by Al Heavens
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On the House: Builder failing to deliver on dreams
As we talk on the phone, he never comes right out and calls it his "dream house." Yet those two words, unspoken, come through everything Alex Gerena of Glassboro says about his first home - the one he's having built in Franklinville, Gloucester County.
Make that the one he thought he was having built. Gerena and his wife, Xiomara, both 32, gave Signature Homes Inc. of West Berlin a total of $15,100 in February - all of which was supposed to have been placed in escrow - as good-faith money and as a deposit when the contract for the $340,000 house was signed.
"A beautiful home on an acre of land - everything felt so right about it, so cozy," Gerena said.
Construction was to have begun in April, builder Frank Inzanni told the Gerenas. Instead, on April 22, Inzanni sent the couple a letter in which he announced that Signature Homes was "closing its doors indefinitely," the result of increasingly difficult financial times affecting the housing market.
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| by Marcella Peyre-Ferry |
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Pennsbury to vote on open-space funding
PENNSBURY - There will be an open-space referendum on the fall ballot but the supervisors want to be sure it clearly explains the situation for voters.
Voters will be asked to approve a 0.79-mill real estate tax for open space. This would replace the current 0.45-mill real estate and 1.88 percent earned income taxes to support open space that are currently in place, but will sunset at the end of this year.
The first wording for the resolution that the supervisors considered described the new 0.79 mills as an additional tax, but supervisor Karen Wood objected to that version.
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