By: centraljersey.com
To paraphrase. . .I have a dream . . . I have a dream that one day our youngest will be with our oldest under the same roof enjoying life as it was meant it to be . . . I have a dream . . .Well, it is really a suggestion put forth to solve some pressing issues the people of the township have.
The suggestion starts with the Hopewell Valley schools administration function being relocated to a newly constructed facility in the "Pennytown Improvement Area." This move will have the administration in a regional setting. If a transition period is needed, the administration can relocate in the existing school buildings temporarily. The new facility should be designed for the new 25th-century computer telecommunication environment. A win-win situation.
Next, place the teenagers and the senior citizens in the vacated administration building. The senior citizens should occupy the first floor, with the main and left entrances for their use. The teenagers would occupy the second floor and the right entrance would be for their use. Both floors have facilities. The gym could be shared for other activities. There is parking space and it is on secondary roads, reducing traffic problems. The building has water and sanitation arrangements. The neighbors would be the "watch dog" group. The police and fire personnel are close at hand. The local businesses would enjoy their patronage. The school buses and the maintenance function would not be disturbed. A win-win situation.
Additionally, the Boy Scout operation could occupy the vacated senior citizen building with its parking/recreation area and its favorable location. A win-win situation.
There is one more dream – The proposed Animal Habitat on Reed Road could be established within the grounds of the county’s horse farm on the road out of Pennington and it would be a point of interest along the Lawrence-Hopewell Trail. It would be regional in participation.
It is something to think and to talk about.
Don Mauer Pennington
Politically motivated?
This is an open letter to Pennington Borough Council:
In August 2010, the Historic Preservation Task Force held a series of public meetings to introduce their proposal to the community. The majority of the standing-room-only crowds in attendance were vehemently and vocally opposed to the Historic District Ordinance and the proposed powers to be granted to the Historic District Commission.
Intriguingly, after my outspoken opposition to the Historic Ordinance and Commission, our house, "The Cornell House" at 111 N. Main St., the oldest house in Pennington, dating back to 1784, and a proud participant in the "Homes on Main" Pennington Historic House Tour in 2008, as well as a highlight of the book "Pennington Profiles," has been eliminated from the planned Pennington Crossroads Historic District in the January 2011 draft of the Historic District map. Our neighbors, the Blackwells, who also have also been outspoken critics of the Historic District proposal, also have had their property removed from the Historic District in the latest draft of the map.
Curious? Yes. Politically motivated? Of course!
However, this creates a situation where the owners of the oldest house in Pennington are no longer "stakeholders" in the dialogue about the proposed Pennington Historic District, and no longer entitled to participate in the long-delayed survey of Historic District property owners about their opinions regarding the Task Force proposals.
In August, when I asked a member of the Task Force why Pennington couldn’t enact a Historic District with an Advisory Commission, (a "weak" commission) instead of a Commission with regulatory powers, (a "strong" commission) the response I received was, "What would be the point of that?"
Well, the point of an Advisory Historic Commission would be to allow Pennington Borough to apply for grants for the Historic District, which is what the Task Force and Borough Council members have claimed as their motivation, while ensuring that property rights in Pennington Borough remain sacrosanct, and that property owners in the Historic District will not become involuntary members of a "Homeowners Association."
According to the NJ Department of Environmental Protection Historic Preservation Office, there is no additional benefit to a community for having a "strong" ordinance versus a "weak" ordinance as it regards obtaining Historic Grant Funding from the Certified Local Governments (CLG) grants. The total amount of funding available from CLG grants in the last two years, to be doled out among the 45 communities in New Jersey that are eligible, is a total of $80,000-$90,000 per year. Pennington could become eligible for its slice of this 45-piece pie, and get about $1,800!
This effort is not a benign attempt to give homeowners architectural advice and provide Pennington Borough Council with the opportunity to apply for grant money. Otherwise they could enact an advisory ("weak") ordinance. Clearly, the Task Force and Historic District Commission members want to have control over the decisions made by their neighbors. That is the bottom line.
