Westwood residents take our property taxes poll.

Westwood, NJ residents take our property taxes poll.

by Mr. Westwood

3 responses to “Westwood residents take our property taxes poll.

  1. Taxes are up about 17.00 per month for me this year, (got my tax bill last week) about 20+% LESS then last year and about 10+% LESS from the year before. How are we to evaluate whether taxes are too high?

    Anything is to high if you can’t afford it; as a senior I need taxes to rise less than inflation if I’m going to keep my head above water and remain living in Westwood. I said as much to our Mayor when I called him just after he came into office.
    He told me that he had little control of the taxes in 2004 because of the property revale and the spending that the Council had planned the prior Fall in preparing for the 2004 budget. He promised he would strive to respect the concerns I had with the rapid rise we had been living with over the last several years. He kept that promise so I wonder how do we determine if taxes are too high?

    Are the taxes in the surrounding towns similar to us, more or less? Westwood looks a lot better then it did several years ago. Debt is reported to be down. The gold plated firehouse is finished and I recently walked with my wife around the new bike path in the Westvale Park. (Looking good down there.) My road has been patched. The downtown looks alive, less empty stores. Mr. Westwood, would you be able to define high taxes?

  2. JimC,

    we don’t mean to suggest that there is an objective formula for determining whether taxes are high or not. We only ask for your subjective opinion.

    You say that local gov’t claimed to have little control over taxes in 2004, and today the story hasn’t changed. On the front page of the 7/16/07 Pascack Press, Mayor Wanner now blames the Bergen County Board of Taxation.

    Unfortunately, spending continues unchecked, while the politicians pass the blame onto someone else. Sometimes they even blame the taxpayers!

    You mention the firehouse that was way over budget while council president Peter Grefrath went AWOL in his duties as liason to the fire department on that project. The guy was rewarded with yet another reelection! There’s just no accountability in government.

    Each year most taxpayers are making the same money as the year before, but the gov’t keeps asking for more and more. Meanwhile, the quality of life remains the same or gets worse as government gets bigger and more costly.

    The function of gov’t should be to put itself out of business and to get the power back into the hands of the people. Our tax dollars are paying for a runaway train on a treadmill; a whole lot of noise and smoke, but we’re getting nowhere.

    Even more devious are the subtleties like the “transit village” crap designed to turn this little borough into a greater cash cow for developers, politicians, and a host of others who don’t have our best interests in mind. Or, the “Tree City” designation, which has the not-so-subtle effect of making you view the borough as a “city.”

    Critical thinking is not a strength of most humans, which makes it easy to dupe the vast majority of Westwood’s inhabitants (or the small minority who actually vote). The effect is only enhanced by a large and indomitable bureaucracy.

    Are taxes too high? Is gov’t too big? Do the answers to these questions make any difference to anybody?

  3. You note, “The function of gov’t should be to put itself out of business and to get the power back into the hands of the people.” Isn’t government in the hands of the people, the same ones who reelected Councilman Grefrath?

    At my age I’m a realist, you can’t get something for nothing. I pay taxes for the various services that I receive and though the services may lack from time to time, depending on the guidance of our elected representatives, locally things have been much better.

    As I said in my first comment, my tax bill was less then the years before. I credit Mayor Wanner for that and noticed it was him who was quoted as raising the concern in the article you noted in the Pascack Press, on the rounding tax issue. The Community Life had a little snippet on it too.

    Where you see the mention of the tax concern as an excuse I see it as call to action on an issue that was cited in the Record not too long ago. Unfortunately I think we’ll see little actual reaction to address the additional tax. That additional $43 could have paid toward the deductible on my drug prescriptions or the fees my young neighbor pays for their children’s sports.

    I do agree with you that too many people do not think critically which I fear will be the reason why we will be seeing our town sliding back into the black hole of debt spending. The recent Primary showed no rationale on the choices that resulted. It reminded me of Mr. John K. Galbraith, an economist who died last year, a two time recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom who once said, “These are the days when men of all social disciplines and all political faiths seek the comfortable and the accepted; when the man of controversy is looked upon as a disturbing influence; when originality is taken to be a mark of instability; and when, in minor modification of the original parable, the bland lead the bland.” Mayor Wanner was controversial, not the standard politician, honest, refreshing.

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