Mayor David Siedell addresses residents during a March 4 meeting of the Rotary Club.
Mayor Dave Siedell addressed the state of the borough during a Rotary Club meeting on March 4, but first he recounted a conversation he had before beginning his speech.
“We had a conversation at the table between fair and beneficial,” he said. “Saying that they’re not the same things. So you can be respectfully disagreeable without being disagreeable. And (have) a willingness to make decisions that won’t satisfy everyone, but will serve the borough well over time. So that sounds like service above self.”
That happens to be the Rotary Club’s mission.
Siedell described how the borough has long employed an informal way to do some business.
“For a long time, Haddonfield operated on what I like to call a Haddonfield handshake,” he explained. “And that’s informal understandings rooted in good-faith arrangements and long memories. However, good government requires more than memory, so this last year, we’ve been working really to document agreements clearly.”
The mayor pointed to two instances that need to be addressed more formally. One is a shared-service agreement between Haddonfield and Tavistock, specifically in the areas of emergency services, trash, construction services and tax payments.
The borough has previously collected, on the high end, $30,000 a year from Tavistock, Siedell estimated. In a pilot program started in 2025, Haddonfield collected $45,000.
“That’s pretty reasonable for a four-house town,” Siedell noted. “And this is where it goes. Is it fair and is it beneficial? Is it fair to them? Yes. Is it beneficial to us? Yes. The revenue outweighs the costs. So it is revenue in Haddonfield’s coffers still maintaining the tradition of always serving this little borough that was born of us.”
Siedell also pointed to recreation, specifically about field three at the Little League complex on Potter Street and how it was made with volunteers.
“That’s a Haddonfield handshake if I ever heard it,” he mused. “But that field has to be maintained. It has to be replanted, it has to be cycled. And all these things happened on agreement and memory and especially during COVID, a lot of memory, especially institutional memory … kind of faded. Especially during that time.”
Siedell lamented the fact that the borough isn’t doing enough to keep people in town and that more recreation should be geared to adults.
“Take for example, we have to redo Crows Woods,” Siedell said. “Now, Crows Woods is our biggest field complex. But there’s very few things other than the garden program, which is separate and distinct from it. But there’s no adult recreation in that area. It’s all for children. And frankly, we’re the ones that pay the taxes.
“So there should be services for the children and adults, and I’m really working on that.”
Other issues Haddonfield is facing, according to the mayor, include how to maintain the right firetrucks to physically fit inside a cramped station, how to address homelessness, and where the borough should be plowing when it snows.
“So (homelessness) is an issue we have to confront head on in a lot of different ways,” he pointed out. “And it’s a balance of compassion and accountability .. But homelessness is also a county problem. We could be the best at it and we’d instantly be overrun, because then everyone will say, ‘Let’s come to Haddonfield because it’s a great place to be homeless.’
“We want to be fair and compassionate, but we can’t be any better than any of our neighbors.”
As for plowing, Siedell acknowledged that in the past, neither the borough nor the school district had a map of which sidewalks needed to be cleared so students could get to school. That improved after consultation with the county and participation in the Safe Routes to School program.
“So from a documentation standpoint, we have that now,” Siedell maintained. “So the second snow happened, you saw communication go out say, overnight, (that) we’re gonna be clearing the safe routes to school. Cause now we knew what they were. It’s one of these you don’t know what you don’t know until it happens. …
“The government’s gotta write it down,” he added, instead of just shaking hands. “And so that’s been a mantra of my administration, and it will continue as we (have) situations where there isn’t an easy answer.”
Regarding the alleyway behind Grove Street – from the law offices of Elaine Cheung to Grove Automotive – Siedell noted that the path doesn’t have a name, so it doesn’t get plowed, despite residents parking there. And getting help on the alleyway, he emphasized, is difficult. He cited the case of a woman trying to get an ambulance for her husband on a roadway that isn’t on a map.
The woman eventually told the dispatcher to have help meet her at Grove Automotive. She then had to drive her husband to the business’ parking lot, where an ambulance picked them up.
“That can’t happen,” the mayor remarked.
He would like the alleyway’s residents to come up with a name that would be sanctioned through a borough ordinance.
At the end of his talk, a member of the audience asked Siedell when Haddonfield will stop putting off problems. He referred to the efforts of past mayors to avoid that, but some issues are more difficult that others.
” … Even my predecessors, they made the best decisions they had with the information they had at the time with the resources they could for that problem,” Siedwll emphasized. “Some problems are ever present. Homelessness is an ever-present issue. Zoning issues change with the wind …
“Most government issues are ongoing concerns. There’s no solution, there’s just reactions to problems.”