I oppose the current proposals by the Pennington Borough Historic Preservation Committee, and I hope members of the Borough Council will take these concerns into account.
I applaud all of the volunteers in our community who give of their time and talents to make Pennington such a wonderful place to live, work and raise a family.
Molly Sword McDonough The Cornell House Pennington
Adjust the plan
To the editor:
The Hopewell Township Committee eventually will vote on the ELSA sewer project, which would bring sewer and water services to hundreds of homes and business in the areas east and south of the Pennington Circle. The township has two reasons for considering this proposal: (1) some businesses around the circle are experiencing water quality problems; and (2) the township needs sewers to support the 150 new units it must develop in order to meet the state’s low-income housing mandate.
To spread the construction cost amongst more homeowners, the township solution is to force sewers on the residents of Orchard, Crest, Plymouth, Indian Hill and Ewing Gardens area, even though these areas have fully functional well and septic systems.
The estimated cost ranges between $44,000 and five times that amount per home. If the proposal passes, the township Committee, instead of taking $44k out of our 5-month-old baby boy’s college fund in order to pay this completely unnecessary expense, we will have to move out of the affected area.
We urge the township to adjust its plan to either: (a) have the entire town’s tax base pay for capital costs that are driven by a state mandate; or (b) only install sewers in the areas that actually need them: west of Route 31 and north of Denow.
Erik and Sally-Ann Limpaecher Orchard Avenue, Hopewell Township
No relation to reality
To the editor:
I’d like to share my thoughts regarding the largest line item in our annual school budget – teacher salaries. Teachers’ salaries recently have grown at rates that bear no relation to the reality the taxpayers funding the district have faced these last two years.
I’ve written on this topic before, but I wanted to review it again before the election. Agree with my conclusions or not, I think it is important for everyone in the district to understand the current pay scale.
In the current teacher contract, consistent with every teacher contract I reviewed in the area, you’ll find three charts in the back, detailing the pay scale for each of the three years of the contract. Consider the salary history of a first-year teacher hired the first year of the contract (2008-09) – with just a BA degree, this "Step 1" teacher was paid $46,074 base pay. The following school year (2009-10), that now second-year ("Step 2") teacher was paid $49,270 base pay (a 6.94 percent raise). And for this current school year (2010-11), that now "Step 3" teacher is being paid $52,364 base pay (a 6.28 percent raise). This rate of increasing salaries is clearly unsustainable.
My suggestion is that the next teacher contract have only one chart, and that chart should be last school year’s chart (2009-10) from the current contract. That would give our now "Step 4" teacher a 0.54 percent increase over their current pay in the first year of the new contract, and then a 3.37 percent increase the second year of the new contract, and then ending their sixth year with the district being paid $56,255, another 3.37 percent increase over the previous year. Of course, the raises across the board would be similar, except for those teachers in "Step 18" who would see no pay raise, but should be allowed to keep their current pay levels, defined as a new "Step 19." "Step 19" would equal the "Step 18" pay rate from the current 2010-11 school year chart, effectively freezing their salary at $85,872 (for a teacher with just a BA degree) for the life of the contract (three years).
Other district contracts have more conventional means to control increases year-after-year, but this "Step" progression makes it very hard to manage teacher salary increases. I’m curious what our school board candidates propose to control the growth of this portion of our school budget.
Ken Hansen Hopewell Township
More respect and good manners
To the editor:
I watched the video of the Township Committee meeting from Feb. 28 and was honestly astonished as to how it evolved into such a mean-spirited affair. The argument was over the way in which Mayor Jim Burd handled the process of selecting the new municipal court judge. It is clearly the case that Vanessa Sandom and John Murphy had a valid point as to the way in which the interview process unfolded. It could have and should have been more inclusive. Ms. Sandom and Mr. Murphy were not involved in the interview process for each candidate and should have been.
