It’s hard to believe that summer is winding down and Labor Day is just a few weeks away. Fortunately, there’s still plenty of sunshine and warm weather ahead, and lots of fun events coming to Moorestown.
In addition to all the end-of-summer and back-to-school festivities, we can also look forward to seeing real progress on a few community development projects as well. Our annual road resurfacing program is underway and no, you’re not dreaming, East Main Street from Poplar to Marter has finally been resurfaced!
The rest of Main Street also needs resurfacing, but before we undertake that project, a very old concrete water main running under Main Street must be replaced. Engineering for that project is underway, and thanks to Congressman Andy Kim, we’re in the running to get about $2M of federal funding toward that project.
We’ll also see construction begin on the Lenola Town Center Improvement project later this fall. We received the final round of approvals and federal funding (totaling almost $1.9M for design and construction) for the project in late July and went out to bid on Aug. 4. Bids are due on Sept. 7 and because this project is federally funded, we’ll need approval from NJDOT before we can award the contract. Fortunately, all permitting was handled in the final design phase, so once the contractor is approved, they should be able to get to work relatively quickly.
We’ve been discussing how we might build on the momentum of this project to attract new businesses and development to the commercial area on Camden Ave in the Lenola neighborhood. Councilman Law and I hosted a Zoom listening session on Aug. 17 to hear from residents, especially those who live in the Lenola neighborhood, about what they would like to see in that area.
We heard a lot of great ideas that night that we’ll be sharing with the rest of council and township staff and encourage anyone else who would like to share their thoughts to send us an email at council@moorestown.nj.us. One option we can consider is to designate some or all of that area as “in need of rehabilitation”, which would allow us to incentivize improvements and encourage new development by offering a tax abatement.
If you’d like to learn more about rehabilitation, you can listen to the presentation and discussion from the June 13 council meeting (starting approximately 15:10 at https://moorestowntwpnj.civicclerk.com/Web/Player.aspx?id=736&key=-1&mod=1&mk=-1&nov=0, slides at https://bit.ly/RehabilitationPresentation.)
And last but not least, don’t forget that we’re still collecting ideas for a Township slogan through Labor Day. Submit your ideas at https://bit.ly/MoorestownSlogan. We’ll be asking residents to vote on their favorites in September, so that our new slogan can be launched along with our new website (more on that in my next column.)
