Well it looks like our Mayor Doherty won’t be needing to resort to the drastic budget measures taken by his namesake mayor in Scranton (see post below this one.) The Coast Star reports (only in it’s print version for some reason) that Belmar has recently earned an Aa3 rating from Moody’s Investors Service on it’s municipal bonds. I’m sure the mayor will find that good rating quite useful to parry any charges of financial mismanagement coming from his critics and he can certainly feel some justification in doing so.
However.
I think we can do better. I did a little research and learned that Aa3 is a fairly typical rating for the bonds issued by middle class suburban New Jersey towns. Many towns have earned an Aa3 rating for their bonds in recent years, too many to list here. Just as motivation to improve ourselves, I have listed some towns that in the past couple of years have earned a better rating for their bonds than Belmar has.
Aa2:
Hawthorne
Old Bridge
Englewood Cliffs
Lawrence Twp
Metuchen
Livingston
Brick
Fort Lee
Englewood Cliffs
Middletown
East Hanover
Oradell
Monroe
Cranford
Maplewood
South Orange
Woodbridge
Medford
Harrington Park
Sparta
Ho-Ho-Kus
Edison
Clinton
Toms River
West Caldwell
Westfield
Watchung
Plainsboro
Aa1:
Tewksbury
Woodcliff Lake
Berkeley Heights
Warren Township
Morris Township
Bernards Township
Mahwah
Alpine
Aaa
Upper Saddle River
Rumson
Wayne
Florham Park
Chatham
Summit
Princeton
Bear in mind these aren’t the only towns to have these high ratings. These are just the ones that have been looked at by Moody’s in the past couple of years and given these ratings. Maybe if we hadn’t increased our debt by 10% in one year by dropping $1 million into re-doing 10th Ave and the Acme parking lot we would be on the list above.
Just having to pay such close attention to our credit rating is a little undignified, sort of like we are one of the over-extended customers of places like free-credit-report.com. In a perfect world, in other words if I was running everything, Belmar would not need to worry about it’s credit rating because we would have no debt. Personally, I believe public debt to be immoral except in emergencies. Our borrowing is putting a burden on future taxpayers who may not have been able to participate in these decisions or enjoy the benefits of our current spending either because they don’t live here yet or may not have even been born yet. In this respect, public debt is taxation without representation, in other words, theft. (BTW, I don’t consider beautification projects to be emergencies.)
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