Is the Board of Education Mortgaging the Future of Ridgewood Schools ?

the staff of the Ridgewolod blog

Ridgewood NJ, on the Facebookk group ,”It takes a Ridgewood Village” the administrator Saurabh Dani claimed ,

“Ratable for all homes combined in Ridgewood is about 5.8B. If the school district borrows 95M more, the new school debt will be 140M. That’s 2.41% of ratable value.

So, just ignore all the monthly / annual payment numbers that are being presented to you by the board. The bottomline will be 2.41% of your homes assessed value will go towards current school debt. I.e. if someone has to buy your home today, it’s current value should be discounted by that number.

If your home value is
600k, your portion of school debt will be 14,460
700k, your portion of school debt will be 16,870
800k, your portion of school debt will be 19,280
900k, your portion of school debt will be 21,690
1M, your portion of school debt will be 24,100
….
You can multiply your homes current assessed value by .0241 to get to the number that you will owe as a share to school debt, and any new buyer of your home would want that much reduction.

Don’t assume that you will have to pay a small monthly number for a couple of years while your kids are in school and then you can bail out from here.”

Dani went on in another post on the same Facebook group , “If our debt limit is 232M (4% of 5.8B), and we borrow 145M at a 30 year term. For next several years we will not able to borrow for anything important.
It’s like maxing out your credit card on a fun vacation and then not having enough credit available to spend when really needed.”
Dani added, “I think we can borrow up to 4% for schools. This accessed value has gone down from 6B. So, we can’t assume that credit limit will go up anytime soon.”