It was mentioned to me recently that right around the time someone decided it would be a good idea to have a banquet hall right above Taylor, Merri-Makers was badly in need of a new waterfront wedding venue. Did a little research into it and found out it was true.
Looks like the Botts learned in 2011 that 2012 would be their last year at the Waters Edge in Sea Bright:
Then Sandy hit, making things very difficult for the Botts and their customers:
Very difficult:
Meanwhile at the exact same time this was going on, Belmar was laying plans for a beachfront wedding hall. Hard to believe this was a coincidence.
This morning I dug down deep into the dark recesses of the Common Sense for Belmar archives and found tapes of a presentation architect Gregg Sonnenfeld made to the Boardwalk Committee on June 20, 2013. The discussion about Taylor and the wedding hall begins at the 21:45 mark of the first tape. Found it to be pretty interesting in light of what we now know.
When Taylor was finally completed as a single story banquet hall Merri-Makers was the only one to bid for the food concession lease.
19 Comments
The reason you form a separate LLC is so if it doesn’t work you are not going to lose your main business.I will never buy food from that snack bar,due to how they steal all the best pavilion dates.
Why was Merri Makers given OUR building so they could make money? What other town does that? Who gives away municipal property and lets a privately owned business benefit from it? The new administration needs to fix this mess. It’s truly disgusting.
BELLE – I think we can all pretty much figure out what happened for Merri Makers to get that sweetheart deal.
Thanks so much to Dave and Ken for the research. Maybe we can bring the pavilion back to the people. Any news about that FEMA money and if they’ll pay for it?
The people I blame the most for all the problems. Yes you guessed it>>>> The John Does. We all let it happen.
#5- Speak for yourself. There were many people who attending meetings, spoke up over the BS and started referendums. And if you care to blame yourself for the problems, you are not alone. Some went to jail, some are losing their jobs and the rest will sit there and remain silent. It is that group of silent people I blame.
Scales of Justice are getting filled up. Hopefully Judge Judy will be on the bench for this conspiracy. How long ago (prior to Belmar BA) was colleen getting paid in any capacity by Merrimakers, their subsidiaries, tradenames, Botts, etc?
And any commissions, vacation, contest winner, VIP, vig,ETC paid by the above while on Belmar payroll?
In the first video it was stated that fema would only pay for what was there before. Period. Dorehty and Connolly lies lied lied. The night before the second pavillion vote, AFTER a judge ruled that only a small percent of fema money ( which we STILL haven’t gotten) could be used for the building of Taylor, They were out knocking on doors telling people it would cost the residents nothing! They never mentioned giving our building away to a commercial catering company.
We were bamboozled folks. Lets face it. That is one ugly as sin building with no character, no public access and our DEBT is coming due!!!! Remember when the new administration tells you how much we owe and how little money we have, dont shoot the messenger. All that crowing about no tax increase WAS to good to be true!!!! The day of reckoning is coming. And it won’t be pretty.
And for folks just tuning in. BA Colleen worked for Merri Makers.
MM didn’t even need to submit architectural drawings to do building improvements, as 10th ave did. They got permits in days,10 th ave has to wait months. They were allowed access immediately, 10th ave did not receive keys until Mid JUly.
#5- Here’s some history that shouldn’t be forgotten: The only reason we don’t have a two-story monstrosity on the boardwalk at Fifth Avenue is that nearly 400 citizens put their names to a petition to protest the $7 plus million bond ordinance the Mayor & Council introduced for it. Even then, some of these citizens had to agree to be Plaintiffs and go to court to compel the Borough to comply with the law and hold a referendum on that bond ordinance. At the same time, we brought a separate suit in which we requested that the Court rule on the legality of the Mayor & Council’s plan to use beach fees to pay the debt on the $2 Million cost of the second-story catering facility — the part that Magovern admitted in the first video above that FEMA would not fund. Judge Lawson ruled in our favor in a preliminary decision on November 6, 2013, in which he noted that “Plaintiffs could very well find themselves bank-rolling the construction of facilities such as catering halls and community meeting spaces which, while useful to the Borough and its residents, will provide Plaintiffs with little to no benefit in their capacity as beachgoers.” Faced with the prospect of having to hold a referendum on a $7 million bond ordinance to build a 250-seat, second-floor catering facility at taxpayer expense, the Mayor & Council repealed that proposed bond ordinance, and re-designed the pavilion to the version we have now.
It took the Mayor & Council three more tries at adopting pavilion bond ordinances. In May of 2014, they adopted a $6.5 million bond ordinance to pay for both the 5th and 10th Ave pavilions– only $500,000 less than the one they repealed, even though the cost of the second-floor catering facility had been $2 million. Again, a group of citizens circulated a protest petition forcing a referendum on that bond ordinance, and the voters defeated it overwhelmingly at the polls in August of 2014.
