The Holiday Villager November 2018 PRESIDENT’S MESSAGE by Marie Campbell Hello, The months are flying by! My mother always told me the older you get the time goes so fast; as usual, Mom was right! ---------------------- Something special happened recently at our clubhouse. We think it will be something we will be having twice a year: Meet & Greet! Sometimes we don’t get to meet our new neighbors; life goes on and time passes. Well, Kerri thought of Meet and Greet, and along with Claire Turner got it together. (Thank you) The Board Of Trustees, along with a representative from each committee, gave a brief summary of what they had to offer. There were a few new residents that signed up for an activity and one or two that signed up for a committee. We do hope if you are a new resident, please get involved! ------------------------- Just letting you know it’s Budget Meeting time of the year again. Please join us Tuesday, November 20th at 7:00 p.m. Hope to see you there. Talk to you soon! Marie GOOD MORNING, VIETNAM! I would have to bet that lots of Villagers have seen the Robin Williams classic "Good Morning, Vietnam," in which Williams played an Armed Forces Vietnam radio disk jockey, an Air Force sergeant by the name of Adrian Cronauer. Whether you realized it or not, Adrian Cronauer was a real person who did the morning “Dawn Buster” show on AFVN - Saigon in 1965/66. He really did, as an article in the August American Legion Dispatch re- minded us, begin his show with the line that Williams turned into a classic, "Goooood Morning, Vietnam." Adrian Cronauer died in Virginia on 18 July at 79. This picture is from the movie’s 1987 premiere. It was the first time the two met. Holiday Village Community Services Association The Holiday Villager OFFICERS AND TRUSTEES November 2018 1 Holiday Boulevard, Mount Laurel, NJ 08054 President ........................ Marie Campbell The Villager Staff Vice President ................ Ritchie Berr Editor & Directory Manager Gil McDonald Secretary ........................ Joe Sykes Secretary and Columnist Jill McDonald Treasurer ......................... Mike Trust Trustee ............................ Al Bove Calendar Editor Linda Flannery Trustee ............................ Phyllis Katz-Hernisey Distribution Charlotte Wilson Trustee ……………….…… Gail Moyer Margaret Gilfillan Correspondent Peggie Stark Community Manager Writers and Columnists: Kerri Perez Lou Antosh Don Rosser Administrative Assistant Art Dorst Renee Dorst Nancy Seymour Joan Fingerman Joe Sykes HVCSA OFFICE HOURS Debbie Kramer Susan Powell Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday & Friday And You, Hello! 9 a.m. - 3 p.m. Photographers: Rick Spencer Thursday 9 a.m. - 4 p.m. Appointments by request Debbie Dion 856-866-1753 The Holiday Villager welcomes news items, notices, and letters. All material may be e-mailed to CLUBHOUSE HOURS [email protected]. Although e-mail is Seven Days a week: 6 a.m. to 11 p.m. preferred, typed letters or legible handwritten material may be dropped off at the Holiday Village management office in our Clubhouse. All material Holiday Village Condominium Association must include the writer’s name and phone number. President .................. Joe Sykes Names will be withheld upon request. Vice President ......... Ann Torre Opinions expressed in submitted material are not necessarily those of the editorial staff or the Board of Secretary ................. Cathy Moss Trustees. We reserve the right to reject any material Treasurer ................. Trudy Collins Tomkowicz deemed to be inappropriate. We also reserve the Trustee .................... Nancy Ball right to edit all submissions, but we will make every Trustee .................... Janice Weiner effort to maintain the writer’s concept and meaning. Trustee .................... Vacant Please be brief and concise. ASSOCIA Condo Office. .856-996-9646 We accept no responsibility for goods and services Lynne Hartman, Manager advertised herein. Lisa Bianchini, Administrative Assistant Deadline for the December 2018 issue is November 10 **PATRONIZE OUR ADVERTISERS** send all articles to: [email protected] 2 REMEMBER Lots of us remember November 11 as Armistice Day. 100 years ago, the guns of Europe fell silent, only to speak up again a little more than 20 years later. Now, we know November 11 as Veterans Day, and for the many Villagers, past and present who served, and their sons and grandsons who continue to serve, we should remember. Whether you go to a ceremony, visit a gravesite, watch a parade, or maybe just stop for a moment as you look at our flag as it flies from so many Holiday Village homes, remember. AND WHILE WE ARE REMEMBERING—- Election Day is 6 November. Our polling place is the Fire Department Headquarters on Elbo Lane. Elections Matter. Remember. HOLIDAY VILLAGE MARKET REVIEW FOR 2018 by Gil