Middletown Newsletter Isn’t Telling It Straight About Township’s Budget

PRESS RELEASE

For Immediate Publication

June 30, 2008

Middletown newsletter isn’t telling it straight about township’s budget

MIDDLETOWN TOWNSHIP (MONMOUTH COUNTY, NJ): It’s more of the same, according to Middletown Democrat for Township Committee Jim Grenafege.

According to Grenafege, a retired career consultant, the Republican Majority on the Township Committee has resorted to gross inaccuracies in its June 2008 edition.

“One of the things is that it isn’t up to date about this newsletter is the Standard and Poor’s AA rating the township had done about four years ago,” Grenafege said. “Mayor Gerard Scharfenberger is just resting on the township’s past laurels. There is nothing new by way of accomplishments in the Mayor’s tenure but Mr. Scharfenberger is trying to take historical information and take ownership of it to make himself look better.”

Middletown Democrat for Township Committee Patricia A. Walsh, a 12-year school board member, said, “Mayor Scharfenberger, in this recent Middletown Matters, fails to disclose that, for the past 20 years, the current and previous GOP administrations in town have used deferred school taxes to balance this township’s budget and make it look better than it actually is.”

Walsh said, “Being fiscally conservative does not amount to the obscene amount of bonding that this township’s taxpayers are paying for. In fact, within this allegedly ‘fiscally conservative’ $62.3 million budget professional contracts have continued to increase at an exorbitant rate. This year there is a 4.1 percent increase to the municipal budget, about a 46% increase over last year’s budget increase. The fact is I know there is more room to reduce the tax increase to residents.”

Grenafege said that just calling something fiscally conservative does not make it so.

“Clearly, the Middletown Committee Republican Majority is using the community newsletter, Middletown Matters, to help augment the Republican Political Campaign for November and it is offensive and wrong,” Walsh said. She noted that the use of publicly funded newsletters for campaign purposes should be investigated and not encouraged by this county.

Grenafege concluded that the “$2.8 million contribution to the State Pension Fund is not a surprise to Mayor Scharfenberger, but it is being treated like that by this Mayor. Any good leader would have planned for when it came time to pay the bill. But, this Republican Administration continues to blame the state and anyone else it has to in order to mitigate the fact they haven’t lived up to their responsibility locally. This is a failure to provide leadership.”

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