Villadom Times Weekly Newpaper Online-April 29, 2009 Issue

Page 4 THE VILLADOM TIMES I • April 29, 2009 Franklin Lakes Voters approve school budgets, board members by Frank J. McMahon The voters of Franklin Lakes have approved a $21,844,912 tax levy to fund the local school district’s 2009-10 budget and have joined the voters in Oakland and Wyckoff in approving a $42,238,098 tax levy to fund the 2009-10 budget of the Ramapo Indian Hills Regional High School District. Voters elected two incumbents and one newcomer to the local school district’s board of education. Incumbents Joseph Conti and Kathleen Schwartz were reelected, and Margaret Bennett was elected to her first term on the board. Bennett was the high vote-getter with 679 ballots, followed by Schwartz with 653 votes, and Conti with 652 votes. The other local school board candidates, Michael Ben-David, Ann Turi Connelly, and John F Wood Jr., received 436, 409 and 372 votes, respectively. Bennett has resided in Franklin Lakes for five years and has four children ages 10, five, five, and four. During the past two years, she regularly attended board of education meetings. She serves on the Franklin Lakes District Math Revision Committee. Schwartz has completed a one year term on the board of education during which she served on the Operations, Community Relations, and the Personnel committee as an alternate. Conti has been on the board for 12 years and will be serving his fifth term on the board. A past board president, he is the current chairman of the board’s Personnel Committee. He has also chaired the board’s Finance Committee. The trustees will begin serving their terms on the board following its May 5 reorganization. Ira Belsky, an incumbent member of the regional school board, ran unopposed as a Franklin Lakes representative and received 725 votes. Newcomer Robert Gebhard ran unopposed for the regional school board as a representative of Wyckoff, and received 1,923 votes. Geri Petersen, an incumbent Oakland representative on the regional school board was defeated by Elizabeth Pierce, 642 to 543. Gebhard is a senior account executive with a paper print- Discussion groups to meet Franklin Lakes children and teens are invited to join one of the book discussion groups offered at the Franklin Lakes Library. Books for each month can be picked up at the front desk. Snacks are always served. All readers in grades four, five, and six are invited to meet on the last Thursday of every month at 4 p.m. to participate in the Double Digits Book Discussion Group. Participants who cannot make the meeting can join in the discussion at http://kidzcornerblog.blogspot.com. The topic for April 30 will be “Please Write in This Book” by Mary Amato. Book Club for teens welcomes readers in grades seven through nine to meet at 4 p.m. at the library on the first Wednesday of each month. Participants, who cannot make the meeting, can join in the discussion at http://katethelibrarian.blogspot.com. E-mail kate_thelibrarian@yahoo.com or call (201) 8912224. For details, visit www.franklinlakeslibrary.org. ing firm who has had two children graduate from Ramapo High School. Pierce has been an Oakland resident for 20 years and has a child who is a junior at Indian Hills High School. They will join the nine member regional school board and begin serving their three year terms following that board’s reorganization meeting on April 27. There were 1,366 votes cast in the borough, or 18 percent of the town’s registered voters. In the regional school district election, there were 28,342 votes cast or 21 percent of the registered voters in the district. The $21.8 million local school district tax levy was approved 723 to 564, and the $42.2 million regional school district’s tax levy was approved 722 to 579 in the borough and 3,370 to 2,567 district wide. The local school tax levy will fund that district’s $27,886,988 budget including debt service for 2009-10. That budget represents an increase of $915,940 or 3.40 percent over the district’s total budget for 2008-09, which was reduced after borough voters defeated the spending plan at the polls. The approved tax levy will result in a 0.0057 cent increase in the local school tax rate. On a home assessed at $1,278,690, the current average value in the borough, that rate will increase the local school tax rate to 47.81 cents. That will result in a tax increase of $73 annually. The regional school district’s tax levy represents an increase of $1,521,832 over last year’s figure, which is a 3.74 percent increase. The result is an increase of $107 per year for a Franklin Lakes home with the borough’s average assessed value. �� LANDSCAPE �� COMPLETE ��DESIGN & CONSTRUCTION • LAWN & GROUNDS MAINTENANCE �� REVISED... Nancy