June 9th Meeting Summary

Here is a quick summary of what happened at our meeting on June 9th.

We introduced all of our capital ordinances for 2025. This was after months of discussion and debate. As you may already know, Department Heads submit requests for capital projects to the Township Manager and CFO. A subset of those projects are presented to the Council as part of our budget discussions in February and March. They were then trimmed down a second time before this introduction.

The first capital ordinance is for $9.9 million in bonds, and includes the Everett Field renovation (which costs $4 million before grants and donations are applied). Also included in that ordinance is rehabilitation/replacement of the Franklin Street bridge, reconstruction of Linden Avenue, Dodd Terrace, Summit Road, and Afterglow Way, replacing the roof of the Community Center, and $468K of investment in police department equipment. There are nearly 26 projects laid out in the ordinance - so I encourage you to take a look here.

Next capital ordinance is for our water and sewer utility for $950K in bonds. This will pay for major repairs of the sewer line near Derwent Avenue, additional critical repairs of the sewer line that were identified by the smoke testing project, acquisition of two dump trucks, and additional work on our systems to address nitrate levels.

We have a capital ordinance of $20K that is just focused on investment in IT infrastructure. In addition, another ordinance is for the pool utility for $27,500 for new furniture and renovations of the basketball courts. The final is for $132,200 in the water and sewer utility to update our Asset Management Plan, money for lead service replacements, a water interconnection study with Montclair, and sewer mapping. All three of these capital ordinances and financed out of our existing budget.

Votes for all of these moneys will be at our next meeting. Capital ordinances all require a supermajority vote of 4. If you have any comments, I encourage you to email the entire Council here.

Under resolutions, we submitted a grant to repave Hamilton, Crestmont Place and Crestmont Road to the DOT. We awarded contracts for holiday decorations in downtown, Spatial Data logic, and L&P integrators. We accepted several grants for Clean Communities ($35K), Distracted Driving ($7K), and a Federal Highway Safety Grant ($7K).

Our next meeting is on Monday June 23rd and its going to be a big meeting. Not only will be voting on all of the capital ordinances, and essentially the final vote to renovate Everett Field, we will be voting on our Affordable Housing commitments over the next 10 years. The Planning Board is having a special meeting on June 19th to discuss the plan. I encourage you to look at it and attend their special meeting. More information here.

As always, please send comments to the entire Council here.