Dear Editor: This letter is in response to Mayor Schundler’s letter dated February 6, 2000. First, it must be noted that Mayor Schundler has a reading comprehension problem. He said, “Yvonne Balcer recently wrote that there is a box on her tax bill which says that state funding for Jersey City is up.” I quoted the figure from the tax box which is labeled “State Aid Used To Offset Local Property Taxes.” In 1993, it was $37.7 million and now in 2000, it is $97.2 million. I said Jersey City always received the lion share of municipal aid. Since Mayor Schundler wants numbers, then in FY 1994 Jersey City received from various state programs $39,361,690. After the enactment of the Consolidated Municipal Property Relief Act in 1996, Jersey City received $45,900,988, an increase of 16 percent. This figure does not include funds from the “Supplementary School Tax Relief” which benefits our municipal budget. Only a few selected cities receive this aid. Jersey City has received more than $10 million each year. Mayor Schundler has created our municipal problems with his false tax cuts. In FY92 the municipal tax rate was $17.04, in FY94, it dropped to $11.26 which left the city in a deficit. Schundler than balanced the budget through various bonding schemes and/or the increase in water/sewerage rates. Our bonding indebtedness has increased over $100 million under these schemes. Now we have more debt (over $800 million) and the tax rate last year was $20.08! Our city is in a mess due to the political games the mayor plays. This fact became evident due to the 14 cops’ promotion against state orders. Tom Damm, spokesperson for the Department of Community Affairs, called these promotions, “bad faith” on spending. It is well known that the cops were promoted because due to a political favor of a key Republican in South Jersey; his relative is on our payroll. Taxpayers and municipal employees should not be harmed, but the state of New Jersey should enforce 11A10-1 (salary disapproval). Your salary and salaries of the corporation officers should be subjected to penalties or be disapproved. Mayor Schundler, not the state, has caused this problem. Yvonne Balcer