By Charley Falkenburg, Staff Writer
MONTGOMERY As the sluggish economy gains momentum, an influx of promising business and commercial projects seem to be on the horizon for Montgomery.
However, resident Frank Drift is worried the township won’t be able to manage the need for permits and inspections with its current code enforcement crew of part-timers.
Mr. Drift was the second person to go before the Township Committee to voice complaints that the permit and inspection processes were taking too long. The first was a business owner who had attended the Feb. 7 committee meeting.
”You can’t possibly handle what’s coming here with part-time people,” he told the Township Committee on Feb. 21. “People are going to say ‘What the hell, we don’t want to build in Montgomery’ why should we have that reputation?”
Committeeman Rich Smith, who works in construction, agreed with Mr. Drift and also suggested the department become more electronic with its documents and forms rather than by hand.
”It kills you as a builder when you have to sit and wait to do work,” said Mr. Smith. “We have to get a head of the curve a lot is coming.”
The root of issue goes back to 2009, when the economy tanked and the township was forced to eliminate two building inspectors and a secretary and reduce the hours of remaining code officials. Currently, there are four sub-code officials, one secretary and one construction official, who doubles as a fire code official. Most of them work 30 hours a week except one, who works 25 due to having another part-time job.
”The complaints are based on how we used to be able to meet demands for the service,” said Township Administrator Donato Nieman. “We recognize we are not able to respond as we had in the past, but unfortunately less government means less government we had to reduce staff to stay within the budget constraints.”
Mayor Ed Trzaska said staffing the code enforcement department was also challenged because of its seasonal work and “large peaks and valleys due to the timing of specific construction projects.”
In addition, the electrical sub code official recently had to retire due to health issues and the plumbing code official has been ill.
Now that projects are picking up, and the township plans on hiring another electric sub code official and making all code enforcement officials fulltime again.
Resident Robert Kress suggested the township look into sharing code enforcement services with a neighboring town such as Princeton. Montgomery had flirted with the idea of joining forces with Princeton, but it never quite panned out.
However, with the consolidation and new Mayor Liz Lempert, the mayor thought it would be worthwhile to take another look.
”Planning ahead is critical and so is forming partnerships with neighboring towns to share resources,” said Mayor Trzaska. “We have already made a commitment to increase the hours of our current code employees and we have other ideas to make the process more efficient.”
In the best case scenario, Mr. Nieman said code officials would become fulltime within the next few weeks.

