PARSIPPANY — A Parsippany Democratic Fundraiser Concert was held on Sunday, August 2 at the Livingston‐Benedict House on Old Parsippany Road.
Grover Kemble, Tim Metz, Frank Elmo and Teddy Comora performed some jazz and blues during the afternoon fundraiser. “The entire experience was awesome,” said attendee Joanne Rich.
Some of the summer time menu items included mini-mufalettas, mini-shrimp po’boys, pimento cheese sandwiches and fruit skewers. After the music, they served freshly fried beignets, (and I have to say delicious too), prepared by Roberta Bramhall
The event was hosted by Bob and Julia Dutton Peterson.
Tim Metz, bass
Council Candidate Nick Kumburis and Frank Elmo
Frank Elmo, Sax and Flute; Council Candidate Nick Kumburis; Tim Metz, bass; Council Candidate Greg Elbin; Council Candidate Janice McCarthy; Teddy Comora and Grover Kemble, guitar/vocals
Frank Elmo playing the sax and flute
Frank Elmo and Grover Kemble
Tom and Betty Wyka
Former Parsippany-Troy Hills Mayor Mimi Letts talking to Teddy Comora
Definately a bumper sticker you would find at such an event
In April Nick Kumburis, Janice McCarthy and Greg Elbin was endorsed by the Parsippany Democratic Committee to run for Town Council on the Democratic Committee Line.
Nick Kumburis, a resident of Lake Parsippany, is a U.S.Navy veteran. He is a graduate of Montclair State with a degree in biology and chemistry and will receive an MBA from Rutgers this month. He and his wife, Sue Martin, are raising two children who attend Eastlake School. Nick is a member of the Lake Parsippany Property Owners Association and has served St. Andrew’s Lutheran Church as a Vice President of their Council and is currently employed at PAR Pharmaceuticals.
anice McCarthy lives in Mount Tabor with her husband Joe. She has an undergraduate degree in Business from Bloomfield College and an MBA from Fairleigh Dickinson. After a career as a financial professional managing and directing for Fortune 500 companies, she helped lead the Budget and Planning function at Montclair State University, served in the University’s freshman mentoring program, and taught finance at Seton Hall. Janice has volunteered for Literacy Volunteers and served as trustee and treasurer for a local homeowner’s association.
Greg Elbin is a graduate of Dickinson College and earned an MA from Penn State. He taught at Morris Knolls High School for 28 years. He and his wife, Susan, are active in environmental causes. Their daughter is a graduate of Parsippany High School. Greg is active in Kiwanis and Parsippany United Methodist Church.
The team of Kumburis, McCarthy and Elbin will work to build consensus on the Town Council to support an open and transparent town government that advocates for spending accountability and responsible development.
The general election will be held on Tuesday, November 3.
The Lake Parsippany Property Owners Association (LPPOA) is going to ask the residents of Lake Parsippany to foot more of the bill. (Click here to read related article)
The decline in people using the Lake is not the residents fault. So why should we have to pay? I have a pool in my yard for my grandchildren. They use it an enjoy it as I do.
I stopped one day with my grandson to let him see the ducks. A man came up to me and said it was private property an I would have to leave. Great Public Relations on his part.
It doesn’t cost me $460.00 a year to run my pool. This would be a very unfair tax burden on the resents of Lake Parsippany. It’s like saying you have to buy a car from us but you can’t drive it. This would be a tax but no repetitive. My spelling may not be 100% but my anger is.
As most wake up to a wet morning, New Jersey residents should expect the rain to clear up by midday, setting the stage for another scorcher. Highs Tuesday are expected to push into the 90s for the eighth straight day, the longest heat wave since 2013. PLUS: ‘Winter-like’ storm could break heat wave, usher in cool…
On Thursday, August 13 at 6:30 p.m., Parsippany Board of Education is holding a meeting at the Board Office, 292 Parsippany Road, to discuss how and when the newly turfed football field and track will be used once work has been completed this September. (Editors note: click here to read related article).
