Letters

The Manalapan Township Committee will be discussing plans for the Manalapan Recreation Center expansion project during a meeting to be held Jan. 31 at 8 p.m. This is a special meeting for the discussion of the recreation center expansion project.

This meeting will be held in the court room of the municipal building at 120 Route 522 in Manalapan. The public is invited and encouraged to attend.

You must be at this meeting or they will assume that you are happy with the expansion as it is. Mayor (Drew) Shapiro has stated that he believes the public is happy with the proposed expansion as no one has come before the Township Committee to voice any objections or other ideas.

This is a $10 million to $15 million project that is funded through our tax dollars. You decide what you want, not the heads of baseball, soccer and football.

Butch Budai

Manalapan

Resident has concerns about pending application in Marlboro

As a homeowner of 35 years in an R-80 residential zone in Marlboro, I am concerned about an application to build a 23,000-square-foot commercial/industrial building across the street from me at Tennent and Amboy roads.

I hope others who are concerned about how our town has developed in recent years — aided and abetted by boards with questionable motives — will join me when the Zoning Board of Adjustment conducts a public hearing at 8 p.m. Feb. 7 at Town Hall.

This application does not even come close to complying with the OIR zoning. It’s for a hodgepodge of uses. A store, nature unspecified. In this very same building: a day care center, when the Kiddie Academy is just up the street? And a “flex” space for contractors, whatever that is. With parking for 76 cars and a tractor-trailer entrance.

Toddlers and trucks — what a combination!

There are lots of properties in existing commercial zones where stores can locate. They should not be placed in inappropriate locations like this.

The owners are seeking a variety of variances for this project. The lot is too small to be developed for IOR, under the 5-acre minimum required in the zoning ordinance. The applicant knew, or should have known that when he bought the lot. He should have known there are wetlands in the back, so he wants the town to compromise on its standards and let him concentrate more development on the front end.

There are setback and buffer requirements in the ordinance. He wants to trample all over them. Instead of building 150 feet back from Tennent Road, he wants to come within 15 feet from the residential zone.

Instead of the 50-foot buffer required to shield his development from the residential zone, he wants 15 feet.

Even the engineers who drew up his plans expressed misgivings about whether what he wanted to build could be squeezed onto this property.

One of the obligations of those serving on official boards is to protect the people of Marl-boro, people living in residential zones, from intrusive, inappropriate and nonconforming proposals such as this. I hope they will keep that in mind as they consider this matter.

The site is now occupied by a lovely old farmhouse and barn and 4 acres of nicely kept lawn. There’s room for at least two more homes to be built, which would be much more in character with the residential neighborhood. Homes are easy to sell for a good price in Marlboro. Go for those variances instead and help preserve this neighborhood, rather than destroy it.

Nadine Lawson

Marlboro

Letter writer should try to get his facts straight

One has to wonder what town Alexander Cedeno is actually living in, for he seems to have his information either intentionally or unintentionally mistaken. Which is it?

In a letter to editor on Jan. 25, Mr. Cedeno talks about a “fragile coalition” of elected officials last year with them replacing professionals who saved the town thousands if not hundreds of thousands of dollars. There is a very simple answer to that Mr. Cedeno, and that is they did a quarter of the work that other professionals did in past years. That’s why they were paid less.

Your statement about CME Associates making millions of dollars off the residents is just another misleading lie. The source of the majority of the money paid to CME is escrow money the builders pay. Not the residents.

As for your statement that CME proudly admitted to donating money, CME honestly answered yes, as they have legally donated to the Republicans and Democrats for over 20 years.

Are you trying to lead the public to believe that Birdsall Engineering, Gravatt Planning and Bob Oliwa (auditor) did not donate to the Republicans two years ago before they got their jobs? Why not mention that the professionals your “fragile coalition” put in place also gave campaign contributions before getting their appointments?

As for your complaint about the ambulances, all five Manalapan Township Committee people voted for them. Not just the “coalition.”

The big tax decrease you talk about (a whopping $12 a year) would better have been spent on the ambulances instead of bonding for them. I don’t think a tax paying resident of this town would have had a problem not getting $12 back and buying two ambulances instead.

Now we are left paying interest on the bonds they bought to purchase the ambulances.

How much is our town’s reputation worth? The year before the $12 tax decrease, (Committeeman Joseph) Mr. Locricchio and (Committee Andrew) Mr. Lucas swore we were going insolvent. How is it we went from insolvency to having enough money for a tax decrease?

And their “plan” to preserve open space protected only 1 acre (with a price tag of close to a million dollars). Why didn’t you mention that Republican supporters owned the property and peppered their lawn with large Republican campaign signs?

As for your statement that the voters were turned off by lies the Democrats told, I think the election result spoke for itself. We won! What turned your voters off were the secret meetings and lies that the Republicans got caught in.

One can only hope that you really wrote this letter without knowing the facts and didn’t just sign a letter written by someone else. Remember, Mr. Lucas was caught red-handed by the editor of this paper asking a teenager to get her parents to sign a letter for him under false pretenses.

I don’t think a person with so much misinformation should write letters to the editor without having real facts.

Gerard D. Ward

Democratic municipal leader

Manalapan

Township must pay its fair share for health services

Here’s an easy way for the taxpayers of Freehold Township and Freehold Borough to reduce their property taxes by $120,000 each year: Stop Upper Freehold Township from turning what was intended to be a cost-sharing agreement between the three towns into a subsidy that you’re paying to open Upper Freehold’s borders to the sprawl that has plagued so much of the rest of the state.

The Freehold Area Health Depart-ment (FAHD) is an office that provides shared health services to Upper Freehold Township, Freehold Township and Free-hold Borough. The agreement, which has existed for more than 20 years, is exactly the kind of consolidation that the state has urged towns to consider as a way to contain property taxes.

Sadly, the accelerated development of Upper Freehold in recent years has created an imbalance between who pays and who benefits, thanks to an increased workload of septic inspections, planning and zoning reviews, and other costs, most of which are directly attributable to sprawl.

Upper Freehold’s fair share of the cost to operate the FAHD is now approximately $175,000 — an amount that reflects Upper Freehold’s share of the office’s activities. Yet Upper Freehold currently contributes only $35,000 for FAHD services.

A proposed increase, which has not yet been adopted, would raise Upper Free-hold’s contribution to $55,000. Even under this proposed increase, however, Upper Freehold would still pay $120,000 per year less than the cost of the services it consumes. That’s a $120,000 free ride for Upper Freehold, paid for by the other two towns that participate in the FAHD.

If Upper Freehold officials are hell bent on abandoning the rural character of their township, which was once considered worthy of preserving, let them do it on the dime of their own property taxpayers (or better still the developers), but not on the backs of hard-working property taxpayers in Freehold Township and Freehold Borough.

Micah Rasmussen

Allentown