Mayor Says Costs of Newsletter Could Nearly Triple Next Year

Two of three borough commissioners favor paying up to $9,000 a year to publish the Municipal Matters newsletter twice a month in a newspaper mailed to town residents.

Mayor Tish Colombi said she would not be surprised if the borough spent up to $20,000 next year for communications, nearly three times what it budgeted this year.

“When you get right down to it, the reason we are changing is that it was obvious the current way of getting news out is not working,” Colombi said Thursday. “Doing something on the cheap is what that is. It doesn’t always work.”

Colombi and fellow commissioner Ed Borden agreed this week to an offer from David Hunter, publisher of What’s on Haddonfield, to redesign the borough newsletter and publish it on a full page. Hunter lost a bid to write the newsletter, as he had for nearly two decades, when the commissioners chose Suasion Communications Group earlier this month. Some of the communications services in Hunter’s bid were four times the costs of Suasion’s bid.

Hunter previously published the newsletter in his paper for free when he wrote it. He lost the communications contract last year to Elauwit Media, publisher of the Haddonfield Sun, when it underbid him. He stopped publishing the newsletter when Elauwit wrote it. Elauwit published Municipal Matters, but not in the contiguous form in which it had previously appeared in print. Then it stopped publishing it at all.

Commissioner Jeff Kasko is a dissenting voice. He has asked borough Administrator Sharon McCullough to get a price quote from the Sun for equivalent space to run Municipal Matters. Kasko said his real preference is for the borough to use its Web site as a primary means of disseminating information.

“My feeling is we can do it ourselves,” Kasko said. “But the others don’t see it that way. Now they want to pay for space.”

Colombi told the commissioners this week that she had formed a citizen’s committee as a sounding board on how borough-government news should be disseminated to residents. The committee said printing Municipal Matters in a newspaper delivered to every home for free was the way to go, she said.

The borough has about $6,500 of $7,000 budgeted for municipal communications remaining this year. Officials said it will cost about $4,900 to publish Municipal Matters in What’s On for the remainder of the year, about $346 per run. Suasion’s contract calls for about $210 to write each newsletter, which should cost about $1,800 for the remainder of the year.

Suasion also has a contract with the borough's business improvement district the Partnership for Haddonfield, which pays it $2,400 a month for media services.