.

If your budgets pass, you can breathe easy for another year. The people would have told you that they like the way you are spending their money, and they will suck it up and pay a little extra so our children can keep getting the good education that they need. But still let the Governor know, you need some help for the future. That, I agree.

As I told Frank, the only way that the public can change anything in this country, state or town, is at the voting booth. Let's see a nice turnout on Tuesday, however it might end up.

Some committee meeting thoughts.

2010-04-10T05:53:00.006-04:00

The meeting on Monday night was more of the same, a rerun from weeks, even months before. sidewalk talk, engineer fees, shared services, the same old stuff. Funny, as my post below called for, the complete first reading resolutions and ordinances on the committee meeting agendas are now available on-line as I asked. Click here for the link What this means is that if any of the public wants to see what is happening at the town meetings, they can go to the website, click on the agenda for that night (if it has been posted, it has not been posted the past three weeks until after the meeting was over) go to the resolutions and ordinances and see the complete resolution or ordinance as written for the first reading. This is a very important tool for the public to have, it allows them to intelligently comment on any resolution because you have all of the facts concerning such, and not just a vague synopsis that is written under the resolutions or ordinances on the agendas. It allows for total transparency, in a waste free (no paper), quick and very convenient way for government to get information to the public. Many times I will be at a meeting and hear people ask to be told exactly what is in the guts of a resolution, this way the public can be on an equal playing field with the government when questioning the whys and wherefore's of future legislation in town.

What is odd is that if you click on the link I have provided, there are 3 resolutions that have no links. 2010-191, that is the resolution allowing for negotiations for Mr Breedens services with Waretown to serve as a part time administrator, and 2 more resolutions that OK a severance package for 2 retiring officers. These 3 items were discussed at the meeting that night and the figures where made public, why are these 3 resolutions not readable on-line?

We are bonding 500,00 for sidewalks, in response to Marianne Clemente and Jake Taylor who scolded the town for waiting so long to do the right thing, the mayor said, "OK , so we are doing it now!" I heard no mention of money being taken out of the township "sidewalk fund", how much money is in there that could offset more bonding.

And now to the great township engineer fiasco, as I reported in my last post, the numbers for Birdsall Engineering were up substantially from 2008 to 2009. I guess Mr. Breeden and Mr Hess are tired of hearing from the public that we are spending too much money on professional services, and I will concur with that sentiment. What will happen next will be an education for the public on why we will pay Birdsall Engineering approx. $50,000 in engineering fees for a road milling and paving, where the actual job will cost $250,000. Mr Breeden and Mr Hess (the engineer) will come back at the next meeting with a breakdown of how and why it costs so much money for the professional side of any road paving project. This should be a very interesting presentation.

Township Committee Meeting Tonight - Professionals Expense Update

2010-04-05T17:12:00.002-04:00

Township meeting tonight. I went to the township website to download the agenda to see whats on the docket, oops, no agenda posted. Too busy, I guess. Another pet peeve, why do they provide a link to a resolution after it passes the second reading. Don't you think it would be more advantageous to provide a link to a resolution before the first reading so that if anyone from the public wants to read it and comment on it, they could do so. The public can just go to their home computer, go to the agenda, (if it is posted) and read the resolutions as written. It seems that the links to the complete resolutions are provided after they are passed by the committee, after the fact. Transparency in government is so easy to have, and convenient for the residents.

I got the figures for the township lawyer and engineer for 2009.
They did OK in 2009, up from 2008.
Lawyer fees 2008 - $262,576
Lawyer fees 2009 - $311,900
Engineer Fees 2008- $521,079
Engineer Fees 2009 - $665,442

If anyone is interested, send me a comment and I'll post the breakdown, lots of stuff in those reports. It's interesting to see where the money goes.

See you tonight?

I went, I listened, I learned. The Barnegat School Budget.

2010-03-28T05:48:00.010-04:00

I don't profess to be to knowledgeable on school budget matters, so I attended the Friday evening budget presentation at the High School auditorium to learn the ins and outs. I listened to the Barnegat Township School administrator, business administrator and school board explain what happened to our budget, and it became a little clearer. As we all know Governor Christie, in his effort to try to balance a NJ budget deficit, withheld state aid from many different departments throughout the state, and education was one of them. You could argue for days for or against what he did or why he did it, I'm not going to do that because the bottom line is, he did it. It is a done deal, much like health care reform, and now we have to deal with it.

So as I pointed out in my previous post from Thursday before the meeting, I tried to predict where the cuts would come from, the top or the bottom. The cuts came from the bottom in the form of 41 layoffs of lower level jobs. I also learned a phrase that the state like to call "adequacy". As a school district you are either, over adequacy or below adequacy, over means less state aide, under means, more. In a nutshell it means that the state looks at your workforce and decides if you have more or less employees than you really need. Now from what the super said, we were over adequate in bus drivers and school aides, and who knows what else. So we eliminated jobs on that level.

I'm not going to get into all of this budget stuff here. We as residents will be inundated with this in the coming weeks, the road show will begin. A lady asked a question that I had in my mind the whole evening, what will it cost us as taxpayers. Simple question, how much more money will this budget add to our already large tax bills. I think we got some kind of answer, but I wasn't sure. Mr. Allison, the business administrator, threw out a number of $255 per year increase on a house valued at $312,000, but they did say that they don't set the tax rate, that will be done by the municipality. Now he likened this rate increase to buying a cup of Wawa coffee each day, but I hope he knows that the whole population of Barnegat does not drink Wawa coffee. Most of us make it at home, to save money.

This school board (the new regime that we voted in a couple of years ago) has done a great job in cutting the fat over the years from the budget without affecting the child's education. And over the next few weeks, they will blow their own horn as to how careful they have been spending our tax dollars. To that I say, fantastic, but that is why we voted them in, this is what should have been done years ago, before the previous superintendent and board let it get out of control. To the board I say, when a person does the job that they are supposed to do, they will be recognized. We can't give you a raise, but we will vote you back in, we will also let you know if you did a good job by passing your budget in April. You are put on the board to work for the people of Barnegat, not the teachers, not the administrators and certainly not the unions. In April you will get your report card from the people.

