BY ELAINE VAN DEVELDE
Staff Writer
EDISON — Owners of plots at the St. James Episcopal Church cemetery will no longer be financially buried by fees to maintain their plots.
The Township Council unanimously adopted an ordinance at the June 8 meeting to roll back a $750 maintenance fee for each expected interment at the historic site — also known as the Historic Piscatawaytown Burial Grounds — to $50 for residents and $100 for non-residents.
Senior citizens are already exempted from paying any township fees. They would be exempt from this fee also, Mayor George A. Spadoro said.
A few weeks ago, the mayor appealed to the governing body to rescind the original ordinance, adopted last year, setting the one-time $750 maintenance and administrative fee.
Council members agreed.
“As always, we would like to minimize any possible hardship caused to residents and hope this is a satisfactory resolution to the matter for all parties involved,” council President Parag Patel said.
But the $50 fee is still too much for resident Wendy Borwegen.
Borwegen’s husband Peter, in life a longtime paid Edison firefighter, is buried at the cemetery.
Borwegen wants the council to adopt an ordinance that would exempt people who have given years of service to the township.
Peter “Butch” Borwegen died of a heart attack in his 40s at the firehouse he worked out of.
While he did not die in the line of duty, Wendy Borwegen said he gave too much to the township to expect his family to fork over a dime after his death.
“I said it before and I will repeat it: $1 is too much to pay,” Borwegen said. “It was a rule that people who wanted to become paid firefighters in town had to answer a certain percentage of fire calls voluntarily first in order to be considered for the job. My husband gave not only that service, but the rest of his life to that fire company and this town.”
Her in-laws paid $50 in 1938 for their plot. Her husband’s great-grandfather, William, and his wife, Helene Pletzkow, are buried there.
“It’s the principal, really,” she said. “I think the mayor did this because of the campaign and now he lost, so it was for nothing. I’m not a senior citizen. I am just someone whose husband worked for this town and gave, basically, his life to his work. His family deserves better. There should be no fee. My kids don’t live in Edison any more either, so now they’re going to have to pay the $100. It’s not right. Not after Butch served this town.”
But Spadoro said the fee was nothing personal, just a way to deal with the necessary maintenance of the land that the township is responsible for.
Borwegen said she confronted the mayor at the town’s memorial service for deceased firefighters and police and he promised to rectify the situation.
The township recently discovered it owned the land and assessed the one-time fee to deal with the land’s maintenance and supervision.
But some plot owners balked at the fee and its April Fools’ Day deadline.
They appealed to the mayor, and he recommended the fee be changed to what he said was the more palatable $50 for residents and $100 for non-residents.
“Residents came to see me and made a strong case that the fee was too high,” Spadoro said in a previous interview. “It is very rare for a township to actually own a cemetery. Council had to figure out a way to deal with ownership and maintenance and that was it.”