NORTH WILDWOOD — City Council introduced a $25 million budget for 2012 that will increase the local purpose tax by 1.1 cents per each $100 of assessed value. The proposed budget is $671,740 below the state-imposed cap, and is $4,000 less than the 2011 municipal budget.
“You’re as sound financially as you can be,” said auditor Leon Costello. “The decisions you made over the past five, six or seven years have been excellent ones and have kept you out of the newspapers for having issues with your budges, layoffs, furloughs, etc.”
According to Costello, the city lost some ratables but was proactive and did a reassessment.
“You stopped the bleeding with the appeals, which some other towns did not,” said Costello, “And that is why you only have a minimal amount of ratable reduction, even though appeals are rampant all throughout the state.”
Salaries for city employees have gone down approximately 3.5 percent for this year’s budget.
“You’ve done an incredible job,” said Costello, noting a $291,000 savings in salaries for 2012 and almost $300,00 last year. You’re just about $600,000 down in what your employee costs are. Again, it’s hard to match those numbers throughout the state without using the layoff word, and you have not done that.”
According to Mayor Bill Henfey, savings in employee costs were “accomplished through consolidations and attrition.”
“All in all,” said Costello, “financially this is a very stable budget.”
One area that did take a financial hit was the cost of health care benefits.
“Health care is a major issue and it’s always been a major issue,” said Henfey. “Even though we switched to a lower plan and our employees are contributing more than they ever have, and we have far less employees than we had two years ago, health care is still up more than a quarter-million dollars this year in our budget. If we didn’t have that raise, there wouldn’t be a tax increase, there would be a tax decrease.”
Like virtually everyone else in the nation, the city took a hit in its proverbial pocketbook by the cost of utilities.
“We have to put in an extra $85,000 just for gasoline for our vehicles,” said Henfey. “These are things that, unfortunately, we can’t control.”
According to the mayor, last year’s budget had a 0 percent tax increase.
“You can only do that so many years, but we are continually doing a good job managing our debt and managing expenses.”
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