By Paul Goldfinger, editor and Jack Bredin, reporter/researcher @Blogfinger.net
An estimated 100 Grovers showed up at last night’s Township Committee meeting to support permit parking as one popular solution to the town’s parking problems.
According to our reporter, the Committee was less than enthused about the proposal. They claimed that the idea was floated in the past, and no agreement could be reached. Randy Bishop is said to have previously called this topic “a waste of time.”
Nevertheless, the Township Committee asked their attorney Gene Anthony to prepare the wording for a November non-binding referendum which would be voted on at the next meeting. Anthony said that the issue was complex. There was no talk of a detailed plan; the referendum would be more general.
Evidently the idea of a referendum was floated by the HOA and that idea doesn’t seem so thrilling. Here is what Barbara Burns said about that in a recent email to the HOA members:
“Several members of the OGHOA attended the last Township Committee meeting and spoke up. As a result, on July 10, 2017, the Township Committee will discuss a proposal to place a referendum question on the November ballot, for Ocean Grove only, on whether to institute permit parking.”
The reason that a referendum is not a good idea is that we have to wait until November to take the pulse of voters and also only registered voters could vote on it. We have many homeowners in town who vote elsewhere, so they will be disenfranchised for this parking referendum, while many renters could vote.
In addition, Burns was evidently wrong when she said that only Grovers would vote on the permit question. So Neptuners would vote, and they tend to be negative regarding OG’s needs.
The best goal would be for only Grovers to be surveyed on this question, and that could be accomplished if we had a town meeting, perhaps at the Youth Temple, where we could vote on the question and get a more accurate assessment of how residents here feel about. Absentee ballots should be allowed.
The Blogfinger poll may be getting more “no’s” than expected due to renters voting who are worried about their situation. Their roll in all this remains to be seen.
But perhaps the best news of the day is that a large number of concerned residents showed up at the seat of local power to demand, as a group, implementation of permit parking. Hopefully this sort of meaningful concern would happen again as needed.
This is a good sign. If only the HOA would wake up some more from their misguided past history and get more aggressive about certain issues such as Wesley Lake, single family zoning, and the commercialization of the North End.
RICHARD KILEY from Man of La Mancha:
Being a resident of Ocean Grove is the political equivalent of a foster child with neglectful surrogate parents. Why is a referendum even under consideration?
The Committee is elected to make decisions, not refer them. OG has a parking problem which won’t be solved with one-side parking restriction.
It is being floated as an alternative to doing nothing; which is Neptune’s specialty.