POINT PLEASANT BEACH — Prior to the annual public meeting of Point Pleasant Beach’s Non-Resident Taxpayers’ Advisory Committee (NRTAC) this year, two people integral to the group’s formation spoke to The Ocean Star to explain their views on the yearly meeting, as well as what makes the body so unique.
Keith Sluka and Vic DeLuca, two Point Pleasant Beach non-resident taxpayers, helped to form the NRTAC over a decade ago. Sluka, a former council president in the borough of Garwood, gave a bit of background to the formation of the committee. He said that he joined the group after receiving a letter from Seth Sloan, one of the non-resident taxpayers who first conceptualized the committee.
“Originally, I received a letter in the mail from Seth, I believe, 11 or 12 years ago,” said Sluka, “and he basically was asking if anyone was interested in applying for this committee, and the committee would look after the interests of mainly the non-resident taxpayers in Point Pleasant Beach.”
“At the time, I was council president in Garwood, New Jersey, so I thought I had some skills to offer regarding local government and things like that,” said Sluka. “A lot of times, people think it’s very easy — that if you just want something done, you should just get it done — but sometimes there are laws or ordinances in place that prevent that. I figured I could add to that conversation.”
Sluka spoke to the stark difference that he perceives between administrative work in a town like Garwood, which has mostly year-round residents, and Point Beach, which has a population that swells from below 5,000 to often over 25,000 in the summer.
“I give the people who run the government in Point Pleasant Beach a lot of credit,” said Sluka. “Governing a town (like Garwood) that has full-time residents…the people live there 24/7; some are commuters to New York, things like that. But you never have a position (like in Point Beach) where you have 5,000 residents and then every Saturday and Sunday you have 50,000 residents — it’s a little harder to manage.”
“We were never anti-resident — that’s for sure,” he said. “It was good that the government could hear from people who aren’t necessarily here year-round. But a lot of times, it really fell into the same realm as what the residents wanted, as well…One of the big things was, after (Superstorm) Sandy, a lot of the people were displaced; everybody wanted to put together a plan here this wouldn’t happen again…Both the residents and the non-residents wanted some type of outcome that would prevent that (displacement) from happening again.”
DeLuca, former mayor of Maplewood for 14 years and a current councilman in the township, explained from his own local government perspective how he thinks the NRTAC meeting benefits both non-residents and residents.
“I try to bring a sense of what’s possible; what’s real, what can be achieved, the importance of working together with the community…to get information out,” he said.
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