‘No deep pockets’

After two years of budgets that upped municipal taxes by a collective 15%, officials have begun work on the 2025 Middlesex Borough spending plan.

Top borough staff have been “asked” to limit their departmental budgets to 2024 levels, barring an extenuating need, according to officials.

“So far, it looks really good for us,” said Borough Administrator Michael LaPlace. Before the spending plan ends up with the mayor and council, department heads and administrators will go through it line by line, he said, to look for further reductions.

A new year of budget work comes at a time of federal government cost-cutting and staff paring mandated by President Donald Trump’s recent executive orders. However, the Elon Musk-led Department of Government Efficiency – or anything resembling it – won’t be coming to the Ronald S. Dobies municipal building.

Mayor Jack Mikolajczyk said at the Borough Council’s Tuesday, Feb. 11 meeting that he does not see the need to enlist an efficiency advisor through an organization such as the New Jersey League of Municipalities.

“I’ve been doing this for 38 years in accounting and finance,” he said. “You sort of have an idea what to look for. We do have a very stringent audit process. We do the self assessments and frankly, we don’t have $5 million that we’re sending to Africa to check the tsetse fly and everything else. It’s not going on here.”

The municipal budget accounts for 30% of a borough property owner’s total tax bill. The majority of the bill – about 54% – relates to the K-12 school district budget. The Middlesex County government’s budget accounts for the remaining 16%.

Mikolajczyk called the governing body’s budgeting process “very difficult” the past few years.

“We don’t want to cut any services to the residents – none,” he said. “Every year, that’s getting harder and harder and harder. Especially when you have (employee) health insurance going up like crazy, you’ve got the state coming up with all these cockamamie fees and all the rest of the things that they want you to do.“

The municipal budgeting process comes down to making choices, according to the mayor.

“People come in and say, ‘We would like you to handle the geese.’ Now you have to balance that,” Mikolajczyk said. “Do I take care of geese, or do I take care of a bambo infestation somewhere? You have to balance all these things out.”

The mayor noted the borough has added few new ratables the past few years and seen properties taken off the tax rolls due to the floodwall project.

“We don’t have deep pockets,” he said. “You don’t have to go that far to find the loose change. That’s really what it comes down to.”

Some community members have suggested a forensic audit of borough finances, but Mikolajczyk doesn’t see it as necessary due to the annual audit and other self-analysis by municipal officials.

“To be quite honest, if I thought there was merit to it, I’d be the first one in line saying, ‘Boy we’ve really got to to that,’ ” he said.

The 2025 budget season comes after a five-year roller coaster ride for Middlesex Borough municipal taxes.

In 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic erupted. Businesses were shuttered, jobs were lost temporarily or permanently, and revenue dropped. Some Central Jersey municipal governments levied tax increases of 1% or less to ease the burden on their constituents. In Middlesex Borough, a 5.47% municipal tax increase was imposed to plug a revenue hole and replenish surplus depleted during Mayor Ron DiMura’s administration.

Revenue from Payments in Lieu of Taxes (PILOTs) began to stream into borough coffers in 2021 and 2022. There was no municipal tax increase in either year. Then-Borough Administrator Marcia Karrow brashly boasted that would continue if officials “don’t do anything stupid.”

Karrow left Middlesex’s employ in 2022 and the council moved away from what some have portrayed, in retrospect, as overly tight-fisted ways.

Municipal taxes rose 7.5% in 2023. Few taxpayers noticed as a revaluation adjusted property values. Some homeowners still saw a tax bill decrease as the formula it is based on got reconfigured.

The mayor and council again hiked municipal taxes 7.5% last year. School taxes rose roughly 4% in 2024, bringing the total tax increase that year to more than 5%.

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