Dear Editor:
The Hoboken Board of Education has hired a lawyer, Mr. Gagliardi, for a maximum billing of $75,000 for a six month contract. He has helped the Board review a number of contracts, understand civil service rules, review job descriptions and more.
The Board eliminated five major administrative contracts totaling $450,000 plus $50,000 in benefits (benefits number is conservative. Used $12,000 per person but some get as much as $20,000 in benefits). They have eliminated the Asst. Superintendent, HVAC Technician, Assistant BA, Web Administrator and Summer Assistant Superintendent.
The Transportation sub-committee, chaired by Maureen Sullivan, implemented changes recommended by the Transportation Audit eliminating $200,000 in structural waste from things such as declaring a work day as 8 a.m. – 4 p.m. when the bus drivers have to start at 6:45 a.m. and finish at 4:30 a.m. banking in 1.75 hours of overtime for every bus driver, every day, paying aides for overtime who are part-time employees, and much more. In the words of the auditors, “it’s unheard of to pay overtime for bus aides.”
Outside the scope of the transportation audit, the Transportation Sub-committee discovered that the Transportation Department has not been billing the municipality for fuel costs. The BOE has an inter-local agreement with the municipality where the municipality can use the school’s buses and bus drivers for the Hoboken Recreation Program. For some reasons, not yet fully explained to the sub-committee or the public, the school was only billing the municipality for the bus drivers and not the fuel. Over the course of a year, the estimated fuel expenditure for the Hoboken Recreation program is estimated at $400,000.
You may ask, who cares if the BOE hasn’t billed the town for fuel? It’s the same tax base, right? Wrong . . . a budget for a given year is usually based on what you spent on the same program the year before. So if the school doesn’t charge the city, then the city builds a budget off the wrong numbers and understates what a program really costs. So, last year Hoboken spent $9.2 million on the Recreation Program when it should have included the cost of fuel for a total of $9.6 million. Why don’t we round that up to an even $10 million! I think it’s more glaring evidence that we need to cut the Recreation Program or at least make sure we are only serving Hoboken kids. Parents have to pay something, albeit nominal to have their kids in the program. We can have a scholarship program for our needy kids but we have to ask parents to chip in. And if we don’t kill our local business with forcing them to close by 10 p.m. or some other tax coming from the state, maybe we can get them to sponsor some of these programs and advertise at the events.
In summary, the Transportation Committee has saved the school about $600,000 on a $1.2 million budget. This, plus savings of $500,000 from eliminating unnecessary positions, the BOE has saved the Taxpayer a total $1,097,000. Good job!!
Donna Antonucci