We are now at roughly 6 years since the borough had their ambush meeting. This was a meeting where borough officials requested the Rescue Squad leadership appear, but would not share the purpose of the meeting. At the meeting, they threatened a lawsuit if control of the South River Rescue Squad and South River EMS were not turned over to borough officials. Needless to say, we played their buff and now the residents of South River are footing the bill.
In 2016, the borough commissioned a study for a downtown revitalization project. In that study, the rescue squad’s lot was identified as a place that a parking lot could be built as part of the project. Although we’ve suspected that was the borough’s motivation from the start, we only recently found out that this is 100% true. A council member told a member of the public that the borough intends to tear down the rescue squad to make it into a parking lot and that person informed us. They never intended to negotiate in good faith and they had no plans to reinstate the squad. They are happy paying East Brunswick $25,000 a year to provide EMS for the borough. That doesn’t even cover the salary of 1 EMT for a year!
If you are interested in looking over the study, it can be found here: https://www.southrivernj.org/DocumentCenter/View/134/2016-Redevelopment-Study—Lower-Main-Street-Study-Area-PDF
In case the borough removes that link, it can also be found here: https://www.southriverrescue.org/fileinfo/2016%20Redevelopment%20Study%20-%20Lower%20Main%20Street%20Study%20Area%20(PDF).pdf
Page 46 shows the rescue squad and indicates that the criteria for using that lot is satisfied because the borough owns the lot. This was in 2016, two years before the borough conspired to destroy the rescue squad.
We look forward to our day in court! Well, it’ll probably be a lot more than a day because the thousands of pages of documents we have tell quite the story of illegal activity, agreement violation and general bad acting by the borough and it’s officials.