Tempest over towns left out of study
Shared services panel does not include Shrewsbury, Oceanport
BY LAYLI WHYTE
Staff Writer

The Little Silver Borough Council passed a resolution Monday to ask the state to fund a feasibility study of shared services limited to three local municipalities.

The feasibility study would look into the possible savings that may come from combining the police departments in the three towns.

The council action came despite controversy that arose last week after the announcement by the newly formed Two River Shared Services Committee that it would look at sharing services in the three contiguous boroughs of Little Silver, Rumson and Fair Haven.

When news of the committee's plans got out last Friday, officials in two of the towns left out of the plan - Shrewsbury and Oceanport - had strong reactions.

Shrewsbury Mayor Emilia Siciliano said Friday that she was disappointed that the intention of the Two River Shared Services Committee to go forward with an application for grant funding for the feasibility study was not discussed at the Oct. 7 meeting of the Two River Council of Mayors.

"In all the years I have been on council," Siciliano wrote in a statement to The Hub, "I have never experienced the lack of courtesy between neighboring municipalities as has occurred recently."

Little Silver already is looking at shared police dispatch with Shrewsbury.

Little Silver Councilman Declan O'Scanlon, who organized the three-town committee, said Monday the intent of the committee was not to exclude anyone, and that he is willing to meet with anyone who would like to be involved in the study.

"We get along very well with the Oceanport folks," he said, "and we have a great relationship with Shrewsbury as well. We're now in the process of setting up dates when representatives from Oceanport and Shrewsbury can meet with the committee."

Although the Little Silver Borough Council passed a resolution Monday that only included the original three municipalities, O'Scanlon said that it may be possible to amend the resolution and the grant application after the committee meets with the other two municipalities.

O'Scanlon said that the reason the committee had included only Little Silver, Fair Haven and Rumson was because geographically and demographically, the three towns are very similar.

"We all decided we wanted to take a bite of something we could chew," he said. "If we included Shrewsbury, we may have gotten a call from Tinton Falls asking why they weren't included."

Little Silver Mayor Suzanne Castleman said at Monday's council meeting that whatever towns are involved in the feasibility study should be deliberate in their actions.

"If this is not done right," she said, "it won't work."

Castleman also said that she wants to be informed of any new actions taken by the shared services committee.

"I would like to be notified as to what's going on," she said, "so I don't feel that I've been blindsided."

Castleman said that she found out about the plan to seek a feasibility grant when Siciliano called her after reading about it in a news article.

"We're not winning any friends," she said.

On Monday, Siciliano announced that she had received word that the three-borough alliance would be open to discussing the possible inclusion of both Shrewsbury and Oceanport, two boroughs that have provided mutual aid to other municipalities in the region since 1973.

After the change was announced by O'Scanlon, Siciliano released a statement saying, she was very pleased.

"Although Shrewsbury is small in size and its population is the lowest of the five municipalities, Shrewsbury is the borough with state-of-the-art policing equipment and with a jail that we will be able to share with other municipalities," her written statement read.

Oceanport Mayor Lucille Chaump said Monday that she had not heard anything from the committee yet, but that she has been a proponent of shared services for quite some time.

"I'd been trying to get shared services on the agenda [of the Two River Council of Mayors] since April when Emilia Siciliano and I went to the League of Municipalities conference on April 6 and shared services was discussed."

Chaump said she was disappointed to find out the three towns were proceeding with a shared services feasibility study without including Oceanport, and that she received several phone calls from Oceanport residents who thought the borough should be a part of that study, she is open to working with the committee.

At the meeting of the Two River Council of Mayors, Chaump asked that each mayor bring a list of equipment already owned by his or her borough in order for the other mayors to begin discussing the possibility of leasing out equipment.

"I wouldn't ever want to jeopardize the services the borough already has," Chaump said, "but if we can save money by joining with other towns, we should look into that."

Rumson Mayor John Ekdahl said last Friday that the reason he did not bring up the feasibility grant at the Two River Council of Mayors meeting was because he was not sure how much Castleman and Fair Haven Mayor Joseph Szostak knew about the plan.

"I didn't want to bring it up publicly like that if they didn't know," he said.

Szostak said that he was not even aware the committee, which included Fair Haven, had been formed until he read the news article about it. The issue was never discussed at a Fair Haven Borough Council meeting, he added.

"I'm disappointed in the whole thing," Szostak said in an interview last week. "I thought this was supposed to be a borough affair."

Szostak said that the only member of the Fair Haven Borough Council to attend the meeting last week at which the new committee was formed was Councilman Thomas Gilmour, who was also at the Two River Council meeting.

Gilmour said Monday that because Fair Haven had canceled its regular Borough Council meeting on Oct. 9, he did not have an opportunity to discuss the shared services study plan with Szostak and the rest of the council.

"It's a shame that with the timing of this," he said. "I wasn't able to get the word out."

He said he thinks sharing services might benefit Fair Haven because it is a small town.

"For us to fund our own police department is very expensive," he said. "I think there will definitely be some cost savings to come out of this feasibility study."

O'Scanlon said one reason for limiting the study to Little Silver, Fair Haven and Rumson was that a different kind of policing goes on in Shrewsbury by virtue of the fact that Route 35 runs through the town.

Ekdahl said that because the three original municipalities each have only modest business districts, and no major highways, it made sense to start with those three.

"We're all bedroom communities," he said. "Our police have a lot more in common with each other than with a town that has to police a state highway."

Little Silver Councilman Jon Bitman said at Monday's council meeting that if the committee is going to be expanded beyond the three towns, the council should revisit its approval.

"Should it get so big that it turns into a second county government," he said, "when our own county government isn't efficient, I would want to talk about that."

The grant for which the committee will apply is provided by the state Department of Community Affairs and is known as a SHARE grant (Sharing Available Resources Efficiently).

The grant would be for $20,000, with half of that being provided by the participating municipalities.

Both Rumson and Fair Haven will pay $3,333.33, and Little Silver, because it is the lead agency in applying for the grant, will pay $3,333.34.