Home Care In Succasunna, NJ

ROXBURY, NJ – Roxbury Company 1 Fire and EMS has a good reason to throw a party: On Monday, the firehouse in Succasunna took possession of a new, $1.8 million fire truck.

But community parties celebrating new fire trucks - called wet downs - are traditionally held when the weather’s warm; nobody wants to get damp outdoors in late September. So, the big unveiling of Company 1’s new 100-foot, mid-mount tower truck is tentatively scheduled for June 29, 2024, said Battalion Chief Tommy Bilancia.

As he spoke Tuesday night, some Company 1 firefighters were in the adjacent firehouse bay (where the new Pierce Ascendant Heavy-Duty Aerial Tower was parked) receiving training on the gleaming vehicle.

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The ladder truck will replace the fire station’s Engine 11 and Engine 14, vehicles built in the 1990s that have become difficult to maintain and will be sold, according to Roxbury Township Manager John Shepherd. Unlike the others, the new truck has all-wheel steering, a feature that enables it to access fires more easily when they occur on narrow streets and other tight spaces, he noted.

While not yet ready for a big public unveiling, the firefighters did show the new truck Monday evening to members of the Roxbury Township Council.

“They actually took us for a ride, which was very nice,” said Roxbury Councilman Fred Hall. “Best of luck to the fire department for the new truck they received. I honestly believe it will help to save lives in the future. It’s a wonderful truck.”

Roxbury Councilman Tom Carey had similar comments. “What a great piece of equipment,” he said. “I can’t say enough about it. It’s just an amazing piece.”

He said Roxbury got a good deal. Instead of ordering a new truck from scratch, the township bought one that was already in production, a move that saved both money and time, officials said.

$1.8 million is $200,000 more than Roxbury budgeted. However, the township had the cash, and Shepherd noted that fire truck prices keep increasing.

“Quite honestly, we moved quick enough,” Carey said. “It would have been a substantial increase if we had waited any longer.’

Firefighters and council members, on Monday, pushed the truck into its new home. According to a Company 1 post on Facebook, doing so is a tradition that goes back to when firefighting equipment was pulled by horses.

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PublishedMay 9, 2023 at 5:03 PM

ROXBURY, NJ – The Roxbury school district will be installing an artificial turf sports field at the Lincoln-Roosevelt School in Succasunna instead of at Roxbury High School.

The township school board, on Monday, approved the proposal to spend about $1.2 million from the district’s capital reserve fund for the new field. The material will be purchased from FieldTurf USA Inc.

“We’ve been talking about a new turf field for at least over the last year, and we had a location picked out,” said Roxbury Schools Business Administrator Joseph Mondanaro. “That location (along Bryant Drive, the road to the high school off of South Hillside Avenue) turned into a nightmare.”

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As Mondanaro mentioned several weeks ago, environmental constraints near the Bryant Drive site, including nearby wetlands and “a protected species of owls,” ruled out the site along with any other land near the high school.

Mondanaro said the only “downside” to installing the new field at Lincoln-Roosevelt is that Roxbury High School teams will have to take buses to get to the site, which is a mile away. But he noted high school athletes who play at Horseshoe Lake Park fields also take buses.

A Vision of Bigger and Better

On the other hand, the Lincoln-Roosevelt site has big potential for future improvement and development, said the business administrator. “It gives us, actually a lot more space,” he noted. “We can have a collegiate-level soccer field … a wider field to play on.”

He said he envisions a “5- to 10-year plan for Lincoln-Roosevelt,” commenting, “I think other things can be done here, maybe another baseball field. We can do this in bits and pieces. We can’t do this all at once. Let’s get the turf down. We know people are going to come. We know Roxbury needs another turf field. Then we’ll move on from there.”

Mondanaro noted that students attending Lincoln-Roosevelt “are on their field every single day” of the school year. “So I know it’s going to be utilized and hopefully the Franklin School students can come as well,” he said. “I’m really excited for it.”

During the public comment part of Monday’s meeting, Landing resident Fran Day questioned why the field isn’t going in at Eisenhower Middle School “or anywhere else.”

Claiming they’re not allowed to respond to public comments, neither Mondanaro nor any board members engaged in a discussion with Day, who expressed irritation at their silence. “It’s called public comment,” said Mondanaro. “It’s not called public question and answer.”