At that meeting the board will provide the public with the opportunity to comment and hopefully the board will take the public’s input into consideration as they decide who will use the field and when the field will be used having served on the board of education for seven years I know that if the board does not receive any feedback from the public, the board will likely conclude that it can take any action it wants to take and will then feel free to favorably consider the requests that are going to come from the many organizations that will want to use the Parsippany High School field. (Please remember that the turfed field is being lined so that football, soccer, field hockey and lacrosse teams can use it. As the board of education has the authority to allow any Parsippany based not- for-profit organization to use the field the risk that the field could be in use seven days a week from 8:00 a.m. to 10:00 p.m. is very real.
On numerous occasions over the past couple of years the board of education has been asked to provide families who live around and near the field information as to how the board planned to manage potential noise, parking, litter and safety issues that might arise as a result of opening up the field to teams other than those that play for the high school. Up to this point in time the Board of Education has refused to comment which is why attending the meeting on August 13 is so important. Among the questions that need to be answered:
Which organizations does the Board of Education intend to allow to use the field and what will be the ages of the athletes allowed to use the field?
What days of the week will the field be available to those organizations and what hours will the field be open? Who will enforce those hours?
What kind of noise restrictions will be in effect i.e. no public address system?
Will parking be allowed on streets surrounding the field or restricted to the high school parking lot?
Who will be responsible for ensuring that the surrounding neighborhoods are kept safe and clean when the fields are being used by non-school teams and their out of town opponents?
Last evening, Monday, August 3, Parsippany-Troy Hills Planning Board approved the UPS Office complex, while vacant office space rules the landscapes. (Editors Note: The UPS Office complex will be located in Morris Corporate Center)
In 2014 Parsippany after 8-years of allegedly being in a regional Master Plan Conformance process suddenly decided to end the process. In eight years Parsippany improved its Master Plan not at all. They have though changed the meaning of the term “redevelopment” in favor of re-use and even that term, Re-use has lost its meaning.
One definite reason perhaps conveniently dismissed for not conforming to regional plan was Parsippany’s so-called “redevelopment” or the deal between Parsippany & UPS to construct their office complex on Block 136 Lot 43. Private property rights take preference over good land use, and the balance between large development and protection of natural resources.
From our Master Plan: To protect and conserve the water supply serving the Parsippany-Troy Hills community. To ensure that any prospective development is responsive to the Township’s environmental features, and can be accommodated while preserving these physical characteristics.
Anyone reviewing the interactive maps provided by the Highlands Council would have seen, this landscape has wellhead protection area, almost all of it is a Ground water Recharge Area, harbors a small mature forest, wetlands, borders on a Flood prone area, and could be considered a Community Environmentally Constrained Sub-zone.
The legal argument last night by UPS vs Morris Corporate was traffic and how the 1000 new employees at UPS and the upcoming removal of trees; (no mention of replacing them elsewhere) and 4200 loads of soil, should be allowed to proceed before the Interface Parkway, Upper Pond Road to Cherry Hill Roads extension are constructed. The argument quite ridiculous and ironic was that a portion of the Ordinance requires “vacant parking spaces” to be included in the formula. Instead what this should have triggered was the complete lack of need for more office space and potential vacant spaces of impervious surface.
Look-up how redevelopment is defined by the State. It is land already developed, Brown and Grey fields, not new land development. Block 136 Lot 43 has no infrastructure, sewers and needed roads and safety devices to accompany the new traffic volume. PARSIPPANY SO-CALLED REDEVELOPMENT PLAN IS A SMOKE SCREEN, NEGLECTING PROPER LANDUSE OR STEWARDSHIP IN FAVOR OF PROPERTY OWNERSHIP RIGHTS THAT DO-NOT CONSIDER CONFLICTS BETWEEN DEVELOPMENT AND PROTECTION OF NATURAL RESOURCES. The so-called redevelopment plan also provided a loophole for Parsippany to evade its own traffic ordinance. This redevelopment scheme was “secretly’ conceived with no public encouragement; or participation. Who would think redevelopment would be anything other than its defined meaning?