My personal thoughts on the budget presentation. I don't want to see anyone laid off, but if there are too many people doing a job that less can do, that means that someone over-hired. In my business, if I have too many cooks standing around and no customers, someone goes home, plain and simple. As I look at the budget presentation, it looks like we are about $1,000,000 in the hole. This is where it gets tricky for the board, either they make the taxpayers make up the shortfall in higher taxes or they at least ask for the teachers to take a salary freeze for a year as Christie has suggested. He has not asked for anyone to be laid off, he has just asked for the teachers to get together to save the quality of education and their union brothers and sisters jobs. Mr Allison himself was asked this question at the meeting, "how much would the district save if the teachers took a 1 year pay freeze?" The answer was alarmingly $1,000,000. There is the increase. And not only teachers should take a freeze, administrative and support staff also, as Mr. Sarno asked the superintendent, lead by example. It will show the NJEA that you are serious in sharing the same sacrifices as you are asking your "workers" to share in this bad economic time. I would like all teachers and administrators to remember this, we would not be taking anything away from you that you already have now, not your benefits, not your salary, not your job security. All we would ask you is that you share in the sacrifice that your Barnegat neighbors will share in. If you teachers and administrators will take this freeze, you will single-handed prevent a tax increase on the school end of the budget. I'm asking you to help us, as residents. And you know what, I really believe that if the board is serious about helping the people of Barnegat prevent a tax increase, when they sit down with the union after the Spring Break, as they said they would, they would consider presenting this offer suggested by the Governor and probably backed by the majority of the Barnegat residents.

As I sat at that meeting on Friday night, I looked around the room and saw many teachers, some I knew from them coaching my child and also hearing him talk about them at home. These are real people, young and old, who understand economics and politics, and have the intelligence to separate the two. People might think what Christie did was political, maybe it was, but the bottom line is something needed to be done, and he did it to everybody not just schools. Will it work, only time will tell. But I would truly believe that they all would take the offer of a pay freeze for a year, it is not much to sacrifice for the town that provides them with a good job, with great benefits, and fantastic new schools, I know I would! But the problem is the board won't deal with these teachers on a one on one level, they will be dealing with the NJEA. Let's be real, if one district's teachers agrees to go against their union and do the right thing for their community, the rest of the districts would be screaming for their teachers to do it also, and the NJEA would lose their stranglehold on the members and the public. The NJEA needs to be exposed if they do not ask their members to sacrifice along with the public. Tell me, good thing or bad thing?

In summary, I'll have to give up my coffee I guess. What's another 70 cents, I'm already living paycheck to paycheck, no raise in 3 years and paying $4,000 a year for benefits. But I'm happy to do it because at least I'm working, and you won't hear me complain. All I ask is a little help, just a little. Maybe the board could ask the teachers to give up their coffee?

Friday Night 2-26-10 6:30 School Budget Meeting at the High School

2010-03-25T15:29:00.007-04:00

Tomorrow evening (Friday) our school board will be the first ones to tackle the new Governors solution to NJ huge deficit. The lessening of our school aid from the state. Now I will be the first one to tell you, I don't really understand the numbers side of state school aide. What I do know is that the school tax portion of my tax bill is the highest, as has always been the case in NJ because of the way schools are funded here, by how much land you own and not by how much money you make. That much I do know.

I urge all of you to go tomorrow night and get the numbers from the board, where will they cut, who will they cut, will they ask for give-backs from the teachers as Christie has suggested? What will our super tell us, will he be taking a salary freeze for a year, will he be cutting from the top (administrators, vice principals, etc) or will he chop down the tree from the bottom (cafeteria workers, bus drivers, custodians).

These people have very tough decisions to make, but the way I see it, through the years, the school boards have always blamed the state for more mandates that cost more money, etc. Now it seems that the new "big man on campus in Trenton" is with them as far as freezing rising salaries for the teachers and administrators and asking for a small contribution to the health benefits. The NJEA is taking a very negative hard line toward this and I don't think their membership concurs. I know a lot of teachers and they are more than willing to forgo raises and make some contributions to their benefits, as all of us private sector workers do and have done in our jobs. This has now become a battle between Christie and the NJEA, not the teachers, and neither wants to budge.

The school board has options, I won't list them here, I will go tomorrow night and listen to what they propose. I will listen to the residents, to the teachers, to the administration etc. I'm sure all will have an opinion. What happened in Trenton is done, we will receive less aid, the ball is in the school boards court now, we'll see if they dribble, lay-up or take a three-pointer.

Some observations on the NJEA and the PBA: layoffs or give-backs.

2010-03-24T04:46:00.006-04:00

As I sat home on Tuesday night and watched the TV broadcast of the Stafford Township Committee meeting, I heard the Mayor and the committee re-iterating this one fact to the public who were very irate over the layoffs of 5 officers. If the Police Benevolent Association had agreed to furlough days and no raises this year, the officers could have been saved. Click here for the story. Now the kicker is that this offer, furlough days, no salary increase this year and 3% increase a year for the next 3 years was agreed to by the other unions in the other Stafford Township departments. The police union did not take it and will choose to have the officers laid off instead. I'm not a union guy, never have been, but I would think it is a brotherhood of men and women looking out for each other. I guess there are people that run the union, not working officers, that make decisions for the members. My question would be why did they choose to have 5 officers laid off rather than the brotherhood banding together and taking one for the team in the form of accepting furlough days and no pay raise this year to save the 5 officers jobs? The rest of the township workers unions took the same deal and didn't bat an eye, the PBA chose not to, why?

