A budget that comes in like a flood

T

his week last year, The Hub ran a story on the front page about Sea Bright’s plight with the Shore Regional budget.

The lead sentence read: "With the strength of a nor’easter, Shore Regional High School’s proposed budget is threatening to blow through this borough and leave a trail of financial burden in its wake."

It appears the storm has just been upgraded to a hurricane.

The crest of Shore’s budget is once again looming over the little borough that sends about 35 students to the high school, this time threatening to tax the residents $195 more for every $100,000 of assessed value.

Despite the fact that Sea Bright’s students make up 5 percent of the school’s population, the borough has a drastically higher per pupil cost than the other three sending districts.

The culprit is an antiquated state formula that requires Shore’s administrators to divide the costs along lines that make no monetary sense.

The numbers are different every year, but the story’s just the same. Sea Bright officials are faced with a no-win situation. They can try to vote down the budget, but even then it will only be trimmed and students always suffer in the end.

Then there are the options of costly and time-consuming legal action, politicking and begging for state aid, all of which have made about as much lasting change as beach replenishment in hurricane season. The mayor and Borough Council of Sea Bright are part-time officials faced with a daunting problem they didn’t create. Where are the state legislators with the power to set right a problem they have too long ignored?

Have they forgotten about this tiny seaside town? Hurricane season and the November elections are right around the corner. Will Sea Bright remember them then?