Mayor Barberio seems to think all is just a matter of opinion, to him there is no facts. The fact that the Planning Board does not themselves review landscapes using provided for “interactive maps” is telling. In fact when in my experience they are presented they are shunned. They are neutral, simply providing scientifically known land characteristics. OUR MASTER PLAN IS NOT WORTH THE PAPER IT IS WRITTEN ON. In a County with abundant vacant office space, we make another for a tax rateable; while we erase an important remaining natural resource that will surely affect our water supply. Over 15 acres of a 20.9 acre landscape in a ground water recharge area will become an impervious surface. How long will UPS’s office complex remain is use; adding to the inventory of vacant office space.
We will find in the long-term & short that Parsippany the UPS will bring and does not promote the standard of living or health for resident s of Parsippany; only more money to spend on more needless spending for spending’s sake.
Regional Planning would have solved all these problems and UPS would still have their complex but not at the price of natural resource destruction surely to have an accumulative effect on our water and quality of life here, costly tax-payers in the future. Without the Regional Management Plan no balance can be had with corporate wants ignoring the needs of protecting our natural resources of which the future generations depend.
UPS is not an environmentally friendly corporation being selfish in their property rights ignoring the fact that they property they choose to purchase had “natural resource value” all to be erased by a NJDEP that is not doing their job, but favoring so-called short-term economic interest over long-term sustainability. Will the trees on this landscape be replaced? Most cases no tree inventory even exist despite Parsipanny’s claim to be tree conscience and caring. Under Home Rule our Master Plan is a joke an instrument of propaganda, not in the best interest of Parsippany but the large corporate land owners that surround us. Without leadership this trend will continue.
PARSIPPANY — The Lake Parsippany Property Owners Association held a meeting on Monday, August 3 to explore the feasibility of assessing all Lake Parsippany residents. Over the past five years there has been a decline in membership.
Of the 56 voting members in attendance they voted 49-7 to allocate $1,080 to hire Attorney Eileen Borne, from Dolan and Dolan to explore the feasibility of an assessment.
It is estimated to have 443 current members, about 300 households from Lake Parsippany and another 143 from out of the borders of the lake.
The nuts and bolts have not been worked out, the overlying premise is the maintenance (water quality, tree removal, etc) would be part of the assessment, which gives you no right to the lake. To use the lake you would need to pay the annual recreation fee.
The assessment would affect approximately 2,000 plus homes within the borders of Lake Parsippany.
The basic premises is that in order to recap the benefit you need to help with the burden. The concept is often referred to as “Fair Share.”
“In a memo released by the LPPOA they stated “We know that all of us have many unanswered questions such as how much will it cost. At this time we do not know. However, as we go through this process we will keep the membership informed. Each lake that has transitioned had its own unique obstacles and as a Board we simply cannot use the other lakes as an absolute model. All of your questions will be noted; however we cannot answer any of them at this time. Should you come up with any questions, please feel free to email contactus@lakeparsippany.net,” stated the Board of Directors.
Currently the membership to join the lake for a family is $460.00. Junior membership is $120.00 and a single membership is $265.00 and a senior membership is $120.00. (note: there are discounts for early bird specials).
Most recently transitioned are Lake Arrowhead and Intervale. Glacier Hills Pool is in the process now and Rainbow Lakes is beginning an investigation as well.
Correction: Previous version of this story referred to the assessment as a tax assessment, the word tax was deleted from the story.
PARSIPPANY — The national political newspaper and website POLITICO recently published a scathing article which links township venders circumventing local Pay to Play laws by donating money to a Super PAC supporting a local slate of GOP Council candidates.