Same with the Teachers union, the NJEA. Seems like no one wants to give back anything as our state and towns go deeper into debt. We know Christie is not a fan of the NJEA, and they are not a fan of his either. They vehemently tried with all of their might, and money, to make sure that he did not win, but the people spoke loudly, and he did. The people gave him support because the previous governor did not have the spine to stand up to the NJEA's demands. Our economic outlook in NJ is not improving, it is deteriorating and the residents are the one's paying the price in higher taxes and unemployment. People need to give back, just as we have in the private sector. I have had no raise in 3 years as my boss tries to keep our business afloat and keep all of us employed, and we are all grateful to have a job. We all "understand" the economy problem this state, and for that matter, this country, is having. And we will band together and give back to the business that has fed our families and kept a roof over our heads for many years. When times were good, the money flowed, the raises and bonuses were given without batting an eye, but those times are gone. For now. Please read a copy of a letter that Christie sent to the school boards and the NJEA, it describes a plan to prevent layoffs and keep the teachers working. It does not seem unreasonable to ask our workers to "take one for the team", does it? Click here for the letter.

Healthcare reform, Governor Christie's budget address, what will Barnegat do?

2010-03-19T08:09:00.006-04:00

Just a short comment on health care reform. It passed! What will it mean for us, who knows? I heard an interesting comment on a news show this morning after the "historic?" vote. He was talking against the republicans, I guess, saying that not one republican voted for this legislation, claiming that it was all political and not in the best interest of our country. What he failed to mention is that along with all of the republicans, 34 democrats voted against it. So what it says to me is that you had more bipartisan support against it, right? But again you have to remember as I've said in the past, we just don't understand what is best for us, that's why we have politicians.

Enough about the countries politics, health care is a done deal. As Nancy Pelosi said, we need to pass it first, then we'll find out what's in it. So we did, and now we will.

Christie's budget speech. I like it, I always thought government on all levels is too large with lots of waste. Now it will be up to our Barnegat Township committee and Mr. Breeden to really run some numbers and start cutting some fat. I will make a request again for a copy of the complete budget to be scanned ( 10 pages or 100 pages, the complete budget) and a copy be put up on the Township website so that the public can see where the money goes and make "educated" suggestions on what we can live without. Christe is also suggesting a 2.5 cap on all raises, government and education, property taxes, etc. We will see what our committee and school board are willing to give up as they take a long hard look at the budgets.

Another item that is sure to become a hotbed is the resolution that has to do with the Ocean Acres Preservation area that the Pinelands Commission is about to declassify as preserved and return it to developable land. Click here for the agenda and click on Ordinance 2010-05 for the complete ordinance. It seems to me as I read this when the original ordinance was written in 2004, someone worded a little loophole in there that would allow some of the preserved property to be reverted back to developable property if they did some studies that proved they were not endangered pine snake habitat. And guess what, they proved it wasn't, and now it can be developed. What a surprise, money talks, if you got it! This will get interesting.

They finally made the right decision, "fair assessments for all"! Meeting minutes from 3-1-10.

2010-03-07T15:47:00.009-05:00

It was good to finally get a call from one of the Barnegat committee people on Monday, the day of the committee meeting. Mr. Lisella called me to assure me that Mr. Breeden, our administrator would be unveiling a plan that would bring fair assessments to all in town. It was good to get a callback or a response from one of my elected officials seeing that in my e-mail correspondence, I requested that they please e-mail me back a confirmation of receiving this e-mail. I did not receive a response at all from anyone until the day of the meeting, or two weeks later. I may be nit-picking but I would hope that our committee would be a little more professional in the future and give a resident the courtesy of a response when asked. All you need to do is hit the reply button and write, "Yes Mr Effron, we received your e-mail and are working on it." Check my Feb 17 blog post for a copy of the e-mail. Oh well, enough of the no response from the committee.

It was announced that it would be a hybrid assessment that would be conducted by the town assessor, her assistants, and maybe some outside hired help, under scrutiny by the county tax office. It was the only way possible to get it done right. I also asked Mr Breeden if maintenence could be done so we don't get into this mess again and he assured me that it could not, we are just to big of a town. A call to Ozzie Vitusca, the OC Board of Taxation Administrator seconded that opinion, when I asked why not, he more or less blamed it on the State. Hey, why not, everyone else does! I'll accept that, but what happens if the market crashes again, we'll see.

I like to think that my e-mails and suggestions to the committee steered them in the right direction, you know they all read this blog. Mr Morano almost quoted me word for word, no problem, thank you. Bottom line is your saving the taxpayers lots of money and time and we appreciate that, keep up the good work! You are saving us money by doing it in-house and time by not having 6,000 residents file appeals.

On another subject, as Mr Breeden puts it, "the $24,000 health care family plan.' $24,000, that sounds like alot of money, I asked them to find a cheaper one just to hear what they would say, the answer was the usual, "we're not legallyallowed, union stuff, you know." Wouldn't you fall over if one of our elected officials ever had the guts to say, "You're right, this health care plan is too expensive for the taxpayers to afford, we need to pass a resolution telling Trenton that Barnegat wants the power to give our employees a more affordable plan in line with the private sector." If the rest of the state and municipalities want to overpay their employee benefits, that is their problem, Barnegat can't afford it. Do I hear a motion to adopt, No, I didn't think so. Sorry Jake.

How about the engineering cost fiasco. Jake Taylor had his usual bi-weekly battle with the committee about Birdsall engineering and their fees. John Hess was ready for him this week with a 15 minute explanation of how you figure costs, time, contractor fees, etc, etc, etc. I got to be honest, after 5 minutes I turned to my neighbor sitting next to me and said, "What is he talking about", my neighbor just shrugged! I will put up the audio if you are interested, if you need to sleep, just put this on. No disrespect Mr. Hess, (I know you are out there), but the bottom line is "can't you charge us less?" You have been here a long time , it has to be over 15 years, you have made millions of dollars here. Being in business myself, I see that when people work for a company for a long time, they start to feel that they are untouchable. When a company starts to feel the economic pinch, they need to ask their vendors for some give-backs, we need to stay in business here in Barnegat. It's time for some give-backs from our vendors, if not we can find others more than willing to take the job. I'm wondering if Birdsall has ever put a bid less than one from the year before.

It was pretty funny that Rose Jackson stood up after Mr. Hess's explanation and still couldn't understand why the engineering cost for a road job came out to 30%, too much. Just listen to the audio.

