The Chaos Continues: West Amwell Township Committee Meeting Details from October 7, 2026
The Township Committee Meeting on October 7th, 2026 continued the 2026 trend of being chaotic and unpredictable, as Mayor Deal continued to upend agendas and bring in last minute, unvetted materials to present to the public.
For reference, we covered the agenda in a previous article available here.
Our full video of the multi-hour meeting is available below:
Mayor Deal's Push to Nuke the Shared Construction Office
The Mayor started the meeting by turning the agenda upside down, as usual, and brinigng this item to the front of the meeting "New Business - 10f. Discussion - Construction Office Shared Service Agreement with East Amwell Township".
The reason stated for moving the Shared Construction Office Agreement up was because the auditor was present and could not stay for the entire meeting, and would be answering questions and providing color on the presentation. As it turned out, the auditor more or less debunked the presentation and urged the Township to look at the numbers holistically and not in a vacuum.
We had a quick-take of Mayor deal's presentation in a previous article. To summarize, after claiming for months that she was gathering data about construction office finances, and delaying a presentation on that data over multiple Township Committee Meetings, Mayor Deal decided to present Uniform Commercial Code (UCC) reporting data about the construction office, and to present wild extrapolations and projections based on this data, and this data alone.
To be clear, the Mayor did not present Construction office budget numbers, or information from our Township finances. She strictly relied on State-reported UCC numbers. According to the Construction office manager, the construction office was not consulted at all for the materials in the presentation.
The conclusion reached by the Mayor was that the Construction office was costing the Township tens of thousands of dollars, and showed graphs indicating that over the next ten years that deficit would balloon to hundreds of thousands of dollars, and that therefore we should consider severing our relationship with East Amwell and moving to the DCA instead for our construction services. The DCA office that would serve us is in Asbury, NJ, nearly an hour away.
The assumptions behind that presentation appears to be badly, and perhaps even fatally, flawed.
First and foremost, the Mayor presented future construction activity within the Township as following a smooth 3.59% compound annual growth curve, while she showed expenses rising at a compound annual rate of 10.7%. Neither assumption makes much sense.
Compound revenue growth relies on regularly recurring revenues which are then increased by other means over time. Construction activity in East and West Amwell are not regularly recurring on a per-property basis. That is, individual property owners do not reliably undertake new construction projects year after year after year on a regular basis. Instead, different owners have different projects that come in and out of scope based on both personal factors as well as macro-economic factors. On any given year, very different owners will be undertaking various projects, and that will change every year. Factors like covid19 quarrantines, inflattion, and prevailing interest rates will heavily impact these numbers as well. People will tend to build when building is cheap, and will tend to avoid it when building is expensive.
The Mayor's presentation completely ignores these realities.
Second, expenses are not going to increase over 10% for every year for the next 10 years. If that were to actually occur, forget about our construction office. A literal doubling of expenses over 10 years would bankrupt West Amwell and every other Township in NJ. In fact, expenses only spiked because health care costs have spiked due to legislative issues. These spikes can't continue, or again we'll all be in deep trouble.
Third, the numbers ignore the fact that historically the Construction Department has been net-positive for at least 8 out of the past 10 years, and debatably could be shown to have been positive for all 10. Even if we assume it was profitable for "only" for 8 out of the last ten years, that profit all goes into other areas of our budget.
Removing the Construction Office completely removes the revenue potential for the township, and means we will never generate offsetting profits.
If interest rates go down, diesel fuel drops back to normal levels, or one or two large projects come to West Amwell, in the current model, West Amwell will see a renewed spike in Construction Office revenue. In the Mayor's model, only the State of NJ will profit if West Amwell and East Amwell construction activity increases.
It should be noted that the Mayor did not call to actually get rid of the Construction Office. Oh no, this was simply data that she presented to help us all make a decision in the near future.
Of course, Mayor Deal did not provide any analysis on continuing with our agreement with East Amwell as-is, or to negotiate a new deal with East Amwell. The only option she explored in her presentation was abandoning the agreement entirely, and forcing West Amwell residents to travel all the way to the DCA in Asbury, NJ.
