Editor’s note: The following was sent as a letter to the editor. redbankgreen is publishing it in its entirety.
Dear Editor:
As a Red Bank resident and one of the original founders for the charter school, I am submitting the following letter to the editor regarding the true structural forces driving up our local property taxes.
Thank you for your time and continued coverage of these vital issues.
Let’s get real about our property tax bills and truly understand them. Red Bank residents are being squeezed and while politicians promise “affordability,” the plain truth is that Red Bank residents are being left entirely in the dark while forced to fund hidden financial bailouts on both sides of the educational aisle.
The fact that the Red Bank Charter School carries a more than $3 million in mortgage debt stands as definitive proof of a systemic lack of long-term planning and fiscal responsibility.
Their recent failure on Monmouth Street proves it- they spent years chasing an unrealistic gym project. By 2019, the same year the long-term charter school lead resigned, the school was drowning in debt, juggling three separate real estate loans. The debt burden was too high, and they did not have the cash flow to sustain it. This crushing financial reality left the new leadership with no choice but to abandon the project entirely and sell the land for $2.875 million to a luxury apartment developer just to survive their debts.
To keep their facility afloat, they depend entirely on pass-through funds from the Red Bank Borough School District – funds that the public believes are going into the classroom. Instead, they’re using those funds to pay off their mortgage debt and they put it in their IRS forms as rent, basically passing the real estate bill directly onto the taxpayer.
This pattern directly mirrors the lack of long-term planning seen in the traditional public school system’s healthcare crisis.
We were told teachers healthcare premiums had to skyrocket by over 34% simply because medical care got expensive. That is a blatant deception. The actual cost of care only went up 17%. The other 17% adjustment was built into the 34% premium and acts as a hidden bailout for a failing system that ran up a massive $90 million debt because of an unsustainable healthcare plan (Chapter 44) that didn’t have long-term planning.
Being hit from both of these directions completely sandwiches our public-school superintendent, Dr. Rumage, into a precarious, no-win quandary. He is trapped under unfair pressure by a system failing him on both sides and ultimately comes at the direct expense of our children’s education.
The ultimate crush to the Red Bank residents is that the bi-partisan middle-class tax relief programs-like STAYNJ, ANCHOR, and Senior Freeze-will feel the pain. Since these buckets have already been hit in the last state budget, those property tax relief programs are absolutely the buckets most vulnerable to being continually raided to sweep these multi-million-dollar structural failures under the rug.
The worst thing you can do to regular people is deceive them. These systems might be legally compliant, but they are loopholes that treat taxpayers like an endless ATM. It is time to stop picking partisan teams and let the state know that the public is finally on to the loopholes sending Red Bank property taxes helter-skelter.
Sincerely,
W. Michael Moore
The author is a past president of the Red Bank Charter School Association and a past member of the Red Bank Charter School Board of Trustees.
