On the Issues: Candidates for Local Office on Taxes, Development

When Democratic incumbents Mayor Mark Sokolich and Councilmen Armand Pohan and Michael J. Sargenti sparred with their Republican challengers—mayoral candidate Judith Fisher and Council candidates Martha Cohen and Alfred V. Norton—last week in a debate at , it was probably no surprise that the first questions they were asked to address were related to municipal taxes, maintaining services in the borough while reducing costs and the potential impact of large-scale development projects like the one now commonly known as Redevelopment Area 5.

While at least some members of the United Homeowners of Fort Lee were pleased that the current municipal budget reflected a tax increase of less than one percent, one member-submitted question challenged the candidates to describe their plans or ideas to further reduce taxes without affecting services or increasing fees.

Noting that it’s not reflected in this year’s budget but will be in future years, Pohan immediately pointed to the governing body’s refunding of $15 million in bonds “because of the low interest rate.”

“We should save about 1.5 percent on that $15 million,” Pohan said. “That’s about $200,000 that we’re going to save just in interest payments alone.”

Pohan also said the borough expects to save significantly from programs such as its self-insurance prescription plan, and that ongoing litigation the borough is pursuing against the Bergen County Utilities Authority over rates charged for sanitary sewage versus storm sewage, which the borough produces more of and costs less to treat, could help save even more money.

Fisher said, “In order to manage the budget we need to show a lot more leadership than is currently being shown by this administration.”

She said the current practice of council liaisons reporting back with “a sentence or two at a meeting” needs to change.

“We need meaningful reports,” Fisher said. “I would push, first and foremost, for a Governmental Accounting Standards Board approach to the budget, known as GASB. Back when Gov. Whitman was in office, she strongly suggested all municipalities adopt this kind of accounting so that you can tell, municipality to municipality [and] compare apples to apples. Who’s doing a good job? Are you managing your costs, your personnel effectively? We need meaningful accounting records, and they are sorely missing here.”

Sokolich began by saying, “I presumed that in anticipation of this year’s election, we’d hear specifics; I get ideas,” a theme he repeated throughout the debate.

“I’m open-minded, but I have still not heard specifics, and there’s a reason for it,” Sokolich said. “The reason for it is that this budget is thin, and this budget is tight.”

He said the borough can “continue to save money” by “continuing to implement and empower our on-site, in-town projects team, a projects team that was put in place about four years ago that’s constructed for our community things such as little league fields and capital improvement projects.”

Sokolich said the borough also instituted an “in-house engineering program,” which cuts reliance on outside contractors for capital improvement projects, saving “hundreds of thousands of dollars.”

“Our program of attrition will remain in place,” he added, and said the borough will continue to “zealously negotiate” favorable collective bargaining agreements.

“Whatever cost saving measures we implement, your health, safety and welfare will not be compromised,” Sokolich said. “Not on our watch.”

Norton agreed with Sokolich that this year’s budget is “lean and mean,” but he took issue with the size of the local government.

“In looking at Fort Lee, it appears that Fort Lee has more departments than Macy’s,” Norton quipped. “St some point in time, when you’re looking at a salary base of over $28 million on a total appropriation of $58 million, you’ve got to look at staffing.”

Norton also said that another way to save money is to support the Fair School Funding plan, as many Republican state legislators have done, something he estimated would decrease property taxes in Fort Lee by 25 percent.

“We want to have fair and equitable distribution,” Norton said. “We don’t want to get one-fifteenth of the return from Trenton that a town like Asbury Park is getting in terms of school funding. [The Fair School Funding plan] puts money in people’s pockets. That makes people happy. That makes people want to stay. That makes businesses want to come here.”

Sargenti started his response to the question with two simple words: “shared services.”

“Why is it that everyone wants to come to us in the town of Fort Lee? Why do outside towns want to come to us?” Sargenti said. “We have the best decision-making, and people see what we’ve done in this town with less now than we’ve ever had. We’re in negotiations with a few towns and talking to them about shared services, which once again, lessens costs.”

He also said called the current budget “tight.”

“We’re running departments now where we have less than or where we had full-timers, we’re using part-timers,” Sargenti said, adding that there has been no drop-off in services as a result.

Cohen said that with “so much bonding going on,” the municipal tax increase this year is effectively “much more than one percent” and that it’s therefore misleading to trumpet the “less than one percent” municipal tax increase as a success.

“I would like to see no more bonding,” Cohen said. “I would look at that and why we need to bond. Why do we need to bond for computers? Something that costs maybe a thousand dollars and we’re bonding for it, and we’re paying interest on it. I don’t even understand that.”

