After Spending Freely, Liberal Town Faces Fight on Frugality

So a storm was set off when 100 self-described “PTA moms” took out a full-page advertisement in The Montclair Times supporting a candidate for mayor in the elections on Tuesday who has questioned how much the town is required to spend on libraries and called for a re-examination of school busing that dates to the 1970s, citing its cost.

At coffees and cocktail gatherings, she and her slate of candidates for the Township Council have warned nodding residents that Montclair is at a breaking point — that it must cut waste and shrink government.

Asked at a debate about scholarships for poor children to attend a prekindergarten the town helped set up 14 years ago, the candidate, Karen Turner, praised it as the Rolls-Royce of programs, but wondered if the money might be better spent buying “20 families a Chevy.”

In this push for frugality is the national debate writ small: the town spent lavishly for years, going into debt to pay for things like shade trees and a $45 million LEED-certified school, and now residents are facing the bill.

Montclair is not the only place finding itself with a tax revolt as a result. But it ranks among the most unlikely.

“The most liberal town in America has a Tea Party faction,” marveled Cary Chevat, a local political activist.

The campaign has opened up a debate about what kind of town the residents want this to be. Montclair likes to think of itself as an idyll of liberal values, where families black and white, gay and straight, very rich and very poor mingle in the public schools.

Ms. Turner’s critics argue that eliminating things like scholarships to the prekindergarten, or starving libraries where residents without computers can use them, will ruin the diversity that, in the words of one of her opponents, “makes Montclair Montclair.”

“If we end up in a situation where the things that we all value in this town are held out as being unaffordable, even if we say, ‘Of course we value these things; we just don’t have enough money for them,’ the property values will plummet because people like me will stop moving to this town,” said Charles Rosen, who has lived here for eight years. “I’ll move to Short Hills with the other rich white guys.”

On local blogs, Ms. Turner’s supporters argue that this “Montclair exceptionalism” is simply too expensive. “It’s all this ‘what makes Montclair special’ language that will bankrupt us as a town,” one wrote.

Typically, the town’s elections are decided by fewer than 7,000 of its 24,000 registered voters. But this one has galvanized people who have never before voted for local offices — including one of the candidates running with Ms. Turner, LeeAnn Carlson, who, when asked why, explained that she had not realized the town had such problems until recently. In the kind of statement that soothes in a town like this, she added that she had voted in 2008 as “an ardent supporter” of Mr. Obama.

Ms. Turner’s two opponents — Robert Jackson, a developer, and Harvey Susswein, a retired management consultant — are identified as more liberal and are expected to split that vote, giving Ms. Turner a good chance to win.

Strikingly, all three mayoral candidates agree on the broad outlines of the problems — just not the solution.

In the last decade, Montclair’s debt has more than doubled, to $250 million, as it used short-term, low-interest loans to pay many operating expenses as well as to build or refurbish schools and athletic fields.

“Nobody paid attention because it didn’t mean an immediate increase in anyone’s taxes,” said John Reichman, the chairman of the Capital Finance Committee, an advisory group that was set up by — and that often feuds with — the Council.