Good evening, Commissioners,

I’m pleased to stand before you once again as I present my administration’s proposed 2025 calendar year budget, and this time a full month earlier than last year.

Last year I opened by saying that our budget is a reflection of our values, and that remains just as true today. In DC, Congress and the White House are debating the federal budget right now, and we’re getting a very troubling picture of what, and who, they value. They want to pass another tax cut for billionaires and big corporations. To pay for it, they’re planning to cut funding for Medicaid, education, public health, and social services at the expense of our children, veterans, seniors, and our hardworking public employees. 

In Mercer County, we were left with a big financial mess by the previous administration, and we’re still cleaning it up. Inflation, rising healthcare costs, past overspending, and the increased costs of housing juvenile offenders are all making this harder. But we need to take a different approach from what they’re doing on the federal level and continue to put our community first. It will mean making some hard choices, with a budget that is limited in spending and keeps our County tax rate stable or slightly lower. This is not an easy budget. But we were elected to make hard choices. 

Our proposed 2025 County budget, including grant money, is $420,116,994.83.  Comparing apples to apples, without grants, 2024 spending was approximately $397 million and this year’s 2025 spending without grants is just over $403 million.  This is a less than 2% increase.  Our overall tax levy is less than 4% higher over last year.  But thanks to our property values increasing, the County tax rate is down 6.1%. It’s still too soon to know what impact this will have on municipal tax rates. While lean, this budget ensures we can continue to provide the County’s essential services without jeopardizing our future. 

The uncertainty and chaos in Washington are already impacting us here in Mercer County, but it’s still too soon to know exactly how bad it’s going to get. We rely on direct federal funds for less than a 2% of our County budget, however, we’ve already seen close to $200,000 cut from public health alone. So further federal cuts to both state and local funding could lead to some more tough conversations down the road. Whether it’s potential cuts to Medicaid, federal capital programs, job training programs, and social services like food stamps could affect many in our community who rely on these services daily. That’s why it's so important that we get our County government back on a strong financial footing—we have to be ready to step up and meet the needs of our residents over the next few years. 

In my address last year, I talked at length about the fiscal mess we inherited from the last administration. Our first budget faced an initial deficit of well over 27 million dollars, even as many key departments were under-budgeted and faced staff vacancies. Grants were not fully accounted for, audits and financial statements were overdue, our internal financial records were in disarray, and we faced a staggering 10.3 million dollars in deferred charges. 

The previous administration's overspending forced a tax increase last year and a reduced surplus going into this year.  And as our problems weren’t created in a single year, we always knew it was going to take more than a year to clean up this mess. We’ve made a lot of progress, but there’s still a lot of work to do. As a result, the introduced 2025 budget will face some of the same challenges and constraints as last year’s budget, but compounded by the mess on the federal level. Unlike the slash-and-burn cuts that Elon Musk is making in Washington, we’re taking a strategic and surgical approach. This ensures that we maintain our critical County services while still continuing to make key, long-term investments in our future. 

Over the last year, the County has worked closely with our employee unions to negotiate and settle twelve outstanding collective bargaining agreements through December 31st, 2024. It is important to note that some of these contracts had expired as far back as 2019.

To date, our team has been able to reach settlement with seven of the twelve bargaining units including: AFSCME 2287 [Blue and White Collar], AFSCME 3566 [Supervisors], CWA 1032 [Superintendent of Elections], PBA 187 [Sheriff’s Officers], Teamsters 469 [Engineering Professional and Technical], Teamsters 469 [Prosecutor’s Clerical], and Teamsters 469 [Public Safety Professionals]. Contract negotiations with PBA 167 [Corrections Officers] are nearing conclusion and we hope to present a memorandum of agreement to the Board of County Commissioners later this month. The four remaining outstanding contracts, represented by FMBA and Teamsters, we also hope will be settled before June.

