Middle GOP Majority in, Terenik out

COURT HOUSE – Elizabeth Terenik took her position as business administrator for Middle Township in May 2017.
A year and a half later, Terenik is being asked to leave, but no one is faulting the job she’s done.
Terenik is a Middle Township resident who left a position as director of Planning and Development for Atlantic City to return home. 
She had previously served as a planner for the township and held a similar position in Ocean City where she served as planning and engineering director.
Returning to Middle Township as administrator offered her a job she found exciting and an opportunity to spend more time with her teenage daughter.
Terenik readily admitted that being closer to her daughter was a big incentive to leave the Atlantic City position.
News that Terenik would be replaced as administrator broke unintentionally when an email authored by Committee member Timothy Donohue leaked.
In the note, Donohue praised Terenik’ s skills as a “professional planner” and called her “a positive and creative leader.” 
Still, as part of an incoming Republican majority on the three-member governing body, Donohue asserted the right to have an administrator “who is loyal to our mission, can be trusted to fully implement our agenda, and who shares our vision of the appropriate role of local government.”
Constance Mahon, a capable and well thought of administrator was an appointee of a Republican-controlled committee.
When her contract was set to expire the then Democrat- controlled governing body did not move to keep her in Middle. Donohue at the time railed against the decision to change administrators.
The job of the business administrator is to oversee the department heads and act as the contact point between them and the committee members.
The administrator also must often serve as a go-between for the governing body members since state “sunshine laws” interfere with the potential non-public interactions of the three-member board.
During Terenik’s tenure as business administrator, she has focused on economic development issues. Large portions of the township’s commercial sectors have been designated as economic rehabilitation or development zones in an effort to attract business investment.
At the last governing body meeting of the year Dec. 17, a number of residents used the public comment period to laud Terenik and the job she had done as administrator. 
Rewind the tape almost two years and many similar comments were mad as Mahon reluctantly left Middle.
Middle recently created an advisory committee to review its form of government and recommend potential changes.
Two items that will be part of that review will be the size of the governing body and whether or not the township should continue to have a partisan elected governing body.
Terenik said she expects to be gone at the end of December. She was confident that her experience will translate into another opportunity.
“It didn’t have to be this way,” she said.