It was a great idea for Aberdeen Township to seek volunteers for a Saturday morning clean up event at the River Gardens Natural Area, but it seems to me that the Township's Environmental Board could have done more to draw in volunteers for this worthy project in the Riverdale Park section of Cliffwood.
The board's press release was dated Thursday for a Saturday morning event, a bit late in my view. I know I didn't come across word of the event until about an hour ago. While it was somehow picked up before press time by Gannet's weekly Independent, the original press release didn't go out to Aberdeen residents by e-Bulletin until Friday morning and there was no information in The Matawan-Aberdeen Patch or Asbury Park Press.
The board could have taken advantage of the Patch's free community events feature or given them a brief interview. There was nothing in The Asbury Park Press, but that's no surprise. We're not in southeastern Monmouth or Ocean County, so we don't count.
I hope the project was well attended and wish I could have participated. Its last minute and limited promotion might have kept many people like me in the dark.
By the way, in the course of conducting my research for this article I noticed that the Township website search tool only brings up 3 hits for the string "River gardens," while an advanced Google search of the website ("river gardens" site:www.aberdeennj.org) yields 19 hits. The Township webmaster might want to take a look at the search tool and see what's up. Neither tool brought up Thursday's press release, but that could be due to a slow web crawler.
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