The mayor asked for ideas from the public on services that they could live without. This all has to do with the municipal aid cuts that Governor Christie will impose this year to try and balance the NJ budget, good luck! I thought it was a little funny that he would ask us, after all he works in town hall, sees what is going on, sees who is working, sees who is not, sees who can be cut, has access to records, salaries, waste and the whole inner workings of this company named Barnegat.
He asked a resident, do you want your trash picked up once every two weeks or would you rather see less cops on the street. Well to that I say, we have many more places to cut than police and public works, those are just the one's they like to hold over residents heads. Need some ideas Mayor, show us a budget with line items with expenses, better yet, put the whole Barnegat budget on the town website w/ income and expenses, we'll give you some ideas. Just give us the tools, we'll do your job. But just off the top of my head, wage freezes, pension reform and cheaper health insurance plans, oh yea, union stuff.

Here is your audio, two parts. Just click the link and it will download. Don't worry, virus free!

Barnegat Meeting 3-1-10 Part 1

Barnegat Meeting 3-1-10 Part 2

Have a good one, comments anyone?

I know, more assessment talk, sorry!

2010-02-23T18:58:00.010-05:00

When you sit at a township committee meeting, you listen to lots of opinions about certain subjects that affect all in town. And one of these are the assessments. Al Cirulli says that we need to adjust the whole town equally, the mayor wants everyone to appeal to teach the county a lesson and David Breeden made a statement that "the property tax system in NJ is based upon an assumption that property values will never go down, and there is no mechanism to account for that", that could not be farther from fact. The mechanism is the Barnegat tax assessor and her office.
Let me quote from the New Jersey Tax Assessors Handbook:

Chapter 9 - Maintenance of Real Property Assessments
Section 901. The need for Maintenance
901.1
Once it is assumed that assessments on all properties in a taxing district have been made equitably, either as a result of a revaluation program or through local action, the assessor must devote his attention to keeping assessments equitable. This work breaks down into two principal areas:
1) the location and assessment of new taxable property; and
2) the identification of trends in property values throughout the taxing district, and the adjustment of assessments where justified.
Unless an organized effort is made to meet these two situations, even the most perfect assessment list soon will become out of date, and the funds spent for a revaluation or the effort expended in carrying out a reassessment program will be wasted.

The above is the actual quote, notice the last sentence in italics, does this not sound like Barnegat? I admit that the reval came at the height of the market and crashed the next year, but the committee needed to work with the assessor to get the tax rate back in line with the falling values.

I listen to the people talk to the committee, our residents are intelligent people, we want to be treated as such. I've yet to hear a committee member or the administrator once say that our assessor pointed this out to us back in 2006 when this problem arose. Instead we are hearing ideas from our committee that are unprofessional and illegal. Like Al Cirulli saying what if we tell the County we are just going to lower the rate through the whole town, not a good or even a fair idea. I'll say it again, to fix this problem correctly and fairly will take hard work, that's it. No easy way out.

Maybe the residents would like to hear an answer to the assessment problem from the town that might sound like this:

"We are sorry but we dropped the ball on the assessments over the last three years, we will be fixing that now to make a fair and equitable attempt at getting the assessment values back in line and adjust the tax rate in relation. In doing this we will be working closely with the assessors office in conducting what the State calls a "Reassessment Program". Like a revaluation program, a proper reassessment program seeks to spread the tax burden equitably throughout a taxing district. A reassessment program, rather than being conducted by an outside professional appraisal firm under contract with the municipality, is instead an adjustment or updating of previous revaluation or previous reassessment, carried out by, and under direct supervision of the tax assessor. This method will take the burden off of our residents to file appeals, appear in court and pay fees. We might have to add a little more manpower to the assessors office, but it will be far cheaper than a re val or making you all file appeals. Again, we are sorry, we caused the problem and we will fix it."

I am going to give you the link to the document about a reassessment program, I'm sure when I bring it up you will hear a million reasons why it can't be done, I think otherwise. This is from The new Jersey Tax Assessors Handbook, go to the second page of the pdf document to see how it can be done. Here is the link

During the meeting Jake Taylor brought up the health insurance costs of the town, he's been bringing this up for the last four meetings. He comes prepared with numbers from the school board and the township comparing the two policies. He says the schools family health plan is $10,000 less than the townships family plan. Dave and the mayor tell him that it is only$2,500 less. I'll have to agree with Jake and Frank Pecci, $2,500 less, why aren't we on it. What is $2,500 times the number of Barnegat employees? That kind of savings could pay for a little help for the assessor to do the reassessment. The town keeps jerking him around with no numbers to back up their dispute of Jake's numbers. If we had committee people who would work as hard as Jake in gathering information, things might be different. I don't always agree with Jake's method but his message is clear, watch every dollar! Jake also complained about a $249,000 street paving job of which $86,000 is engineer costs, (sorry Birdsall, I know you are one of my most ardent readers, but facts are facts). As he puts it, 600 hours of engineering costs at $140 per hour, that's $86,000 in engineering costs to pave a road, and the committee looks at him like he has two heads. You get no explanation about why, that's just the way it is. As most politicians think, "we the people are just not smart enough to understand the way things need to be done in government".

Have a good one!

What's the plan? Hey, I asked!

2010-02-17T20:29:00.012-05:00

As the meeting went on last night, I had to stand up and ask the committee "what was your plan for the tax assessment problem". Mr. Breeden went on about closing the gap between lower assessments and lost township revenue by getting state aid (which the new Governor has shut down), meeting with the County Board of Taxation, sharing services and doing whatever else they can do to make up the gap. It wasn't until I just asked him "you will have to raise taxes, right?", to which all of the committee agreed will have to be done. As I listened to the rhetoric of, it's the Counties fault, it's the hard economic times, it's going to be the States fault when we don't get the aid, I have to think that the real problem might just be laziness, yes, laziness.

