February 9, 2008
Ringwood – Undoing the legacy of Democratic rule, the new all-Republican Borough Council is moving quickly to stamp its brand on the local government.
First, it held council sessions in January that were over well before midnight—the hour at which the previous Democratic-controlled council often was just going into executive session for another couple of hours.
Then, in a brief special meeting on Thursday, the council unanimously appointed Borough Clerk Kelley Rohde as acting borough manager, replacing Ken Hetrick who was the municipal manager during the democrats’ four-year term. In November, voters chose Republicans to fill all four contested seats, joining three Republicans already on the council.
The new council also hired a special counsel for the Upper Ringwood legal issues, which include a lawsuit by neighborhood residents against Ford Motor Co. and the borough and orders from the federal Environmental Protection Agency, holding Ringwood partly responsible for the ongoing cleanup of dumped industrial waste. The council appointed the law firm of Scarinci and Hollenbeck to replace the special counsel hired by the previous council.
The newcomers even reached back into last year’s official actions and rescinded a resolution to buy a set of controversial streetlamps on Dosky Drive from Rockland Electric Co. The previous council split 4-3 along party lines in November to buy the lights for $6,125 to install a switch to turn them off at night. “It should never have happened,” Councilman William Marsala said Thursday of that earlier vote.
Councilwoman Donna Anderson, who questioned last year why the lights burned all night on a deserted park road, said additional questions that she and others raised on what it would cost for the borough to maintain the lights were never satisfactorily answered.
Mayor Walter Davison said a big factor in the vote to not buy the lights was financial.
“The maintenance [expense] is significant,” Davison said.
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