Related TAPinto Roxbury coverage:

Plan for Second Turf Field at Roxbury High Bites the Dust

Second Turf Field Proposed for Roxbury High School

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SUCCASUNNA, NJ – A federal court has approved a consent judgment ordering a Succasunna landscaping company and its owner to pay $400,000 in back wages and damages after the U.S. Department of Labor found the employer denied 32 of its workers the overtime pay they earned.

The court’s action follows an investigation by the department’s Wage and Hour Division that determined Fullerton Landscapes LLC – operating as Fullerton Landscape Architects – and owner Douglas B. Fullerton failed to pay 32 employees time-and-a-half for hours over 40 in a workweek, in violation of the Fair Labor Standards Act.

Following litigation by the department’s Office of the Solicitor, the U.S. District Court for the District of New Jersey ordered the company and its owner to pay a total of $200,000 in overtime back wages and an equal amount in liquidated damages to the affected workers.

“Paying straight-time rates or rates below straight time for overtime hours worked shortchanges workers of the hard-earned wages they need to make ends meet, and violates the Fair Labor Standards Act,” said Wage and Hour District Director Paula Ruffin in Mountainside, New Jersey. “Unfortunately, these types of violations are common in the landscaping services industry. We encourage employers to contact the Wage and Hour Division about their responsibilities and workers to contact the agency with questions about their rights.”

The division’s Northern New Jersey District Office conducted the investigation. Rolando Valdez, a senior trial attorney in the department’s New York Regional Office of the Solicitor litigated the case.

View the complaint and consent judgment.

In fiscal year 2021, the Wage and Hour Division recovered $1.2 million for more than 1,000 workers in the landscaping services industry. With more than 11 million job openings in the U.S. reported by the Bureau of Labor Statistics in April 2022 coupled with 4.4 million workers quitting their jobs, employers are find it difficult to fill positions they need to be successful. Employers who pay workers the wages they are due will have a competitive advantage over those who don’t.

“The U.S. Department of Labor vigorously pursued legal action to ensure that all employees are properly compensated as required by the law. The department will continue to pursue litigation where employers fail to comply with the FLSA’s minimum wage and overtime requirements,” said Regional Solicitor of Labor Jeffrey Rogoff in New York.

Based in Succasunna, Fullerton Landscapes LLC provides residential, commercial and public design and construction landscaping services.

For information about laws enforced by the division, contact the agency’s toll-free helpline at 866-4US-WAGE (487-9243). Workers can call the Wage and Hour Division confidentially with questions, regardless of immigration status, and the department can speak with callers in more than 200 languages.

The Wage and Hour Division has a number of resources online for workers and employers, including an FLSA compliance toolkit. Learn more about the Wage and Hour Division, including a search tool to use if you think you may be owed back wages collected by the division.

SUCCASUNNA — The Cine?polis Succasunna movie theater, one of just a handful of cinemas Sussex County residents frequent, is shutting off their lights for good today, according to a theater spokesperson.

The cinema, located off Route 10 in the Roxbury Mall, will show its last movies this evening before shutting down, a move for which Cine?polis USA spokesperson Marcus Angelo Moreno declined to give a reason.

Instead, Moreno directed the New Jersey Herald to a statement on the Cine?polis website, which identified the Jan. 5 closing and thanked those who visited the theater over the years.

“We hope that you continue your support of cinema-going after we are gone,” the statement read.

In July 2019, Cine?polis USA, a chain of theaters headquartered in California, expanded their brand to the East Coast and purchased three theaters previously owned by Bow Tie Cinemas in Mansfield, Parsippany and Succasunna.

The Cine?polis website indicates the newly renovated Cine?polis Mansfield location will remain open and Moreno verified that no other locations will be closing in the area. The Mansfield location closed in late spring and reopened on Aug. 7 after undergoing renovations, which included the addition of 615 reclining leather seats and in-seat food delivery. A bar has been constructed and will open pending the approval of a liquor license.

The Cine?polis Parsippany location appears to be the next on the list for renovations; a statement on the Route 46 theater’s website indicates the cinema is open but undergoing renovations.

While Moreno declined to say if the Cine?polis Succasunna location had already undergone its own renovations, reviews on Google indicated that the theater had yet to see any upgrades, although many touted the theater’s cleanliness and affordability.

Those who purchased tickets in advance can return them for a refund by today.

No sales are pending on the building, which was constructed in 1930, according to assessment records.

The closure of the theater comes about 10 months before the Shops at Ledgewood Commons, a proposed 470,000-square-foot open-air mall is expected to open. The mall is located roughly a half mile north of the Roxbury Mall, where the Cine?polis Succasunna theater is located.

