Summit Closes Playgrounds, Other Facilities As Of Monday Evening

SUMMIT, NJ — In an effort to help mitigate workplace exposure to novel coronavirus, the City of Summit is closing all public facilities including City Hall, the Municipal Transfer Station, Summit Community Center, athletic fields and playgrounds at 8 p.m. on Monday until further notice, the town said.

While the City Hall building is closed, staff will continue to conduct business operations. Contact information for city departments is available on the city website or by calling 908-273-6400 between the hours of 8:30 to 4:30.

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• Drop boxes for election and voting forms, and tax payments will be available outside City Hall. The building department has created a designated area in the atrium outside Common Council Chamber through the Police Department entrance to City Hall. Residents and contractors will be admitted individually to conduct business between the hours of 8:30AM and 3PM, Monday through Friday.
• Mayor Nora Radest will be holding in-person office hours by appointment only. To schedule, email nradest@cityofsummit.org or call 908-516-8077.
• Police reports will be taken by telephone at 908-273-0051. In the event of an emergency, dial 911.
• Public parks remain open but citizens are asked to practice social distancing with non-family members. All outdoor restrooms are closed.
• Curbside recycling and household garbage pickup schedules are unchanged. Additional crews are being added to accommodate for the closing of the Municipal Transfer Station.
• A plan is being developed to hold Common Council meetings, introduce the municipal budget and the next Board of School estimate meeting.
• The Zoning Board meeting previously scheduled and advertised for March 16, 2020 at 7:30 PM has been cancelled. All hearings and agenda items will be carried to the first available public meeting once the state of emergency has been lifted.
• Check the city website for information on rescheduled meetings and further cancelations. Website information is updated daily.

Effective on Monday at 8 p.m., the State of New Jersey is limiting crowd capacity for recreational and social gatherings up to 50 people. Restaurants and bars will close for eat-in service, and offer delivery and takeout only. Movie theaters, gyms and casinos are temporarily closed.

Supermarkets, pharmacies, gas stations and medical offices will remain open. All non-essential travel between 8 p.m. to 5 a.m. is highly discouraged. These measures are part of a regional approach by New Jersey, New York and Connecticut to combat the coronavirus. Go to nj.gov for more information.

In a video and several posts on the city website, Mayor Nora Radest gave advice she said might sound "extreme."

"Do not schedule playdates, parties, sleepovers, or visits with other families," she said. "This sounds extreme because it is. We are trying to create distance between family units and between individuals across those family units. Even if you have only one friend to have over, you are creating new links and possibilities for the type of transmission that all of our school, work, and public event closures are trying to prevent."

The city also said the library and municipal court in town will be closed for at least two weeks. The schools are closed for around a month.

"The symptoms of coronavirus take four to five days to manifest themselves," Radest said in her video. "The wisdom of early and aggressive social distancing is that it can flatten the curve. We need to all do our part during these times."

Similar concerns about social distancing had been echoed by Regional Health Officer Megan Avallone on a panel on Friday.

New Jersey's governor said Sunday that at least 98 people had been confirmed with the virus, an increase of 31 over the day before.

Experts say that the novel coronavirus, because it's new, is more lethal and harder to treat than the flu.

Coronaviruses are a family of viruses that include the common cold as well as much more serious diseases. The strain that emerged in China in late 2019, now called COVID-19, is related to others that have caused serious outbreaks in recent years, including severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) and Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS). The first confirmed case of COVID-19 in the U.S. was on Jan. 21.

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