By Frank Mustac, Special Writer
The five-member Hopewell Township Committee introduced Monday night a proposed $24.9 million municipal budget for 2016 that will raise the tax rate to pay for township government expenses by less than one-half of one cent.
That means the property tax bill for municipal spending charged to owners of the average assessed home in town will be less than $10 more than a year ago.
A public hearing on the budget will be held during the April 25 Township Committee meeting, after which members will vote on adoption of the spending plan.
For 2016, the average assessed home in the township is valued at $465,633. With a proposed rate of 36.4 cents per $100 of assessed value, the property tax bill for municipal spending for the owner of the average home is estimated to be $1,963, which is $7.45 higher than last year.
The municipal budget does not include county or school taxes.
In 2015, the municipal budget was about $27.8 million, so the proposed 2016 spending plan is 10.23 percent lower than a year ago.
The tax levy for municipal purposes for 2016, meaning the total taxes that all property owners will pay combined, is about $14.95 million — up 0.29 percent from last year. There are 7,301 taxable properties in Hopewell Township, as of Oct. 1, 2015. The total assessed value of all those properties combined is about $3.96 billion.
From January through about mid-March, the elected Township Committee along with the township’s appointed finance advisory committee had been meeting regularly with department heads to hammer out the budget.
The goal of the meetings, according to Mayor Kevin Kuchinski, was hold the municipal tax rate to what it was last year, if possible.
“We zero-based every departmental budget,” the mayor said in early in March. “We worked closely with the department heads and said that sometimes there needs to be trade-offs.”
The Township Committee, he said, has been was selective in choosing programs it supported, and cut out some areas that were potentially less fruitful.
An example, Mr. Kuchinski said, was scouring previous capital ordinances.
“In some cases, there was unexpected money in those ordinances, which we redeployed for road work that needs to be done in the township,” the mayor said. “That means we’re able to do roadwork this year, but our net debt is going to go down, too. The cost of debt service, which was 30 percent of our budget, is slowly going to go down over time.”
Total debt service is one of the other largest budget line items at about $6.8 million, which includes roughly $1.3 million for open space debt service. The 2016 figure is a 13.5-percent decrease compared to last year.
Another big line item in the budget is personnel at about $11.9 million, which includes base pay, overtime, pension, health benefits and employment taxes.
As it did in 2015, the township will be using a portion of its surplus as revenue for the budget. In 2016, about $2.5 million in surplus will be utilized, which is a 5.2-percent increase from a year ago, according to the Municipal User Friendly Budget published on the township website.
On Monday, March 28, Mayor Kuchinski said he wanted the township’s appointed finance advisory committee to begin meeting with Paul Pogorzelski, the township administrator, and his staff to start preparing for the next year’s 2017 municipal budget, and hopefully “find opportunities to do more with less.”
