Annually, the City of Monmouth has six general obligation bonds that have been issued for infrastructure projects over the years and each year Council has to abate or not levy a property tax to make the debt service payments on those bonds, says Mayor Rod Davies:
“Of the $2 million in annual debt service that we pay, we only levy $400,000 of property taxes to repay part of one bond payment of the six bonds that we have. This is a technical thing we do every year to not levy property taxes to pay for the debt service payments on our general obligation bonds. We are in the $26 million range at the moment. It is kind of where we have been all along. We pay debt down and then we have to issue debt to do big projects, like the Harlem Avenue project, we got a lot of grant funds, but then we had to have local funds to provide the match. That is when we issued our $5 million bond to put together the local matching funds. Right now, we have about $35 million of projects in progress.”
