Shrewsbury municipal complex will be built
$3.8 million bond
approved by
4-2 council vote
By lindsey siegle
Staff Writer

A bond to build a new municipal complex has been passed, but exactly what it will pay for remains to be determined.

On Monday, with an overflow crowd on hand, the Borough Council approved a $3.8 million bond ordinance to fund the construction of its new offices, but delayed moving ahead with the 19,000 square foot building designed by Red Bank architectural firm Kaplan, Gaunt, DeSantis to take one last look at proposals for a smaller building.

The council passed the ordinance with a 4-2 vote, with Terel Cooperhouse, William Kelleher, John McGuire and Gerry Polling in favor and Marge Pignataro and Karl Rauch opposed.

Both Pignataro and Rauch are on record favoring construction of a smaller building.

While they were in a minority on the council, their view was clearly held by the majority of the audience that filled the main meeting room and spilled out into the hall at the Wardell House which currently houses the borough’s municipal operations.

Winifred Matthews of White Street summed up the feelings of those opposed to the larger building, telling the mayor and council, "I’ve lived in Shrewsbury for 43 years, and I am an ex-employee at borough hall, so no one knows more than I do that we need a new borough hall, but we don’t need one of this magnitude."

While Matthews may have concisely expressed the feelings of much of the crowd, Michelle Wilson of Meadow Drive told the governing body why so many people felt that way.

"My concern is, if this passes, when the school rolls around [with a referendum], we’re really not going to have the money," Wilson said. "We’ll have a lovely borough hall, but if we do too much, we won’t have the ability to do this [pass a referendum to meet the needs of the borough school] later."

Many in the crowd asked the council why it did not seek to put the bonding for the new borough hall in a referendum so the entire town could vote on the matter.

Mayor Emilia M. Siciliano said she was not in favor of doing that and McGuire also said he was against a referendum.

Both pointed to the length of time the borough has been considering a new municipal building and Polling noted that the matter has been under consideration in the borough for at least 36 years, a time frame former mayor Raymond "Bucky" Mass extended to 42 years noting that there were discussion on the issue as early as 1958.

While the idea for a referendum did seem to have some support on the council, Borough Attorney Martin Barger noted that planning such a vote would require putting off moving forward on anything for as much as a year.

He noted that if the council decided to make such a referendum binding, and it was defeated, it would set the project back even further.

Before the public hearing on the bond ordinance got started, the mayor read a statement into the record apologizing to Councilman Rauch for any possible misinterpretation that could have occurred by her use of the word "divert" in an op-ed column in the hub last week.

Siciliano noted that she used the word in exactly the way it is defined in both Webster’s and Random House dictionaries and said she was unaware of any specific meaning the word has in the financial world that would allow it to be construed as an inappropriate action.