By Sunayana Prabhu
RED BANK – On Wednesday, June 22, members of the Borough Council unanimously approved the municipal budget for 2022.
At a previous council meeting June 15, Council member and Finance Committee Chair Angela Mirandi and temporary Chief Financial Officer and Borough Auditor Steven Gallagher gave a detailed budget presentation with a spending plan for the municipality.
The total amount of the budget adopted for 2022 is $25,205,136, which is up from $24 million in 2021. “The big news on the budget is that the amount to be raised by taxation is actually down by half a million dollars. That translates to roughly $5.02 increase (in municipal residential taxes) for an average home assessed at around $469,000 in the borough,” said Gallagher.
Projected local revenues in the borough are rising for the first time in three years, from $113,122.85 in 2021 to $1,680,800 for 2022, which represents a year-to-year increase of $1,567,677.15.
Parking revenues, which had dried up during the pandemic, will be available at $850,000.
A brand-new budget for 2022 is the Riverview Medical Center bed tax, which will contribute $440,190 to borough revenues.
At the June 15 meeting, Mirandi gave a Powerpoint presentation on the municipal budget explaining the long-term budget planning process, which includes six-year infrastructure planning for water/sewer projects, buildings, roads, and parks. She also outlined departmental goals which include providing better customer service and technology investments that may impact the budget.
The Powerpoint presentation is available on the borough website.
The total tax levy for Red Bank in 2022 is $54,426,330; 60 percent of that goes to school funding, 1.5 percent for the borough library, 1.7 percent for Red Bank River Center, 12.5 percent for the Monmouth County tax levy and 26 percent for municipal costs.
Also, 60 percent of the tax levy allocated this year will be contributed by residential homeowners, 29.5 percent from commercial property owners, 8.5 percent from apartments and 2.25 percent from other miscellaneous sources.
Mirandi explained that borough property tax assessments total about $2.7 billion, which represents an increase of 20 percent from last year.
Most of that amount reflects an increase in residential property values, which are up about 16 percent. Commercial properties went up almost 4 percent; apartment values rose approximately a half-percent. The impact of that shift is that “the residential homeowner will now take up an additional 2 percent of the tax burden this year versus last year,” Mirandi said, adding that “The overall amount to be raised by taxes this year is about $14.2 million, down for about $475,000 from last year, which equates to an 8.25 percent reduction in the municipal tax rate. The bottom line is that the average homeowner will be paying about $2,500 for the borough municipal tax fees, which is up about $5 from last year.”
“There are basically four kinds of revenues that we collect,” Gallagher explained. “There’s property taxation, which everybody knows. Then there’s receipts for delinquent taxes. Those are people who didn’t pay from the prior year. We collect that and that’s a revenue as well. Then there’s local revenues, and state aid,” he explained. “The big driver in this budget for revenues is municipal taxes. In 2021 taxes made up 60.4 percent of the overall revenues used to support the budget. This year, it’s 56.2 percent. Overall, taxes were cut about $500,000.”
Gallagher presented slides explaining a $3.39 million savings from 2021 will help support the budget this year and the $2 million state aid remains the same.
“The highlight here is that municipal taxes last year, we raised $14,637,000 in municipal taxes to fund our budget,” Gallagher said, “and this year we’re at 14,000,163. We’ve cut taxes over almost a $500,000.”
While the municipal tax rate in 2021 was about 61.4 cents per $100 of assessed valuation, an average homeowner was assessed at $406,067 and paid municipal taxes of about $2,493. The municipal tax rate in 2022 is expected to fall at 53.19 cents per $100 of assessed valuation. However, given that an average assessment of a home in Red Bank stands at $470,195, the owner of that home will have to pay nearly $2,500 in municipal taxes.
The 2022 municipal budget for Red Bank includes salaries and wages amounting to $9.75 million, debt service at $2.92 million, statutory, and deferred charges of $2.37 million and miscellaneous expenses at $8.49 million.
A detailed video of the “live” meeting of the entire budget with the PowerPoint presentation can be found on the Red Bank Borough’s official Facebook page.
The article originally appeared in the June 30 – July 6, 2022 print edition of The Two River Times.
