Middlesex County’s social services board has paid the owner of East Brunswick’s Motel 6 and Studio 6 about $3.47 million since late 2021 to house clients temporarily. Police records show the property also draws an extraordinary amount of police, fire and ambulance work. They do not show that it is the crime center it is often described as.
Two buildings on Route 18 sit at the meeting point of several public systems.
The Middlesex County Board of Social Services pays to put people in rooms there. Other agencies and charities send people there too. East Brunswick police officers, firefighters and ambulance crews answer calls there, sometimes several times a day. The Township has tried to change how the property operates, and the owner is suing the Township.
Records obtained by Eyes on EB show the scale of each piece. They show that a great deal of public money and public-safety time goes to this one address. They also show that most of that police work is not about crime: it is medical calls, welfare checks, disputes and other requests for help. And they leave open the question at the center of the arrangement: what happens next to the people who stay there.
The property, at 244-246 Route 18, has two buildings: a Motel 6 at 244 and a Studio 6, an extended-stay hotel, at 246. It is owned by NJ 18 Enterprises LLC, according to Township planning records and the company’s lawyer.
The payments
The county board paid NJ 18 Enterprises LLC $3,467,078 between Dec. 28, 2021, and July 1, 2026, according to payment records the board released to Eyes on EB under the Open Public Records Act.
| Year | Paid to NJ 18 Enterprises LLC |
|---|---|
| 2021 (Dec. 28 to 31) | $4,220 |
| 2022 | $444,604 |
| 2023 | $722,040 |
| 2024 | $719,463 |
| 2025 | $937,833 |
| 2026 (through July 1) | $638,918 |
| Total | $3,467,078 |
The money was paid by the county board, not by East Brunswick. The payments appear on a State of New Jersey report produced by the Department of Human Services’ Division of Family Development for its Work First New Jersey program. The records do not say which program or level of government funded each payment.
The board’s agreement with the owner, signed in fall 2021, says the rooms are for “temporarily housing MCBSS clients.” A board employee must authorize each stay and name the occupants. Authorizations “will be renewed on a monthly basis as applicable.” The board does not pay for empty rooms, and “Clients are responsible for a portion of their motel stay.” The nightly rates are set by the state, from $72 for one person in one room to $127 for four or five people in two rooms since July 2024.
The payment records list 2,748 payment lines on 398 dates. They do not show how many people stayed, which nights a payment covered, or how long anyone stayed. The board declined to produce counts of placements, people or room nights, saying those requests “do not seek specific identifiable government records and instead constitute requests for information and/or require research.”
The county’s clients are not the only guests. Robert B. Hille, a lawyer for the owner, told Eyes on EB that the motels “receive temporary placements from agencies, including the Middlesex County Board of Social Services’ Office of Temporary Assistance, the Salvation Army, local churches, and the Division of Child Protection and Permanency.” The property also takes paying guests. The records do not show what share of the rooms are filled by any of these groups at any time.
The public-safety workload
The police records start in April 2017 and run to September 2026, in two sets. One is a list of police incidents at the two addresses from April 2017 to March 2022, which the Township published with a 2023 redevelopment study of the area. The other is the police department’s computer-aided dispatch log for April 2022 to Sept. 10, 2026, which East Brunswick police released to Eyes on EB. The two were compiled differently, so Eyes on EB reports them separately and does not combine them into one trend.
Both show a very large volume of activity.
The Township’s study counted 1,575 police incidents at the two buildings in the five years from April 2017 to April 2022, an average of more than 26 a month.
The dispatch log shows more. From April 2022 to Sept. 10, 2026, it records 5,312 separate incidents at the two buildings. Those incidents brought 11,699 dispatches of individual police officers and units, fire units and ambulances, about two for every incident. The largest single incident drew 23 units.
| Year | Incidents | Units dispatched |
|---|---|---|
| 2023 | 983 | 2,017 |
| 2024 | 1,336 | 2,849 |
| 2025 | 1,350 | 3,141 |
| 2026 (Jan. 1 to Sept. 10) | 1,080 | 2,509 |
2022 is left out of the table because the log starts in April of that year.