Labor negotiations with all our employee unions will continue throughout this year and the financial challenges that we face as a government employer are significant. The total cost of healthcare has been rising and County enrollment in the State Health Benefits Plan (SHBP) is proving to be unsustainable with double digit cost increases. We will work closely with our union reps to identify opportunities for cost savings.

One area that we must address is whether to exit the state health benefit plan. This decision could save on health care costs, provide the same or better benefits, and give us more flexibility while freeing up resources for future negotiations. If undertaken, this change won’t save us money this year, but it would allow us to see savings in the coming years, which we believe would be significant.

Many needed vacancies will have to remain unfilled until next year. But our goal is to keep positions that we filled last year to ensure government continues to run smoothly. To be clear, that means that this budget contains no layoffs.

In addition to the problems we inherited, we’re also facing rising costs. Salaries, wages, and health benefit costs have increased by $16 million dollars. I recently testified before the NJ State Senate with other counties and NJAC on the broken system of youth detention that is costing us millions more each year in money that should be going to youth services.  

Despite these challenges, I’m proud to say that we have made significant progress in stabilizing our finances. Since coming to office, we’ve completed four audits in just over one year’s time. We’ve updated our accounting procedures and fixed many of the areas flagged in the 2023 audit that detailed the prior administration’s poor fiscal practices. We’ve fully implemented a new financial system with Edmunds that will prevent the sort of accounting errors that were rampant in the previous administration. We’re budgeting responsibly and we’re not overspending by deferring expenses into the next year. We’ve already completed our 2024 Annual Financial Statement. And, thanks to the diligent work of our CFO and the finance team, we were even able to identify and secure $400,000 in unclaimed state funds that were due to Mercer. 

Throughout this process we’ve been transparent with the ratings agencies about the steps we’re taking to stabilize our finances and fix our systems so the mistakes of the past never happen again. I’m proud to say that the outlook from ratings agencies continues to be stable. 

While financially this is a difficult year, we still made room for a number of key investments in our future: Renovating the Trenton Thunder ballpark, modernizing the Trenton-Mercer Airport in Ewing, rebuilding the Lincoln Avenue Bridge, and revitalizing the South Broad Street corridor are all important investments we were able to make. We’re making investments in open space, and we’ll soon be announcing a new municipal and nonprofit trails grant program. These ambitious projects are just the beginning—and I’m excited to watch our shared vision of Mercer’s future being made real, brick by brick. 

We reorganized departments to create more efficiency by integrating Public Health and Public Safety and by bringing Veteran Services, Housing, One-Stop, County Connection, Human Services, and TRADE together under the umbrella of Community Services. 

Our new office of LGBTQIA+ Affairs is fully operational within the Department of Community Services, something that’s needed now more than ever. The office’s programs have been very well attended, and navigation services and programs are now up and running.

We’ve instituted improvements to our cybersecurity systems and conducted full audits of our IT systems and the Trenton Mercer Airport. We are continuing to make improvements at Corrections, and we are planning a more comprehensive assessment of the facility and its operations. These management audits are helping us to identify savings and efficiencies, and we’re taking steps to implement a number of their recommendations.

Our new Office of Travel and Tourism is making great progress and is already building connections with businesses, nonprofits, and municipal governments. Leading up to the St. Patrick's Day parade in Hamilton, we piloted and debuted a new digital passport system driving new customers, so visitors can receive “stamps” when they visit locations we’re trying to highlight, laying the groundwork for future efforts to direct more visitors and customers to Mercer businesses, communities and Mercer County facilities. Our Economic Development department has been leading the charge through our Travel and Tourism and Culture and Heritage offices as we prepare to celebrate our nation’s 250th anniversary, and we look forward to sharing a draft of our new Mercer 250 website in the coming months. 

And speaking of websites, we expect to start a full revamp and redesign of the Mercer County website this year. The new site will make County government more accessible and transparent to the public. 

In 2024, we took important steps to help our municipalities through municipal assistance requests and shared services agreements. These actions save the taxpayers money, and also make services more efficient and accessible.

