West Deptford Republicans Propose Flattening Taxes, Spending Surplus

Budget issues once again dominated the West Deptford committee meeting Thursday, as local leaders debated drawing down the financial reserves of the township in order to introduce a flat budget for 2013.

As he had been hesitant to introduce a 9¢-per-$100 levied budget in May—which was itself delayed by contentious discussion—Committeeman Sam Cianfarini on Tuesday prepared an amended plan would spend $3.635 million of the current West Deptford financial surplus to avoid raising taxes for 2013.

It was a move that had apparently caused significant concern among the governing body and its financial advisors prior to the meeting.

An e-mail from financial consultant John Barrett to township administrator Eric Campo and CFO Brenda Sprigman advised that the committee “should not take action to introduce this amendment before getting approval from DLGS [the New Jersey Department of Community Affairs Division of Local Government Services].

“If it is on tonight’s agenda, it should be removed,” Barrett’s e-mail noted. 

Mayor Ray Chintall had tried to do just that, but when pressed from Committeewoman Denice DiCarlo for comment on the proposal, opened the floor for discussion “since we’ve authorized a public hearing with regards to the budget.”

Cianfarini challenged whether Barrett had even written the e-mail, as it was signed only with his initials and sent from a personal address instead of his work account.

“Why are we taking action on a nefarious email such as this?” he asked Campo.

“I’m satisfied of its authenticity and I also spoke to [Barrett] on the phone,” Campo replied. “It’s simply the state’s review of the budget amendment that attempts to utilize the entire surplus, or nearly all of it, to offset a tax increase. “

“It goes against best practices,” Campo said.

Line item review

Barrett’s e-mail, which noted that a DLGS contact characterized the plan as "garbage," also stated that in order to approve the proposal, Sprigman would have to provide a line item review detailing specific cuts with a budget analysis for each one adjusted by the amendment.

"They also told me that needing emergency appropriations or incurring overexpenditures during 2013 will not be tolerated by the Director," Barrett wrote.

In the discusion that followed, Cianfarini was clearly frustrated that the budget process, typically undertaken in spring, won’t be resolved until the middle of the summer at the earliest. 

He was further put off by criticisms from DiCarlo that the amended budget would leave too little in surplus. 

Comparatively, Cianfarini said, his plan would reserve more for West Deptford than its own previous budgets had, and more than the budgets of some neighboring communities like Washington and Monroe Townships had allocated.

“If you look at the historical use of surplus in West Deptford: $16,000 in 2008, $47,700 in 2009, $17,000 in 2010. In 2012, $1.8 million," Cianfarini said. “And now in 2013, we are simply proposing amendments that would leave almost $700,000 in surplus.

“It’s much more than we’ve historically done,” he said. “I’ve met with [CFO] Brenda [Sprigman], and we worked on this surplus, and we were comfortable,” he said.

When pressed for comment by DiCarlo, however, Sprigman said “my comfort level after six months [on the job] is not as high.

“I’m not disagreeing, I’m just saying I’m in a different place,” Sprigman said.

“I’m not comfortable with it, and it sounds like the state isn’t either,” DiCarlo said.

'We're trying to acquire businesses' 

After the meeting, Cianfarini expressed a feeling of exclusion from the e-mail conversation among Barrett, Campo and Sprigman.

“I should have known about that [memo] as soon as it came in,” Cianfarini said. “I could have gotten on the phone with DLGS, and I could have started turning over some barrels to get things done.”

“In 39 years I’ve lived here, I’ve never seen a 0 tax increase,” he said. “We’re trying to do that to acquire businesses and residents in this town. I got feedback from the CFO that this was more than sufficient surplus for this town.”

But DiCarlo told Patch that the amount of the surplus remaining isn’t as important as the amount of debt its carrying plus its expenditures.

“You don’t use your bank to pay for recurring items,” she said. “If you are a business, that’s not the way businesses operate.

“If revenue is down six percent, they don’t go down and tell everybody to cut six percent. You go back and say, ‘What is essential?’ And then you say, ‘What do we want to cut?’

“You always hope to find that one thing,” she said, “but you don’t make arbitrary, six-percent cuts without looking at each business line.

“What it shows more than anything is that man has zero budgeting experience,” DiCarlo said. “I think a town of our size and the amount of industrial rates that we’ve been losing, it’s foolish [to draw down our reserves].”