For more than a month, staff in Trenton's Statehouse have anticipated Gov. Chris Christie's maiden budget.
But as Tuesday's big announcement came and went, at least one local mayor was left feeling bamboozled.
"I don't really know why the administration would say one thing, then do the opposite," Buena Vista Township Mayor Chuck Chiarello said of his beef with the governor's budget plan, which seeks to slash state spending by about $3 billion.
Chiarello's complaint is not that municipalities such as his will face cuts in their state assistance. Like many other mayors, Chiarello expected the bad news, and he cut $150,000 from the township's expenses in late 2009.
What confuses him, he said, is that he attended an administration briefing the day before Christie's address, where he and other local leaders were told one sort of aid would be held harmless.
"They told us the energy-tax receipts would not be touched," Chiarello said Friday, referring to payments originally made by gas and electric companies who ran power lines across valuable municipal land. "They promised us that."
Seeing the aid figures Thursday, Chiarello said he immediately saw that promise had not been kept.
In Buena Vista's case, that surprise cut accounts for more than half of the $182,000 the township would lose under the draft proposal.
That rough $100,000 sounds like a small additional cut on top of hundreds of others, during a year in which municipal aid was cut by hundreds of millions of dollars - but when it comes to those energy-tax receipts, municipalities such as Buena Vista already hold something of a grudge.
To make up for the lost taxable land that was filled with pylons and other infrastructure, the companies paid the municipalities a fee. And in the 1980s, the utilities pressured the state government to start administering that money.
"Since then, the state has been able to dip into that fund, diverting it to the general fund to help with the budget," said Chiarello, a Democrat who also serves as vice president of the state League of Municipalities.
When it comes to that kind of tax releief, Chiarello said, "It seems we're never given all of it these days."
On the campaign trail ahead of last November's election, Christie described the state's past practice of using earmarked money for something other than its promised purpose as "raiding."
So why, Chiarello asks, did a roomful of mayors receive a promise Monday, only to see it broken Tuesday?
On Friday, Chiarello attended a meeting of staff from 100 New Jersey municipalities. Also in attendance was Rich Bagger, Christie's chief of staff.
"I was asking a few tough questions," Chiarello said. "But I got only a short answer, and it's not clear to me why it happened."
He said Bagger said he would make note of the question.
Officials from the Governor's Office and the state Department of Community Affairs could not be reached for coment Friday.
People and Power by Juliet Fletcher, The Press of Atlantic City's Statehouse Bureau reporter, appears every Sunday. Fletcher can be reached at:
