By Philip Sean Curran
MIDDLETOWN – The township hopes to open a new 72,000-square-foot town hall in summer 2021, in partnership with a real estate company.
Brandywine Acquisitions and Development, part of the Brandywine Companies headquartered in Pennsylvania, will pay to construct the building and charge the township around $3 million annually in rent through a 30-year lease. At the end of the lease term, the township will retake ownership of the land, now a parking lot next to the current town hall.
At a groundbreaking ceremony June 20 for the new town hall, the township said it was also breaking new ground by having a public-private partnership for the building. Overall, the project will cost $56 million, the township has said.
“This is a really unique deal,” Deputy Mayor Anthony P. Fiore said at the ceremony in the municipal complex on Kings Highway. “This is a deal that, in a public-private partnership, is what I believe the first of its kind.”
He was joined by local officials and others for the late afternoon event. With rain falling, Mayor Tony Perry said the new building would give township residents and municipal employees “a place that they can be proud of, a place that they can see their investment, a place where the leaders of the future will continue to build on the progress that we’ve made.”
Township officials have said most government functions will be housed under one roof once the building opens. That will eliminate the need for residents to go to more than one place to conduct their business.
“Because right now, if you want to get a passport from the clerk, you want to pay your dog license and you want to apply for a permit in town, you’ve got to go to three different buildings,” Perry said in an interview after the ceremony. During construction, municipal employees in town hall will continue to work there. The building eventually will be demolished and the land turned into a parking lot.
“We don’t have the space to grow,” Perry said. “We don’t have a place where we can grow into. Every municipality is looking for new ways to save taxpayer dollars. Part of that is through shared-service agreements. And we need to ensure that we have the space to grow those shared-service agreements.”
Township administrator Anthony P. Mercantante said the current town hall was built in 1960, at a time when the community’s population was 39,000 people and the police department had 28 officers. Fast forward to the present: Middletown has grown to 68,000 people and 126 officers.
Perry said the town’s 13 female officers – the most of any police force in the county – do not have a dedicated changing room and instead have to use a private bathroom. He said the police locker room floods every time it rains.
“And what you will see from this municipal complex is a municipal complex that our world class police department will flourish with,” Fiore said.
Perry said the township had looked at renovating the current town hall, a project that would have cost between $25 million and $35 million. He said the building, now home to the municipal health department, is becoming a township-run animal shelter.
Last week’s ceremony brought back past town officials, like former Mayor Frank Self, who led the community in the early 1980s.
“At that time, the mayor preceding me and myself, our office consisted of a filing cabinet in the clerk’s office,” he said.
“This has been a long day coming,” said former mayor and current Freeholder Gerry P. Scharfenberger. “A lot of meetings, a lot of presentations.”
Last year the township unveiled plans for the new building. As part of their larger vision, officials will decide in the coming months whether to lease or sell two pad sites at the municipal complex. Those new revenues will “help offset the cost of this project,” Fiore said.
Brandywine president Eric C. Moore, a former college basketball player at the University of Pennsylvania in the 1990s, said he valued what “a good team can do.”
“It’s been such a pleasure to work with the town to get this deal done,” he said. “We’re really partners with the town.”
