{"id":7882,"date":"2016-03-18T00:54:39","date_gmt":"2016-03-18T04:54:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.shorebeat.com\/brick\/?p=7882"},"modified":"2016-03-18T11:00:54","modified_gmt":"2016-03-18T15:00:54","slug":"brick-school-budget-with-5-7m-tax-hike-voted-down-by-school-board","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/shorebeat.com\/brick\/2016\/03\/brick-school-budget-with-5-7m-tax-hike-voted-down-by-school-board\/","title":{"rendered":"Brick School Budget With $5.7M Tax Hike Voted Down by School Board"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Brick<\/a>

Brick Township Board of Education\/Schools (Photo: Daniel Nee)<\/p><\/div>\n

The Brick Township Board of Education, after hours of debate over taxation, education funding, facilities improvements, and the ability of Brick residents to bear a tax hike, voted down a tentative school budget that would increase expenditures by $7.1 million and hike taxes by $5.7 million.<\/p>\n

\u201cI want to emphasize the word \u2018tentative\u2019 budget,\u201d said Interim Superintendent\u00a0Thomas Gialanella, who occasionally engaged in back-and-forth exchanges with residents angry over the proposed tax increase.<\/p>\n

Gialanella, a Brick resident and former Jackson Township schools superintendent, said past boards of education in town should have raised taxes to the full 2 percent allowed under state law. Former board members, however, argued they negotiated contracts that were tax-neutral, and performed millions of dollars in capital improvements without raising taxes to the maximum amount allowed by law.<\/p>\n

Ultimately, a majority of board members \u2013 including those who ran on the same ticket in November 2015 \u2013 voted down the tentative budget. Except for board members George White and John Barton, all members of the seven-person school board voted against adopting the spending plan.<\/p>\n

A special meeting has been set for Monday, March 21 to hammer out the final budget which will be introduced to Brick taxpayers.<\/p>\n

Karyn Cusanelli, a member of the board who did not run with the current majority, questioned budgetary items in the wake of confirmation by Business Administrator Jim Edwards that last year\u2019s pay increase for teachers was tax neutral \u2013 offset by give-backs in the teachers\u2019 health benefits contributions. Cusanelli said newly-created administrator positions and funds tacked onto ambiguously-named line item accounts, including $535,000 in an account known as \u201cVarious,\u201d is cause for concern.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen you\u2019re looking to beat the taxpayer for another $6 million, when I see additional high salaries, when I see not a lot of money in the things that we say are important, I get concerned,\u201d said Cusanelli. \u201cI\u2019m getting the impression that everybody is blaming the teachers for this budget, they made a sacrifice to changes to their healthcare and their benefits, and it was a compromise that was very fair. For the duration of the contract, that was all taken into consideration.\u201d<\/p>\n

Board member Victoria Pakala, who ran as part of the \u201cClean Slate\u201d ticket that won a majority on the board this year, said previous boards should not have kept tax increases to a minimum, and should have spent more money to improve facilities.<\/p>\n

Gialanella said previously, by not imposing tax hikes to the 2 percent maximum each year over the past several years, did not \u201ctake advantage\u201d of the law and said in the future, boards should increase taxes to the top of the cap level to avoid \u201closing ground.\u201d<\/p>\n

Still, board members and Gialanella did not go into detail about where the funding from the $7.1 million budget increase would go, with Gialenella saying only that most of it would go toward teacher salaries. Edwards, however, contradicted that at multiple points in the meeting by saying pay increases granted to teachers under their current contract would be offset by health insurance give-backs.<\/p>\n

At times, the meeting got personal, with resident Vic Fanelli taking aim at Gialanella over advocating for tax increases while he earns an equivalent $177,000 annual salary while collecting a pension from his previous position in Jackson. The tone was reverberated by former board member Larry Reid, who opposed the tax increase.<\/p>\n

\u201cI find it a little disingenuous for someone who\u2019s collecting both a pension and a salary as an interim superintendent to say that we should raise the budget 2 percent every year,\u201d Reid, a Normandy Drive resident, said.<\/p>\n

\u201cNot only are the taxpayers in Brick looking for no increase in the school budget, they\u2019re looking for a decrease in the school budget,\u201d said resident Vic Fanelli. \u201cThe people I talk to are looking for a decrease in the school budget because we have the highest taxes in the country.\u201d<\/p>\n

Another resident, Victor Finamore, said after Brick Shorebeat posted a story on the tax increase, he received over 100 phone calls from residents opposing the budget.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf this budget goes through, they\u2019re selling their homes,\u201d Finamore said.<\/p>\n

Gialanella said before the meeting, he was already in contact with the Ocean County Executive Superintendent of Schools to discuss a defeated budget proposal. A special meeting to come to a budget compromise has been scheduled for Monday, March 21 at 6 p.m. in the administration building.<\/p>\n

\u201cHis instructions were that the meeting not adjourn until we have a tentative budget,\u201d Gialanella said.<\/p>\n

<\/div><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Brick Township Board of Education, after hours of debate over taxation, education funding, facilities improvements, and the ability of Brick residents to bear a tax hike, voted down a tentative school budget that would increase expenditures by $7.1 million and hike taxes by $5.7 million. \u201cI want to emphasize the word \u2018tentative\u2019 budget,\u201d said […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3140,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[13],"tags":[2007,41,24],"class_list":["post-7882","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-brick-schools","tag-2016-school-budget","tag-board-of-education","tag-brick-nj-news"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/shorebeat.com\/brick\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/01\/DSC_0004.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pgt2Ft-238","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shorebeat.com\/brick\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7882","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shorebeat.com\/brick\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shorebeat.com\/brick\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shorebeat.com\/brick\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shorebeat.com\/brick\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7882"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.shorebeat.com\/brick\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7882\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shorebeat.com\/brick\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3140"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shorebeat.com\/brick\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7882"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shorebeat.com\/brick\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7882"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shorebeat.com\/brick\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7882"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}