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Monmouth Freeholders’ 2019 Budget Is $44 million Less Than 2010

2019 Monmouth County Board of Chosen Freeholders: Sue Kiley, Pat Impreveduto (Deputy Director), Tom Arnone (Director), Lillian Burry and Gerry Scharfenberger

The Monmouth County Board of Chosen Freeholders recently adopted their final budget of the decade.  In the ten years since the 2010 budget, annual spending for county government as declined by $43.8 million, 8.9%, according to an announcement by Freeholder Director Tom Arnone.

2010 was the year Arnone was first elected to the Freeholder Board and the year the GOP took back control of county government after two years of Democrat control.

“The Board has taken a hard line approach to ensure that each County department is being fiscally responsible. We are currently using a similar amount of fund balance as the revenue that we regenerated during the year and work to ensure future financial stability with all bond rating agencies,” said Freeholder Director Arnone. “It is important to note that even though department spending has gone down, we have kept the quality of services at the level our residents have come to expect.”

The 2019 budget of $449,600,000 is up .37% over the 2018 budget and is funded by a tax levy of $305,500,000, an increase of .49% over 2018.  Spending on County operations  declines by $1.5 million this year, according to the announcement.  The modest increases are to replenish the surplus and shore up the County’s AAA balance sheet.

The annual budget covers the cost of maintaining 1,000 lane miles of roads, more than 900 bridges, 16,000 acres of County parks, emergency management services, 911 emergency communications, law enforcement through the Prosecutor’s and Sheriff’s offices, elections, deed recording and passport services in the County Clerk’s Office, probates and adoptions through the Surrogate’s office as well as numerous additional programs and benefits.

The budget is posted online here.

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Posted: March 21st, 2019 | Author: | Filed under: Monmouth County News, New Jersey, News | Tags: , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments »

2 Comments on “Monmouth Freeholders’ 2019 Budget Is $44 million Less Than 2010”

  1. Good thing said at 2:03 pm on March 21st, 2019:

    they outsourced the youth detention center and medical examiner to Middlesex, and sold the two nursing homes, or it’d undoubtedly have kept going up. More shared services and consolidations in this state are the only way to stop some of the taxpayer bleeding- since no one really seems to want to cut spending.( read, “services.”) Yearly reviews of outdated, unsuccessful programs, additional auditing of all operating expenses, and more continual program reviews/ cuts, or the un-funding of some, are needed. The county doing a good job is about the only thing that keeps some people from leaving, since the school funding formulas are killing us, locally.

  2. Steve Adams said at 1:05 pm on March 27th, 2019:

    The cost of running the County started to go down significantly when its corrupt leader left office to face charges of corruption and official misconduct. The Freeholder Director Harry Larrison was a well documented corrupt politician that operated the County for his benefit and the benefit of his “friends and family”. Of course the taxpayer costs dropped when the misconduct was interrupted by an indictment.
    The remaining tragedy is that corrupt Harrison was allowed to put his name on the largest building at Brookdale Community College. This is where our children develop their system of values. Exposing our children the the example of a corrupt politician is a tragedy that the Freeholders or the BCC Board of trustees can and should fix. Corruption should not be rewarded or memorialized, especially in front of developing citizens.