If the American Dream ever existed, it was realized by Bob Bartolini, right, and his family when they settled in West Windsor in 1968. With a plum job at RCA Laboratories, Bartolini, 25, moved into a two-story colonial home in the Jefferson Park neighborhood adjacent to Mercer County Park with his high school sweetheart, Janice, and their three children
“Our plan was to have kids,” Bartolini says. “Most people buy a house and expand to a bigger home. We didn’t upgrade; we had the family already.”
But Bartolini hit a homeowner speed bump soon after. The developer no longer wanted to oversee the sewer plant that processed the wastewater for the 110-home neighborhood. The sewerage system needed to be maintained, and Bartolini, an engineer by training, sought to address the issue. This initial volunteer effort was the start of more than 40 years of local service, with Bartolini participating in the establishment of the public sewer system for the township and the region, the Stony Brook Regional Sewerage Authority (SBRSA).
Bartolini joined the SBRSA board in 1980 and has been the board chairman since 1998. The six-member, $14.7-million-budget sewerage Authority processes 10 million gallons of wastewater a day from West Windsor, Princeton, South Brunswick, Hopewell (township and borough), and Pennington Borough. West Windsor currently contributes nearly a quarter of the total sewerage flow, or 2.5 million gallons a day.
Back in the late 1960s an alarmed Bartolini and two neighbors started a civic association, hiring a lawyer in response to the pullout of the developer-owned sewer company.
“The sewer needed to be maintained,” Bartolini says. “These are complex systems, and if broken the discharge can pollute the river.”
An appeal to West Windsor’s governing body, then a township committee, was a success, and the township took over the sewer system. Yet Bartolini recalls West Windsor, then with a population of 3,500, had a municipal government with only a handful of full-time personnel. Many homeowners relied on on-site septic tanks.
“In taking the sewer system over, the township didn’t know what to do with it long-term,” Bartolini says. “The committee said, ‘You’re an engineer, let’s have you figure out how to help us with a sewer department.’”
The township hired an operator and created a budget and a sewage fee, and in 1970 Bartolini was appointed an advisor to the Board of Health, which oversaw the sewers. Bartolini designed the maps that showed the township’s suitability of soil for percolation, or water absorption rate. Roughly half of West Windsor has clay undersoil, which is less porous than sand, and this ruled out the possibility of on-site septic tanks as a large-scale solution to serve the sewerage needs of the growing township.
Around the same time in the early 1970s, President Richard Nixon approved the Clean Water Act, under which federal and state funds would pay for 85 percent of sewer plant costs provided the plant was regionally organized under one watershed area.
“Rivers in the U.S. up to the 1960s were terrible,” says Bartolini, recalling the infamous 1969 incident when the polluted Cuyahoga River caught on fire.
Water in the six SBRSA municipalities drains into Stony Brook, a Millstone River tributary that flows into the Raritan River and then the ocean. The SBRSA was established in 1970 as an independent entity responsible for the region’s sewerage after all six participating towns reached a service agreement. Bartolini says Malcolm Roszel, who had previously served as mayor for more than 30 years, represented West Windsor in the sewer negotiations, and Roszel then became the first West Windsor representative on SBRSA’s board.
Bartolini was one of seven citizens to serve on the township’s Sewer Advisory Committee. Future mayors Mike Mastro, Steve Decter, and Bob Murray were on the committee, as well as future committee member Sue Stanberry and future school board members Bob Duncan and Bob Prigge. The engineering firm of Ditmars and Carmichael designed the West Windsor sewer system, and the proposed network of sewer lines and pumping stations was reviewed by the committee.
“Along with the township assessor, we had to develop a sewer assessment plan and community payment plan,” Bartolini says. “We made the newsletters ourselves, told the community how they were going to pay for it. We wrote ordinances for how to implement the system. This is when volunteers did all the work.”
In 1977 the Advisory Committee became the Sewer Operating Committee before eventually folding into the Public Works Department. Longtime public works director Alex Drummond was Bartolini’s third hire, originally for the township sewer department.
As a long time resident and volunteer, Bartolini has witnessed the township’s transformation from a farming community into a community of professionals with a well regarded school system.
The establishment of the SBRSA has facilitated West Windsor’s growth, though Bartolini says the Authority has no planning functions. There was a moratorium on new sewer connections at one point in the 1980s due to the plant nearing its 10 million gallon-a-day sewerage flow capacity.
“Princeton township and borough sued the SBRSA to stop sewerage expansion and control growth in the region,” says Bartolini. “They took the federal money to build a regional sewerage plant, and then turned around and said ‘we finished all our sewers, you guys can’t build anymore.’” Ultimately the SBRSA was able to expand, and the current flow capacity is more than 13 million gallons a day.
Bartolini has also served on various other township committees, receiving the township’s “Volunteer of the Year Award” in 1992. Bartolini also deeply values education, and he has taught engineering at LaSalle University in Philadelphia and at George Washington University in D.C. From 2007 to 2013 Bartolini was president of the board of trustees of the West Windsor-Plainsboro Education Foundation, which raises money to further programs in the school district.
