Montclair Council Annual Finance Meeting: Edgemont Pond, Merging Police/Municipal Offices

The Montclair Township Council held its 2012 finance meeting on Thursday, December 27, in which pending ordinances establishing a new parking utility to replace the Montclair Parking Authority (MPA) and creating parking enforcement officers for the new department were passed on second reading.  Resolutions passed included approval of emergency appropriations for Hurricane Sandy cleanup, an appointment of an auditor McEnerney, Brady and Company to conduct the township’s annual audit, the sale of the property underneath the Orange Road parking deck to CentroVerde site and deck owner DCH, and approval of the redevelopment agreement with Fountain Square for the planned assisted living facility on the Church Street parking lot.  There were five ordinances and seventeen resolutions in all, and all of them passed unanimously.

Edgemont Park Pond Dredging Contract
The biggest news from the last Montclair town council meeting was the long-sought settling of the dredging contract for the pond at Edgemont Park.  The original resolution was withdrawn, but Township Attorney Ira Karasick introduced a replacement resolution that was literally written at the last minute, which he read aloud for the sake of transparency. The township has an agreement with Montclair State University in which the university plans to cart the dredging material to its campus for a fill project provided it is clean or only slightly contaminated; this arrangement is known as Plan A.  If it is noticeably contaminated, an alternative plan—Plan B—will be pursued, in which less dredging will be done and the material will be carted at an additional cost. Plan A is budgeted at $798,477.50; Plan B, $808,315.  All of this was in the new resolution.

The level of contamination has yet to be fully determined.  After preliminary soil testing was done, Montclair State University requested a more comprehensive test.

“When we did the initial bids, we bid out the project and it came in high,” Township Manager Marc Dashield told reporters after the meeting.  “So what we did was, we said, ‘We’ll do an initial preliminary testing,’ and based on the preliminary testing, people [would] have a better idea of what they could do with it. So when [contractors] bid the next bid, we thought that may reduce the costs.   And then they were required to go back in and do a full testing.” Dashield said that Montclair State wanted to see the results of the full test to ensure that it was clean enough. Preliminary tests of the material to be dredged showed traces of natural contaminants that, at low levels, would not deter Montclair State from accepting the fill.

One line item from the original resolution did not change—the contractor. GMP Contracting of South Plainfield will still be the contractor, and the dredging will commence as soon as possible once the tests are completed.

MPA
While most of the other resolutions, including an emergency resolution that allows the parking utility ordinances to take effect immediately after the Montclair Parking Authority is dissolved on December 31 rather than the customary twenty-day waiting period for ordinances to take effect after passage (otherwise, parking fees would have been unenforceable for the first half of January 2013), passed without controversy or discussion.

Baskerville Asks Where the Women are in the Facilities Task Force
Fourth Ward Councilor Renée Baskerville raised questions about the all-male list of appointments to the Facilities Task Force, which was started back in August to look into merging the police department and the municipal offices into a single building to reduce operating costs. Mayor Robert Jackson explained that task force membership was based on volunteers who expressed interest in serving.

“Most of the potential developers who could serve on this don’t want to serve on it because they’re so interested in working on the actual projects, so they won’t have a conflict. So that’s very good news, as far as I’m concerned,” Mayor Jackson said.  He insisted that the fact that all of the designated Facilities Task Force appointees, which include 2012 mayoral candidate Harvey Susswein, were men was more by coincidence than by sexism. Dr. Baskerville countered that she wasn’t implying such a thing, only that she was raising a question about it.

“I was just trying to find out the process,” she said of the selection phase.  The mayor said that the task force was still open to anyone who wished to join.

Mayor Jackson was hopeful that consolidating the police department and the municipal building, for example, would allow for greater shared services with adjacent communities and allow the police to be closer to the township’s more problematic areas in terms of crime, as well as open the properties occupied by the current police headquarters (formerly the municipal building) and the current municipal building for development and add to the tax base.  The mayor said that both buildings are antiquated, and Deputy Mayor Robert Russo noted that the current municipal building is a former office building for a computer company.

“This is not a good building for a town hall,” Deputy Mayor Russo said of the big yellow box on Claremont Avenue.

Mayor Jackson suggested that relocating to the Lackawanna Plaza area was a potential location for a new municipal complex, but he admitted that the task force may decide that such a relocation might not be possible. “I do believe that it is, and it’s just a question of having very talented people to take a look at it and let us know,” he said.

Police Foundation
At the end of the meeting, Montclair Police Chief David Sabagh addressed the council to suggest the establishment of a police foundation to supplement the annual police department budget, which has been done in other towns and cities. It would be a non-profit organization that would get funding from local businesses and residents to support policing initiatives and special equipment purchases.  Second Ward Councilor Robin Schlager noted how the Montclair Fund for Educational Excellence operates in a similar fashion to supply the public schools with training and extra materials, and she told Chief Sabagh she’d be happy to work on his idea with him.

Senior/Community Center
At the beginning of the meeting, Deputy Mayor Robert Russo reiterated his commitment to explore possibility of a senior/community center in town, either at its own dedicated building (he mentioned the Social Security building on Bloomfield Ave.) or utilizing existing facilities. Russo, who says he is now carrying a Medicare card himself, has spoken with the Senior Citizens Action Committee about the need for such a facility for seniors in town.