However, Ms. Sandom and Mr. Murphy did have the opportunity to submit questions to all candidates being interviewed by a sub-committee made up of Mayor Burd and Deputy Mayor Mike Markulec; and in the end they did interview in Executive Session the candidate that was ultimately selected. Mr. Burd has admitted that the process could have been handled better. The end result was that the entire committee did interview and vote on the final candidate and the appointment was made after a fair amount of unnecessary bickering and insults.
There is no question in my mind that there have been many instances over the years where the members in the minority party had little say in how a process unfolded. Sometimes it is intentional and other times not so. In this case, Mr. Burd made it clear that it was not his intent to exclude anyone.
In either case, it is my goal along with the whole of the Hopewell Township Republican Committee to raise the debate bar to a higher level. It is one thing to argue an issue in earnest and yet another to allow a meeting to dissolve into a scolding session. There were also several residents who came up to the podium to discuss their displeasure with the process. Some were civil and others were not.
It’s not that gentleman Jim Burd cannot handle himself. He is more than capable of that. What bothered me more than anything was how the discussion took an incredibly acerbic, caustic and unnecessary direction.
This letter is a call for more respect and good manners at our township committee meetings. The mayor deserves to be treated like the gentleman he always has been and campaigning for re-election by either side should not be tolerated at township meetings.
Mark Iorio Hopewell Township GOP municipal chairman
Do we need sewers?
To the editor:
In today’s economy many are living paycheck to paycheck, especially here in the southern tier of Hopewell Township, south of the circle. The Township Committee is calling for us, the approximately 300 property owners here, to take on a huge burden, a burden that may have consequences for your property values. If they have their way, we will be funding ELSA improvements and infrastructure to Hopewell Township because the committee cannot find an equitable solution that does not divide the township.
The township needs to satisfy its low-income housing quota and cannot do that without sewers. The businesses at the circle need sewers. The developers who want to build on our land need sewers. The sprawl needs sewer. But, did anyone ask us if we needed sewer? Many of us have septic and wells that work fine or have been replaced, or repaired. We like our autonomy and self-sufficiency.
The southern tier has been the recipient of most of the development over the years, and many who live in the northern section of the township are glad for that. We’ve kept the sprawl out of your backyards. But we, your neighbors, cannot afford to fund the infrastructure, so the township can meet its low-income housing responsibilities, and ELSA improvements.
You may say that sewers would raise the value of our homes, but with these economic times, who could afford to pay the extra, over $4,000/year for the next 20 years, not including the extra service fees attached to having sewers. We’ve got a lot of property owners on fixed incomes and they couldn’t pay this fee and you would see foreclosures, which would bring property values down, not up as you would expect.
Sewers are an improvement to communities, but at what cost? On a personal level, it would be financial hardship and on a larger scale, development and sprawl.
I also have to wonder why the open space organizations, Friends of Hopewell Valley Open Space and the Stony Brook-Millstone Watershed Association are not interested in the sprawl this will create? Many are not aware that the Township Committee may be voting very soon and we need to act now. I would like to ask my neighbors, all my neighbors, to let your voices be heard and say no to sewers at this time. Our 300 properties need the help of the other 5,000 property owners in our township.
Jennifer Paoloni Orchard Avenue Hopewell Township
Overloaded freight train
To the editor:
Like many families, we moved to Hopewell Township to provide the best life we could for our children. Within months of arriving, our property taxes rose by over 40 percent. Within months of that, we got new neighbors, including a bank with several lanes of drive-through and a parking lot with attendant dumpster dispensing trash into our yard, along with a strip mall which of late features several shuttered businesses.
Our family, like most here, found a way to keep paying our rising property taxes, even while our incomes suffered greatly during the recession, and our schools lost resources and programs that led us to this community.
