Damascus budget passed

By SARAH KOENIG

DAMASCUS — Damascus Township passed its 2002 budget with little fanfare on Monday, December 17 at their monthly meeting.

The supervisors said that they might need to apply for a tax anticipation loan to carry them through until April or May of 2002, and made a resolution to get the ball rolling. Township secretary and treasurer Alice Reynolds estimated a loan amount of $125,000, but said that it was only a rough estimate and that the resolution passed Monday only allowed the township to proceed with due process to obtain a tax anticipation loan.

Supervisor Stan Kuta stressed the need to cut down on expenditures, saying that the township had reached its millage on real estate property taxes and was not paying enough attention to expenditure of those tax dollars.

Resident Gary Packer, who spent most of the evening advocating coordination between the supervisors as a means of eliminating confusion and having things run smoother, said that the problem of not having enough money was “a great opportunity to work together and work out any differences between the supervisors.”

In other board news, the supervisors: set January 24 as a date for the public discussion of a comprehensive road management plan, following a complaint from resident Rolf Beck who said that the supervisors would be violating the Sunshine Law (Open Meeting’s Law) if they discussed it privately; instructed Supervisor chairman Bill Gager to look into replacing Town Solicitor Rich Henry; admitted that they had leased property to Princeton Towers, a telecommunications company intending to build a cell tower in the township, prior to running it by the Damascus Planning Commission; and set its re-organizational meeting was for Monday, January 7, 2002 at noon.