When will Middletown adopt its budget? Rumor has it that later this month the Township Committee will be rescheduling the May 20th budget hearing that was cancelled due to the sudden illness (termination) of Township CFO Richard Wright.
After months of telling the Township Committee that the budget was on target, Wright informed the committee just before the May 20th meeting that he had miss-calculated and that he was missing $2 million dollars. It was then announced that Wright was taking a leave of absence due to health reasons.
Former Township CFO Bob Roth was brought in to fix the mess that Wright had made and because of this the public budget hearing had been postponed indefinitely.
From what I have heard, the budget hearing will be scheduled sometime before the regularly schedule Township Committee meeting on July 20th.
This year's proposed budget includes a 9.2% tax increase to cover a budget shortfall of over $2.4 million.
I have also been informed that because of the lateness of this year's budget, estimated tax bills are now in the mail and should start showing up in resident's mailboxes later this week or early next week.
Believe me; if this budget is not adopted soon utter chaos will break loose when it does.
First of all, it is unlikely that Middletown will get a waiver from the State in order to exceed the state budget cap increase of 4%.
That means in order to balance the budget nearly $3 million or more would need to be cut from the budget during the last 5 months of the year.
Layoffs and service cuts are looming large over the horizon, if people complained loudly about last year's leaf pick-up they haven't seen anything yet! Wait until they can't pay their taxes on time or get needed permits for home improvements.
The Republican majority really screwed up the budget this year. If only they would have listened to Committeeman Sean Byrnes and formed a budget committee, they would have seen and anticipated this problem long ago before this situation got out of hand.
1 comment:
Seems the Republican majority has reached their pinnacle level of incompetence !!!!!
This township needs a FORENSIC AUDIT NOW !!!!
And this township's residents should start recall petitions against all three republicans NOW !!!
Post a Comment