My first full week in the mayoral saddle. Feels good; I like this job.
Tuesday, January 11: Met with Municipal Employees
For those who do not know, Tuesday night is open house at the municipal building. Want to meet with our Tax Assessor, Zoning Officer, or Construction Official? The municipal building is open from 7:00 PM until 9:00 PM for the public. I take advantage of the time to visit our municipal employees, hear what they have to say, and get a pulse of how things are around town. Tuesday night was the night of our most recent snowstorm, so it was good timing to drive to our Public Works Garage on Locust Grove Road. I met up with our Public Works employees just as they were preparing their trucks for plowing. Alan and the guys have it down to a science; I’ll bet I could take the family to Disney World during a blizzard and know for certain that our DPW has the situation under control! Truth be told- I am not a fan of Disney World and I love snow so there’s no chance I would miss out on being in New Jersey during a snow storm.
Wednesday, January 12: Land Use Board Reorganization Meeting
Our Land Use Board met and reorganized; Jim Stryker was elected Chairman, and Ted Blew was elected Vice Chairman. The Board chose Rick Roseberry for their consulting engineer, and Carl Hintz as their consulting planner. After the formalities the Board held a brainstorming session on 2010 goals and objectives. Of the Township Committee, both myself and Vigdis Austad are members of the Land Use Board. I am looking forward to working with Chairman Stryker and the rest of the Board in 2011.
Thursday, January 13: Township Committee Meeting
My first regular meeting as Mayor, and Vigdis and Sue’s first meeting as members of the Committee; unfortunately there was only about 10 or so members of the public on hand for the occasion. Interesting, there were over 100 posts on the nj.com article about Franklin’s reorganization meeting, but only 10 people in attendance to see how we work together. I will continue to challenge our residents to attend our meetings, ask us the difficult questions, and bring to the table ideas on how we can serve them better.
This year on my blog I will still report the activities from our Committee meetings, but I might not provide as much detail as I did in 2010. If something peaks your interest, you can always reach me on this blog, or through the township clerk.
We hired William Colantano, CPA to perform our 2010 audit, and to provide accounting services for 2011.
We passed Resolution 2011-11 appointing Special Police Officers for 2011. We passed Resolution 2011-12 ensuring payment of our patrolmen for 2011 in accordance to our contract agreement. We passed Resolution 2011-13 ensuring payment of our Public Works Department for 2011 in accordance to our contract agreement.
We discussed at length a draft recycling ordinance that all Hunterdon County municipalities are required to adopt. We have additional questions and asked our attorney to contact the County.
We discussed the need for an animal control contract for 2011. We used St. Hubert’s in 2010 but before signing on again, we are doing our due diligence by seeing if there are entities that can provide us the same service for less money; it cost us in the neighborhood of $9,300 in 2010.
By responding to an inquiry sent by Hunterdon County in December, we agreed to tell them that we are interested in what they have to offer in terms of shared web site service and email hosting. We paid $3,800 for our website in 2010.
We hired Rick Roseberry of Maser Consulting, PA for Professional Engineering Services for 2011.
We accepted the resignation letter of now former Fire Subcode Official Frank Ball and we made a temporary appointment until the position is filled permanently.
We approved a salvage yard license for 2011 for Block 41, Lot 1.
We introduced by title only a solar energy ordinance; the first reading of the ordinance will take place on February 24. It is important for us to hear what you have to say about this ordinance. A copy can be found here: http://www.scribd.com/doc/45662473/Solar-Energy-Ordinance-for-Dec-23-Hearing
Those were the highlights of our meeting. As mayor I am going to make sure that the minutes from our meeting are posted on our township website in a timely manner.
No comments:
Post a Comment