Today’s 7:00 am meeting of the Somerset County Park Commission at its headquarters in North Branch Park, Bridgewater, was filled to capacity. Of about 80 attendees present, 50 filled all the chairs in the meeting room, while the remainder spilled out into the corridor and reception area. At least half of the audience wore either the distinctive green jerseys of Somerset County Park employees, while several sported the brown shirts of county park rangers.
The meeting opened with four commissioners offering their resignations. (See Martin Bricketto’s 9:30 am breaking news story at http://www.c-n.com/apps/pbcs.dll/frontpage).
Most of the meeting, however, was taken up with a review of recommendations made to the Somerset County Freeholders as contained in the Wolff & Sampson $150,000 report. Freeholder Rick Fontana went down the list, point-by-point, as the Somerset County Commission responded to each one, either agreeing or not.
The commission concurred with most of the recommendations, with some notable exceptions. One of those is that the rents to park employees on commission-owned homes should be reviewed for increases to fair-market value. However – and this could be a loophole – it was proposed that the rents charged to county employees should be set at what is “the custom and usage in the industry.”
Interpretation: Charge Somerset County park employees a rental in line with what other counties in New Jersey charge their park employees for renting publicly-owned homes, not what a New Jersey citizen would pay to rent similar properties on the open market.
Furthermore, some of the other park entities in New Jersey don’t even rent public property to their park employees. There is no open competition for Somerset County Commission-owned rental property (you have to be a park employee to get a home!). Therefore, fair market value needs to be assessed by an evaluation of rental values established in the real world, not by a contrived evaluation that does not represent the real market for housing.
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