I'm still pretty new to all of this and don't know quite what to expect from Board of Trustee meetings. The ones I've been to have been relatively quiet—not many impassioned outcries during the public comment period—and sparsely attended, but I get the sense that more people are watching at home.

Monday's meeting was a different story, and most seats in the house were filled by people anxious to hear the outcome of a resolution to submit a draft layoff plan to the state Department of Personnel. The people who signed up to comment were from the Municipal Court, the Department of Recreation and Cultural Affairs, but mostly from the Department of Public Works, and one woman attested to the fact that she'd only learned of the plan that afternoon. The fact that this is happening elsewhere in the state and in the next town over is of no consolation to the people whose jobs are at stake.

Some commenters implored the Trustees to talk to them personally and ask how things could be run more efficiently for savings to the Village. Others warned against outsourcing and held up Shade Tree as a cautionary tale of how privatization doesn't work, since the program was contracted out and then taken over by DPW. Many of them spoke eloquently and talked about their passion for doing good work; one man in particular stood out, though I couldn't find a place for him in the story I wrote.

His name was Larry Murphy, and he started working for the Parks Department in 1969. He looked back on the 1970s, when South Orange won awards for having some of the best parks in New Jersey, but there was a period of decline that culminated in the early 1990s when the Parks Department merged with Public Works. In the 1980s when Shade Tree was privatized, he remembers stepping in and doing some of the work that had been left undone because he couldn't let it be otherwise.

Many of the stories told at the meeting were powerful, but the Village's $5.1 million budget deficit is an inescapable fact. And no one wants their taxes raised 26 percent, which is the course charted in a draft budget in which no dramatic steps are taken. While nothing is final, and several steps remain before the layoffs become reality—the Department of Personnel must approve the draft plan, and then the Trustees have to vote on a finalized version—it looks like the Trustees' hands might be tied.