Nearly two months after a state-mandated deadline for the introduction and approval of municipal budgets, East Rutherford’s is still not quite ready.
"We’re hoping to have something formulated within the next couple of weeks," Mayor James Cassella told the South Bergenite on May 2.
With the exception of Lyndhurst—which operates on a fiscal-year calendar—the borough is consistently the last municipality in the South Bergenite area to submit a budget.
Cassella said that this year’s March 11 deadline, set by the Department of Community Affairs’ (DCA) Division of Local Government Services, pertains mostly to boroughs applying for extraordinary state aid. Because of East Rutherford’s revenue surpluses, the borough does not qualify for such aid.
"Most towns wait to see what their extraordinary aid will be, so they can plug in that number [to amend their budgets]. That can go on until August," Cassella said. "In the end we wind up passing our budget well before most of the towns around [here], we just get started later."
According to the DCA, any municipality that wanted to apply for extraordinary aid had to introduce its budget by March 21, a mere 10 days after the regular deadline.
Though a DCA official said that late budgets are not uncommon.
"We work with municipalities as long as they are making progress and we will accept a late budget," said Jennifer Monaghan, a DCA spokeswoman. "As they get later, we will send out municipalities and give them deadlines by which they have to submit."
Last June, when the borough had exceeded the state’s March 12 deadline by three months, the Department of Community Affairs (DCA) ordered that East Rutherford’s budget be submitted by June 15, and threatened a daily fine of $25 for every day past that. The budget was introduced at the mayor and council’s June 19 meeting without incident.
Cassella cited state constraints as contributing to the budget delay. The state imposes a 2.5-percent cap on the year-to-year increases in municipal expenditures, though that figure can be increased to 3.5 percent by the passage of an ordinance, which the mayor and council did at their April meeting. The state also caps year-to-year increases in property taxes at 4 percent. Cassella called the pair a "double-edged sword."
