Dear friends and neighbors:
Tonight is a really important city council meeting at 7pm that I hope you can either attend in person or watch online on the City's website or on Facebook Live. Two big things:
We introduced the Mayor's budget on March 27th which included a 2.8% increase in the municipal tax rate. After budget workshops and a more detailed review, on Monday we announced plans and submitted a recommendation for a budget amendment with further cuts of over $1M to bring the increase down to 1%. Since then we have continued to work further with the administration and believe that the ultimate outcome tonight with a revised amendment will show an amount closer to a still much lower 1.3% increase vs. what was originally proposed.
Tonight we are voting on second reading for a new contract with Suez that will ultimately allow Hoboken to use much more of the water revenues that Hoboken residents pay to invest back into our water infrastructure. We will be able to address all of $33 million of upgrades identified by the City and then some. You can read my exhaustive email I sent on this (I even think it was long...) but the one chart that captures what is happening is this one below which shows how are water revenues are shared between the City of Hoboken and Suez:
We are going from keeping 7% of the revenues to keeping 60% of the revenues under this new contract which means we get to reduce the taxpayer burden and no step water increases will be necessary to upgrade our water infrastructure.
There is a LOT going on right now, but these two are the biggest that impact everyone in Hoboken. I am optimisitc that both will be passed tonight. So I hope you can tune in! Once these are behind us, I will send a more robust update on what else is going on around town.
As always please forward this to everyone you think may be interested and feel free to reach out via email, text or phone (201-208-1674) about this or anything else important to you.
