The Whippany Village developer offered to construct a Butler building (a sheet-metal structure) which might have cost a couple of hundred thousand dollars at best.
They also offered to construct a building to the Township’s / Fire Commissioners design but NOT PAY FOR IT. That was a sincere offer. His offer was limited to providing the actual manpower and construction services and labor (excavation, concrete work, walls roof, etc) since they were already on site. Perhaps that is where the confusion is. Building a building is not the same as paying for it!
As it turned out, he would not have been able to do this anyway since it was a public project, the actual construction would have to go out for bid. If the developer of Whippany Village was not the low bidder, he would be out of the picture.
The bottom line here is that the Fire Commissioners are doing everything in their power to put together a package where the Township will end up with a new fire house while at the same time minimizing the cost to the tax payers.
The developer has already prepared the site for utilities, drainage, and egress including curbs, etc. so they are working with within the spirit of assisting to the extent that they can.
If Iradi, Fariello & Coppolla keep up these false claims and maintain that they were unaware of these details then this whole thing could easily fall apart with the end result of no new fire house or one that will end up costing the taxpayers more than it shuold have. The more they insist on maintaining their version of the story the more incompetent they look. They were in the majority and if they really believed their own version of the story, then how did we end up with no guarantee to back it up.
Judy, Lenny, & George – you can’t have it both ways. Either you’re right and collectively incompetent, or you’re knowingly wrong and trying to make this into a political issue.
Knowing Lenny, he is just using this as precursor for his announcement to run as an independent for Township Committee while at the same time running for County Committee as a Republican!
