Can we start a thread on the Financial Advisory Committee?
What is their mission? Are they supposed to be a nonpolitical group? Is it the bull pen for council positions?
How did the committee get so big? Who appointed them?
Will their job ever be complete or will they hang around forever?
We sincerely hope that the current Village Council will have the wisdom and
courage to act, thereby avoiding the urgency for another “independent” review of the Vil
lage budget and management process in the future.
Our committee focused only on the municipal budget and practices, not the Board of Education (BOE). Since
the BOE budget represents 64% of the property tax burden in Ridgewood, we hope that this report wi
ll also serve as a template for the BOE to establish a similar process for cost and efficiency improvements
.
Given the time and resource constraints mentioned earlier, the report is not an exhaustive study, but attempts to raise
issues and make actionable recommendations for the Village Council’s immediate attention and further
consideration. We held almost 50 hours of meetings, including with current and past Village representatives
and various Village constituents. We met with consultants in municipal government operational efficiency and
studied all of the Village’s collective bargaining agreements.
Finally, we carefully reviewed the Village’s budget trends over the past 10 years to understand key budget influences and, more importantly, what they tell us about Ridgewood’s future liabilities. Collectively, our Committee devoted hundreds of hours in an
effort to deliver recommendations that we hope will have great value for Ridgewood taxpayers.
While our committee has no authority to enact any of our recommendations, we appreciate and are honored
to have the opportunity to serve our community in this manner. We took the responsibility of Mayor
Aronsohn’s mandate seriously. We respectfully submit the following recommendations to the Village Council
with the hope that you will make every effort to act on them fully and expeditiously. We wish to be clear that
these recommendations do not, necessarily, represent the unanimous opinion of all members of our
committee. However, they do represent the consensus of the committee. It is the opinion of the committee that the consequences of failing to act on these recommendations have never been more momentous or urgent for the sustainability of our Village, as we know it, and for the rising fiscal burden on Village taxpayers.
The Members of the 2012 Financial Advisory Committee (alphabetically)
Rich Barclay
Bayard DeI\/Iallie
Ed Feldsott
Nancy Johansen *
Charlie Kime
John Maxwell
Jim McCarthy
David Sabath
Jim Schimmei
Fran Shovlìn
Roberta Sonenfeld *
Bob Zeller
Nothing above gives the FAC authority to submit letters to the editor and promote the agenda of the mayor.
That was the 2012 roster. Are they all still on? Some of them are just wanna-bees. No real financial expertise. A couple have oversized egos but can’t even manage their personal finances