The towns answer to me was more or less, let everyone in town file an appeal, we'll adjust the tax rate accordingly, and everything will be just fine. Which in a perfect world, would be true. But this brings me back to laziness. It seems that the town wants to put all of the hard work on the taxpayers, they want all of us to find the comps to our homes and businesses, they want us to fill out all of the paperwork, hire the lawyers, pay the filing fees and do the legwork. They actually want over 6,000 properties to file tax appeals, so they won't have to do the work. (The actual number of properties is 9,000, but I'm using 6,000 to factor in the people who have already appealed)I'll say it again as I have said in previous posts, the only fair way to do this for all of the town is to do another re-val, but do it in house. With a full commitment from the Township committee and OUR assessor and tax office clerks, we can get it done. In the end it will be cheaper and less of a burden on the 6,000 property owners that the town expects to file appeals. You can not do a blanket assessment percentage drop through the whole town and have it be fair. There also needs to be a mechanism in place so that the town can be reassessed yearly by our assessor. It's done in other towns, it can be done here. Not only would this be advantageous to the citizens in time of economic downturn, it will also serve the town in times of an economic upswing, by adjusting the assessments up and the rate lower. This desperately needs to be done, but it will take work by our assessors office, but that is why we pay them a good salary with great benefits.

So this is a job for our town to do for us, this is what we pay you for. We don't pay you so that we can do the work, that is your job. There is no easy way out of this mess, the magic tax fairy won't wave her wand and automatically reassess everyone fairly. It's not Ocean County's problem to solve, it's not the states problem to solve. They didn't cause it. It is our problem to solve, so stop looking for the easy way out, roll up your sleeves and get to work! I really don't want to bring this up, but I will. You have the nerve to tell the citizens that you don't have the money to spend for a re val, but the bill for helping the people of Mirage is close to a million. Right? Well now the rest of the town needs your help. Just watching Mr. Fernandez, Mr. Gorman, Mr. Pecci and Mr. Taylor comment on this last night was a bright spot. I thought if these people get it why doesn't my committee?

Doing hard work means running numbers to find the best and most economically feasible way to do things. I sent an e-mail to Mr. Breeden and the rest of the committee so that they could explain to me and anyone else who is interested why their way would be cheaper and better than my suggestion. Here is a copy of that e-mail. I'd like some readers to comment if possible:

2-17-2010

Dear Mr. Breeden and Barnegat Committee,

I sat in awe at last nights meeting as I listened to your strategy to deal with this reassessment problem that we have in our town. As I understand it your plan is to have everybody appeal so that you can keep adjusting the tax rate higher as people’s assessments fall. I’ll make this short and sweet. You had a few people stand up and tell you that that method is just not fair or even feasible. I heard Mr. Connors tell you that the cost of filing appeals is high considering the paperwork involved, lawyers fees and filing fees. So your plan involves 9,000 properties in town (this number was quoted by the Mayor) filing appeals. I would like you to run some numbers and give me the approximate figure of how much you think that would cost the people of this town. Just off the top of my head, if every appeal cost roughly $100.00 in fees and time to push the paper, that would be roughly $900,000. And $100.00 per appeal is a low figure.

You and I know that the only way to do this fairly and correctly is for the town to be re-valued again and a method put into place where the town can be adjusted yearly by our assessor so that this won’t happen again. Reassessing the town 10% across the board is not an option, in many instances that will not be enough for people and they will file appeals to make up the difference. The next problem would be is how to pay for it and how much it will cost. Considering your solution to have all people file appeals, as was stated last night by the mayor “if everybody files an appeal our problem will be solved” and the fact that it will cost approximately $900,000 to do that, any solution that you come up with that is under that figure will be better than your solution. You have quoted many numbers over the last month as to the cost of doing a re-val from $500,000 as quoted in the Asbury Park Press on 2-11-10 to $200,000 to $300,000 as you quoted me at last nights meeting. Take the high number, it seems like a big savings to me over the $900,000 that it will cost our residents to do their own work.

I would like you and the committee to come up with a better solution to this problem. Do your homework, make some calls, find out the law for doing a re-val. Call the tax assessor from Branchburg, NJ, Fran Kuczynski, 908-526-1300 ext 119 this town adjusts the rate yearly. Call the assessor from Barnegat Light and Harvey Cedars, Bernie Haney, he adjusts yearly. Talk to our assessor and get her ideas on how we can re-val the town in the most economical way. It does not take a physical inspection of every house in our town as was done in 2005. Ozzie told you point blank that to make this fair you need to re-val the town. It’s going to cost money, it’s up to you and the committee to find out the most cost effective way to get it done.

I stood in front of you last night and asked you all if you where in agreement with Mr. Breeden’s solution to our problem and you all concurred. So, I as a taxpayer and Barnegat resident am giving you another alternative, one that is fair for all and, as you know, the only equitable way to get this done. I would like a report on your findings at the next committee meeting. Please give me the figures, how much you think it costs per appeal, the actual cost of a re-val to be done in house, and the law of doing a re-val and what it entails. I encourage all of you to get involved, Mr. Breeden might need a little help and guidance in his hunt for information.

As our committee, we expect you to help us and make living here a pleasure. This is your job, Barnegat did not create this situation, the economy did, no one is blaming you. It is your job to do the right thing for ALL, and a re-val is the only fair way. In addition to a re-val, an in house method of tax assessment yearly is also important. I’ll be looking forward to hearing you ideas or why you think this could not work, or maybe you will find it could. Could all of you please e-mail me back a confirmation of receiving this e-mail.
Thank you,
Howard Effron

So there you go, I guess I couldn't have made it clearer. I'll be expecting some numbers and explanation of the law at the next meeting. I can't believe that we have six intelligent people sitting up there and the best idea they could come up with is that we all need to appeal.
Thanks for reading, I'm getting more and more readers every day.

Barnegat Committee Meeting - Tuesday Feb 16, 6:30

2010-02-15T19:08:00.003-05:00

Committee meeting Tuesday night, maybe we'll get some indication of where the township is heading with the assessment problem. The committee will also be discussing Menk, Mirage issues at 5 pm in a workshop meeting. Could have to do with the ability of the town to recoup all of it's legal and inspection fees that are probably close to half a million or more. (I'm being low in my estimate) I would like to hear a summary of what was discussed at the 6:30 regular meeting. Everyone can't make both meetings. See you there.
Click here for the agenda.

Our new Governor, Chris Christie. Could it be?