In a news release on Sept. 10 of this year, the East Brunswick Police Department said that since Jan. 1 officers had taken more than 750 police reports involving the property, and that its dispatch statistics showed more than 2,500 police, fire and EMS resources had been dispatched to incidents there in 2026. The department said it had responded to the property “multiple times each day,” requiring “thousands of dedicated hours” of police time. Police Chief Frank LoSacco said the calls “place a strain on police resources and remain a public safety concern.”
Eyes on EB’s count of the dispatch log independently arrived at almost the same figure: 2,509 units dispatched to the two buildings from Jan. 1 to Sept. 10. That match confirms how the log works. Each line in it is one officer, fire unit or ambulance sent to a call, not a separate event. That is why the three 2026 numbers differ and should not be confused:
- Units dispatched, about 2,500: every police car, fire unit and ambulance sent.
- Incidents, 1,080: separate events, each of which may draw several units.
- Police reports, more than 750: the department’s own count of reports written, a narrower measure.
The 2026 figures also include more officer checks than earlier years. Premises checks and checks of occupied vehicles made up 151 of the 2026 incidents through Sept. 10, compared with 56 in each full year from 2023 through 2025. Those are often started by officers on patrol rather than by a call for help.
A heavy service burden is not the same as a crime wave
The police records show a large volume of calls and emergency responses at the property. They also show that criminal incidents are a small part of that volume, and in the earlier records they did not rise as the total did.
That matters because the property, and the people placed there, are often discussed as though it is a major source of the township’s crime. Claims that the property accounts for half of East Brunswick’s crime are not supported by the records Eyes on EB reviewed. What those records do show is that criminal activity represents only a small fraction of the thousands of police and emergency-service incidents recorded at the property.
The earlier records. The Township’s own study found that 151 of the 1,575 incidents from 2017 to 2022, fewer than one in 10, cited a section of the state’s criminal code. Eyes on EB rechecked that count against the incident list and reached the same 151.
Year by year, total incidents climbed while the criminal-code incidents stayed close to level:
| Year | All police incidents | Incidents citing the criminal code |
|---|---|---|
| 2018 | 236 | 27 |
| 2019 | 372 | 34 |
| 2020 | 312 | 27 |
| 2021 | 366 | 30 |
Full years only. The list also covers April to December 2017 and January to March 2022.
Total incidents rose 55 percent from 2018 to 2021. Criminal-code incidents went from 27 to 30. Most of the jump came at the Studio 6 building, where incidents went from 99 in 2018 to 229 in 2019. The growth was mainly in disputes, noise and harassment complaints, and reports of suspicious activity. Medical calls doubled in 2019, from 28 to 56, before falling back.
The dispatch log. The newer log labels each incident by type rather than by criminal-code section. Eyes on EB counted every incident carrying a crime label, such as theft, assault, burglary, robbery, fraud, criminal mischief, a drug offense, threats, trespassing or a warrant arrest. Those were 155 of the 5,312 incidents from April 2022 to September 2026, about 3 percent. Their number did rise, from 16 in 2023 to 59 in 2025, but in no year did they exceed about one in 20 incidents.
Over the same period the log records:
- 703 medical calls. An ambulance unit is logged on 697 of the 702 incidents labeled “medical call.”
- 293 welfare checks, in which police are asked to check on someone’s safety.
- 223 fire alarms or fire department calls.
- Hundreds of disputes, noise complaints, harassment complaints and abandoned or misdialed 911 calls.
An ambulance unit appears on 1,034 of the 5,312 incidents.
None of this means crime does not happen at the property. Crimes are in the records, and some are serious. The 2017-to-2022 list includes 48 simple assaults, five aggravated assaults and 28 warrant arrests, as well as 17 drug overdoses and six unattended deaths. In August 2023, Chief LoSacco wrote to Mayor Brad Cohen that the property had become “a hotbed for criminal activities.” His letter listed, for roughly the previous six months, one attempted murder, two aggravated assaults, six simple assaults and three death investigations, along with 53 disputes, 26 medical calls and 17 welfare checks. He wrote that “many of the medical calls” involved overdoses. The police records do not separate overdoses from other medical calls, so they can neither confirm nor rule out that statement.
On Sept. 9 of this year, police arrested two men in the Studio 6 parking lot on weapons and drug-distribution charges after finding a loaded handgun, a large-capacity drum magazine and about half a pound of suspected marijuana in a car, according to the department’s release. A third man was held on an unrelated warrant. The release identified the men as from New Brunswick, Bordentown and Edison and did not say whether any was staying at the property. Charges are accusations; the men are presumed innocent unless proven guilty.
