New Public Workshop Sessions For Chatham Borough Announced By Mayor

CHATHAM, NJ — Chatham Borough Mayor Thaddeus Kobylarz announced at this week's council meeting that the Borough of Chatham Council will begin holding quarterly public workshop meetings next month.

The new format was inspired by seeing how similar meetings were being held in other New Jersey municipalities, and Kobylarz also mentioned that Chatham Township had recently implemented meeting workshops.

The workshop sessions will take the place of four regularly scheduled meetings on the calendar, the first of which is on Monday, Mar. 27. The workshop meetings will be held at the same time in the municipal building at 54 Fairmount Ave. and will still be open to the public.

"This has been something we have been kicking back and forth, and some of us have been thinking about it for, probably a couple of years now, but we are finally going to pull the trigger on this," Kobylarz said.

In comparison to a normal council meeting, the new workshop sessions will allow the council members to engage in conversations and listen to public comment without needing to take any sort of formal action.

The meetings will solely focus on the discussion of policy, along with a section for reports from various borough officials.

Kobylarz said that while some municipalities hold the workshop sessions immediately after each regular council meeting, it seems more practical to hold the workshop meetings quarterly in Chatham Borough.

"Based on how these meetings go, we could look at adjusting their frequency at some point down the line," Kobylarz said.

One of the main goals of the new meetings, according to Kobylarz, is to help increase the transparency between the local government and its residents, which has been a point of contention in previous council meetings.

"Work sessions such as these will allow the full governing body to discuss policy matters and progress with respect to borough projects and initiatives with our borough professionals together in a public setting," Kobylarz said. " You'll get kind of a different perspective on some of the topics. You'll get to see how some of our policy decisions get formed."