Council Addresses ATV, Verizon Complaints

Manchester Town Hall (Photo by Micromedia Publications)

  MANCHESTER – Mayor Kenneth Palmer told members of the Township Council that a recurring problem has returned in the form of illegal all-terrain vehicle use.

  “Recently we’ve gotten a number of ATV complaints. The increase of the ATVs are not just in the woods like the fire trails but out in different (Manchester) communities,” the mayor said. “The police department has come up with a specific enforcement detail which they are going to be implementing. They are addressing that.”

  The mayor said he also spoke with Verizon regarding complaints of a different form. “Some of the complaints I’ve received from different senior communities in Whiting is the lack of choices for internet providers and cable providers.”

  “On the east side of town Verizon did come into town so you have a choice of Comcast or Fios. The west side of town, Whiting does not have the option of Verizon,” the mayor added.

  Mayor Palmer said he spoke with a representative of Verizon who indicated there were no plans “to go up there. It is really based on the density of population. I explained to her we probably have around 8,000 homes out there but that is just not enough to entice them to make the capital investment to come out to Whiting at this point.”

  In other news, the mayor said he heard “John Richie is again going to be appointed as our municipal alliance coordinator. I can tell you John is devoted to the job. He is very good and very through. He really does care about the program and the township and I appreciate that he and his wife take the time to run the municipal alliance it is not an easy task.”

  “No, it is thankless,” Council Vice President Joan Brush said having experience serving on the Alliance.

  “It is long hours you really don’t get anything for it other than knowing you are serving and doing a great job for the town,” the mayor added. “Thank you to John and his wife.”

  “The sad part about that is pretty much all the alliances had their funding cut in half by the state,” Brush added.

  “They did, state wide and definitely county wide which makes it even tougher,” Mayor Palmer said.

  Councilman Sam Fusaro told the council that meetings regarding the updating and revision of the township’s master plan are continuing. “We started in October or November but we were having meetings twice a month. I don’t want to use Zoom because we had one meeting of Zoom and it really didn’t work for the master plan.”

  The councilman added, “I think we’ll wait a little bit more for the time we need to redo or upgrade our master plan. We have six years to do that and we wanted to get a jump on everything and add some additional items to our ordinances.”

  Councilman Fusaro said “the one thing we did have a lot of excellent help with was from our zoning officer who brought us a number of items to upgrade the ordinances and code book. We had at least a dozen or more good ideas that need to be completed. We can start looking at them and just start getting them to ordinances rather than wait for the completion of the master plan.”

  “These ideas are pretty much outside the master plan. They are items that aren’t articulated to what we are trying to say,” Fusaro added.

  He noted in recent discussions among the council regarding the COVID-19 pandemic and recommendations for vaccination distribution hubs in various areas of the senior communities in the township that “I don’t know if all our residents know that anyone over 65 can now go into the registration period. I registered about 10 days ago and got an invite from the New Jersey website to get a date at various places.”

  Fusaro added, “the closest one was in Trenton but every day there are five or six different ones so if you haven’t registered already is covid19.nj,gov/pages/vaccine. It is very easy and takes three to five minutes to fill out the registration.

  Council President Craig Wallis said “I agree Sam it is easy to register online. Finding a place to go is a different story. I registered with Community Medical Center who will contact you whenever they have appointments available so it will probably be six months before they get ahold of me. Getting the vaccine is one of the only ways that we are going to stop this.”

  He added that “it isn’t so much the vaccine; it is the people being vaccinated that will actually do it. You can have a vaccine but if people don’t get it, it is not doing any good.”