Wednesday, April 17, 2013
Jim Van Kruiningen, a lifelong Fair Lawn resident and assistant to the borough manager for the past six years, will take over as acting manager on June 4.
Jim Van Kruiningen, a 21-year borough employee, will serve as the acting borough manager of Fair Lawn after current manager Tom Metzler steps down at the end of May. Following a closed session discussion Tuesday, council voted 4-0 — Councilman Kurt Peluso did not attend the meeting — to appoint Van Kruiningen as deputy borough manager, Metzler said. He will become the acting borough manager on June 4. "[Van Kruiningen] spent six years with four different managers learning the position," said Metzler, a strong proponent of having Van Kruiningen succeed him. "There's nobody more qualified in the borough to do it." Van Kruiningen, a lifelong Fair Lawn resident and 1990 Fair Lawn High School graduate, spent 10 years working as a police …
Friday, April 5, 2013
Recently released closed session minutes detail Fair Lawn borough council's decision not to provide the manager a vote of confidence that he'd be retained after this year.
Mayor John Cosgrove went to bat for manager Tom Metzler during a failed closed session conversation he called back in February to discuss extending the manager's contract, Patch has learned. According to recently released closed session minutes, Cosgrove repeatedly asked council members to reassure Metzler that they would extend his contract until the end of 2014. Extending Metzler was important, he said, because the borough had already turned over its manager four times in the past seven years and, for the sake of continuity, could not afford to do it again. "What I tried to do was frame the situation and let the council members know that Tom had received numerous (job) offers and that in order to keep him we really needed to give him a …
Tuesday, March 12, 2013
Fair Lawn's blue- and white-collar workers have reached a new 6-year contract agreement with the borough that will afford them a 6.5 percent raise over the contract's life.
After working for more than three years under an expired contract, Fair Lawn’s blue- and white-collar workers have reached a new employment agreement with the borough. Blue and white employees, who hadn’t seen a raise since 2009 when their old contract expired, will receive a 6.5 percent pay increase over the six-year life of the new contract, which runs until the end of 2015, borough manager Tom Metzler said. He said that in exchange for the pay bumps, blue and white workers — who comprise all employees who are not police officers, department heads and supervisors — made numerous concessions that should save the borough money in the long run. “I think the contract represents reasonable increases and I believe the concessions are going to …
Sunday, March 10, 2013
Missed any of this week's Fair Lawn-Saddle Brook news? It's all right here.
Without a commitment from council to extend his contract beyond this year, Fair Lawn borough manager Tom Metzler submitted his letter of resignation Monday. Chief Erik Rose, a 30-year veteran of the Fair Lawn Police Department, announced his retirement Friday. An infant involved in a three-car crash on Route 80 in Saddle Brook Monday night was transported to St. Joseph's Regional Medical Center in Paterson, New Jersey State Police said. A Fair Lawn High School graduate who now lives in Garfield was arrested Wednesday on charges he impersonated a police officer to force sex on a woman in a Fairfield hotel, police said. Fair Lawn borough council has asked the manager to put money for a Fourth of July fireworks display in this year's budget. …
Thursday, March 7, 2013
Are you concerned with the turnover at the top in Fair Lawn? How would you fix it?
With the resignation of borough manager Tom Metzler Monday, Fair Lawn is once again in the market for a chief executive officer. Council members on both sides of the aisle acknowledge that changing managers so often -- five times in the past seven years -- is a problem that needs to be addressed. The job, as Metzler noted in his resignation letter, has been historically vulnerable to changing political tides. His own recent situation is a case in point. While Metzler has received nothing but positive reviews from both Republican and Democratic council members since announcing his resignation, he was nonetheless not given a guarantee that he'd be retained next year. "It’s just the position. There's not really much job security with it," …
Monday, March 4, 2013
Without a commitment from council to extend his contract beyond this year, Fair Lawn borough manager Tom Metzler submitted his letter of resignation Monday.
Unable to secure a commitment from council that he'd be retained beyond this year, Fair Lawn borough manager Tom Metzler chose to resign Monday and accept a job doing emergency management consulting. Metzler's resignation, which takes effect May 30, marks the fifth time Fair Lawn has changed managers in the past seven years. While Metzler said he would have preferred to remain the borough's chief executive officer, he was unable to get assurance from council members that they'd have him back next year. "There's an election in November and Fair Lawn doesn’t actually have a stellar reputation of keeping managers through an election," Metzler said Friday. "I was very concerned that, at the end of this year, if the majority pendulum swung in …
Thursday, June 28, 2012
Borough manager Tom Metzler signed his official contract on Wednesday, which pays him $140,000 per year to start.
Council voted unanimously Tuesday to formalize borough manager Tom Metzler's contract through 2013. Per its terms, Metzler will make an annual salary of $140,000 until the end of this year. He'll then make a salary of $145,000 for the first half of 2013, and a salary of $150,000 during next year's second half. The gradual pay increases built into Metzler's contract over the course of the next 18 months do not represent pay raises, he explained. Rather, they're the result of a misunderstanding that occurred when he was hired in January. "When I started, the agreement that I made was that I would work under the same terms and conditions that my predecessor did," explained Metzler, who said he was told that former manager Timothy Stafford …
Friday, February 17, 2012
Borough council voted 3 to 2 in favor of approving a gradual increase of the water meter service
An ordinance that would quadruple the borough’s water meter service charge over the next three years looks primed for passage. Council approved the measure on first reading Tuesday, by a 3-to-2 vote down party lines. If it passes second reading on Feb. 28, it will become law. The proposed fee increase coupled with the borough's water usage rate would align what the borough charges for water with neighboring municipalities and generate over $1.3 million in much-needed revenue, borough manager Tom Metzler said. Councilman Ed Trawinski, who voted in favor of the service charge increase, said he didn’t like having to raise the rates, but felt it was a necessary evil. “If we don’t do it over three years, then in a subsequent year we’re going to…
Monday, January 30, 2012
The borough has 26 fewer full-time employees than it did at the beginning of last year
The borough’s aging workforce, decimated by employee retirements and extended disability-related leaves of absence, has left some departments operating at critically-low staff levels. Borough manager Tom Metzler said Friday that in the past year, 26 vacated borough staff positions hadn’t been filled because of budgetary constraints. “In lieu of layoffs and furloughs, it’s not a bad practice to leave positions open, it certainly saves money,” he said. “But we are reaching a point where we have departments finding it difficult to finish their work because we’ve had so many positions left open.” One such department is Health and Human Services, which is down three full-time employees since the beginning of last year. Until recently, the …
Wednesday, January 25, 2012
The borough expects to bring in hundreds of thousands in revenue from the implementation of third-party ambulance billing
Third-party ambulance billing, a potential cash cow for the borough that has been delayed since last summer, will commence on March 1. In mid-January, the borough and third-party intermediary Revenue Guard EMS Claims Management signed a two-year contract with a one-year extension option, borough manager Tom Metzler said. For Fair Lawn residents who utilize the ambulance service, the switch means precious little. Transport will remain free to residents as well as non-residents, whether they're insured or uninsured. "At the end of the day, no resident should ever pay a bill from the borough of Fair Lawn for ambulance service," Fair Lawn Volunteer Ambulance Corps president Dan Furphy said back in October. "We never ever want any money from a …
Buster Hyman
12:16 am on Friday, April 19, 2013
There goes the police moral that was on the rise... Go quit the academy again Jimmy!!! more ›