There goes our tax $

There are costs to doing business. If your business involves providing municipal services to roughly 14,000 people, the monthly price tag is hundreds of thousands of dollars.

The average working family frets when the unexpected car repair bill occurs or expenses are incurred from unwanted junk disposal. Imagine a monthly recycling bill or the cost of having a firm take down problem trees across a 3.5-square-mile town.

Those are among the items included in the Middlesex Borough Council’s monthly bill lists and those approved routinely by other Central Jersey municipal governing bodies.

Inside – Middlesex reviewed the Middlesex council’s bill lists from January to October 2023 after filing an Open Public Records Act request. Some of the bills paid in 2023, particularly during the early months of the year, were for expenses incurred the prior year. Salaries paid to municipal staff through union and individual contracts are not listed in the monthly bills.

One large recurring bill is the sewage processing charge paid to the Middlesex County Utilities Authority. The borough paid more than $1.45 million to the MCUA this year in quarterly installments.

The MCUA provides wastewater treatment services for 943,000 industrial, commercial and residential users in Middlesex County, as well as several municipalities in Union and Somerset counties, according to the authority’s website.

The borough gets another hefty bill from the MCUA, that one for dumping charges at the county landfill in East Brunswick. Through October, the 2023 dumping bill stood at more than $207,000. The MCUA’s Solid Waste Division operates and administers the landfill, that annually accepts more than 500,000 tons of waste from more than 850,000 county residents.

The municipal engineering tab for the year also stood at a bit more than $207,000 to Colliers Engineering, through 10 months. Much of the Colliers bill was related to the Bound Brook Road streetscape project.

Recycling and leaf disposal also do not come cheap. The Middlesex County Improvement Authority oversees curbside recycling, including leaf disposal. Middlesex has paid the MCIA more than $227,000 for those services, so far this year.

Trees? Yeah those have to come down when they’re old, threatening to fall over or have already done so in a public right-of-way. In MIddlesex, that’s been done to the tune of more than $71,000 by October’s end.

Middlesex has switched its dispatching services to Somerset County. An $87,500 installment for the services was paid in September.

And of course there’s always the potential for legal trouble, so you better have an attorney to consult. The Borough Council’s legal counsel – Savo, Schalk, Corsini, et al – has been paid more than $103,000 so far in 2023, according to the bill lists.

Other, far lesser amounts have been paid this year to specialty attorneys who handle matters such as bond sales, environmental issues, and labor matters.

The major bills tend to be anticipated. Like business owners and Joe Average citizens, the council sometimes gets hit with unexpected expenses.

The numerous other bills the council has paid in 2023 include new library computers ($6,900), borough hall Wi-Fi update ($4,956), municipal audit expenses ($36,450), and a fire truck repair ($6,070).

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