Fanwood Inches Toward Review of SPF Shared-Services Plan

The Fanwood Mayor and Borough Council reached "an informal consensus to move forward with shared services," said Mayor Colleen Mahr after a special meeting with council members Tuesday night. 

Mahr said that while the agreement related specifically to five municipal departments —police, public works, courts, construction and the tax assessor — the group did not take a vote. The meeting came two weeks after the Scotch Plains Mayor and Township Council to place the police and building departments at the top of a list of offices that they said they hope to merge with Fanwood. The shared-services feasibility study published in December 2009 by Cranford-based consultant group Jersey Professional Management estimates that the towns could generate about $1 million, or between $100 and $200 per taxpayer, in annual savings. 

Although the Scotch Plains Mayor and Council conducted most of their discussion on shared services in public, the Fanwood Mayor and Council held the entirety of their nearly two-hour meeting  meeting in executive session so that it could be closed to the general public and members of the media. Mahr offered a short summary of the outcome – the announced consensus – during the open agenda meeting that followed the closed meeting.

"We went into executive session to talk about shared services and their effect on borough employees," Mahr said in an interview, referring to a state statute that allows public committees to hold private meetings when discussing matters that concern personnel. 

The mayor and council's discussion, however, could be heard in the vestibule outside the council chambers. Their conversation revealed little different than the public discussion by the Scotch Plains Mayor and Council on March 23, but the tenuous consensus from the Fanwood contingent was reinforced by post-meeting comments from individual council members, a majority of whom expressed strong misgivings about creating joint departments with Scotch Plains. 

"I don't prefer merging the police departments first," Councilman Mike Szuch said in a telephone interview Wednesday, echoing comments he had made during the executive session. "My personal fear as a citizen is that we would lose our hands-on relationship with the police... You're going from a police force for 7,000 residents to a police force for 30,000 residents. That speaks for itself." 

He and Councilwoman Joan Wheeler called for merging the smaller departments first.  "Since I heard about the annual savings, I've been kind of turned off by this," Wheeler said during the council's executive session. "I do believe that for us to merge anything, we have to know we'll save more than $100…. I would like to see us be successful at a smaller level – like the courts, like the library. I would say even the Department of Public Works is too big."

Councilmen Robert Manduca and Anthony Parenti were perhaps the most vocal skeptics of merging departments. "The police departments getting merged, the construction offices, the courts – I'm not so sure I agree with that," Parenti said in a telephone interview. He argued that departmental consolidation would create larger, less effective offices. "Bigger is not always better, and it would have to be substantial savings for me to support it. But I am so disgusted with the school board. Administrators' salaries are too high. And how does that happen? When it gets too big." 

Parenti and Manduca also disagreed with Scotch Plains Councilman Kevin Glover's claim that the projected savings put forth in the shared service report were conservative. "You look at Scotch Plains, look at the distance their troops travel. They're trying to get us to pay for their gasoline," Manduca said during the executive session, comments that he later reiterated during interviews with Patch. "The Department of Public Works building in Scotch Plains needs millions of dollars in repairs. How do we know this isn't inviting Fanwood taxpayers to pay for Scotch Plains' capital plan?"

Mahr cautioned, however, that the purpose of the meeting was to prioritize, rather than discuss the specifics of, any of the proposed mergers. "Our goal tonight is, after a year and a half and two public forums, it's time to figure out where we're going to look at," she said during the executive session. "It's not, 'What it's going to look like.' It's, 'Where we're going to go.'"

It was a message she repeated several times throughout the meeting, as she urged council members to focus on the big picture, rather than getting stuck in minutiae. Future meetings, she said, would focus on the more detailed aspects of a shared services plan. 

Manduca and Parenti, however, contended that this was precisely their concern regarding shared services.

"I don't see the plan," Parenti said in an interview. "All I see here, 'Let's do it. It's going to save us money.'"

Nevertheless, the discussion was not entirely one-sided. Council members Russell Huegel and Katherine Mitchell each expressed support for exploring a police merger. "I think we owe it to the residents to at least put it on the table," Mitchell said during the executive session. "I think we have to have the discussions. We're not going to make this decision tomorrow." 

Mahr ultimately characterized the consensus as progress. Although she clarified that the council was not endorsing any of the recommendations put forth in the shared services report, she stated, "At the end of the day, we were able to walk out of there and state where we wanted to go. I think that's what separates tonight," she said in an interview with Patch. "I will take the consensus how it came out tonight. I am satisfied with the outcome."

Mahr and the Fanwood Council will next hold a joint meeting with Malool and the Scotch Plain Council to discuss shared services on a date to be determined.