By Allison Perrine
RED BANK – The borough senior center on Shrewsbury Avenue has sat in disrepair for over two years. Residents have clearly demonstrated their anger over its status at public rallies and tense public council meetings for many months.
But a solution may be around the corner.
Announced March 1 in a press release issued by council members Erik Yngstrom, Kate Triggiano, Kathy Horgan and Hazim Yassin, the borough redevelopment agency will hear three proposals and cost estimates of potential plans for a new senior center. Two of the three plans keep the senior center where it stands today. The other involves relocating it.
“Although I have not been happy with the speed with which this issue has been addressed, I’ve always been in favor of completing the process we originally set up to fix our public buildings, and being able to actually compare options instead of just putting another band-aid on today’s problem,” said Triggiano, senior center liaison.
The senior center is currently unoccupied and has been for two years after a pipe burst at the facility in 2019. Located at 80 Shrewsbury Ave. overlooking the Navesink River, residents in town have been up in arms defending the property and demanding the council not sell it or repurpose it. Their demands are clear: Secure the funds to repair the senior center in its current location immediately.
At the Feb. 10 council meeting, officials introduced a resolution calling on the redevelopment agency, a group currently tasked with finding viable solutions to issues with multiple borough facilities in town, to emphasize public use and waterfront property while making decisions regarding borough facilities. It was ultimately approved that night in a 4-2 vote, with dissent coming from council members Michael Ballard and Ed Zipprich.
“The redevelopment agency’s exploration for municipal properties is part of its mission,” Zipprich wrote to The Two River Times Wednesday. “I’m a firm believer in the fact that it is less expensive to repair your assets and adaptively reuse them than to make
acquisitions of land, develop plans, tailor those plans and ultimately bond the financing in order to build new.”
Ballard also made his feelings clear at the February meeting when the council passed the resolution.
“I don’t understand why we’re hiding behind a redevelopment agency when it’s a very clear ask from the taxpayer to do a simple thing, to fix it. But we’re hiding behind a redevelopment agency and this resolution and all of this other – we’re twisting ourselves in pretzels when we can just agree to fix it,” he said. He asked that the council remove the senior center from the resolution, which was a blanket resolution for all borough facilities, but his proposal was shut down.
The redevelopment agency responded during its Feb. 23 meeting. According to Triggiano, last year the agency was looking at potentially combining the senior center with a community center at Count Basie Fields, but after hearing from local seniors and community members begging for it to be renovated in its existing location, that idea may change.
With that, the agency approved three proposals for the Hasbrouck Heights-based DMR Architects agency to conduct cost estimates and comparative options to bring the senior center “back to life,” according to the release.
The first option would be to restore the senior center as a stand-alone public building at its current location. The second would be to expand the building into a combined senior center and community center at its current location. And the third is a proposal to build a new senior center and community center at Count Basie Fields and remove the existing senior center. The final decision will be made by the mayor and council after they receive the analysis.
Yassin, who is running for reelection alongside Triggiano, said while he knows “a lot of people are upset” about the status of the senior center, “The public attention has certainly refocused our efforts, and we’ve made some changes to help expedite the process and answer our seniors’ calls for a solution.”
In an open letter dated Feb. 28 to the Red Bank Planning Board, signed by “concerned Red Bank residents,” calls were made to repair the center, along with bold accusations about Triggiano, Yassin, Horgan and Yngstrom, and borough administrator Ziad Shehady’s role in the process.
“In our opinion, our Borough Administrator and four members of the Borough Council have deliberately stalled and intentionally delayed fixing our senior center so that it can be part of the Redevelopment Agencies’ vision for our town,” the letter states. “We call this Demolition by Neglect and we are beyond furious that, though the Council is supposed to represent the residents, those four members are instead doing the bidding of outside interests.”
These “concerned Red Bank residents” wrote that the consideration of razing the building and combining it with a community center “is a clear example of age discrimination, where those of advancing age are ignored and cast aside.”
The redevelopment agency will meet again March 23 and will review the concept plans and prepare a report and recommendation for the mayor and council.
This article originally appeared in the March 4, 2021 print edition of The Two River Times.
