The Hillside Township Council tomorrow will hold a public hearing and vote on the $41.2 million budget they introduced a week ago.

The meeting at the municipal building will be held at 4 p.m. even though township meetings are usually scheduled for 7 p.m.

The meeting was scheduled during a council meeting on April 8. Township Clerk Janet Vlaisavljevic reminded the council at the time that some of them had to attend an event on Monday evening, calling for an earlier meeting time.

Second Ward Councilwoman Shelley-Ann Bates, a candidate for mayor, picked up on the budget meeting’s timing as a way to criticize one of her opponents, fellow Councilman Jerome Jewell.

In an e-mail sent out Sunday night with the subject line “A Tree Falls in the Forest,” Bates writes: “I don’t believe that I am being unfair to conclude that by holding the hearing in the afternoon instead of in its usual evening time slot Councilman Jewell hopes that you won’t hear the noise of the reduction of services and the hike in municipal property taxes.”

“We are being told that a conflicting “event” is the reason that Mr. Jewell and the council majority has scheduled the hearing . . . You may ask, what event could possibly take precedent over the passage of the municipal budget? I did too. Councilman [Jewell’s] response: ‘None of your business!'”

“We should be thankful to Councilman Jewell for his brutal albeit unusual honesty. Most Hillside taxpayers have felt that this was the overall sentiment held by the Council Majority but it wasn’t until those words escaped his parted lips that anyone actually voiced it.

“This year’s budget’s lateness has been blamed by Jewell and the Council Majority at various times on figures as local as current Mayor Karen McCoy-Oliver all the way up to Governor Jon Corzine. We’ve been told as recently as a month ago that our budget was based on zero extraordinary aid yet now that zero state aid has become a reality they say we need service cuts and tax hikes – all of this, weeks after Mr. Jewell and his Council Majority advocated for and awarded long term employee contracts.”