municipal building among possibilities
Converting gym in
municipal building among possibilities
BY SHERRY CONOHAN
Staff Writer
SEA BRIGHT — A new municipal building in the north end of the borough-owned Peninsula House parking lot could be just the ticket, in the opinion of the Borough Council.
Another option may be constructing an office building for municipal offices or for the court at the north end of the public library in the municipal parking lot.
Those appeared to be the most favored options considered by the council at a special workshop meeting on Dec. 10 addressing how to get badly needed extra space.
As always, however, there’s cost involved and the council wasn’t certain it could afford either of those options.
Other alternatives considered in the free-wheeling discussion were putting a second story on the present municipal building or, the bargain basement proposal, converting the gymnasium in the Borough Hall/Community Center to a combined court/council chambers and court offices.
If the gym would be usurped, a new gym might be built by the beach pavilion.
The court office is currently housed in a trailer behind the borough hall.
Councilman William J. Keeler, who led the discussion on long-range planning, said building a basic gym would be the cheapest new construction and the most likely to command a grant.
When the three-hour session ended, there was agreement on two things: bringing in a structural engineer to assess whether a second story could be constructed on Borough Hall and meeting in workshop again to continue the discussion. That meeting was scheduled for Jan. 5 at 7 p.m.
Keeler, who oversees the borough’s purse strings, explained at the outset of the meeting that $40,000 to $60,000 had been set aside in the budget to hire a professional to help the council and mayor determine the best use of all borough-owned properties in town.
"But I felt that without giving them a pretty precise idea of what we want, we could go through $40,000 to $60,000 pretty quickly," he told his colleagues on the council.
Keeler said his focus for several years has been on acquiring the Allied/Marine lumber property next to Borough Hall for a municipal complex but he couldn’t get anyone interested in that idea. Then, in the last three years, he said, it looked like the borough was going to be moving in that direction, a reference to a proposed land swap that has since been called off.
Under the land swap, the borough would have given the late John Mulheren the northern one-third of the Peninsula House parking lot adjoining the Chapel Beach Club which he owned with his wife. In exchange, the borough would have received the Allied/Marine lumber building, plus $300,000, from Mulheren.
Mulheren had decided not to pursue the land swap prior to his death on December 15. At the workshop, held just prior to Mulheren’s death, Keeler asked how the borough might move now that the land swap had been terminated. Mayor Gregory W. Harquail said they would have to ask borough attorney Scott C. Arnette to go back to Mulheren to see what, if anything, might be worked out.
Keeler said if the borough could acquire the Allied/Marine lumber property, it could move the Public Works Department and the Police Department there. Then, the other offices and the First Aid and Emergency Management offices could move into the present police station.
He said a gym could be built in the "barn structure" in the back of the Allied/Marine building.
The borough is renting space for public works now and could lose it at any time, he noted.
Keeler said the borough might want to look into sharing a court facility with another town, but Councilwoman Maria Fernandes said she didn’t want to hear anything about regionalizing services. It would just be like Shore Regional High School, she said. In addition, she said, it would be disruptive to the police schedule to have officers going out of town to go to court.
The borough has complained bitterly about its contribution to Shore Regional High School which receives more than $1.3 million in taxes from the borough as its contribution to run the district. Currently there are 31 students from Sea Bright in the school.
If the contribution arrangement could be changed and reduced to $500,000, he said, "we could do anything we want with new construction," with that money freed up for bond payment.
For such a transfer to take place, the reduction in the tax rate for the regional school district would have to be matched by an increase in the municipal tax rate.
It was Councilman Andrew Mencinsky, the liaison to the library, who proposed building a new municipal complex at the north end of the Peninsula House lot and suggested moving the library to that site. Keeler had earlier suggested building a new facility next to the library where it is, with court offices on the north side of it, which Fernandes called "a very interesting idea."
Councilman Charles Galloway raised the prospect of the borough financing a new building with the help of income from renting out space in it. He said Manasquan rents out part of its building and, if it needs the space in the future, can decide not to renew the lease of the tenant.
Harquail said if the borough can get an overall plan together for what it wants to do, it can tackle it step by step, as the money becomes available.
"We don’t have to bite it all off at one time," he said.