Confirming what was previously reported in Parsippany Focus, POLITICO reports that IRS filings reveal that the Super PAC, America’s Future First, raised almost $88,000 in 2014. Of that, about $48,000 came from Fairview Insurance, while another $32,000 came from the engineering firm Adams, Rehmann and Heggan (ARH). Earlier this year Fairview Insurance, Parsippany’s health insurance broker, was voted out by the Council to be the broker of record for 2015.
In 2014, ARH was awarded a contract with the township but neither POLITICO nor Parsippany Focus were unable to confirm whether or not any work was done for the township. One source told Parsippany Focus that ARH has been retained by Waterview Developer Steve Kalafer, but at publication time, Parsippany Focus has been unable to confirm this.
Although IRS filings do not show Super PAC spokesman Timothy White nor his firm Beckerman Group as being paid by America’s Future First, or it’s sister Super PAC, NJ’s Future First, White does represent himself as the Super PAC’s spokesman. As previously reported in Parsippany Focus, Timothy White is no stranger to Parsippany. White, a vice president at Beckerman Group public relations firm, has previously been retained by Steve Kalafer, one of the investors of the controversial Whole Foods development plan at “Waterview”, a project, Carifi and his team opposed, and one that dePierro and his slate supported. In 2013, White, working for Waterview developer partner Kalfer, penned “letters to the editor” on behalf of various individuals in support of the project and issued press releases for the building trades unions, of which the Super PAC’s director Robert Dombroski is a member of. In one email Parsippany Focus has obtained, White wrote Kalfer and his personal assistant:
Bob Grieb from the Pipefitters was nice enough to lend his name to the quote in the press release, I thought we can follow up with a letter to the editor from Bob that we can publish in the Daily Record, The PATCH and The Star-Ledger.
Attached is a draft of a letter from Bob. Do you think we can get him to approve this letter? If so I would just need his phone number and e-mail address for verification purposes and I will submit on his behalf.
Thanks again,TW
In another email, Mr. Kalafer’s assistant asked another Waterview development partner, Joseph M Forgione, to forward a Timothy White authored press release to Parsippany Township attorney John Inglesino.
Within a week of the Waterview project being voted down in October 2013, White was also issuing press releases to the media on behalf of no one against former Councilman Jonathan Nelson who voted against the controversial project.
Super PAC sets up shop in Parsippany
As the 2015 Council primary race heated up, The Super PAC advertised on various employment websites that they would pay between $10-$20/hour for canvassers supporting the dePierro slate and rented a small storefront at 709 Lake Shore Drive, Lake Parsippany, as it’s headquarters.
Parsippany Focus inquired with the Township’s Zoning Department about the small office. The Zoning Department had no records of any permit being filed and immediately sent a field inspector out to inspect the office.
Although the headquarters was closed at the time of inspection, the township inspector confirmed that the Super PAC was operating at the location and took photos of the operation. The day after the Township’s Zoning Department contacted the owner of the property, the Super PAC abruptly abandoned the premises.
According to state and federal laws, PACs may support issues, but may not have any contact with individual candidates. When first made aware of the Super PAC’s presence in Parsippany, dePierro told Politickrnj that “this must have been arranged by someone who sees what they’re [Councilman Paul Carifi] doing on council and doesn’t like their conduct at council meetings. Parsippany is the largest town [in Morris County] and all these years I never felt completely in control [of what happens in campaigns].”
“I don’t know who the PAC is,” he added. “I haven’t even seen the mailer. I understand they misspelled my name. I haven’t seen this.”
While the Super PAC was operating the office in Lake Parsippany, sources have observed Councilman dePierro and his running mate Vincent Ferrera both inside and outside of the Super PAC’s headquarters. Parsippany Focushas obtained photos which clearly confirm this accusation.
UPDATE:
The photos of Council Candidate Vincent Ferrara and his car were taken in mid May. His license plate is blurred to protect his privacy. The photo of Councilman dePierro’s car was taken the following afternoon. Councilman dePierro was also observed carrying what appeared to be a “Staples” ream of paper box leaving the office carrying a large folder with a lot of paper. However, Councilman dePierro had difficulty carrying the material so the person who observed him offered to assist rather than take a photo. The address of the Super PAC HQ is 709 Lake Shore Drive. Visiting street view in Google Maps show clearly that these photos are taken at that address.
