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Although Allenhurst bristled at the prospect of consolidation with Loch Arbour last month, Allenhurst Commissioner Terence Bolan and many others still support the merger, Bolan said at the Feb. 6 Loch Arbour commissioners’ meeting.

Allenhurst officials expressed trepidation after a Department of Education [DOE] official, Susan Ecks, said the consolidation would create a new school district. Previously, the DOE and both towns had said Loch Arbour would simply join Allenhurst’s district, not create a new one.

This gave Allenhurst’s board of commissioners pause because of the potential legal liabilities of creating a new district.

“At that point I said, ‘This is not acceptable, I hadn’t heard this before, and we cannot proceed,’” Allenhurst Mayor David McLaughlin said at the Jan. 22 commissioners’ meeting.

Loch Arbour Mayor Paul Fernicola [pictured above, left] said at the time that the merger was not off, and he confirmed the same at this week’s Loch Arbour commissioners’ meeting.

Allenhurst Commissioner Terence Bolan also attended the Loch Arbour meeting, saying the consolidation plan was “not dead.”

“The storm couldn’t have come at a worse time,” Bolan said. “Everyone has twice as much to do now at no fault of anybody’s. But as we move forward, there’s a lot of people in Allenhurst who’re pro-consolidation. I’m one of them.”

Consolidation “is good for both towns, it’s good with the state, and your mayor and commissioners are doing a wonderful job moving this forward,” Bolan added.

A MEETING WITH THE DOE

Loch Arbour Mayor Fernicola has sent a letter to DOE Comissioner Chris Cerf on Jan. 24, requesting a meeting between Cerf and the mayors of Allenhurst and Loch Arbour. This meeting would show how Ecks’ comments affected the consolidation project. The mayors would request an official retraction of those comments.

“I was very frank in the letter that it was clear to me she had only recently joined the DOE and obviously had not reviewed the DOE materials that had previously been supplied, hence my conclusion that she would not otherwise have contradicted her boss,” Fernicola said.

There has been no response from Cerf yet, but Fernicola acknowledged that Cerf is likely too busy to answer in one week anyway.

Fernicola has advocated for the consolidation largely to change school tax rates in Loch Arbour. Currently, Loch Arbour pays school taxes to the Ocean Township school district, based on property values. Allenhurst pays a per-pupil rate in a sending-receiving agreement with Asbury Park, at a lower cost to the taxpayer than Loch Arbour’s system.

In case consolidation is not approved, Loch Arbour may try to reconstitute as a non-operating school district instead of a consolidated school district.

“But there are a lot of legal hurdles and difficulty to accomplish in doing that, so that’s why consolidation is the most viable means of doing that,” Fernicola said. “If consolidation is approved we know it’s guaranteed to reduce our taxes, the tricky part is to get it approved.”

If consolidation is put back on track, residents can expect to vote on it in November 2013.

 

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