When Gov. Phil Murphy signed into law a $15 minimum wage last month, he pitched the phased-in pay bumps as "a path to the middle class."

Now, it's budget season for local governments and some officials are grumbling that the mandatory raises for part-time public employees are forcing municipalities to choose between raising property taxes on New Jersey's already overburdened homeowners or trimming back services to residents.

Virtually every municipality or county in the state has part-time or seasonal workers who monitor crosswalks for children on school mornings, help file library books a couple times a week or sit under an umbrella on a hot summer day and check beach badges.

Those employees have been making as little as $8 an hour, but no longer.

Local governments are not exempt from the state's new minimum wage law, which raises the hourly wage floor for most jobs to $10 in July and then by an additional $1 every Jan. 1 until 2024, when it hits the $15 mark.

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The mayor of Middletown says the township estimates the impact to be a total of $750,000 to its budget spread out through 2024. The township declined to share the analysis that arrived at that figure with the Asbury Park Press.

Using payroll records, the Press estimates the additional expense for Middletown this year to be just $28,000 this year, although it will grow to $177,000 when the wage increase is fully realized.

"The way it impacts a Shore town is different than the way it will impact a town in Camden County or Sussex County," said Tony Perry, mayor of Monmouth County's largest municipality. "Some towns are going to be able to absorb it better than others, but I can't just sit idly by and say nothing as more and more mandates come down and put more burdens on our taxpayers."

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The latest available state data shows some 100,000 people in New Jersey were working for minimum wage in 2017. Another 750,000 or so make less than $15 and would see a direct benefit from the new law, according to New Jersey Policy Perspective, a think tank that supports liberal causes.

Those workers at the bottom of the wage scale have to stretch dollars to live in one of America's most expensive states.

In 2017, the cost of living was 13 percent more expensive in New Jersey than in the U.S. as a whole. Only Hawaii, the District of Columbia, New York and California were pricier, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.

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A single person needs to work 2,080 hours annually — 40 hours a week with no unpaid time off — at $13.37 per hour to be self-sufficient in Monmouth County, according to Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Living Wage Calculator. A single mother with one child needs nearly $29 an hour to live free of the manifestations of true poverty, albeit without any money left over for restaurants, entertainment, vacations or savings.

“Public employees paychecks are funded by tax dollars and with anything that comes out of our tax dollars we have to be very careful how we spend it," said Leo Gertner, an attorney and minimum wage expert for the National Employment Law Center, which advocates for low-wage workers, "but I can't think of any better use than making sure that the people who clean our streets or the people who ensure that city vehicles are functioning are able to live and raise their kids in the same towns in which they work in.”

That answer doesn't satisfy the concerns of what opponents see as yet another squeeze on municipal finances.

Because of a 2 percent cap on property tax increases implemented in 2010, even a relatively small bump in expenses adds to the tightrope act that is local government budgeting, said Michael Cerra, the assistant executive director of the New Jersey League of Municipalities.

Cerra pointed to other changes, such as the expiration of the arbitration cap that tempered growth of police and fire salaries, in saying the big picture was "death by a thousand cuts."

"We’re not looking at this as one issue," Cerra said. "This is one of a series of cost drivers that have been put on local governments in recent years. The cumulative effect from which — under the 2 percent cap — creates budgetary pressures."

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Here's how it looks in Middletown

Last year, the township bought 45,000 hours of labor from employees for less than $15 per hour, according to a Press analysis of township payroll records obtained through the state's public records law.

If all of those hours would have been paid at the 2024 hourly minimum wage of $15, the township's expenses would have increased by about $177,000.

That total includes $141,369 more in wages, plus another estimated $35,342 in pension contributions and employment taxes.

An increase of that size represents one-quarter of 1 percent of the township's 2018 general budget. On the typical Middletown homeowner's tax bill that would be equal to about $23 annually.

The increase would have affected 77 township employees last year, including 26 who no longer work for the town.

Most are crossing guards, although some are listed as part-timers for the public works department or the library. Typically, these employees are working the annual equivalent of 10 to 15 hours per week.

The single largest bump in pay would have been $5,600 for an employee who worked an average of 28 hours per week at a pay rate of $11.17 per hour. That does not include additional pension contributions or employment taxes paid by the town on their behalf.

The Press also requested Middletown provide any analyses that would have estimated the effect of the increased minimum wage on township finances. The township identified such a report — and two updated versions — as well as a document titled "data for Mayor Perry" but declined to release these records, citing the transparency law's exception for "advisory, consultative and deliberative materials."

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Russ Zimmer: 732-557-5748, razimmer@app.com, @russzimmer