2010-02-12T21:40:00.000-05:00

I made it a point to listen to the Governors speech yesterday. I had to hear if it was going to be the same rhetoric, or something "New and Exciting"! I got to tell you, he said everything I wanted to hear, and more. But more important, I can tell by reader comments and people I talk to that he said what the NJ public wanted to hear. This is not about party affiliation, but about doing what is right. The people of NJ have about had enough of the politicians, the frivolous spending of OUR money, and the total indifference to what the people of this, the most taxed state in the union, need. This guy excited me, he gives me a glimmer of hope, he thinks like me and probably like the majority of the people in this state, who don't have access to the entitlements that are bankrupting our state.

He spoke about STRONG pension and benefit reform, he more or less laughed at the bills that the assembly and senate scrambled to write when they found out the new sheriff got elected. I'm going to cut and paste actual quotes by Christie so you can get a grasp of how our governor thinks.

Christie on pension and benefit reform, actual text from his speech:

"The state cannot this year spend another $100 million contributing to a pension system that is desperately in need of reform. I am encouraged by the bi-partisan bills filed in the Senate this week to begin pension and benefit reform. I commend President Sweeney and Senator Kean for leading the way to begin this long overdue set of reforms. I am sure our Assembly colleagues will follow suit with the same kind of bi-partisan effort.

These bills must just mark the beginning, not the end, of our conversation and actions on pension and benefit reform. Because make no mistake about it, pensions and benefits are the major driver of our spending increases at all levels of government—state, county, municipal and school board. Also, don’t believe our citizens don’t know it and demand, finally, from their government real action and meaningful reform. The special interests have already begun to scream their favorite word, which, coincidentally, is my nine year old son’s favorite word when we are making him do something he knows is right but does not want to do—“unfair.”

Let’s tell our citizens the truth—today—right now—about what failing to do strong reforms costs them.

One state retiree, 49 years old, paid, over the course of his entire career, a total of $124,000 towards his retirement pension and health benefits. What will we pay him? $3.3 million in pension payments over his life and nearly $500,000 for health care benefits -- a total of $3.8m on a $120,000 investment. Is that fair?

A retired teacher paid $62,000 towards her pension and nothing, yes nothing, for full family medical, dental and vision coverage over her entire career. What will we pay her? $1.4 million in pension benefits and another $215,000 in health care benefit premiums over her lifetime. Is it “fair” for all of us and our children to have to pay for this excess?

The total unfunded pension and medical benefit costs are $90 billion. We would have to pay $7 billion per year to make them current. We don’t have that money—you know it and I know it. What has been done to our citizens by offering a pension system we cannot afford and health benefits that are 41% more expensive than the average fortune 500 company’s costs is the truly unfair part of this equation.

The only principled path in light of these mountainous challenges is this—take these reform bills, make them even stronger and put them on my desk before I return here on March sixteenth for my budget address. And on this you have my pledge—unlike in the past, when you stood up and did what was right, this governor will not pull the rug out from underneath you—I will sign strong reform bills.

But until that reform is enacted, we cannot in good conscience fund a system that is out of control, bankrupting our state and its people, and making promises it cannot meet in the long term."

So there is quote number one. Who can argue with what the man said? Even if you are as I call it "in the system" you still must agree, the current system is just not fair anymore. It has been used and abused by politicians to the point of no return. The private sector has done away with doing business the way the government does because it's not fiscally possible. As he spoke these words the assembly chambers erupted in thunderous bipartisan applause. It made me laugh, I was wondering which legislator would be the first to stand up and declare that he wanted his benefit and pension package reduced! Yea, like that will happen. So I believe that in order for Christie to get this ball rolling, it should start from the top, you know, set an example. That's just my opinion.

I encourage all New Jersey citizens to read this speech, Christie is not a teacher hater, he's not a government worker hater, he just wants all the citizens and taxpayers to be on a level playing field. Especially since we are paying for it. We just can't afford it anymore. Click here for the speech transcript.

He said alot in this speech, he touched on lots of government waste and inequities. He said the subsidies are gone, it's up to towns, schools, cities and government programs like New Jersey Transit to tighten their belts and get their houses in fiscal order. I'm no idiot, I'm not ready to bow down and kiss his shoes yet. He is a politician also, I know it. But I think he woke alot of people up in this state, it's going to be a long road ahead. But as you listened to the speech or read it, in the back of your mind, wasn't it what you really wanted to hear. He got elected for a reason, the people have had enough and he will need our support. Until he proves otherwise, it seems he wants to do what's right for the masses not the elite few.

What can Barnegat do? First we must see if our leaders concur with his message, start calling Trenton, write a few resolutions (we love to write resolutions)supporting the Governor and his cost cutting ideas. We have a Republican majority, Christie is their man. Maybe he can be all of ours! I'll be keeping up on all of the happenings in our town and Trenton too! Until next time, and don't forget to comment if you would like!

Some answers for the assessment problem in Barnegat.

2010-02-11T17:35:00.000-05:00

During the day I made a few phone calls concerning the assessment problem that is rearing it's ugly head in our town, but there is a definite problem. Just a short summary of how we got here. We were re valuated in 2005, the real estate market tanked in 2006, oh well, stuff happens. The market continued to go lower and peoples houses, commercial and industrial property alike lost from 10- 40% of their value. None of this was Barnegat's fault, they did not cause the economic downturn. But the fact that the town did nothing when they saw what was happening to property values was the problem.

Now we have a bigger problem, and everyone has a band-aid to fix it. Townspeople are filing appeals by the thousands,(1400 last year and probably more this year).
We need a solution to this problem. The solution does not lie with the current decision by the Ocean County Board of Taxation to reassess the four communities in Barnegat, that just causes less tax revenue. Granted those homes probably do need to be reassessed and doing it this way will save lots of time and money, agreed. The solution does not lie with all of the other people that are over assessed to file appeals,me included. That will create less tax revenue. So correct me if I am wrong, when a town like Barnegat loses all of that revenue, what do they have to do to make up the short fall, raise taxes.

