New Mayor Jeffrey Beenstock is a believer in laying out all of his goals and objectives before pursuing them.
At last week’s Medford Town Council meeting, Beenstock used his initial discussion item to share the goals he and his group look to accomplish during 2016.
The first and seemingly most important topic was the budget. Council plans to turn its attention to the budget within the next month or so to continue to build on the improvements it has made to the financial struggles it was introduced to when the members started in office.
“I don’t want to lose sight of how quickly a budget can slip out of control,” Councilman Christopher Buoni said. “We want to maintain a high level of frugality in the process.”
“I think as we’ve shown over the past four years we’ve been in office, the stability of our town is always going to be our priority,” Beenstock said.
Beenstock also referenced the town’s stability when discussing how it’s been able to shift some focus to other matters — such as leaf service — as opposed to years past when it spent the majority of time on the budget.
Medford was able to complete leaf pickup three months earlier in 2015 than in 2014. The township even picked up more leaves throughout the process.
The road program was another point of emphasis discussed during Beenstock’s goals and objectives.
“I’d like to see us continue the road program to the extent our resources allow and maybe allocate more than that to continue to improve our roads,” he said.
He acknowledged several residents have voiced their concern about this problem, and council has taken their suggestions into consideration.
The police force is an area Beenstock would like to see addressed this year as well.
Police Chief Richard Meder came to council with a plan to improve the force.
“We all know they’ve been operating under difficult circumstances over the last few years, and they’ve been doing more with less,” Beenstock said.
The group plans to continue with Meder’s plan to increase the numbers in the force over the next few years.
The Route 70 initiative also resurfaced.
Beenstock plans on completing this early in the year so they can focus on getting zoning improved to encourage more businesses to develop on Route 70.
The last notion discussed was one that was originally brought up four years ago — the improvement of the town’s library and municipal building. Beenstock expressed his desire to create a subcommittee to look into the idea of a new township building and a new library.
He proposed the subcommittee be made up of himself and Deputy Mayor Charles Watson. The two plan to put their heads together to muster some ideas and then report back to the committee with their progress down the road.
“That’s where I see us going for the coming year,” Beenstock said.
While Watson agreed to be a part of the committee, he also stated there are numerous subcommittees that have been formed in the past that never came to fruition. The groups formed to look at the noise ordinance, the protests and potentially allowing hunting on township property were all acknowledged as initiatives left incomplete by subcommittees that Watson thinks should be tied up early in 2016.
Buoni proposed the idea of considering relations with other taxing entities in the township to help lower taxes.
“I’m talking about entities that levy obscenely high taxes on our residents and have seemingly not had any restraint of late,” he said.
