Taxes

Two contracts worth $69,000 were approved by the Township Council at its Feb. 25 meeting. The largest of the two, worth $55,000 a year, was awarded to Joseph Smentkowski, Inc. of Jersey City for servicing the township mini-dump. The two-year contract expires on Feb. 28, 2016.

Robert Trautmann, a Board of Education member in the middle of his first term, has resigned. But he’s not going quietly.

All proposed budgets passed in last week’s Fire District elections. The results from the Feb. 15 vote are as follows:

An $85 million referendum that would result in a new elementary school and a reconfiguration of the Pre-K to 8th Grade schools could be held in September, now that state grant money has been promised to the district. That was the word from Board of Education vice president Eva Nagy at the Feb. 20 meeting.

An expected vote to privatize the school district’s 123 paraprofessionals was put off Feb. 20 by the Board of Education. District officials said they wanted more time to gather information to answer questions posed by the public at the Feb. 17 special meeting, when more than two hours of comment was heard by the board on the proposal.

School district teachers’ aides showed up in force at the Feb. 17 Board of Education meeting to tell the board just what they thought of yet another proposal to outsource their jobs. In a nutshell: Not much.

The Township Council is now the body in charge of the Hamilton Street business district Special Improvement Zone. Thanks to a last-minute amendment to the ordinance making that so, the council’s status as the SID’s “district management corporation” is limited to two years.

Professional contracts worth $273,000 were awarded at the Feb. 11 Township Council meeting. The largest, $200,000, was for township attorney Louis Rainone, a member of the DeCotiis, Fitzpatrick and Cole law firm.

Board of Education president Julia Presley on at least eight occasions consulted with the board attorney on the former schools Superintendent’s separation agreement that is predicated on the withdrawal of ethics complaints against her, according to the attorney’s invoices. The conversations are delineated in invoices submitted for November and December, 2013, by board attorney Robert M. Tosti.

The five commissioners of Fire District 3 have changed their minds about the $144 salary increases they requested. The commissioners, whose territory includes the areas covered by Community Fire Company on Hamilton Street and East Franklin Volunteer Fire Company on Pine Grove Avenue, had requested the Township Council approve 2014 salaries of $7,428.