Hank Kalet

This story, written by Staff Writer Joseph Harvie, will be running in tomorrow’s South Brunswick Post:

The Township Council could have a public hearing on the 2006 municipal budget at its meeting Tuesday if Extraordinary State Aid figures are released by then.

A 2006 budget hasn’t been adopted because the Township Council applied for $700,000 in Extraordinary Aid.

However, the state adopted its $30.8 budget on July 8, eight days after it was due on June 30, which delayed the release of Extraordinary Aid numbers for municipalities.

Sean Darcy, a spokesman for the state Department of Community Affairs, said municipalities should expect Extraordinary Aid figures soon.

Township Public Affairs Coordinator Ron Schmalz said the township will hold a public hearing on the budget if state aid figures are released in time.

He said that if figures aren’t released, the Township Council will vote on budget amendments that will allow the township to operate without a formal budget.

The delay in adoption has also delayed third-quarter tax bills, which are usually due on Aug. 1. Tax bills will not be mailed until the Township Council adopts its budget. Residents will have 45 days after they are mailed to pay.

The Township Council introduced a $43.68 million budget in March that was $280,000 more than last year’s $43.4 million spending plan.

If adopted, the municipal tax rate would increase by 8 cents, to 60 cents per $100 of assessed valuation. Under that rate, the owner of a house assessed at the township average of $190,000 would pay $1,140 in municipal taxes, up $152 from the previous year.

The proposed plan does not include the $700,000 in Extraordinary State Aid. In order to apply for Extraordinary Aid, the township must use $4.3 million of its $4.7 million surplus, which it has done.

According to township Chief Financial Officer Joe Monzo, $385,485 represents one tax point in the township. That means $700,000 in Extraordinary Aid could mean a tax rate reduction of 1.82 cents.

Members of the council said that the budget was “a work in progress” and more cuts would be made before it is adopted.

I run the story in full to offer some context. What we are witnessing at the local level here in South Brunswick is similar to what has happened at the state level for too many years. The Township Council has been resorting to a series of one-shot approaches that have offset potential tax hikes in the past, but which are now coming due. This has left the township — considered one of the more affluent municipalities in the state — going to the state like a panhandler, hat in hand hoping for a couple of quarters in extraordinary aid to help it balance its budget without having to ask local taxpayers for too much cash. Only, the budget asks for a municipal tax hike of 11.9 percent after the state handout is included.

And it doesn’t take into account the difficult straits the township will find itself in next year as it scrambles to balance its budget without much of a surplus account or extraordinary aid.

South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press

In a year of great Mets stories, this one is probably my favorite.

South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press

Nicholas Kristof looks at the boomerang effect that has made the Middle East such a mess all these years. He describes it like this:

Impatient Arabs backed violence and thus put Ariel Sharon and now Ehud Olmert into power, while utterly discrediting Israeli doves. Some Arabs seethed at their daily discomforts, and so they backed provocations that are now vastly multiplying the suffering in Gaza and Lebanon alike.

I’m afraid that impatient Israelis may now be falling into the same trap. Israelis, outraged by attacks and kidnappings, have escalated the conflict by launching an assault on Lebanon that may make life in Israel far more dangerous for many years to come.

Kristof symapthizes with the Israelis — this round of violence was, after all, precipitated by Hezbollah and Hamas, though the Israelis went out of their way to taunt Hamas — but he also calls into question the basic approach being used by the Israelis.

Plenty of experience shows that Israel can’t deter private terror networks, but that it can deter states. Syria, for example, despises Israel but doesn’t launch rockets or kidnap soldiers. So Israel might benefit from firmer states in Lebanon and Gaza that actually control their territories. Instead, the latest Israeli offensives foster anarchy to both the north and the south, potentially nurturing militant groups that are not subject to classical deterrence.

If Israel is ever to achieve real security, we have a pretty good idea how it will be achieved: the kind of two-state solution reached in the private Geneva accord of 2003 between Arab and Israeli peaceniks. The fighting in Lebanon pushes that possibility even farther away — and in that sense, each bombing mission harms Israel’s future as well as Lebanon’s.

South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press

A lot of ink is being wasted on this, but it is worth commenting on.

Here’s the background:

Last week, the mayor and council of Bogota in Bergen County sent a letter to McDonald’s asking formally asking that the fast-food chain remove a Spanish-language billboard and replace it with an English version.

The mayor, Steve Lonegan, is an arch-conservative who ran unsuccessfully for the Republican nomination for governor and just maybe angling for another shot.

Into this little flap, which plays on the anti-immigrant anger that has been festering in American politics recently, steps the state’s attorney general, Zulima Farber. The AG’s Division of Civil Rights requested a copy of the letter, which led Lonegan to go public.

Farber, of course, is embroiled in a little flap of her own, having apparently intervened in a traffic stop involving her boyfriend. There have been calls for her to step down, even some calling for impeachment proceedings to begin.

The reality is that both sides are using the billboard for political purposes, wallowing in the kind of political hypocrisy that gives everyone in public life a bad name.

Here is what Lonegan said in The Star-Ledger, a quote that lays bare the absurdity involved:

“It seems to me that the Attorney General of the State of New Jersey … would have more important things to do than to involve herself in a debate about the marketing of iced coffee.”

I could ask the mayor the same thing. Doesn’t the mayor of a small Bergen County borough with a growing Hispanic population have anything to do than debate the marketing practices of a fast-food chain hawking iced coffee?

South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press

A new book by the great Irish poet Seamus Heaney. This is from the publisher’s site:

Seamus Heaney’s new collection starts “In an age of bare hands and cast iron” and ends as “The automatic lock / clunks shut” in the eerie new conditions of a menaced twenty-first century. In their haunted, almost visionary clarity, the poems assay the weight and worth of what has been held in the hand and in the memory. Images out of a childhood spent safe from the horrors of World War II – railway sleepers, a sledgehammer, the “heavyweight / Silence” of “Cattle out in rain” – are colored by a strongly contemporary sense that “Anything can happen,” and other images from the dangerous present – a journey on the Underground, a melting glacier – are fraught with this same anxiety.

But District and Circle, which includes a number of prose poems and translations, offers resistance as the poet gathers his staying powers and stands his ground in the hiding places of love and excited language. In a sequence like “The Tollund Man in Springtime” and in several poems which “do the rounds of the district” – its known roads and rivers and trees, its familiar and unfamiliar ghosts – the gravity of memorial is transformed into the grace of recollection. With more relish and conviction than ever, Seamus Heaney maintains his trust in the obduracy of workaday realities and the mystery of everyday renewals.

Read about it here in The New York Times Book Revew. And here from Tower Poetry. An excerpt of the review:

Heaney seems to feel that whatever else poetry could or should do, its first task is to make eloquent the five senses in the remembered world: his own verse makes the best case for that task. We might say of these low-key, often beautiful poems, and of the people and objects they present, what Heaney says (in one of his prose pages) about the wandering people he saw in his childhood, then called “gypsies,” now called travellers: “Even though you encountered them in broad daylight, going about their usual business, there was always a feeling they were coming towards you out of storytime.” No one will mistake “District and Circle” for “Station Island,” nor District and Circle for Field Work; but anyone who isn’t impressed isn’t listening.

Check out this link to read two poems from his latest (from Poetry Daily).

South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press