New Year 2012: Interview with Mayor McCarthy, Part One

To start off the New Year, Patch sat down with Mayor Raymond McCarthy, currently serving his eleventh year in office, to discuss the good and the bad from 2011, and what's ahead in 2012 for the township of Bloomfield.

In this two-part interview, McCarthy discusses his own history with Bloomfield, his personal goals, the changes residents can expect in the coming year and a very important upcoming birthday.

Patch:  What do you see when you look back at 2011?

McCarthy:  In 2011, we started off with pretty much a new council.  The first newsworthy thing we did was, we brought on a new Administrator, Yoshe Manale. 

Patch:  What difference has he made?

McCarthy:  He’s made a big difference.  He’s always trying to find a way to improve things, always trying to find new revenues.  We’re not a business for profit – that’s one of the things people forget.  But we have to raise revenue somehow.  The only definite way we know to do that is raising taxes.  And that’s not always the best way to do it.

Patch:  Were there high and low points in 2011?

McCarthy:  I guess if there was one early . . . I don’t want to call it a mistake, I want to call it a failure of presentation -- it was the   I still believe it’s a good idea.  I think our presentation of it just needed to be refined.  Some of that had to do with the fact that Yoshe just came on board, so we didn’t have a lot of time to talk about it [before it was introduced to the public.] 

We’re a community that has a large number of apartment buildings and a large number of exempt properties.  So with a sewer utility we pick up revenues that we normally would not get.  The one thing that drove me nuts was trying to understand [why it generated opposition.]  When we did the numbers, the average savings per taxpayer would have been $349.  The average sewer utility bill would have been about $200.  No matter how you look at it, you’re still saving $150 per average household. 

Patch:  Will it come back to the table in 2012?

McCarthy:  We think not.  No sense trying if it will be shot down.

Patch:  Do you have anything to say about the ? Will that be coming back in 2012? 

McCarthy:  I think we’ll be reinforcing it the same way that the state does.

Patch:  So you think it will remain as it is, minus the 5% cap?

McCarthy:  Yes.  There won’t be any rent control in the community being introduced on my part.  The first thing anybody has to do – and they still haven’t done this – is prove to me that there’s a need for rent control.  

I started out after college a social worker for a number of years.  So I understand the tugging on the heartstrings.  But it doesn’t mean that because somebody’s going through a tough time, the whole town should change because of that. 

Patch:  When you say, ‘somebody’s going through a tough time,’ what percentage of people are we talking about?

McCarthy:  A very, very small percentage.  We [went over] this for a year with the council.  We had three to five people saying they had unreasonable rent increases.  If you sat at those council meetings as I did, time after time after time, it was all about the management of that property. 

They had all these crazy things going on over at Troy Towers.  We had a hundred people in the audience one night, they came before us [saying] there should be rent control and I’d say 95 out of 100 percent of those people were talking about some problem in the building.  They talked about not enough benches. They talked about not enough parking spots.  They talked about not re-doing the pool.  They complained about a park that the landlord was going to put there.  There was no one coming before us saying, ‘My rent was just raised 35 percent!’  There was nobody saying that.

“There was one woman whose rent was increased by 20 percent, and she was protected by the old rent control law from 1994.  We had four major advocates for rent control, social activists, who didn’t want to drive her to court! ‘Why should we driver her [to court]?’ ”

Patch:  Is there anyone who would be adversely affected by a new rent control law in Bloomfield?

McCarthy:  Yes, the majority of the town.  And here’s why.  If the market is not driven by the rental market then you have is landlords not being able to increase their rents.  Whereby, the heat goes up, electric goes up, insurance goes up.  It doesn’t catch up to the small rent increase. 

The market value of a house is directly connected to the income produced by that building minus the expenses.  So if your expenses go up and your income goes down, the value of your house diminishes. 

What happens with rent control communities is, those people who are most affected by rent control, the landlords, now go for tax appeals.  The assessment comes down when the income doesn’t rise.

“When you use a cap rate (a capitalization rate) to determine what that property is worth, the value comes down.  There’s only one thing to do.  You sell or you go to tax court.  You go to tax court, most of the time the judge says, ‘you know what, your house isn’t worth $300,000.’  So you pay less taxes.  But when you pay less taxes, who’s going to pay them?  The taxpayers, that's who.”

Patch:  So what recourse do tenants have whose landlords raise their rents to unconscionable levels?

McCarthy:  They go to court.  There is already a law to protect tenants [from unconscionable rent hikes.]  It exists, so there’s no reason to duplicate it. (pause.) People sometimes confuse rent control with affordable housing.

This is the first of two Patch interviews with the mayor.  Check back tomorrow, Jan. 6, to read Part Two.