Now we, along with many other families in our community, are being hit again, with the proposed ELSA sewer construction, which – like an overloaded freight train with no working brakes – is crashing into our economic viability.
Other well-versed voices have and are weighing in on the financial inequity and hardship that will be suffered by those of us affected in the southern tier of Hopewell Township. We resoundingly reject the proposal that this mandatory sewer connection is "best" for our community. Simply put, the majority of us cannot afford to shoulder this burden.
We are retired citizens with fixed incomes. We are young families who need to provide for our children’s education. We are couples struggling with losing jobs, dwindling incomes, and uncertain futures. We are your neighbors.
Shame on those elected officials who would force this financial hardship upon us.
Judy Clarke, Dean Harrison Orchard Avenue Hopewell Township
Diversion of property tax relief funding must end in 2011
To the editor:
For over 25 years, the State of New Jersey has balanced its budgets on the backs of local Garden State property taxpayers. New Jersey governors – Democratic and Republican – annually propose spending plans that are balanced with property tax relief revenues. And year after year, New Jersey legislators – Republican and Democrat – enact them. Every year, monies that are collected by the state, with the promise that they will be returned to your hometown for property tax relief, are instead diverted by state officials to balance the state budget.
Here is the issue.
There are two sources for general municipal property tax relief funding – money the state collects, but must return to local governments. These are the "Energy Tax" and the "Consolidated Municipal Property Tax Relief Act (or CMPTRA)" funds. Although it is often referred to as "State Aid," these are actually revenue replacement programs, intended to replace municipal property tax revenue that was, formerly, directly collected by towns.
The Energy Tax is the direct descendant of the Public Utility Gross Receipts and Franchise Tax, which was a tax on regulated public utilities originally assessed and collected at the municipal level. In the early 1980s, at the request and for the convenience of the utilities, the state became the collection agent for this assessment, and the law that made this change promised the proceeds would be distributed back to the municipalities. The state never honored that commitment, immediately and annually diverting large and growing portions of the proceeds to fund state programs. Modernization and deregulation led to a major state legislative reform of utility taxes in the mid-90s, which validated municipal entitlement to these monies and, supposedly, capped the state’s annual portion of the tax proceeds.
Around the same time, for its own convenience, the State decided to ‘consolidate’ a number of previously discrete municipal property tax relief programs. Among its many components, CMPTRA includes the Financial Business Tax, the Business Personal Property Tax Replacement, the Railroad Class II Property Tax, the Insurance Franchise Tax, the Corporation Business Tax on Banking Corporations and State Payments In Lieu Of Taxes (PILOT) payments, that had been under-funded for many years, prior to being folded into CMPTRA. These were all municipal revenue replacement programs – not "aid from the state" in that they were not meant to make things better for municipal property taxpayers; they were only intended to maintain stable local funding.
In the late-90s, a law was passed that required both the Energy Tax and CMPTRA distributions to be annually increased by the rate of inflation. Thereafter, state policy makers skirted the law by annually reducing the CPMTRA payments by the same amount that it increased the Energy Tax payments. The state, then, strayed even farther from original legislative intent, when, in 2008, CMPTRA was reduced by about $62 million more than the Energy Tax was increased, and in 2009, the net loss equaled about $32 million. Then last year, the state, in a dramatic increased funding grab, used over $271 million of these, clearly "dedicated," local property tax relief revenue dollars for other purposes. This did not occur because there was less Energy Tax revenue available for property tax relief. It occurred to augment the State’s Energy Tax skim, which had totaled $403 million in 1998, and had more than doubled to $829 million by 2008.
Obviously, this diversion of municipal property tax relief funding for state use has poked gaping holes in local budgets and had a major impact on local purposes tax levies, throughout the state for longer, now, than the past decade. Towns which host energy producing utilities have lost the use of the land occupied by the utilities and still must provide services, such as police, fire, sewer and nearby public road repairs, to those properties.