The newly established Mercer County Department of Health & Public Safety is upgrading our County-wide P25 Radio System which will improve emergency communications for our first responders. We also formalized agreements on HAZMAT response services provided by the Trenton and West Windsor fire departments. 

And the County Health Division temporarily provided licensed health officer services to Trenton and Hopewell to serve their public health needs in the past year. Our County Department of Economic Development invested in 24-passenger vehicles that include wheelchair accessible seating for Trenton, East Windsor, Ewing, and West Windsor. 

The County Department of Transportation also revived the Municipal Assistance Road Resurfacing Program, fixing municipal roads in East Windsor, Ewing, Hopewell Borough, Pennington, and Princeton. 

We have even more shared projects in the works for this year. We’ll be working with Lawrence to upgrade the County-wide 911 system to ensure we have faster and more reliable emergency response times. And we’ll soon have a new shared services agreement with Ewing on fire services at the Trenton-Mercer Airport.

Last year, Mercer County invested our remaining ARPA funds into several much-needed projects. We supported municipalities and nonprofits through our facilities and recreation grants, and notably the "Mercer at Play for All" program. "Mercer at Play for All" included funding for equipment, senior facility programming, inclusive playgrounds, and grants for nonprofits offering after-school mentoring and sports programs to underserved youth. Additionally, we’re funding capital projects at several County libraries and supporting small businesses with various grant programs. We’re excited by what we were able to achieve using these funds, and the positive impact from these programs we hope will be felt for many years to come. 

We recognize that County employees have a hard job, and they have stepped up to make a difference in people’s lives. We’ve started to add more job coaching and professional development for our employees. And while the nation’s public employees are under attack, I’m proud to say that employee morale here in Mercer is higher than ever, and their contributions are more essential than ever. Together with the County Commissioners, we appreciate everything our County employees do, and the sacrifices they make for our community. We are committed to fostering a diverse County workforce that reflects the community that we serve. Because a County government that looks like its residents is stronger, more effective, and better prepared to meet the needs of the entire community.

We continue to see progress this year in our efforts to track and increase our contracting with minority, women, and veteran owned businesses in real time. Because we remain firm in our belief that the contractors we work with must be representative of the communities they serve. In Mercer, we continue to believe that diversity is one of our greatest strengths, and we stand firmly behind our efforts to foster diversity, equity, and inclusion. 

It’s clear that we’ve made some significant steps forward. But we’re still facing strong headwinds. That's why we’re tightening our belts everywhere we can. We’re maintaining our contribution to the County College, Technical Schools, Special Services School District, and the Board of Social Services this year, matching support from previous years. We will continue to work with the state and with the County Commissioners to strengthen our budget and minimize the impact of cuts both locally and at the federal level. 

As I mentioned, this budget reduces funding for a number of vacancies, and we’re only budgeting for positions that we can’t do without. We’ve been able to save 2 million dollars on pharmacy benefits by renegotiating with our benefits provider. We’re conducting a full review of all of our property leases to identify potential savings. We believe we’ll be able to save up to $500,000 annually by making facilities improvements to buildings that we already own, and moving staff and services from a leased facility to a vacant County office building. We’re reviewing our leases for the Mercer County Office of Training and Employment Services, formerly known as One-Stop, and County Connection. We’re leaving the popular County Clerk's passport services at its current location.

Despite the uncertainty at the federal level, the power of local government is still very strong. Here in Mercer, we’re proving that government can still accomplish big things. Whether it's protecting our seniors, renovating our ballpark, building a new airport terminal, planning for sustainable growth, or supporting our local businesses. No one is better equipped to get the job done than our County government. Our community expects results, and we are going to live up to those expectations. There’s still a lot of work to do, but together we will make County government work for everyone. Thank you. We look forward to working with the Commissioners in the weeks and months ahead to adopt a strong budget for all of Mercer.