Highland Park council weighs delaying 2025 tax sale, budgeting $400,000 reserve hit

Highland Park Borough Council members on March 25 discussed changes to the proposed 2025 municipal budget, including a staff recommendation to delay the borough's fourth-quarter tax sale, a move administrators said would give residents more time to pay but require the borough to budget an estimated $400,000 shortfall.

The proposal, presented by borough staff with Chief Financial Officer Noireya Champion participating, would shift some tax-collection activity into the following year. "We're proposing a potential deacceleration of our tax sale," Champion said, describing the change as a way to ease immediate pressure on residents and on tax-office operations while the borough budgets for uncollected taxes.

Why it matters: delaying the sale would reduce the immediate risk that residents who miss a single quarterly payment are swept into a tax-lien sale during the tight year-end processing window. Staff said the borough would budget an additional $400,000 reserve to cover taxes that otherwise would have been collected in 2025.

Council members and staff discussed how the change would affect the borough's surplus and future budgets. Staff reported the borough's surplus balance at about $4.7 million before the proposal and said the budget proposal would reduce available surplus to roughly $2.0 million while remaining within the administration's comfort range. "This year it's going to be a bit of a hit," staff said, adding they used some surplus to soften the impact.

Budget drivers reviewed during the discussion included a roughly $400,000 increase in debt-service costs and other upward pressures across departments. The packet summary reported total general appropriations increasing 11.4% overall from the prior year; staff noted that, excluding grants, total appropriations in the draft budget rose about 40.3% compared with the prior year.

Department-level changes discussed included a proposed 3% increase in the library appropriation (the administration said it negotiated the figure with the library director and the library board), additional funds for public-works labor, and a staffing proposal for the fire department aimed at cutting overtime costs. Fire officials and staff reported overtime in the fire department on the order of $70,000 last year and said adding coverage (either one new full-time firefighter with benefits or a set of part-time hires to cover night shifts) would reduce overtime; the chief and public-safety committee will return with a recommendation.

Staff also reviewed how grants are treated in the budget. Several grant lines that appeared in the 2024 budget are not listed the same way in the 2025 draft because some grants were one-time awards or have not yet been awarded; staff explained that when grants arrive they are inserted into the budget later by Chapter 159 resolutions and are generally revenue-offsetting.

Other revenue notes in the draft: projected cannabis-tax revenue was shown at about $55,000 for 2025 based on two operating retail stores; staff cautioned that new stores and timing of remittance can change that figure. Main Street program funding and sponsorship targets were discussed separately in the meeting packet.

No formal action was taken on the budget during the session; staff said the council will revisit the items and may introduce the budget at the legally required introduction meeting in early April if the council agrees to proceed.