Cliffside Park, N.J. is moving ahead with a long-promised civic complex that will combine a new recreation center, public library and parking facility under one roof, a project the dense Bergen County borough has been working toward for years.
The Borough Council recently approved the formal contract award to a design-build firm selected through a technical review process, clearing the last major procedural hurdle before construction can begin. The borough is home to roughly 25,000 residents packed into about one square mile, making it one of the most densely populated municipalities in New Jersey, and all three facilities in the project have struggled to keep pace with demand for years.
The recreation center and library serving the borough are decades old. Over the past generation, Cliffside Park has transformed into one of New Jersey's most diverse small towns, with large Cuban-American, Korean and Arab-American communities, and youth programming demand has regularly outrun what the current facilities can handle. Parking, meanwhile, has been a chronic sore spot: the borough sits near the George Washington Bridge and the booming Edgewater waterfront, and on-street spots are notoriously hard to find.
Source: NationGraph.
Combining all three uses into a single stacked structure is a solution several neighboring Bergen County towns have tried, and it is the kind of project that would have been harder to pull off under older procurement rules. New Jersey expanded local design-build authority in recent years, allowing a single contractor to handle both design and construction under one contract rather than completing each phase separately. That compresses timelines and shifts more risk to the contractor.
The awarded contract details, including the contractor's name, total project cost and expected completion date, were not disclosed in the borough's public notice. Those figures would appear in the attached contract documents. Given Cliffside Park's already high property tax burden, typical of Bergen County where annual bills often exceed $12,000, the full price tag will draw scrutiny once it becomes public.
Mayor Thomas Calabrese, who has led the borough since 2008 and made the recreation and library replacement a recurring campaign theme, has yet to announce a groundbreaking date. The next visible milestone will likely be the release of schematic designs as the contractor begins the design phase.
