Solar gets kicked AGAIN by Mayor Mundell

Jane Califf advocating - again - for solar in town

Jane Califf attended the May 5th Council meeting once again - which she has done for nine years now - advocating for Solar in Bloomfield. She made these comments:

"Good Evening,

    At the last Town Council meeting on April 21st, a resident spoke at the public comment period and asked for a progress report on solar since he had not heard anything for quite awhile.  I could barely hear you, Mayor Mundell, because the acoustics are poor in this room.  I had to access the video a few days later at home via the Media Center WMBA, and I was very disappointed in what you said.

     You said that Bloomfield has gone through a series of evaluations and that most of the municipal roofs are not O.K. for solar because the roofs are in disrepair and "we would need to do some things to replace them..."  I wondered why you were talking about roofs when in the fall of Oct. 2023 the Town Council hired Talva Energy to do a survey of town properties, and after their survey was complete, the T.C. hired this company to do the engineering planning to put solar canopies over the Municipal Parking lot and over the Glenwood multi-story garage.  There was and is no talk about roofs.  You did not mention these 2 projects.

       In fact you said that "we don't have any signed deals".  But isn't this contract a deal?  You even implied that this company is questionable by saying this:  "all we have is a company that sells the solar that is telling us solar is great" but Talva does NOT sell solar.  it evaluates sites for solar, does the necessary engineering design for each site and when the town agrees, sends out RFPs to choose a company to build them.

      This highly-regarded company was chosen by this Town Council because it has been doing solar evaluations for 15 years and has successfully helped with solar installations on many NJ schools and town properties and beyond.  Yet you even implied that they were just out to make money and because of this you needed to bring in "the Bloomfield Engineering Dept. and others  to make sure that it's not just a sales person telling us".  

       Our Town Engineer, Mr. Paul Lasek, even said at a recent meeting that the planning work was done and the project was "shovel-ready" when the T.C. has the finances and subsidies in place.

        For 9 years, the Bloomfield Citizens Solar Campaign has advocated for solar, and during this time the T.C. has had one excuse after another to put it off.  In 2019, it paid another company between $17,000 and $30,000, renewed the contract for the same, produced a detailed report and then nothing happened.  That was a big waste of our tax dollars.

        Our organization is concerned that this could happen again, especially after we heard the Town Administrator at a recent T.C. meeting say that maybe putting solar panels over the Municipal parking lot was a bad idea because the building is old and will probably be knocked down and replaced in the next 30 years and the solar panels over the parking lot would be in the way.  This is a very strange argument to make.

        The Town Council should follow up on the idea that Councilwoman Davis put forward a couple of months ago.  She said that you should do all you can to make sure that when the funding is available to put up the solar canopies, that everything is in place to move forward without further delay.

        So do you have any response to what I’ve been saying?

Her response was:  “This is not really a comment period. Do you have anything else?” 

I said No. 

Then she said “Thank you.” 

That was it even though sometimes she does answer people’s questions.

Please watch the May 5th Bloomfield Town Council Meeting

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