New Jersey property taxpayers will see real property tax relief if the state can be convinced to comply with its own revenue replacement funding statutes. The taxes were put in place and have always been collected in order to relieve the burdens heaped upon New Jersey property taxpayers.
Understanding the fiscal problems the governor inherited last year, we tempered our objections to the state’s use of municipal revenues to balance the FY 2011 budget. This diversion of property tax revenues to the state has been practiced for over 25 years; but never to the dramatic levels of 2010.
Now, New Jersey property taxpayers must draw a line in the sand. Faced with unprecedented fiscal challenges and new stringent budget caps, we cannot carry the state any longer. Local governments should no longer be considered the "scapegoat" of the state’s systemic property tax problems when the state government has simply taken more of the towns’ revenues.
The Energy Tax revenues owed to local governments must begin to be restored. We want to see a state commitment this year and we will work with the Administration and the Legislature on a phased plan to wean the state off of its dependence on Energy Tax (and CMPTRA) funds, and to rededicate the dollars to municipal property tax relief.
Giving municipal property taxpayers all the relief they are promised needs to be a part of "the new normal."
Mayor Janice Mironov, East Windsor, chairwoman, NJ League of Municipalities Statutory Funding Compliance Committee, Mayor John Bencivengo, Hamilton, vice chairman
A neighborhood bullied
To the editor:
Once again the southern tier of Hopewell Township has been called upon to remedy a problem the Township Committee cannot solve.
The township needs to meet its affordable housing quota, the developers need sewers to build these homes, and commercial properties need sewers to stay in business. Like a screaming baby it cries "feed me, feed me" and those of us in the southern tier are the appointed mothers to satisfy these cries.
Using township data, in effect, property taxes would nearly double each year for 20 years (whatever happened to the governor’s 2 percent cap on property taxes), and those homeowners with bigger lots could expect astronomical property costs. This scenario continues into perpetuity with increased taxes, maintenance fees and water/sewer usage charges.
Can any taxpayer imagine this happening to them?
What makes our township special and who will protect it are in jeopardy. A Township Committee intent on sewer expansion (beyond that of the affordable housing mandate) does no justice to the tradition perpetuated by the officials who went before them.
Democracy is being held hostage on Orchard, Plymouth, Crest, and other neighborhoods simply because our elected/appointed officials cannot find an equitable solution to a problem they must address, or even more diabolical has a hidden agenda for these properties.
You have to ask yourselves what happened to the idea of shared sacrifice in a Democratic society when a specific area is being held powerless by a group of five committee persons.
Aram Boranian Orchard Avenue Hopewell Township
Political theatre?
To the editor:
After watching last week’s Township Committee meeting, I would like to comment on the actions of several committee members during the process to select a municipal judge. It was obvious that committee members Vanessa Sandom and John Murphy were not satisfied with the process selected by Mayor Jim Burd to find a municipal judge, a position that was becoming available as the previous judge’s term expired.
However, Ms. Sandom and Mr. Murphy chose two entirely different ways to handle the situation. Unfortunately, because of the way Ms. Sandom chose to handle her dissenting opinion, Mayor Burd resorted to answering Ms. Sandom’s barrage of complaints with a simple "thank you," rather than allowing the meeting to spiral into a political shouting match. Had Ms. Sandom taken a cue from her fellow Democrat, Mr. Murphy, perhaps some real discussion and compromise could have resulted.
I want to commend Mr. Murphy, who, without personal attack or childish rhetorical remarks, was able to calmly express his dissent in the selection process, and fairly represent the views of his constituents. It is a shame that Mayor Burd was unable to address Mr. Murphy’s concerns, for fear that Ms. Sandom would continue to hijack and politicize the meeting.
The work of the members of the Hopewell Township Committee is to address the concerns confronting Hopewell Township, and not turn the committee meetings into a political theatrical event. Bravo to the four members who recognize their responsibilities to the citizens of Hopewell.
Todd Brant Hopewell Township

