By ROBERT LINNEHAN
Ho ho ho, perhaps the holiday season won’t be coming early for the Moorestown Township Appearance Committee this year after all. Members of the township council said the process of purchasing more than $33,000 worth of holiday decorations for Main Street is more complicated than previously thought and more information is needed to see if it is a viable idea.
In late June, appearance committee members Gina Zegal and Vickie Sewell pitched their plan to council asking the members to consider the allocation of $33,790 for the purchase of 62 light fixtures that would be affixed to each light pole Main Street from the intersection near Friendly’s to just east of Chester Avenue.
Sewell originally said that a professional decorate from town offered to construct the decorations for the township. He’s a Moorestown resident, she said, and is quoting the same price for the project that he gave the committee in 2005.
To have the decorations be built and to get them up in time for the holiday season, Zegal said a decision would most likely have to be made by mid-July.
Acting Township Manager Tom Merchell said the process would actually have to be put out to bid for the service, since it eclipses the maximum cost a municipality can pay for a service without going out to bid.
Also, a recent study of the 62 potential light poles that would have these decorations showed that 14 of them would have spacing issues for large trucks that need to park near the curb of Main Street.
Making the situation even more complicated, Merchell said that a letter of approval that was originally sent to the township by a PSEG representative was from 2003. A new, more current letter of approval would most likely have to be issued by the company.
“We don’t have the information to go forward with this yet,” Mayor John Button said. “My standpoint is that we’ll continue to look at this issue and move forward when we receive more information.”
