Red Bank Wants Shared Court Services

Mayor Pat Menna has no problem dissolving Red Bank municipal court. The same goes for the ones in Fair Haven, Shrewsbury, and Rumson, too, he said. We don’t need them, never have.

During the borough’s council meeting Wednesday night, Menna suggested that neighboring towns consider dumping their proprietary municipal courts and joining Red Bank in favor of a regional, multi-town municipal court he’s already dubbed the Two River Municipal Court.

In an era where towns are looking to save money at every avenue, Menna said it simply doesn’t make sense for every town to pay to support their own municipal court staff. Menna’s comments about a combined court came following the prodding of Councilman Michael DuPont, who said the issue has come up before but without much of a response from area towns.

Now, Menna said, is the time for discussion.

“It’s not a challenge,” Menna said. “It’s an invitation. An invitation to better serve all of our constituents.”

The idea has been tossed around Red Bank for a while, he said, and it’s one that’s already being implemented by other towns. Though they’re each operating independently at the moment, Menna said Hazlet, Keyport, and Matawan have agreed to share a municipal court in the near future. DuPont added that several municipalities in Sussex County have gone the combined-court route and produced savings in the hundreds of thousands of dollars for their towns.

It’s not just the salaries of a judge, a prosecutor, a public defender, and court staff that come with every municipal court, but other costs, like pension and health benefits too, that add up and linger on local budgets for decades.

“The hidden costs are what get you,” Menna said. “It’s illogical for 53 towns in Monmouth County to have 53 different courts.”

Menna said he’s not putting pressure on other towns to use Red Bank’s court system, and that his talk isn’t an effort to get adjacent towns to dump their courts in favor of having Red Bank manage them. If a combined court were agreed upon, it wouldn’t even matter if it were located in Red Bank or another town, he said.