The Mayor & Council next tried to push the funding for the Fifth Avenue Pavilion through by holding the Lake Como Flood Control project as a hostage, and including the funding for that project in the same bond ordinance as the funding for the Fifth Avenue Pavilion. (The Borough passed a separate bond ordinance for the Tenth Avenue pavilion, which no one objected to). Again, another petition was circulated, and even the residents near Como Lake, who were in desperate need for the flood remediation that project would fund, insisted that the Mayor & Council separate the two projects into separate bond ordinances, which they finally agreed to do.
A group of residents also circulated a protest petition challenging the Mayor & Council’s fourth attempt, bond ordinance 2015-25, which appropriated $4.1 in funding for the current design, was also challenged by protest petition, which forced a referendum. Shortly before that referendum, a group of residents filed suit to challenge the Mayor & Council’s claim that they could legally pay to rebuild the Fifth Avenue pavilion “at no cost to taxpayers” by using a combination of FEMA funds, $700,000 in funds donated to the Borough’s Buy-a-Board campaign, and $400,000 in flood insurance proceeds the Borough received for damage to the old Tenth Ave pavilion. As Katrina noted, the Court ruled that only a small portion of the cost of the new Fifth Avenue pavilion could be paid for using FEMA funds. But during that process, Colleen Connolly unlawfully submitted an explanatory statement to the County Clerk to be put on the ballot question that falsely suggested that the entire cost of the building would be paid within 2 or 3 years from FEMA funds, and that otherwise tried improperly to influence voters. Again, Belmar citizens stepped forward to serve as plaintiffs in an emergent suit to challenge that explanatory statement. Although we were successful in getting the court to strike that language from the ballot and to force the County clerk to issue new vote-by-mail ballots, more than 200 vote-by-mail voters had seen the misleading language that Connolly wrote, and a display ad with that language was posted in the Asbury Park Press. The damage was done. Although the voters at the polls voted by overwhelmingly to defeat the ordinance, even though as Katrina correctly states that Doherty went door-to-door in the final week before the referendum lying to voters about how the pavilion would be paid for, the vote by mail voters voted overwhelmingly to approve, and the bond ordinance passed by a scant 18 votes.
So, please don’t ever say the John Does did nothing. Blame the ones who swallowed the lies — even when they knew the truth — and went along with what when on. Or stayed silent and did nothing.
Blame for the extreme debt burden caused by the Doherty Administration belongs on the steps of where the Sheepeople live. They happily drank the former Mayor’s FREE koolaid and likewise the food at Djais annual “End of Summer we are sorry” afternoon.
Next time you see Frank you can ask him to pay your upcoming tax increase because he was instrumental in getting 200 absentee votes for the Catering Hall to be built. There are no bigger fish!
There is another lawsuit I should mention, because in hindsight it takes on new import in light of what we now know about Doherty, Connolly and Merri-Makers.
Beginning in January of 2013, the Mayor & Council started the process of designating the entire 39-acre beachfront area east of Ocean Avenue and south of the Belmar Fishing Club as an “area in need of redevelopment.” If this process had succeeded, the Mayor & Council would have had the authority under the Redevelopment statute, as they were in the marina redevelopment area, not only to award construction contracts without public bidding, but also to award leases to any concessionaire of their choosing on whatever terms they chose. The redevelopment plan report that Maser Consulting presented to the Planning Board on September 24, 2013, shows each of the locations of demolished pavilions as redevelopment areas, and includes for the location of the Fifth Avenue Pavilion, an architectural rendering for the two-story Fifth Avenue Pavilion that was similar to the presentation made by the architect in the first video Dave posted, including the floor plan showing the stairs and elevator to the second floor. In a lawsuit in which Belmar residents Henry Grau and Steven Edelman served as Plaintiffs, we challenged the Borough’s redevelopment designation, on the ground Belmar’s beachfront was far from “blighted” at the time of Mayor & Council’s designation in April of 2013, and in fact the new boardwalk was nearly completed. Judge Lawson agreed with this argument, and struck down the Borough’s designation of the beachfront as an area in need of redevelopment. If we had not obtained that critical ruling, residents would have been barred by the Redevelopment Statute from using the bond protest petition law to require that any of the pavilion bond ordinances be put to a referendum vote. (Indeed, the Borough relied on this provision of the Redevelopment Law as the basis for refusing to hold a referendum on the $7 million bond ordinance for the two-story version of the Fifth Avenue pavilion.) Had Henry Grau and Steve Edelman not stepped forward to act as plaintiffs in that suit, the Mayor & Council would have been free to award millions of dollars in construction contracts for all five pavilion areas, and to award long-term leases of the pavilion concession spaces in those pavilions to whomever they pleased without public bidding.
BTW, all of these lawsuits are available to be seen on the Legal Docs page.
Let’s juse call a spade a spade “Doherty Debt” is just that “Doherty Debt”, a strangle hold on your soon to be empty wallet.
Good one, I like the wording so true! “Doherty Debt”
And Thank You Ken Pringle for all you have done for the residents of Belmar. We would have lost so much more without your guidance and direction.
Kenny Pringle loves this town. He is a true Braveheart in every sense of the name. I worry about his safety as I did Dave when he started microscoping
Why is this whole Bid Rig not at the county level for investagation?
All of this stems from the relationship Connolly had with MM. When will she be leaving?
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