Council Candidate Ferrara in Super PAC HQCouncil candidate Ferrara’s car parked in front of Super PAC HQ while he is inside.Councilman dePierro’s car parked directly in front of Super PAC HQ. Councilman dePierro returned to his car moments later carrying a box
PARSIPPANY — I Scream, You Scream, Please join The Goddard School for Ice Cream!
The Goddard School, the premier preschool for children from six weeks to six years, located at 311 Smith Road is hosting an Ice Cream Social Open House on Thursday, August 6 from 5:00 p.m. to 7:00 p.m.
During this free family fun event, children of all ages will enjoy refreshments and fun activities. The evening will feature arts and crafts, games, and of course the opportunity to make your own sundae. You will also be able to visit our classrooms and meet our teachers. New families who enroll at this event will receive 50% off their first month’s tuition.
On-site owners, Ravi and Sushama Patil, along with their faculty, which includes teachers trained and experienced in early childhood development, are eager to welcome children into this nurturing environment where the curriculum encourages learning through play. The program offers parents the convenience of extended hours from 7:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m., the flexibility of either half-or full-day schedules and the security of the highest corporately monitored Quality Assurance standards. For more information about their programs, click here.
PARSIPPANY – Parsippany Central Middle School 12-year olds Kenny Lee, Sarah Lepre, and Karmina Wall will perform in New Vision Players’ (NVP) production of Legally Blonde, Jr.
The students will take center stage in the popular musical at the end of August. This is the premiere youth production for this upcoming company, which won several NJACT Perry Awards for their acclaimed version of Les Miserables in 2013.
A fun international award-winning musical based on the popular movie, Legally Blonde, Jr. follows the transformation of Elle Woods as she tackles stereotypes, snobbery, and scandal in pursuit of her dreams. This action-packed musical explodes on stage with memorable songs and dynamic dances. Equal parts hilarious and heart-warming, this musical experience is a fun night out with the family.
Kenny Lee previously appeared in the CMS Spring musical Peter Pan, Jr. as Michael. This summer, he has the role of Emmett Forrest, the lawyer that is working hard to become a partner and befriends Elle Woods, the main character.
Sarah Lepre has been performing for five years in various community theater productions, short films, and performing arts events. This is her second NVP production, as she played Young Eponine in Les Miserables. She was also in CMS’ Peter Pan, Jr. as Tinkerbell. In Legally Blonde, Jr., Sarah will play Vivienne Kensington, the snobby rich girl who is Elle’s nemesis.
Karmina Wall is an accomplished musician and has played the violin with the New Jersey Youth Symphony Orchestra, and sang recently in Carnegie Hall with the Golden Key Festival. She also plays flute in the CMS band. Karmina will perform the role of Brooke Wyndham, the fitness instructor on trial for murder in Legally Blonde, Jr.
The friends are very excited to perform together and spend their summer singing and dancing.
The production will be held on Thursday, August 27 at 7:00.p.m.; Saturday, August 29 – 7:00 p.m. and Sunday, August 30 at 2:00 p.m.
Legally Blonde, Jr. will be performed at Temple Emeth, 1666 Windsor Road, Teaneck. Tickets are $12.00 for General Admission and $10.00 for Kids 10 and Under, Seniors 65 and older.
For more information/tickets for Legally Blonde, Jr., please visit New Vision Players’ website by clicking here or email Amanda Villafuerte, Co-President/Business Manager, New Vision Players, Inc. at info@newvisionplayers.com.
Dear Editor:
It is estimated to have 443 current members, about 300 households from Lake Parsippany and another 143 from out of the borders of the lake.
PARSIPPANY — I Scream, You Scream, Please join The Goddard School for Ice Cream!