The Merchantville-Cherry Hill Consolidation Commission regrouped last week at the Merchantville Community Center to begin the process of seeking out a consultant to study a possible municipal merge between the two neighboring communities.
The citizen-led commission informed the audience, which was only about 15 residents, that since the last meeting, Cherry Hill resident Pat McCargo took the place of Sandy Levenson, who stepped down.
Chairman Roger Dennis also announced that commissioner Anthony Perno, a Merchantville councilman, was also recently named as the official liaison to the council in an effort to keep the governing body in the know about the commission’s plans to move forward. Perno was absent from the meeting, as was former Cherry Hill Mayor Bernie Platt and Kathy Birmingham.
Dennis opened up the meeting discussing what progress had been made since the last meeting, which was held late last year. He and vice-chairman Rich James recently met with Cherry Hill’s new mayor, Chuck Cahn, to get a sense of how the township could support a potential merger.
“We met with the new mayor to take his temperature on this process. The mayor is trying to learn as much as possible with an open mind toward the process,” Dennis said. “He wants the study done to benefit both communities.”
Moving forward, the commission is now tasked with actively searching for a consultant to do the municipal study.
Dennis reported neither governing body is ready to foot the bill for a study. An RFP was sent out late last year, James said, which was prepared by Cherry Hill Township. He said the responses to the RFP had to be thrown out, though, due to a last-minute addendum added to the RFP that was not sent out to everyone, he said.
The commissioners agreed they needed to come up with a draft of an RFP that could again be sent out to garner bids for a consultant.
Three commissioners volunteered to be a part of a new subcommittee that would specifically research how other merging towns wrote their RFPs — and how the state Department of Community Affairs could possibly assist with tweaking the RFP that was previously sent out.
Between now and the next public meeting, Rosemari Hicks, George Wilkinson and Tom Yarnall will meet to discuss their findings.
The dialogue among the commissioners on creating an RFP sparked a debate as to how in-depth the request for a consultant would go — and how specific services the commission is seeking to have studied.
Most members of the commission agreed to put out an RFP that would not require the consultant to immediately examine very specific things, such as exactly how many police officers or firefighters are needed per 1,000 residents, or exactly how the average classroom size would be affected.
Instead, commissioners agreed they would like to see multiple figures per bidder, depending on the level of services they could provide and how in-depth their study would go.
“I don’t think we need to go into the weeds just yet,” Hicks said. “But we need to make educated suggestions.”
Commissioner and Cherry Hill Board of Education President Seth Klukoff suggested an RFP with three requests — one that is very detailed, one that is more of a hybrid between detailed and basic and one that is simply conceptual, he said.
Hicks said the commission will get to looking into the specifics of merging, such as class sizes, public services and property tax implications further down the road once the study has shown signs of progress.
“First we need to do the study and figure out what we want. We’re putting the cart before the horse. We’re spending a lot of time here before we’re even married,” Hicks said. “We need to look at the 360-degree view and identify what we’re after, making no assumptions that we’re consolidating.”
At the meeting, DCA representative George Haeuber discussed a tool that may prove useful to the commissioners in the coming months. The DCA will issue a fiscal-impact study, which examines a few things about each municipality — current municipal debt burdens, school taxes, municipal revenue levels, assessed home values and total tax rates, he said.
Each municipality already submits this information yearly to the state, he added. The study is a combination of information gleaned from the municipalities and school districts through the state, which will ultimately show how all the information comes together to show whether taxes go up or down, he said.
This information will be provided to the consolidation commission in the coming months, he added.
Residents were also allowed time to add their two cents about the merger process and offered suggestions as to how the commission could approach the study.
“What are people going to say ‘yes’ or ‘no’ to? Start from there and work backward,” said John Tremble, of Cherry Hill. “What impact is it on me, and how does it affect life as we know it?”
Dennis encouraged residents to continue to show up to commission meetings with questions and comments on how to aid the study in moving forward.
“This will only work if we get a lot of tough questions and if we get the right information and right judgments,” Dennis said. “Ultimately, culturally does this work? Will we be a better community?”
The commission decided it would hold its next public meeting on March 6, to have ample time to prepare and review the consulting RFP to put out to the public soon after.
