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Asbury Park unveiled a preliminary budget that could raise the average assesed homeowner’s taxes by $152 during the Wednesday night City Council meeting.

City Manager Michael Capabianco said the proposed spending plan comes with a decreased tax rate but higher property valuations, meaning the amount of money to be raised via taxation increases.

“As in every year, this is the introduced budget that will change later on,” Capabianco [show at right] said. “Changes will be made dependent on the final state aid and transitional aid number.”

Capabianco noted that property valuation increased $80 million up $1.3 billion over 2015. This means the average assessed value of a home increased from $226,831 to 240,646.

Asbury Park participates in the new Monmouth County Tax program that assesses homes at full market value every year instead of every 10 years. This means tax bills are now based on the revenue the town needs to raise through taxation as well as the new property assessments.

The proposed .012 tax rate is a 1.288 reduction from last year’s 1.3 rate, Capabianco said. This means annual municipal tax bills of $3,100.46 increased exactly to a $151.65 in the proposed spending plan.

In 2015 tax bills increased $199.

While typical budget drivers include group insurance rates, public safety and engineering cost, Capabianco said being a city on transitional aid means an automatic budget increase.

“Under the transitional aid program taxes must increase a certain percentage every year based on the formula,” he said.

Capabianco reiterated that utility funds, i.e. beach and sewer, could not be used to offset the operations budget.

“Money cannot be transferred over to the general budget to offset general spending,” he said. “Quite often you will hear there is money in the parking utility; that is money that is dedicated for parking purposes, enforcement or maintenance of meters. We can’t use it to buy a new golf cart or a new lawn mower.”

A public hearing is slated for April 13 but may be postponed until the state figures are finalized. Last year the city adopted the 2015 spending plan in September. Capabianco anticipates adoption could come in August.

Monroe Avenue resident Tracy Rogers questioned how much transitional aid is anticipated in the proposed budget.

“The transitional aid amount is $1.25 million based on the formula [that accounts for] 85 percent of the previous allocation, which was $1.5 million,” Capabianco said.

He said funds have been allocated for an additional code enforcement and the capital budget does call for appropriations for a much needed software upgrade, he said.

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