She also took issue with the Mayor and Council for voting on bonding ordinances during the summer “when everybody’s away” and for holding a special meeting on a new $5 fee for municipal parking stickers on Dec. 23 at 10 a.m. “when half of Fort Lee was out of town.”

With new construction planned in town that could potentially put a strain on services and already overcrowded schools, another question raised during the debate was what the candidates will do to reduce that strain by keeping development to a minimum and what financial assistance—“other than taxes”—will they expect from the developers to cover extra expenses.

Sokolich said that when agreements were reached with the developers for Redevelopment Area 5, there were two issues “we would not deviate from.”

“Number one, telling the developer that we would not provide them with a tax subsidy,” Sokolich said. “Issue number two was that we would not enter into a PILOT program, or ‘payment in lieu of taxes’ because if we did either, it would then cheat the school system.”

He that “as a result of sticking to our guns, the project is projected to garner $10 to $15 million in tax revenue, about 50 percent of which would go to the school district.

“We’ve limited the number of bedrooms in the development, and we’ve put in other safeguards to make sure that it’s not going to be an absolute strain,” Sokolich said. “But there are millions of dollars that are going to be generated all because we decided not to subsidize the developer.”

Norton indentified “roads and infrastructure and how we handle traffic in Fort Lee” as keys, and said there are some “pretty new roads” that are “heavily under-utilized,” but he reverted to the question of refunding bonds, which Sokolich had previously equated to “refinancing your home.”

“What [Sokolich] hasn’t indicated is this: When you refund a bond, are you extending the maturity date, does it remain a callable issue, what’s the interest rate?” Norton said. “We should know that if a bond is being refunded what that bond is going to. At some point in time, we’re going to have to pay for computers, salaries of people that leave. We’re going to have to pay for other fairly ordinary expenses out of our budget and not put them off.”

Pohan said the major development project currently taking place is the Whitehall Tower project on Central Rd., which he noted is designed “for an older community” and said, would put “a minimum burden on services in the town.”

“We cannot ask developers to pay for specific policemen or specific DPW,” Pohan said. “What we can ask them to do is pay their fair share of taxes.”

And that’s something he said the borough is insisting of the developers involved in the Redevelopment Area 5 project, echoing Sokolich in pointing out that they’re not getting any tax breaks or a PILOT program.

“I believe there’s going to be a net savings to the borough,” Pohan said. “The new project as it’s being designed has many more smaller units. We are requiring a minimum of 37 percent of one-bedroom apartments, and a maximum of 10 percent of three-bedroom apartments … The way this project is being designed now, it’s going to be a very big ratable, and that’s the other way we’ll save taxes for the town is by creating good ratables.”

Cohen said she’d like to see council members attend more Planning Board and Zoning Board meetings, “not just the liaisons,” because they can learn a lot.

“I will going if I get elected,” she said.

She proposed a moratorium on any building, “whether it be a single-family home into a dual-family home … or another apartment house.”

“The bottom line is there are a lot of things that we can do so that we don’t have to get to the point about the financial assistance until we get our house in order,” Cohen said.

Sargenti chose to highlight the borough’s ambulance co-pay program, which he said would bring in “about a million plus,” and negotiating “to the point where snow removal is now in our control.”

“We will not be hiring from outside,” Sargenti said. “So streets like Anderson Ave. is under our control now. There’s a lot that we’re still doing, so as long as we keep moving forward and stay the course, we’ll be fine.”

Fisher said she agreed that not making a deal with the Redevelopment Area 5 developers was “a good idea,” saying, “to give away that kind of ratable would have been suicide because the impact that this development is going to have on our services is frankly humungous.”

“Just think of these huge high-rises—10 percent of those apartments are going to be three-bedroom homes,” Fisher said. “That’s going to put a lot of children into Schools No. 1 and 3. If you’re a parent like I am, you know what the crowding conditions are. Of course the schools are going to get half of that tax base, but we’re always going to be playing catch up.”

Fisher also said that one of the “privileges” of being mayor is that he or she makes appointments to various boards and committees.

“You can tell a lot about what is going to come out of a committee and a board by who you put on it,” Fisher said. “You have to vet these people very carefully so that they represent the best interests of the borough and not anything but the best interests of the borough.”

Visit Patch for continued coverage of the Mayor and Council race.

The complete debate will be broadcast on Time Warner Cable channel 81 on Oct. 27 and 29 at 8 p.m.