To the editor,
With so much negativity in the news and online, I wanted to write with some good news as I see it on the Hopewell Township budget. The township committee’s 2018 budget controls 13 percent of the property tax bill (the balance goes to the school district, Mercer County, the fire district, and open space). It’s a good budget all around, with an average increase of 1.6 percent per year over the last three years, but I’m particularly happy to see that the committee is continuing to pay down debt in this era of increasing interest costs.
Debt service, or the interest we pay on the money we owe, is a cost to taxpayers with no return in the way of government services. We are paying for the privilege of having debt. I hate that.
The Wall Street Journal Prime Rate is 4.75 percent today, as compared with a flat 4.00 percent just one year ago, and all forecasts are that it will continue to rise. This means that it will cost more tomorrow to have the same amount of debt that we have today. Logically, the way to mitigate these rising costs is to pay down debt.
I learned at the budget hearing that in 2015, we taxpayers paid almost $6.5 million in debt service. That is $6.5 million in interest costs for which we got nothing other than the privilege of having debt. This year, that will fall to about $5.1 million in interest on our debt. That’s still a big number, but it’s almost $1.3 million less than we paid in 2015.
I’m glad to see that because of this aggressive debt reduction, we are going in the right direction.
Courtney Peters-Manning
Hopewell Township
