Taxes, Quarry, on Menu at Mayor's Brown Bag Lunch With Residents

The expenses that the township must absorb in this year's municipal budget, and the fate of the quarry property off Stonehouse Road, were among the main issues that Mayor John Malay addressed at his first "brown bag lunch" with residents.

The township's 2011 municipal budget, still being compiled, likely will be presented to the public at a Township Committee in April, Malay told a handful of residents gathered around a table in a conference room at town hall.

Saturday was the, at which residents are encouraged to talk about what's on their mind. A second is scheduled for June 11 at Fellowship Village at 8000 Fellowship Road in Basking Ridge. 

"I wanted to meet the new mayor," said resident Katherine Piedici. Last year's mayor, Scott Spitzer, had organized a number of lunches in different locations around the township.

Malay, in responding to a resident's question, said the issues of testing for potential contamination at the Millington Quarry property could be resolved very soon or at some point in the future, depending on the result of mediation with the quarry's owner and operator.

But Township Committeeman Scott Spitzer, who also attended Saturday's discussion, said the township already has substantially achieved its main objectives in dealing with the quarry situation.

Spitzer said the dumping of outside soil being brought into the quarry site, now closed, has ceased. And he said that the quarry representatives are willing to provide further testing at the entire quarry property, with the tests being conducted under the oversight of the state Department of Environmental Protection.

The quarry is zoned for future development as two-acre residentail properties, and township professionals and planners will be involved in planning how that property will be used after its use as a quarry, Malay said. "The future of that site really is the future of that while part of town," he said.

Malay and Spitzer also talked about the challenges the township has in keeping the municipal budget — constituting about one-fifth of the local property tax rate — within the state's two percent budget for 2011.

Both noted that the township must absorb costs such as a 24 percent increase in pensions even while sticking under that cap.

"We have to cut the budget somewhere else," Malay said. The township also must later this year negotiate contracts with union workers, including police and the department of public works, even though the township's non-union workers have been kept to a zero percent increase for at least half of this year.

Malay said the township has reduced its own payroll through attrition, hiring part-time workers instead of full-time employees who would collect health benefits and relying on hundreds of local volunteers to pitch in.