“For me education was really important, and this was a way to give back,” says Bartolini, who is especially proud of the foundation’s teacher mini-grant program.
Bartolini grew up in Waterbury, Connecticut. His family is from a town near Bologna, Italy, on the Adriatic Sea. Bartolini says his paternal grandfather first came to the U.S. in 1923 as a political refugee. Bartolini’s grandfather was a prominent socialist leader in his hometown, but a neighboring town was the home of Benito Mussolini. When Fascist party members paid a visit, banging their clubs on the table, Bartolini’s grandfather saw the writing on the wall and left for America. Six years later, in 1929, he brought over his wife and four children, the oldest of whom was Bartolini’s father.
“My dad was 17 when he left Italy,” Bartolini says. “He was a furniture maker. He had a good trade, a good situation back home, and he comes to the U.S. in October, 1929, when the stock market crashes.”
Settling in a blue-collar Italian neighborhood in Waterbury, Bartolini’s father discovered kitchen design was more lucrative than furniture making in the U.S. Bartolini’s mother was a housewife, and he says his parents first met in Italy.
“My father was mechanical, he understood how things worked,” Bartolini says. “I remember we fixed the picture tube when the TV was broken.”
His father had an influence on the younger Bartolini, who studied electrical engineering at Villanova and then pursued a masters in the same field at Case Western Reserve in Cleveland, then known as the Case Institute of Technology.
Bartolini joined RCA Laboratories, which later became the Sarnoff Corporation, in 1966, and the company sponsored his PhD studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Bartolini describes himself as a technologist. A technologist, he explains, takes the science and makes it useful, demonstrating certain principles, after which an engineer takes over and turns the technology into a product.
RCA was a licensing company that developed products, and Bartolini’s research focused on optical recording materials. He garnered 22 patents, including the technology behind the security hologram on credit cards, before transitioning to management midway in his career. In 2005 Bartolini retired after 40 years at RCA/Sarnoff.
His wife, Janice, retired around the same time. A nurse by training with dual masters degrees from Trenton State (now TCNJ), she worked for the WW-P school district as the nurse at the lone district high school and then as director of nursing and health services.
They have three daughters, all graduates of WW-P High School. The oldest, Jill, lives in Connecticut and is the CFO for a hair restoration clinic. Their youngest, Robin, is a physician based in Yardley, and Ellen works as a chief administrator for Robin’s husband.
With 10 grandkids and dozens of extended family in Italy, Bartolini spends a lot of time with family both home and abroad.
“We retired early, my oldest grandchildren were becoming teenagers,” Bartolini says. “It’s hard for parents to see the forest when they are dealing with the leaves. As a grandparent you can swoop in like a drone.”
Bartolini has also busied himself with compiling a family history. He has visited Italy half a dozen times. One relative had a sprawling family tree filled with names, and Bartolini added to the family tree by matching names with photos. Later he realized that names and photos lacked meaning without individual stories and recent updates. He says he has photos of his great-grandparents, who were born in the mid-19th century, and extended relatives send him all sorts of stuff.
“E-mail is perfect for connecting with them,” Bartolini says.
The older relatives help him make sense of the photo trove he has compiled. On his most recent trip to Italy, Bartolini, along with one of his college-age granddaughters, met for the first time a first cousin of Bartolini’s grandfather.
“That’s five generations. She was holding my granddaughter’s hand, and in her other hand was a glass of Chianti. That’s the secret,” Bartolini says. “This history book, it has to relate to the grandchildren.”
Bartolini’s term as the West Windsor SBRSA representative expires in 2017 and he says he would want to serve one more five-year term, though he says Florida is quite alluring given the recent winters. He has outlasted his neighborhood’s sewerage plant, the one abandoned by the developer, which has long since been decommissioned after the SBRSA went on-line.
“I’ve done it for so long because the pay is good. Zero. We’re one of the only authorities with no pay, no expense accounts, no benefits,” Bartolini says. “Volunteer government works!”
#b#Follow the Water#/b#
Water comes out the faucet and then it flows down the drain, out of sight, and out of mind. Where does the wastewater go?
“A lot of people don’t realize we have a sewage system,” says Bartolini.
Since 1978 the SBRSA treatment plant on River Road in Princeton has processed West Windsor’s sewerage, which is currently 2.5 million gallons a day.
The water’s journey to the SBRSA facility starts at the home’s sewer pipe, which connects to collector pipes under the streets. These collector pipes all connect to the two main trunk lines, four-feet in diameter, that input into the SBRSA treatment plant. Sewerage flows via gravity, though the township also has two pumping stations. One permanent station is located at the end of South Post Road. The other station located on North Post Road near Duck Pond Run will be phased out.
The waste water is processed into a clean, effluent water that is emptied into Stony Brook, while the solids left over are dried and incinerated. Water drained into the river and incineration emissions must comply with environmental standards set forth by the plant’s water and air permits, which are overseen by the state DEP and federal EPA.
