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Chester County Press

Sarro succeeds Hannum as chairman of East Marlborough Board of Supervisors

01/15/2019 11:27AM ● By J. Chambless

By Chris Barber
Correspondent

John Sarro took the reins of the East Marlborough Board of Supervisors on Jan. 7, succeeding Richard P.S. Hannum, Jr., who held the position of chairman for the past four years. Hannum said he was honored to have served in that role.

Sarro, 55, was the vice-chairman last year. He is a local businessman and a Republican. His chairmanship was unanimously approved by the board at the beginning of the organization meeting.

Democrat Robert McKinstry, who joined the board last year, was elected to serve as vice-chairman.

Also during the organization meeting, the board established the dates and times of the meetings for the upcoming year. The East Marlborough Board of Supervisors will continue to meet at 7 p.m. on the first Monday of each month, except in September, when they will meet on the second Monday in consideration of the Labor Day holiday.

During the organization meeting, McKinstry suggested holding an extra meeting each month to relieve the situation where longer single meetings often last well into the night. There was no action on that suggestion.

Agenda items included a report by Longwood Gardens representative Chris Benevento, who said Longwood would be holding six fireworks displays in 2019: one in May, two in July, one in August and two in September.

Following a report by Mike Fuller, president of Keystone Lighting Solutions, the board also unanimously approved going forward with a plan to replace the township’s incandescent street and traffic lights with LED lights. The lights are smaller and cooler than incandescent lights, and they cost substantially less to use. They contain crystal diodes that glow by emitting photons from the atomic structure rather than the way incandescent bulbs glow and get hot from electricity passing through a tiny metal filament inside the bulb.

Fuller said the $34,000 cost of installation and construction would be offset by the long-range savings in operations. Township Manager Laurie Prysock said later that the cost might be even less than $34,000 because most of the stop lights are already LED. Most of the township street lights and traffic signals are in the village of Unionville. Fuller said the work to replace the incandescent lights would be done in one day.

The board also took under consideration a suggestion by McKinstry to take a look in the future at the regulations of the Historic Resources Ordinance. He said he wants it to have “more teeth.”

The next meeting of the East Marlborough supervisors is set for Feb. 4.