Mayor: Town has maintenance plan in place

Recently former mayor Timothy Konopka took issue with my criticisms of how the township did not have a maintenance plan for or make adequate investments in road improvements in Howell. I regret that the former mayor took such offense to my factual statements. I was even more disturbed when he used Nazi references in his newspaper letters while complaining about my remarks.

References and comparisons to the Nazi party are inappropriate, hurtful to many and frankly inexcusable. I feel badly that the former mayor's administration remains under criminal investigation related to the horrible "zoning for dollars'' scandal that will bring us 500 homes along Route 33. The Monmouth County Prosecutor's Office contends the matter remains under investigation and I wish the former mayor well and hope and pray he had no direct hand in this terrible mess.

Regarding the conditions of our roads, I stand by my position that roads all over town are in terrible shape. Not a day goes by when I am not contacted by a resident pleading for help with their road. We regularly get complaints about roads that have not been paved in 20 or 30 years, massive potholes, crumbling curbs and in some cases, sink holes.

The fact is that the township did not have a road maintenance plan (Source: Howell Township Engineering Department) and so as a result we had no way to determine what roads to maintain, fix or repair and when.

It is my position that because of this lack of planning and preparation, we are now paying an ever steeper price in getting our roads up to satisfactory condition. I am sorry that the former mayor takes issue with this matter, but the facts are that we need to learn a valuable lesson from this poor planning.

That is, we need to have strategies and master plans for major matters like road maintenance and other costly matters related to our infrastructure. Had we had a plan for most of the mid-1990s to the early part of new century, we would not be so behind the way we are now.

To support the notion that our roads were largely ignored and that we had no plan, I did some additional research to determine how many miles of road we had serviced over the past several years. To put this in perspective, Howell has nearly 200 miles of road.

+ In 1997 we paved only 11 miles of road.

+ In 1998 we paved only 5 miles of road.

+ In 1999 we paved only 3 miles of road.

+ In 2000 we paved no roads.

+ In 2001 we paved only 3 miles of road.

+ In 2002 we paved on 2 miles of road.

(Source: Township Engineer's Report)

Over a six-year period the township paved less than 25 miles of road or a measly 4 miles of road per year. This was unacceptable and because we had no maintenance plan, we are now forced to play an expensive game of "catch up."

The solution? Thankfully in 2003 we started to make major investments in our roads again. We also designed a road maintenance plan that addresses every road in Howell. We did not have the manpower, technology or resources in-house to conduct such an exhaustive analysis so we competitively bid the work and hired an expert firm that analyzed every road in town, taking into consideration usage, functional conditions and other structural matters that are crucial to measuring road needs.

We have used that document to determine what roads to pave and in what order. This way we can at least ensure fairness when paving roads going forward. Catching up will take some time, but now we have a plan that we need to stick to. We also now have resources to fix potholes and curbs as well; and while not to the degree we'd like, we have made important steps to start addressing this problem.

All told from 2003 to the present (less than four years), we have allocated funds to pave more roads than the township did for a six-year period from 1997 to 2002. Maintaining our roads is an important responsibility the township bears, and it is one we must remain committed too. We all pay entirely too much in taxes in this state and the least we deserve is well maintained roads.

While we have a lot of catching up to do, I feel we now have a plan and that we'll be much better positioned to ensure we do not repeat the mistakes of the past.

Joseph M. DiBella

Mayor

Howell