By Philip Sean Curran, Staff Writer
Princeton decided to stop using a cleaning service made up of adults with developmental disabilities because of the quality of their work, the town said.
The ARC Mercer, a nonprofit organization that was a subcontractor of ACCSES New Jersey, sent in staff to clean municipal government buildings, including the Witherspoon Hall building where the main functions of town government are located. The arrangement had some bumps in the road along the way, including concerns the town had about staff supervision; in one instance, a staffer from ARC had a baby with her while on the job at the same time that a Princeton Council meeting was taking place.
On Monday, the council voted to hire CNS Cleaning Co. of Bensalem, Pennsylvania, for $134,460 for the rest of this year and for 2018. Mayor Liz Lempert has said the deal is expected to save the town about $36,000 annually, but money was not the basis for the decision, the leader of the council said.
“It was not the money that prompted us to change the situation, it was actually the quality of service,” Council President Jenny Crumiller said during the meeting.
ARC Mercer executive director Steven Cook, who spoke at the meeting, argued that the buildings were clean and held up independent reports by ACCSES attesting to that.
“They might not be perfect, but they were clean to industry standards,” Cook said. “So on behalf of the workers, I have to stand in objection to the opinion that the buildings weren’t clean.”
Council originally was scheduled to vote to hire CNS Cleaning on June 26, but delayed action to let officials hear from Robert Hough, director of infrastructure and operations. Hough, who was not at the meeting in June, was there Monday night, but he did not address council.
Councilman Bernard P. Miller, in remarks before the unanimous vote, said the public forms impressions of the government based on the maintenance of its buildings.
“And in our case, our customers are the public,” he said. “And when the public comes in this facility and they see that the facility is not well maintained, that the bathrooms are not clean, then they form a first impression and that carries over to what they think of what goes on in the building.”
