Upper Milford Township supervisors got some good news and some bad news from Township Manager Daniel DeLong at last week's brief meeting.

The good news, DeLong reported Sept. 5, is according to the year-to-date budget report, revenues are running slightly above estimates and expenses are slightly below.

The bad news was in mid-August, when two of the township's hard drives crashed simultaneously. Fortunately, DeLong said, the backup hard drives did work, and only about two hours of work was lost. He said the township's IT consultant said such an event was extremely unusual.

Supervisors chairman Daniel Mohr asked whether that incident was connected in any way to the power failure recently at the traffic signal at Chestnut Street and Shimerville Road. DeLong said the events happened on different days and were unrelated.

He said the cost to the township to address the traffic signal problem was about $8,000, but the signal there had been installed about 30 years ago, and has been replaced with state-of-the-art equipment.

In other action, supervisors acted to separate workers compensation insurance for the fire companies from insurance for other township employees, following the advice of their insurance agent.

DeLong said they were told their insurance premiums for everyone would skyrocket if they had a workers compensation claim from a firefighter, due to the recently passed firefighters' cancer presumption law, which says any cancer diagnosis for a firefighter can be blamed on the firefighting experience.

In other business, supervisor Robert Sentner, who is also a member of the planning commission, reported the planning commission, at its recent meeting, did not receive the township engineer's review of the plans to be addressed that night until after 4 p.m. that day.

"We got rid of the last engineer" because of delays in receiving reports, Sentner said, so he spoke to the current engineer and said he was promised reviews in the future by the Wednesday prior to the planning commission meeting.

Supervisors approved a request from Upper Milford Mennonite Church to hold a "Light in the Night Safe Zones" block party at the township building 6 to 8 p.m. Oct. 27, and to waive the fees for the event.

DeLong said last year's event, for township children to celebrate Halloween, was very successful.

Supervisors also approved a request for fire police attendance at the Vera Cruz Halloween parade, scheduled for 7 p.m. Oct. 13.