The fact of the matter is that Barnegat could do that, keep raising taxes as the people in town file appeal, after appeal, until everybody has filed an appeal. As the assessments go down and the taxes rise it will make everything fair for all. I'm not sure how many line items (residential, commercial and industrial properties)are on Barnegat's tax roles, but I'm sure it's in the many many thousands. And that's how many tax appeals will have to be filed in order to make this method work.

There was another answer to the problem, given by the Ocean County Tax Administrator Lawrence Ozzie Vituscka, The board recommended a township-wide revaluation to bring all property values in town more in line with market values, Vituscka said. However, Breeden said that the $500,000 it would cost was "a half-million dollars the township simply does not have at this time."

Relax Barnegat, I know when we hear $500,000 and the word revaluation in the same sentence, our heads explode! There is another way, it can be done in house. We have a tax assessor and a staff that would be perfectly capable, with some outside help to do the job. This brings me back to my phone calls.

I talked to an assessor from a small town of about 5000 people in Northern NJ today. That town does all of the assessments in house yearly, to keep the values in line. Her town has next to no appeals, even after the real estate market tanked in 2005. She said that year she had two. She was a very nice lady who was more than happy to answer lots of questions that I had about how a town like Barnegat could do the same. This lady has been an assessor for 30 something years, she said you do something like that with "hard work". We have learned here in Barnegat to use our workforce to the maximum, and they have always stepped up and met the challenge. Our public works is a prime example, look at the dock that they built and look at the money we saved. I'm not sure about the state law requirements for doing a revaluation, but the lady from up north stated that 25% of the homes, industrial and commercial property need to be physically inspected. That is where the outside help would come in, if needed. I believe if given the proper tools, funds and cooperation from our township committee, we could do it ourselves again, and not for $500,000, far less. Once the assessments have been brought back in line and the tax rate has been set to make it equitable for all in Barnegat, maintenance needs to be done by the tax office yearly to keep it in line. The tax office has access to information to make that possible,i.e. recent real estate sales in the area. There are spreadsheets that can be set up to divide the town into different areas, some lose or gain value faster or slower in fluctuating real estate markets, put in a percentage press a button, get a new assessment value. This way no matter what the market is doing the yearly assessments and tax rate will be in line.

I don't know what our administrator or committee's plan is to deal with this problem, but I think the answer lies with our workforce and as the lady from up north said "hard work". We got a problem, here is one solution. If there is a better one, I'd like to hear it. Maybe we will get some answers on Monday at the committee meeting.

As George Bernard Shaw said "You see things; and you say, 'Why?' But I dream things that never were; and I say, 'Why not?'" It really fits here.

Property Assessment Modification Program

2010-02-10T17:47:00.000-05:00

If you would like to hear Mr. Breedan's explanation of the, as he calls it, "Property Assessment Modification Program", download Part 1 of the meetings audio and listen at 14:23.
If you want to hear Barnegat residents reactions, download Part 2.

Barnegat Township Meeting Audio from 2-1-10

2010-02-02T23:09:00.000-05:00

Here are the links for the audio from last nights meeting, they contain the different committee reports and public comment session. Enjoy!

http://www.box.net/shared/rajols8hzz Part1

http://www.box.net/shared/eyu6tlnkrv Part 2

http://www.box.net/shared/99ubyf11e1 part 3

Barnegat Township Committee Meeting Assessments down, tax rate up. That's how it works.

2010-02-02T21:55:00.000-05:00

There was a topic brought up last night at the Barnegat Township Committee meeting concerning real estate assessments. It struck a chord with yours truly because I am going to file a tax appeal this year. I probably could have filed one last year along with the other 1400 or so appeals that were filed in Barnegat, but it slipped my mind. Yea, the town got overpaid by me last year, but I will fix that problem this year. Township Administrator David Breeden announced that because of the huge amounts of tax appeals last year, and the anticipated amount of appeals that are to be filed this year, the Ocean County Board of Taxation has allowed our assessor to reduce the assessed values of certain properties in three adult communities. The Mirage, Horizons and Heritage Bay. Ocean Acres was also included. Many people stood up last night and expressed their displeasure at this decision, they said that it was unfair and unjust. I tried to understand exactly what was going on, but some of the explanations given by the committee and the administrator as to why this was the thing to do just didn't add up.

After a quick call to the Ocean County Board of Taxation, it was clear. The bottom line is that everyone who is getting the automatic reassessment is entitled to it. The only difference between them and I is that I will have to file my appeal for reassessment. The Board explained to me that they saw a large discrepancy in home values in these communities and rather than wait for everyone to file an appeal, they will just automatically bring it in line. The Board explained to me that a person in this development who has the same type of home model as someone who has filed an appeal will get reassessed down to that value. They do have a point, most of these homes are exactly the same, which makes this easy to do and it should be pretty accurate. The board claims it will save them time and money. That's probably true.

I asked the board, all these lower assessments mean less tax collected. He agreed. I asked him how do you make up the difference, he gave three answers. Use money in reserve to cover the loss of revenue, cut the township budget or raise the taxes. Looks like it might be the third choice, I don't know how much we have in reserve, but it's probably not enough to cover this mass re-assessment that is coming, cut the budget (I don't think they can cut enough) so the taxes will have to cover it. We will see.

You need to remember one thing, the amount of taxes that you pay might not increase. As the town increases the tax rate you must remember that you assessment will be less, it will probably be a wash. I must say this though, if you don't have the luxury of living in one of the 3 communities that will be automatically re-assessed, you need to file an appeal. If you don't you will get hit with higher taxes when the rate gets adjusted up. FILE THE APPEAL!

If you weren't at the meeting last night I urge you to download and listen to the audio of the different reports from the mayor and adminastrator, and I have also included the public comment session. There is some good stuff in there, enjoy.

Thanks for reading.

The Article Below - Towns cut workforce

2010-01-24T18:15:00.000-05:00

The article below gave me a little hope as a taxpayer, I said "a little". I urge you to read it, it reiterates two things that I've been saying and most Barnegat taxpayers have been saying for years: 1. Live within your means, and 2. We can't afford it anymore!
Let's look at a couple of points in the article, I'll put the statements in bold and my comments in italics.

