MIDDLETOWN PLANS A NEW $20 MILLION TOWN HALL

The Two River Times had an article last week announcing the construction of a new Middletown Town Hall complex. The complex has been mentioned a number of times over the past couple of years but the township wasn't ready, willing or able to say much about it publicly.

The devil as they say, is in the details. When reading the article watch for Gerry Scharfenberger's comments, he loves to over exaggerate and use expressions like Wonderful and Fabulous, much like Trump, to make things seem much better than what they are.

Some of us who have regularly attended Township Committee meetings or have watched the video from the meetings,  knew this new complex was being developed and coming, but make no mistake, while this new complex may realistically be needed, it will cost taxpayers a minimum of $10-$15 million even after any outside funding or the selling of township assets realized.

MIDDLETOWN – Penciled into the township’s to-do list in 2017: a complete overhaul to their 1 Kings Highway facility.

On Feb. 10, Middletown Township posted a request for proposal (RFP) on its website, looking for architectural firms to place bids on a possible $20 million complex which would become an overall administrative hub at the township’s main campus.

“We have all these township offices spread all over, and it’s very difficult and inefficient for our residents,” Middletown Mayor Gerry Scharfenberger said by phone on Saturday afternoon. “It would be nice to go to one building and take care of a few things in one area.”

Preliminary plans for the project came in on Sept. 12 and Nov. 16 of last year from Arcari + Iovino, PC – an architectural firm that was retained as the Architect of Record by Middletown at the reorganization meeting on Jan. 1, 2017.

The RFP says this project would be an approximately 23,000-square-foot, multistory building in a new spot at 1 Kings Highway that would host all township administrative offices, along with the police department.

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