The auditor gave detailed comments on the Mayor's proposed plan, and notably did not agree with or endorse her conclusions. He urged more data and more study, and injected quite a bit of reality into the Mayor's trip to fantasy island.
Township Auditor Reality Check on Construction Office Presentation
We'll also note that the entire Committee was not part of creating Mayor Deal's presentation, and that several of them only received it at the last minute. Committeeman Balaam objected to the entire presentation and said it was a mistake to show obviously flawed and incorrect numbers to the public, and offered his own printouts done that afternoon in an attempt to show a more comprehensive picture of the finances involved.
Mr. Balaam's interjection at the start of Mayor Deal's presentation is shown below.
Township Committeeman Balaam interjects on Construction Offices Finances
Finally, Mayor Deal promised her complete presentation would be shared with the public on the Township website the following day. That was a week ago, and nothing has been published to the website. This is probably for the best.
Approval of Meeting Minutes
Normally, approval of minutes would not merit its own entry in an article on a Township meeting. But this is Mayor Deal's West Amwell, and in Mayor Deal's West Amwell minutes are delayed for months and months as Committee Folk and the Township Attorney argue about them (all, ironically, while the livestream cameras are rolling). 15 minutes were wasted arguing about Minutes.
Ag Advisory Update
We had the first update from the Ag Advisory Committee in quite some time. The Chair indicated that they had visited the Poleo farm on Barry Road, and sent the Township Committee a letter noting their findings.
The letter is shown below.
This letter is notable for the fact that Township Committeeman Brian Fitting, Mayor Deal, and Mayor Deal's candidate-husband John Dale has characterized the Poleo property as a "fake farm", and tried to oppose its application to the Hunterdon County Agricultural Development a Board - a Board that was created to block Townships that started taking anti-farming stances in Hunterdon County, like Mayor Deal's majority has.
Land Use Board Update
Sean Pfeiffer, Chairman of the Land Use Board, spoke for about the upcoming sub-committee meetings on ag structures and several minutes on budgets.
Sean Pfeiffer, Land Use Board Comments
Open Public Comment Period
Several people spoke during the Open Public Comment Period. Given the limited time each person is allowed to speak, we can present short videos of several of them here out of the total directly.
Michael Dendis, Mayor, East Amwell Township, Public Comment
Jennifer Batchellor Public Comment
Anthony Poleo Public Comment
Jim Cally Public Comment
Cindy Walters Public Comment
Meghan Hudson Public Comment
Andrea Little Public Comment
Gail Brewi Public Comment
New Business - Route 31N Urban Renewal, LLC Redevelopment
The main notable item of New Business was approval of the Redevelopment Plan and Finance Agreements for Route 31N Urban Renewal. This appears to be part of the overall Route 31 Redevelopment plan, but details are light. The lot in question appears to be a 3 acre lot North of the Quick Chek on Route 31 in the Township as 420 Route 31 aka Block 21, Lot 14, and is zoned for mini-storage or light commercial offices. The next step is for their application to be heard by the Land Use Board on Oct 20th, 2026.
Many questions from previous meetings have remained unanswered by the Mayor or Committee as a whole. The whole Brian Fitting business of an illegal apartment and his appearance before the Hunterdon County Ag Dev Board were not addressed. The CFO fiasco with potential mishandling of Township funds was not covered. The DPW manager was again not present, nor was the CFO present for the Construction Office Financial discussion.
25 Hewitt Road was not on the agenda, but we received an "update" after a question was raised about it towards the end. The "update" consisted of the Township attorney telling us more or less to get stuffed, that the project was moving forward with the sediment basins. The Township Committee assured the audience that no other work could be done until and unless plans for buildings were submitted to the Township.
Finally, the Township actually managed to get their own livestream going. This was not announced to the public and seemed to catch the Township Committee by surprise. For reasons known only to Dave Beaumont, the camera and microphone will be located in the back of the meeting room, so you can only see the back of public speakers and presenters, and noise from the back of the room will be more prominent than that of the Township Committee members. From what we can tell you cannot link to or download the videos, but it is a step forward from where the Township was.
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