Interview With Township Committee Candidate Hal Halverson

hi i'm avi solomon and i'm here with hal halverson who's running for the lakewood township committee seat uh in the republican primary which is running mate steve langer and they are facing challenger herschel hirschfords this will be one of a number of any interviews for to get the local residents to know the candidates a little better some might know some other better than others but i give you hal halverson mr allison can you please tell us a little something about yourself for those who don't know anything who don't know you know much about you okay i'll be more than happy to as you can see my name is hal halverson uh i've been living in ocean county now a little over 40 years i've been living in lakewood itself a little over five years i worked locally uh in ocean county for many years at a financial institution which also had businesses in lakewood my daughter went to the day school so i've had long time ties with lakewood i've also been involved in politics to the extent that i was chairman of the parking authority in dover township and a few years ago i was chairman of the tax review commission here so i've always been involved i have an interest and i felt that it would be important to step forward and be involved at this time thank you first question i'm going to ask is in regards to smart world lakewood is expanding rapidly um i think the projection is in the year 2030 there'll be over 200 000 people living in lakewood what ideas do you have for smart growth being that lakewood is constantly expanding and it seems that there's not so much room do you favor continuing building do you you know do you favor widening the roads yeah living here for 40 years it's been a constant uh one of the the latest person that moved in wanted to close the door and say no more people in ocean county and it's the same uh situation here in lake but people are going to continue to move and they've smart the plan the the town paid a lot of money for and was developed to see how that could be accomplished so the growth is going to come almost regardless of what everybody wants to do you can change some of the laws but the growth is still going to come so i think it's it's here lakewoods is merging from a town to a city and all of those factors have to be taken into consideration so i think that was just noted that uh we're short parking spaces downtown and the projection is the shortage is even going to grow so it stands to reason that parking garages are going to have to take place some of the streets certainly gonna we're gonna have to figure out how to change uh traffic packets as an example new york city certain streets you only can go all the way across town we might have to do that going from forest avenue over to monmouth certain streets maybe it's going to have to be straight through no turns to get the traffic moving i was happy to see we have left-hand lane turns now on on clifton in the middle of town i think that's important i think that the like westgate and that type of development where the people have the opportunity to walk to the stores and so forth is a tremendous plus for the city it reduces the traffic when the stores are closer to the homes and hopefully more businesses will come along with it now follow up on that something like really focusing on where you're willing to stop at building people have been so radical to as suggest to drain the lake and build there now that might not actually happen but the idea is is that they want to tear down anything they can to build because of the amount of people that want to come in the question i'm posing to you is do you have a point where you're going to say you know what we're not building we're not tearing down every single tree um in order to put people here or do you favor you know just continuing and continuing the building to make as much room as possible wow that's that seems to be a stretch to me is draining the lake and things of that nature uh i there's still an awful lot of vacant land in lakewood once that land is developed and we get to that kind of point where else do you go what else do you do i think you just can't arbitrarily take down every tree uh you can't drain the lake i think that's going to you're going to take away the character of the city of the town and then maybe you're going to start to see people leave so there's a reasonable approach to it and i think as as it's going right now and occupying the land that is not uh occupied and the zones that were selected by the planning board the planning uh program that was just developed should continue but yes there is a point of that's it all right um just i'm not sure if you want to continue consider this a follow-up but regarding traffic you know we just had this tragedy happen with the bus um i'm going to ask two points on it number one is the congestion in lakewood is getting out of hand now i was uh in contact with robert cutler a number of years ago the man is a brilliant man he foresaw this problem coming up and what he wanted to do was institute public busting like we have in new york city for example would you be in favor of this idea of you know through federal funds and through advertising and keeping the cost as low as possible and getting buses out there or do you think that that's not going to practically work for lakewood no i think it's all part of becoming a city i think there's going to be more traffic rights i think how extensive a bus system is going to be i'm not really sure but it stands to reason that buses certainly would help to some degree you see all a lot of retirement communities have buses to bring the people into certain areas and bring them back out i think anything we can do to avoid the congestion and get people moving has to be considered thank you let's move on to the subject of property taxes and you know it's such a vast subject that i'm gonna try and narrow it down um general question what if you're on the committee what do you think you would go after to try and lower property taxes and numbers you know let's just deal with that question first okay i think that uh we have to continue what was started two years ago which was really very close examination of everything that's taking place with expenses within the city such as they had you know adjusted the emt salaries and so forth i think that maybe some of the big ones that jump out you have been addressed but i think we have to continue in that that direction i think an awful lot of towns i know for a fact when times are good some courtesy things come into effect ah there's an extra trash pickup there's an extra crossing guard they send a policeman here and do other things i think those types of things will have to be addressed and removed but i think it's equally important that we can constantly work toward increasing rateables we need to keep increasing commercial gradables i think the plan to bring that energy plant into lakewood from germany is a wonderful uh wonderful thing and i think we have to spend as much time and trying to increase the commercial gradables as we spend on trying to figure out how to cut costs thank you uh just going into one of the things that i know one of your opponents um has been a very big uh not but you know it's not been something he's been happy about uh the liquid blue claws um a lot of people feel that it's a drain on the taxpayer dollars especially since now the uez i think is completely gone or i think chris christie cut it off so my question is what do you see possible to do about the blue cost field well i believe the certain aspects it was it's paid for at this point it's my understanding and i believe that the rent that they're paying the township at this point is a minimal amount so i think that certainly could be addressed uh to move that a dollar amount to an appropriate amount uh especially considering with you know the town is paying for police office to be there and so forth so yes i think it should be paying its fair share uh but i also think it it's a possibility of increasing uh businesses for likely okay um one last question uh the downtown area another pet peeve of one of your opponents um he has said that it's a tremendous problem in lakewood as far as the amount of reformation that's needed what problems do you see with the downtown area and what solutions do you see for those problems well certainly parking is a problem and if we go in directions of parking garages that would that would alleviate that situation and to attract businesses that are going to attract shoppers into the downtown area um and of course we have uh the people are you know waiting to get hired for the day and i know they put a different shelter i'm not sure if it's getting a great deal of use which is a problem that is really seems to be beyond our control but we need to constantly try to figure out how to move the people off the streets so the shoppers feel at ease and shopping okay this is hal halverson he's running for the township committee seat with his running mate steve langert uh the opponent is hershel herskowitz um before i close you know i two things i encourage everyone to go out and vote in in the republican primary number two is do you have any last words for the voters of lakewood before we say goodbye yes i think lakewood has a big future in front of us i think we need to approach the issues in a positive manner and i think that we can do that we can solve a lot of the problems that's unique these are unique times the federal government's coming back the state government's coming back at the same time costs are going up so we're just going to have to be diligent treat it like a business you shut the light off when you leave the room and and try to cut as much cost and continue to try to look for increased revenues for the time thank you very much thank you pleasure talking to you