"With state aid drying up, budget surpluses drained and few financial gimmicks left to try, elected officials in cash-strapped county and local governments are leaving scores of positions unfilled and laying off employees."

Few financial gimmicks left to try, that means pension and payment deferments and holidays, and furloughs that aren't really saving any taxpayer money. Eventually you got to pay the piper, except our public officials don't want to be the people that pay, they want to leave that for the next guy so that their budget looks balanced!

Silva (Hamilton Township Mayor Roger Silva) said that government will "just keep growing as long as you feed it." "We can't feed it any more," he said. "You have to go back and ask the basic questions of what is government responsible for,"

I like the way this guy thinks, you can't say it any clearer, and this is the Mayor, we need a little of that in Barnegat. This next quote is great:

Ocean County Freeholder John Bartlett was running around his Toms River office Thursday, busier than he normally has been in the last 30 years serving as a freeholder. That's because on Jan. 1, when Bartlett began his 11th term, his secretary of 23 years retired."We're not replacing any vacancies," Bartlett said of Ocean County government, which leaves 60 positions unfilled. "It's not as efficient or easy as it was, but we just gotta walk up and down the hall a little bit more. No big deal.

All this says to me is that we could have probably done without the secretary and Mr. Bartlett would of had to "work" a little harder, by the way, what the heck does a freeholder do? That should be the next position eliminated. Let me give them a little advice, more people does not equal more efficient, it depends on the work ethic of the person that is doing the job. These next statements from the article are very telling.

Government employees also may be targeted in ways other than layoffs: Their salaries and benefits may be cut. The costs are significant: Atlantic County government faces a $3.3 million increase in health care costs, and a $1 million boost in pension payments. DeMarzo (Wildwood mayor Gary DeMarzo) said Wildwood is negotiating with unions that represent police officers and firefighters. "All parties should be realistic in their goals," DeMarzo said.

Cumberland County employee unions rejected entreaties to take a voluntary wage freeze, but some employees have asked their bargaining units to reconsider those decisions.

Pretty strong words from some local New Jersey mayors, now is the time that we can negotiate these things with our workforce. They see that as people retire and get laid off, the show goes on. The government needs us to believe that we "need" them to survive, and we do, for the basics. We like our garbage picked up, our streets plowed, and our children educated. I think the workforce is getting it. Like in Cumberland County as the employees unions are playing hardball with the County, the union members are saying, "slow down", the economy stinks and a wage freeze is something we can live with. It beats the alternative. They know the union bosses won't be suffering when the strike comes.

On a local note, remember that our resident Jake Taylor asked our administrator, Dave Breeden to look into the less expensive health insurance plan that the school has. Let's see if Mr Breeden comes back with an answer at the next committee meeting Feb. 1. How bout a wage freeze Mr. Breeden, would you go for that? See you at the meeting!

Counties, towns cut back on workers - pressofAtlanticCity.com : Atlantic County

2010-01-24T18:14:00.001-05:00

Click on the link below to get to the article.
Counties, towns cut back on workers - pressofAtlanticCity.com : Atlantic County

Posted using ShareThis

New Jersey, New Year, New Governor, same old?

2010-01-18T07:33:00.000-05:00

Tuesday, January 19th, Chris Christie becomes the new governor of New Jersey. A daunting task for anybody in politics but a job that Mr Christie chose to tackle. He says he will base his decisions to help the New Jersey taxpayer on the fact that he will be a one term governor. I guess that means that the decisions that he will make will benefit the majority of people in our state, the private sector worker who don't have Cadillac health plans, guaranteed pensions, guaranteed raises, tenured jobs, etc. He is ready to take on the unions, both teachers and public sector, who are manipulating the elected officials to get what they want. It all comes back to taxpayer funded entitlements with the key part of the word being entitled. Why are the workers, (the public employees and teachers) entitled to benefits that the bosses (the NJ taxpayer, the private sector worker), do not have? I know I sound like I have pension envy, but I have just one question for all. If there was a question on a New Jersey ballot that was worded quite simply "Should all NJ public employees have the present guaranteed taxpayer funded pension changed to a 401K type pension system", and the New Jersey people voted on it, what do you think the vote would be, I think the vote would overwhelmingly be "Yes".

Will that ever happen, no, because that question will need to be put on the ballot by our legislators, the people that have these benefits and pensions. They know that the private sector people of New Jersey really don't know what is best for them, that is why we elect them, to do the peoples business.

So Mr. Christie, soon to be Governor Christie, the answer is simple. Do the peoples business, get a question on the ballot such as I have proposed. When the people cast their ballot for a pension change, your decision to do so will be easy.The legislators will see that the bosses (the voters) want a change and you can make it with ease, because you will have the backing of the people of the state of New Jersey. We already made our voices heard when we ousted Mr. Corzine, you stated you would not raise taxes, yea, we heard that story before. But as a one term governor, you could be a New Jersey hero, cut government waste, cut guaranteed pensions and health plans, cut guaranteed raises for all public employees. We can not afford it anymore.
When the US economy gets better, and the private sector employees start to see some of thier raises and benefits rise instead of being taken away, then we will of course do the same for our public employees.

One question, how could our little town of Barnegat do the peoples business and make their feelings noted to Trenton. How about a resolution? We pass enough of them expressing our displeasure with things that happen in Trenton. Pass one expressing your displeasure of the burden that guaranteed raises, pensions and health benefits are putting on your already over-taxed residents. Do you think that the mayor will do something like that? Very doubtful because he will benefit from the present system, the deputy mayor is in the system as a vice-principal, Committeeman Morano is in the system working for the schools, so it doesn't look like you would have support for the resolution. Hey maybe Committeeman Lisella or Committeewoman Ryan would propose this resolution, Lisella is a small businessman who can see the effects of a weak economy on his business. I'll bet he wasn't handing out raises to all his employees and he was probably looking for a less expensive health care plan also. So there you go, just my thoughts. Agree? Disagree? Send a comment, I'll post it, just keep it civil. And good luck to our new governor, Chris Christie, I know I'm excited!