What’s Important to Know About Berkeley Heights This Week….
The primary focus of this week’s newsletter is more drama surrounding the Policy Committee Chair’s attempt to steamroll through a policy that essentially seeks to justify the controversial Courtesy Busing program that leaves some families paying for busing while others receive it for free. This week, we learned about closed-door meetings, consultants who refuse to hand over the data supporting their recommendations, and payments to consultants without BOE approval.
Boe Members Joly and Akiri provided insight into this strange process as the public began to see the value of having BOE members who answered questions and did not hide behind committees and made-up rules preventing them from communicating with the public.
Laura adds an element to the discussion with a completely different perspective on the transportation issue Courtesy Busing is trying to solve, which demonstrates how myopic and single-solution-focused those supporting the policy committee chair’s proposed policy have been in discussing potential solutions.
We move onto a new set of forms that allows residents to email the Town Council and BOE as a whole without searching for emails and creates a record of their correspondence that can be published with their permission – as a response to both government bodies stopping the practice of reading community correspondence.
As always, we end with news from around the state and our notes for the week.
