2012 Municipal Budget Discussion Resumes Tonight

The next Lawrence Township Council meeting will take place this evening, Tuesday, May 15, beginning at 6:30 p.m. at the municipal building at 2207 Lawrence Rd. (Route 206).

The agenda for the meeting and Township Manager Richard Krawczun’s explanatory pre-meeting memo can be downloaded from the township’s website or viewed in the Patch media box to the right.  

As expected, the 2012 municipal budget will be discussed tonight, and several awards will also be presented to township police officers and civilians, according to the agenda.

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Notes from May 1 Council Meeting:

Discussion about the 2012 municipal budget that took place at the previous council meeting on May 1 .

Another newsworthy discussion that took place at that meeting, but which has yet to be reported, concerns negotiations that are taking place between Lawrence Township and several other municipalities regarding police dispatch services.

“Last week, I had an opportunity to meet, along with our police chief, Chief [Daniel] Posluszny, with representatives of Ewing Township, Hopewell Township, Princeton Borough and Princeton Township and representatives of the New Jersey Department of Personnel to discuss what are some of the issues and matters that would have to be addressed for any kind of combined or shared service for 911 dispatch,” Krawczun told council members on May 1.

“I think we had a productive meeting. There are a host of options that would have to be chosen as to how to handle the combining of the employees’ labor contracts. Hopewell Township happens to be a non-Civil Service town… So this is the first step of the conversation on personnel,” Krawczun said. “The actual ability to do a combined service – functionally, operationally – for the 911 service has already been studied by an independent consultant and that consultant has advised that it is an operation that can be done. The difficulty now is combining the employees and determining the correct number of staff.

“I think at this juncture there’s going to be a lot of work involving the labor attorneys from the various communities to address particulars of the statute and the particular labor agreements from the different communities, because there are different pay scales, there are different conditions of employment, so there are all these things that have to be worked out,” he said.

After the meeting, Krawczun explained that the plan currently being discussed would involve dispatching operations to be based at the Lawrence Township police station. All 911 calls from participating municipalities would initially be received there, and dispatching for all police calls for those municipalities would be handled there.

Emergency medical calls received via 911, meanwhile, would be transferred to dispatchers at LifeComm, the county’s EMS dispatching service based in Trenton and operated by Capital Health System, while fire calls received via 911 would be transferred to dispatchers at Mercer County’s central fire communications center located at the county fire academy on Lawrence Station Road in Lawrence Township.

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Twelve resolutions were approved by council during the May 1 meeting, including one amending the township’s contract with Genova Burns Giantomasi & Webster, which is the Newark-based law firm that is defending township officials in .

That resolution, according to Krawczun’s pre-meeting memo, “authorizes a change order to the professional services contract of Genova Burns & Giantomasi for the providing of services as Labor Counsel to the Township of Lawrence. The contract is being increased in the amount of $30,000 with a new contract maximum of $40,000. The amendment includes a correction as the original agreement was intended to have a maximum of $30,000 but was shown as $10,000 due to temporary budget limits.”

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Two bids were awarded at the May 1 meeting. Krawczun’s pre-meeting memo offered the following explanation of the awards:

• “Resolution 8-A authorizes an award of bid to TC Landscape Construction Group Inc. of New Brunswick, N.J., in the amount of $44,500 for the installation of a segment of the Lawrence Hopewell Trail on the Dyson Tract. The full amount of the funding is available from a previously-made donation from Bristol Myers Squibb.”
• “Resolution 8-B authorizes an award of bid to Cardinal Contracting Company LLC of Southampton, N.J., in the amount of $359,998 for road improvements. The included roads are Johnson Avenue, Short Johnson Avenue, Springwood Drive and Woodlane Road. Funding is available from previously adopted capital improvement ordinances.”

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Two ordinances were tabled by council members at the May 1 meeting after several members of the public spoke against them. One of the ordinances would have formally combined the township’s Greenway Committee with the Open Space and Stewardship Advisory Committee, while the other ordinance would have combined the Environmental Resources Committee with the Green Team.

Full audio from the May 1, 2012, council meeting, along with the meeting’s agenda and pre-meeting memo, can be found in the media box above.