Combating Hypergrowth
November 1, 2005• (0) Comments
Every summer like clockwork, Peapack-Gladstone municipal officials prepare an annual tax bill for property owners. Among other things, the bill tells us how municipal expenditures will be allocated in the next Borough budget and reminds us again of civic priorities for the year ahead. A helpful graph illustrates where our money is going, with colorful pie-chart slices staking out so much for schools, so much for emergency services, another bit for libraries, and so on.
Helpful as they are, what these bills don’t say are the reasons why our residential property taxes seem to go up every year. Nor do the charts tell us how one of the tiniest line-items, the local Open Space Tax first authorized by voters in 1998, is paying for itself many times over today by helping regulate those bigger chunks, the ones that represent our rising public schools tuition attributable to ever-higher enrollments and our costs of providing borough services.