PRINCETON: Town plans to stop using cleaning service staffed by developmentally disabled workers

By Philip Sean Curran, Staff Writer
Princeton is poised to stop using a cleaning service made up of developmentally disabled workers from The ARC Mercer, a nonprofit organization that had been getting work from the town.
ARC Mercer was responsible for cleaning municipal government buildings through an arrangement in which ACCSES New Jersey, a nonprofit the town has a contract with that then subcontracts out to ARC Mercer, Mayor Liz Lempert said this week. She declined to get into specifics about the change or say if the town was not happy with The ARC Mercer’s work. She confirmed council is due to vote Monday on hiring a new, unspecified contractor, with an annual savings of around $36,000. The new deal starts in September, she said.
She said there were “numerous reasons” for why the town was making the change, and said the town likes to put contracts out to bid “routinely” as a best practice.
But Steven Cook, executive director of The Arc Mercer, was blindsided by the decision when contacted by a reporter.
“And I’m definitely disappointed for two reasons,” he said. “I believe I had established a relationship with the administration to at least communicate with me if there were ongoing problems. And that didn’t happen. And I’m disappointed that people with disabilities will not be able to have an opportunity to perform those services and learn skills in Princeton … .”
He said he had been in talks with the town about putting in a plan to increase supervision, assess whether the buildings’ cleanliness met industry standards and establish a channel for the town to make complaints. He said there were prior problems, but he said his side took steps to correct them.
He said that since then, there were no frequent or significant complaints by the town, except for a few instances when trashcans were not emptied.
He said at the request of the town, ACCSES New Jersey did “several inspections” of Arc Mercer’s work and found the job always met or exceeded industry standards.
Asked if the move had to do with poor performance, Mayor Lempert said Wednesday that “it’s not appropriate for me to talk about the performance of our contractors or our employees.”