There are a ton of great reasons to keep the Old Town Hall standing. There is so much information that those of us trying to save it have posted pages at the Historical Society’s website. Go right to the information pages at:
http://www.longhillhistory.org/save_town_hall.html.
It’s been posted for about a month and we’ve been getting a lot of traffic and overwhelmingly positive responses.
A couple of things to keep in mind. It won’t change your taxes at all. The bulk of the restoration funds will come from the county, but we need to come up with some local matching funds (20% or whatever we request) which is why $.005 reassigned from the largely unused open space tax collections can be put to good use. Ongoing funds to run the restored building as a non-line-item expense have been thought through and are based on what has been done in other towns. Please read the FAQs on the Historical Society website.
http://www.longhillhistory.org/lhh_referendum_FAQs.html
The selection of the four posted letters is deceptive. To date there have been negative letters in the Echoes only from those two writers, Ahlstrom and Lenox. There have been many, many others, all positive, one or two per week since June or July. Arthur Lenox already wrote essentially the same letter in June with the same ill-informed arguments. I answered him then in the Echoes. He apparently doesn’t want to comprehend facts when he reads them or he wouldn’t have asked the exact same legal questions all over again in October.
The new Arthur Lenox letter posted is again largely off base. He is entitled to his opinion that he might not want to have preservation funded. Fine. But historic preservation funding under the Open Space, Recreation, Farmland and Historic Preservation Trust Fund Taxing Districts act of 1997 (notice "Historic Preservation" in the act's title) is entirely legal, above board and operating within the outlines of both NJ state and municipal law. A lot of knowledgeable people worked on putting the proposal together and he insulted the lot of them in his letter. I’ll have a letter in this week’s Echoes (I think) which answers a lot of questions about the using open space historic preservation as a planning tool. If it doesn’t run there, I’ll post it here.
Visit the Long Hill website's Open Space page for the wording of the original 1997 authorizing referendum.
http://www.longhillnj.us/boards/openspace.html
And at the Street Fair in Millington the only vociferously negative comment in 7 hours at the Historical Society's booth came from Mr. Sandow who seemingly enjoys the effect that pure unadulterated meanness brings him. He horrified the hardworking seniors from the Historical Society with the proposition that he’d like to take a 55 gallon drum of kerosene to the old Town Hall. They're still talking about it. Even the candidates he backs don’t take this position. No lemmings there, apparently.
Who’s on board with this proposal? All four candidates from both parties have signed the Historical Society's pledge board promising to vote for the referendum and support its goals. They made this commitment openly and in public at the Millington Street Fair. So did the Mayor and most of the current Township Committee. The Open Space Committee members themselves were very positive at their last meeting and it’s their budget being reallocated. The Morris County version of this proposal, modifying the county open space fund to allow for historic preservation uses, passed its referendum by over a 5 to 1 ratio across all 39 towns in the county in 2002.
More thoughts....? Any questions...?
Larry
