Camden County facing 2.3 percent tax hike

The Camden County freeholders announced Tuesday that they would raise the county property tax levy by 2.3 percent, further hitting residents who face nearly across-the-board tax hikes from their respective townships and school boards.

The decision follows a year in which the county, like virtually every government entity in New Jersey, has seen its revenues slipping and state funding scaled back.

"The question we were grappling with is, 'Can you raise taxes?' " said longtime Freeholder Jeffrey Nash. "You don't want to, but the alternative was unacceptable."

The $323.3 million budget introduced Tuesday represented a $5.4 million increase in operating expenses from last year's budget, and freeholders said the tax increase was necessary to maintain services to residents.

Even so, residents will notice some changes, such as the significant scaling back of the county's summer concert series and its free flu shot program.

The county began the budgeting process with a $35 million deficit and at one point contemplated laying off 800 employees, Nash said.

Instead, freeholders opted to cut employee spending. The salary of any county worker not currently under a union contract, as are the vast majority of the county's 1,800 employees, will be frozen. In addition, all county employees will begin contributing 1.5 percent of their salaries to health-care benefits. And anyone not employed in public safety will take four furlough days, amounting to a combined 3 percent decrease in income.

Karl Walko, president of Council 10, the largest of the labor unions representing county workers, said those concessions were not final.

"We're in negotiations, so our plan is to continue negotiations. They can set the budget at whatever they want," he said.

For the last three years, freeholders had reduced property taxes, the result, they said, of reducing the county staff by 25 percent to 1,800 employees.

But even with fewer employees, county spending still increased over that period. To maintain the tax cuts, officials elected to spend from the county's surplus fund, which has shrunk by almost a third over the last two years and threatens to fall ever further this year.

"We will constantly be monitoring revenues," said David McPeak, Camden County chief financial officer. "It's a very tight budget, but that's what you have to do in times like these."

Freeholders will continue to grapple with how to reduce spending in the long term. They, like many local government officials in New Jersey, are pushing for Gov. Christie to free them from costly worker protection rules and increased payments to the state pension fund.

Last year, freeholders announced they would seek to hand the county jail, long described as a financial burden, over to a private corrections company. But Freeholder Director Louis Cappelli Jr. sounded less convinced of that plan in a meeting with the Inquirer Editorial Board on Monday, pointing to the recent success in reducing the inmate population there.

"I didn't think we could" reduce the numbers, he said. "A year ago I thought we were going to build a new jail no matter what."