I want to first acknowledge that many of the financial problems facing Bruce Township are long standing issues created by previous administrations. I am not blaming the current administration for the creating. What concerns me is what are we doing about it today. This last month, the 2024 annual audit was released. A couple big issues I see need to be addressed.
Financial Issues to Address
Unfunded OPEB Liabilities – Compared to 2021, unfunded OPEB liabilities rose from 4.2 to 6.1 million. The Township’s plan so far has been to transfer money from other funds to this fund. This is not a sustainable plan and does nothing to solve the problem in the long term. On paper we went from 0% to 9% funding, the state requires 40%. But we have been at 9% since 2021 without any improvement.
Water debt rose $435,000 – I do not hear any plan from the current administration to address this. We need to look at all aspects of how we handle the water debt. Only a small subset of Bruce Township has water and sewer so it is not fair to make the entire township pay for it. We need to strategically plan to pay off this debt even if that means taking a hit up front to reduce the interest we are paying on the debt and bonds.
Rising Property Taxes – Many people are talking about how high their property taxes are, and from what I am seeing is it appears to be unequally distributed. I want to review property tax assessments and see if anything improper happened. It appears that politics is always looking to maximize revenue instead of focusing on serving the residents. Another issue I have is with the current poverty guide lines for property tax relief. They are not realistic based on the cost of living in this area. Most people will lose their home before they meet the requirements. This is not fair and equitable and I want to address this.
Transparency – Very little of the details are currently readily available to the public and what is available is in overly long and complicated reports that unless you have a finance degree you can’t understand. I want to release significantly more information to the public through the township website. I hear about all the good progress we have made but no one wants to talk about the negatives. I am looking to create easy to understand graphs on all major financial issues going back 10 years so the public can easily see where we stand both good and bad.
We need a strategic long term plan that pays off our debts and liabilities. We need to think differently about finances. In my personal life I believe in being debt free and being frugal with every dollar I spend. We need to critically think about everything we spend. Do we need this? Is this the best value for our dollar? I will treat other people’s money just like I treat mine. I will critically analyze all expenses. Residents are concerned about every dollar, we as public servants need to view your money the same as our own. I promise to do that.