Working Together to Control Spending

I did see a car careen off of Route 4 and slam into the Teaneck High School fence right at the Queen Anne Road exit ramp, but the real fireworks were inside the Helen B. Hill Auditorium.

I sympathize with the firefighters and the concerns of fellow Teaneck residents that we will be placed at risk if positions are cut.

But I am also concerned as a taxpayer that we have created a structure that is entirely unsustainable. Not unlike General Motors, we have been in an environment for the past decade and longer in which salaries went up at rates far higher than inflation and benefit costs for insurance and pensions skyrocketed, all paid for by the township and passed on to the taxpayer. These costs could be passed on to car buyers until the discrepancies made better and cheaper alternatives more desirable. Teaneck's equalized tax rates for 2007 placed it with the 6th highest municipal taxes of the 70 municipalities in Bergen County and 3rd highest in overall taxes. Fortunately for GM they were considered to be too big to fail. Teaneck is not so lucky.

While new revenue is great, and must be pursued, it has not and will never keep pace with the growth of wages and benefits if salaries grow at 4% annually (or even 2.9%) and benefit costs grow even faster.

The first step needs to be an organized benchmarking process that would allow the Council and residents to see how Teaneck compares to other area municipalities on measures of importance, including spending per capita, residents per police officer / firefighter, police / fire spending per capita, rates of emergency incidents for police and fire, response times, distance to stations, number of stations, etc., along with other measures more relevant to our other such as the DPW, Recreation Department, Library and other municipal departments.

While this information won't provide any answers on its own, it will allow the Council and the public to identify areas where there are potential savings that can be modeled after those of other municipalities that perform these tasks as safely and more efficiently than Teaneck currently does. In some areas, Council and residents may agree that spending more than our neighbors is worth it. But without this valuable information, we have no idea where we stand.

We need an organized process in which the township and its employees work together to control and cut costs. A Council subcommittee should meet together with the Manager, department management and employee representatives on an ongoing basis to look at ways in which the growth in spending can be controlled or eliminated. The overall budget for each department -- wages and benefits, as well as capital and ongoing expenditures -- must be looked at in a comprehensive manner. Cost savings to the township can come from greater productivity, adjusted staffing, elimination of overtime, scheduling changes, attrition, sharing benefit costs and using equipment and expendables more efficiently, among a myriad of other possible changes. Firing employees who provide needed services that address vital community needs should always be a last resort.

This is hard work. It requires a team effort to address our problems. It's a process that will not allow for individual publicity stunts. But if we don't work together to solve these problems, these budget meetings will only become even more contentious for years to come, as municipal employees show up to deride layoffs while the overburdened taxpayers wake up and express their equal frustration with taxes spiraling out of control.

Alan Sohn