UCCF: UCIA; Budget; and Covid Money

Open comments by Bruce Paterson at the 3/24/22 Commissioner meeting elicited this response:

After a sidebar:

What Bruce Paterson had to say:

UC Budget 2022 (3) Open Space Tax Theft

Another year of stealing almost all of the Open Space Tax:

2022 UC Budget (2): UCIA Aid

The 2022 Union County Executive Budget is out and the first curious entry is:

Has the county left off propping up the Union County Improvement Authority in light of the latest fiasco?

2022 Union County Executive Budget (1) Pop Outs

The 2022 Union County Executive Budget is out and this blog kicks off a series that will look at the numbers in detail. Here are the pertinent pages and we start with items that pop out at you to the point where you assume it is some kind of mistake.

 

UCCF 3/3/22: Videos

At a meeting where the 2022 Executive Budget, which we will get to in the next few days, was released there were some related (and unrelated) matters to tape, starting with my contribution:

Other videos:

Municipal Budgets 2021 (6) Insurance

Comparing pension records as to employee counts to 2021 budget allocations that municipalities in Union County paid for insurance including group health, health benefit waivers , and general liability including workers compensation yields these spreadsheets with rankings by municipality.

Municipal Budgets 2021 (5) Debt Rankings

Per Capita, Linden has the largest debt payment and (after Winfield which has no debt) Hillside has the smallest debt payment in 2021.

Municipal Budgets 2021 (4) Pension Contributions

Comparing pension records to 2021 budget allocations that municipalities in Union County made for their contributions to the New Jersey Public Employees Retirement System (PERS) and Police and Firemen’s Retirement System (PFRS) shows that, on average, PERS and PFRS contributions made up 8.17% of total budgets, representing $170 per resident. The average contribution as a percentage of a participant’s salary came to 25.03% with $19,942 as the average contribution per participant.

Spreadsheets with this data and a breakdown by municipality follow.

Municipal Budgets 2021 (3) Salary Rankings

On average, Hillside pays the most and Garwood the least.

Budgets include part-timers and employee counts are arbitrary. Salaries in the 2021 budgets are included in these worksheets but it is pension records as June 30, 2021, which presumably would include all the full-timers, from which these comparisons are drawn.

Municipal Budgets 2021 (2) Tax Rankings

How much does each municipality in Union County charge their taxpayers for the services they provide?

Other blogs in this series will compare costs by types of service, debt, insurance, and pensions. This one calculates the amount raised by taxation for 2021 divided by population which is an imperfect measurement since owners of commercial properties pay taxes (substantial in cases like our costliest municipality) but are not counted in population figures. They also do not have children to educate or entertain and on account of the jobs they provide are often a boon for their municipalities.