The Ledgewood Mall, once home to the closest Macy’s department store to Sussex County, is expected to include a Walmart Supercenter and retailers DSW, Ulta Beauty and Five Below. Jeffery Realty, who has been involved with the site since the new shopping center was announced in 2016, has also allotted sites for five proposed eateries: Five Guys Burgers and Fries, Starbucks, Chipotle Mexican Grill and Panda Express Chinese Kitchen.

A request for comment from the brokers with Jeffery Realty handling the leasing of the center’s sites regarding the theater’s closure and if the realty company is seeking the space was not immediately returned.

In July, when Cine?polis announced their acquisition of the three theaters, located in Morris and Warren counties, April Mendoza, then-vice president of Cine?polis USA, said the Succasunna location was a “good place” to introduce the company’s new theater concept, noting that it was chosen due to its “suburban atmosphere” located outside of a city area.

The Succasunna theater once operated as the Clearview Succasunna Cinema 10 for several years before it was purchased by Bow Tie in 2013.

The Cine?polis Succasunna location, which has 10 movie screens, will close with showings at 8:30 p.m. of “Spies in Disguise,” a computer-animated spy comedy film, and “A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood,” a film based off the real-life friendship between Fred Rogers, aka Mr. Rogers, and skeptical journalist Tom Junod.

Cine?polis Succasunna is located at 21 Sunset Strip with a Roxbury mailing address. For more information about the movies playing this weekend, visit: https://cinepolisusa.com/locations/succasunna.

Other movie theaters in the region include: New Vision Sparta Theatre, located at 25 Centre St. in Sparta, offering three screens; Rockaway’s AMC 16 theater, located in the Rockaway Mall area, about a 20-minute drive from Newton; and the newly renovated Cine?polis Mansfield around a 40-minute drive from Newton. Other options include the Cine?polis Parsippany theater, Kinnelon Cinemas, Flagship Cinemas in Matamoras, Pa., and the Pocono Cinema, in East Stroudsburg, Pa.

Lori Comstock can also be reached on Twitter: @LoriComstockNJH, on Facebook: www.Facebook.com/LoriComstockNJH or by phone: 973-383-1194.

ROXBURY, NJ – A plan to replace the Roxbury Garden Center on Route 10 in Succasunna with a multi-tenant commercial building - one that will include a new home for Valley Pharmacy - was approved recently by Roxbury officials.

The proposed “Maddali Plaza,” named after Valley Pharmacy owner Sam Maddali, was approved Oct. 27 by the Roxbury Planning Board. The project has been under review by township officials since early 2021 and was the subject of four public hearings by the board and many postponements.

The board ultimately granted Maddali Investments LLC about 14 waivers from Roxbury land use ordinance provisions, many being minor forms of relief for items such as parking setback, landscaped buffer width and lighting.

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The proposal has been altered several times since first being proposed. Initially, Maddali wanted to erect a 13,336-square-foot, 2-story structure divided into five stores. The approved plans call for a 1-story, 10,000-square-foot building with four stores (including the pharmacy).

The approved plan includes a drive-through lane for the pharmacy, something Maddali testified in March 2021 that he was not proposing. The board is stipulating a deed restriction stating that the drive-through will only be used for the pharmacy. “The board did not ever want this to change to a fast-food drive-through,” said Roxbury Planning Board secretary Dolores Tardive.

The proposed building will be 200 feet long and 48 feet deep. The board approved a parking lot that has 44 spaces, with four being equipped for electric vehicle charging.

Maddali originally proposed vehicle entry and exit from Route 10 and from Richards Avenue. The approved plans eliminated the Richards Avenue driveway.

Maddali must still go through project reviews from the Morris County Soil Conservation District, the Morris County Planning Board, the state Department of Transportation and the state Department of Environmental Protection (DEP).

The board ruled that Maddali must submit revised plans which conform to the approval within 60 days and these must be deemed by the board’s engineer to be complete within six months. “Failure on the part of the applicant to satisfy this or any other condition of this resolution will result in referral of this matter back to the Planning Board for purposes of deeming the approval null and void,” says the resolution.

Maddali bought the land five years ago from the Dering family which operated the garden center for many years. He paid $750,000 for the property and then leased the site to Roxbury Garden Center, an entity controlled by Fullerton Grounds Maintenance owner Scott Fullerton.

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