Mayor pushing
municipal merger
BY SHERRY CONOHAN
Staff Writer
SEA BRIGHT — Forget about merging the municipal courts or police departments.
Outgoing Mayor Gregory W. Harquail has proposed merging the entire borough with another town.
Harquail, who chose not to run for re-election this year and will step down as mayor on Jan. 3, revealed at a council workshop meeting on Dec. 10 that he had approached Rumson about taking over all of Sea Bright.
"We would be the Sea Bright district of Rumson," he explained, "but they weren’t interested."
The stunned council members asked what would become of them and the continued representation of Sea Bright’s residents under his scenario.
Harquail said Sea Bright would become a ward of Rumson and, as such, would have representation on the Rumson Borough Council.
Sea Bright has 1,818 residents while Rumson has 7,137, according to the last official census in 2000.
Councilman Andrew Mencinsky quickly seized upon a major attraction of such an arrangement — Sea Bright would get to send its children to Rumson schools and bow out of its participation in the Shore Regional High School district, which is roundly lambasted in this borough because of the cost. Shore Regional collects $44,500 in taxes from the borough for each of the 31 students it sends to the school.
Harquail said Sea Bright would be able to help Rumson out with its affordable housing obligation under the Mount Laurel court mandates.
The mayor said the idea of merging the borough with Rumson actually was the idea of Councilman Charles Galloway and he decided to pursue it.
Galloway, like Harquail, is an independent.
Galloway said that the more logical merger of the borough would be with Monmouth Beach (population 3,595) "because of the bridge" separating Sea Bright from Rumson, and the difficulty that would present to police.
When the bridge is open, police couldn’t travel from one side to the other.
Mention also was made of a possible merger with Highlands (population 5,097), although that would present the same bridge drawback.
Both Rumson and Highlands lie across the Shrewsbury River from Sea Bright.
Harquail brought his idea up again at Saturday’s meeting of the Two Rivers Council of Mayors. He told his counterparts, during a discussion of consolidation of services, that he had gone to Rumson Mayor Charles S. Callman with his proposal for Rumson to take over Sea Bright and make it a ward of Rumson, but reported that Callman had no interest.
Callman piped up to say that wasn’t true. "I said we could talk," he responded.
Harquail said he would take up his proposal with Callman’s successor as mayor, John Ekdahl. Callman also did not seek re-election this year.
Ekdahl, contacted later, said that over the next 10 years, given where property taxes are headed, that consolidation of services will be discussed more and more. But he does not foresee a merger of Sea Bright with Rumson.
"Would Rumson, being rather conservative, be the first town to line up for merging services? I think not," he said. As to merging the two towns, he said there are "inherent problems with that., particularly the way the fire departments and police are set up."
"We’re more of a residential area and light on commercial," he explained. "Sea Bright is constituted differently. They have a large commercial area and they have quite a number of condos. It wouldn’t be the perfect marriage."
Callman said after the mayors’ meeting that he was concerned about the cost of such a merger of the two towns.
Callman observed that the West Park section of Rumson once had been part of the borough of Sea Bright. He referred to the peninsula at the easternmost end of Rumson, bounded by Ward and Waterman Avenues, where St. George’s Church stands, just across the Shrewsbury River from Sea Bright.
Callman said the area has "west" in its name because it was the western part of Sea Bright in the past. He thought it was in 1906, when Rumson — which had been settled since the 1600s —was incorporated, that West Park became part of Rumson.