McDonald It's time for the annual review of Holiday Village real estate. As usual, we will not cite any specific addresses or any exact prices. As we approach the end of the year, we are poised to beat our best year since I have been tracking this data. In 2015, we sold 46 single-family and court homes and this year we have sold 46 at this late October writing. Several of the residences have benefited from substantial renovations, a couple by “flippers.” Houses put on the market this year have closed in an average of 70 days from their appearance on the real estate wire, right in line with the Mount Laurel average. There are currently two more residences awaiting closing and another nine for sale. Some of those pending sales are at the upper end of the price range, so the dollar values stand to increase as those sales close. Year-by-year, closed sales have looked like this: Year 2015 2016 2017 YTD 2018 Totals Court 7 5 3 5 20 Avg Price 159K 165K 172K 186K Lexington 12 10 14 9 45 Avg Price 192K 197K 197K 210K Madison* 27 15 20 32 94 Avg Price 194K 200K 208K 214K Totals 46 30 37 46 159 Avg Price 188K 193K 200K 210K Madison numbers include Cambridge and Hamilton models. ** Condos are omitted due to a lack of complete data. 3 NO “FATBERG” CRISIS IN LOCAL SEWERS . YET, BUT DON’T FLUSH WIPES, SAYS MUA OFFICIAL (Second in a two-part series on Mount Laurel Township’s Municipal Utilities Authority (MUA) as it plans for a water rate increase in 2019).) by Lou Antosh Horror music fills a darkened movie theater. Suddenly, the screen goes brilliant with large images showing panic in the streets. City workers in hard hats are screaming to residents: “Go inside and turn off your faucets. DO NOT FLUSH for number one or even number two. It’s here, it happened!!!! “A huge Fatberg just blew up the sewer plant!! We’re all in deep doo-doo!!” No, Hollywood hasn’t made that fantastical disaster movie yet, but fatbergs – solid, intractable obstructions in underground pipes that can do to sewer systems what icebergs do to Titanics – are a world-wide phenomenon threatening thousands of sewage treatment systems. Even ours in Mount Laurel. The Fatberg Scare is being fed by the exploding global consumption of cleaning wipes – some for personal care labeled “flushable,” others not at all flushable. Once flushed into sewer pipes, such wipes often mysterious- ly meet up with sticky amounts of discarded cooking grease and sanitary products to create huge clumps and ob- structions that refuse to dissolve or get torn apart in treatment – fatbergs. “There are wipes for everything now, and it’s gotten substantially worse here in the last 10 years,” said Pam Carolan, engineer and executive director of the township’s Municipal Utility Authority. She said our local sys- tem doesn’t encounter the colossal fatbergs that collect in urban systems. Our fatbergs are smaller clumps of wipes/grease/paper that occur in MUA’s smaller (no more than 24 inches in diameter) sewer pipes, but they still have caused hundreds of thousands of dollars in damage to the system and now require many more employee hours of work daily. Regardless of “flushable” labels, Carolan advises residents: “Never flush anything but toilet paper.” One main reason: Lateral waste pipes from homes to the street sewer main are the property of the homeowner, not the MUA. If the utility cannot easily clear a lateral blockage, she said, then “the homeowner will need to call a plumber to unclog it – even if it’s in the roadway. It has happened and it’s expensive.” Fatbergs are now famous. Sewage system experts everywhere fret about increased flushing of wipes and their affinity for vast amounts of used cooking grease from homes and restaurants, sticky grease which should be so- lidified at room temperature and trashed but is instead poured hot into drains where it facilitates fatberg for- mation. Those experts cannot yet defeat the fatbergs in this classic confrontation between the culture of conven- ience and strained infrastructures. Meanwhile, the protective screens at the MUA’s 41 pumping stations, which used to be cleaned out at least weekly, now must be raked clean almost daily to extract “rags,” the industry term for wipes, tissues, heavy toilet paper. And even that is not sufficient. Carolan said “There were too many rags getting past the screens, and getting into our pumps.” The trouble- some material got into the main plant and even survived the very large garbage disposal-type chopper there. “After the chopper, they did not disintegrate and were getting back together, so we invented a word, saying they were re-agglomerating,” she said, laughing. “It was like hair from the drain getting all tangled up, it was matting. It’s what I call very Velrco-ish.” The best answer thus far? Two MUA employees created a massive bar screen as an added protection in the main plant.