In a Facebook post from Jersey City Mayor Steven Fulop on Sunday afternoon, the Mayor announced that there will be no tax increase when the municipal budget is introduced later this week. Here is the Mayor’s statement:
GOOD NEWS TO SHARE FOR JERSEY CITY RESIDENTS:
This week we will be introducing the municipal budget for Jersey City and after much work by our team we are happy to share that this budget will have NO tax increase once again for our residents. These are challenging times so I want to publicly thank our team for staying focused on this objective and achieving it.
While I don’t have oversight/input of school taxes, county taxes, state taxes, or federal taxes – our team does have control of the city/municipal budget which is one aspect of your tax bill that I can directly impact. Our team felt that in these times when people are struggling with personal finances due to Covid-19 that we do everything in our power to continue stabilizing the city finances as we have done over the last few years. We felt it is crucial in these times to have no tax increase and we will present a budget that speaks to this.
In this budget we have cut approximately $25million in programs, restructured headcount/personnel, reduced projected new hires for police/fire, offered buyouts to existing employees, restructured healthcare with our union partners, and changed our debt offerings to get to the goal of offsetting massive revenue losses due to Covid-19. We also are leveraging close to $20m from the CARES Act to offset some additional Covid related cost increases.
Since I took office we have set a long term goal of remodeling the city’s budget after decades of mismanagement. We gradually eliminated tax abatements, we did internal audits, we eliminated redundant services, and we eliminated autonomous agencies but we have more to do.
I’m proud of our team that they are continuing to stay focused on moving the city forward in tough times and I’m happy to share this bit of good news with residents.
