BOE Takes Second Crack at Bancroft Proposal

The Haddonfield board of education will hold its second public meeting in less than a month tonight to explain a plan for the public purchase of the 19.7-acre Bancroft property on Kings Highway East.

The meeting is at 7:30 p.m. at the middle school auditorium on Lincoln Avenue.

The board rolled out a $32 million proposal in a public meeting on Oct. 19 to buy Bancroft, a center for the developmentally disabled that has occupied the site, now adjacent to the high school, for the last 128 years. Two details of that plan -- selling Radnor Avenue athletic fields, possibly for residential development; the $32 million price tag -- were sore spots in a nearly three-hour, standing-room-only meeting at the Municipal Hall.

The revamped plan that will be unveiled tonight will scrap the sale of the athletic fields and pitch the plan as a more digestible, $17.7 million initial outlay to purchase the property and do some improvements, but put off other construction for a later date.

"The word we got is don't try to do it all at once," Steve Weinstein, the school board president said Thursday. "It was 'too big a project, it cost too much,' and so on. We came up with a revision and this is our opportunity to put that out there and explain it."

The borough released a cost study for the Bancroft acquisition in September. The price was $19.52 million, $14.27 of which would be financed through tax dollars. That would mean a typical taxpayer with a home assessed at the borough average of $491,000 would pay an additional $271 a year in taxes for the next 20 years. The typical property tax bill in the borough is $12,000 yearly.

The initial school plan nearly doubled the taxpayer cost to $477.84 yearly for the typical home owner to finance $30 million of costs over 20 years. The borough plan adds $16 for every additional million dollars of costs. A similar calculation would hike the school-plan, taxpayer cost to $509.84 yearly.

The new board plan projects an annual cost for a residential property taxpayer at $318.54 over 20 years, or $6,371 dollars for each family. It also projects a Phase II of the plan for the construction of a 24,000-square-foot learning center for an additional $7.2 million. Those additional costs are not included in the $318.54 calculation.

Both phases of the new plan sheds $8 million from the original $32 million proposal two week ago by not including the cost of a new municipal library, which connects to the learning center on a rendering of the site plan released then.

The borough calculations do not include a new library and learning center.

Haddonfield’s average property tax of $12,088.88 is nearly twice the state average at $7,776, according to the state Department of Community Affairs. Haddonfield has the second highest average property tax bill in Camden County. It trails Tavistock, an exclusive enclave at the tip of Haddonfield, enclosed mostly in an exclusive golf course. Haddonfield's property tax bills are 27 percent higher than Voorhees, $8,777.41, third in the county.