Those incidents are real. But they are a small share of the work. The bulk of what brings police, firefighters and ambulance crews to the property is people who are sick, people in distress, people in conflict with one another and alarms.
What the records cannot say. Police records list an address, not anyone’s housing status. Nothing in them shows whether a call involved a county placement, a guest placed by another agency, a paying guest, an employee or a visitor. Eyes on EB did not attempt to assign calls to any group, and the records do not support saying that emergency-housing residents caused any particular share of them.
The timing also argues against a simple link. The sharpest rise in the earlier police records came in April 2019, at the Studio 6 building. The county board’s agreement with the current owner was signed in fall 2021, and its first payment in the records is dated Dec. 28, 2021.
The people behind the numbers
The people placed at the property are, by the owner’s description, often in hard circumstances. Hille wrote that the placements provide “temporary lodging to vulnerable individuals,” among them “victims of domestic violence and those facing housing instability.”
A motel room is meant to be a stopgap. The county board’s agreement describes the rooms as temporary housing, with each stay authorized month to month. The state regulation on emergency assistance that the board released to Eyes on EB refers to an emergency-assistance “service plan” for recipients. It says that when additional barriers are identified, “the recipient shall be referred to appropriate services,” and that in some cases treatment becomes a required part of that plan.
Whether the people at this property have service plans or receive those referrals, Eyes on EB cannot say. The records released do not show how long people stay, what services they receive, or where they go when they leave. Those are case records, which are confidential, and the board declined to produce counts.
That leaves the most important question about the arrangement unanswered: how a stay at the Route 18 property connects to a permanent home for the people placed there.
What the school records show
Eyes on EB asked East Brunswick Public Schools for the annual accounting of homeless students that Board of Education Policy 5116 says the district reports to the state Office of Homelessness Prevention. The district released a 10-page roster covering school years from 2019-20 to the start of 2026-27, saying it had “conducted a good-faith search and identified the 10 pages of enclosed records as responsive.”
Names and identification numbers are blacked out. For each entry the roster gives a category of “nighttime residence.” Entries listed as living in hotels or motels:
| School year | All entries | Hotels or motels |
|---|---|---|
| 2019-20 | 25 | 10 |
| 2020-21 | 28 | 11 |
| 2021-22 | 47 | 20 |
| 2022-23 | 61 | 36 |
| 2023-24 | 70 | 38 |
| 2024-25 | 62 | 31 |
| 2025-26 | 57 | 30 |
Entries under the 2026-27 heading, which covers only the first weeks of the school year, include 20 listed in hotels or motels.
The roster does not name any hotel or motel, so it does not show how many of these students stayed at the Route 18 property. Hotel and motel entries also appear in 2019-20 and 2020-21, before the county’s 2021 agreement with the owner.
The figures count entries, not individual students. A student enrolled across several years can appear under more than one. Most of the remaining entries are listed as sharing someone else’s housing, and a smaller number as living in shelters or transitional housing.
The Township’s response and the 28-day rule
The Township has tried twice to change how the property operates.
In June 2024, the Planning Board designated the property part of an area in need of redevelopment. The Township’s study behind that designation relied on the police incident counts and on the chief’s letters about the burden on the police force. The designation was challenged in a separate lawsuit. In January 2026, the chairman of the Township’s Redevelopment Agency said at a public meeting that the judge had “sided with the property owners.”
In May 2025, the Township Council adopted Ordinance 25-18, which says no guest may occupy a motel or hotel room “for a period of more than 28 consecutive days or more than 28 days during any ninety-day period.” A motel operator may petition the police chief for a longer stay for a guest who lives more than 30 miles away and is in town for temporary work, or whose home is temporarily uninhabitable during repairs. The decision is at the chief’s discretion.
The ordinance’s text does not mention emergency assistance or placements by a government agency, either to cover them or to exempt them. The county board’s agreement, by contrast, provides for authorizations renewed month to month.
Eyes on EB asked the Township for records since May 12, 2025: any petition or decision under the extension provision for 244-246 Route 18, any tally of such requests, any correspondence with the owner or the county board about the limit, and any written criteria for deciding. The Township answered: “There are no records that are responsive to your OPRA request, items 1 through 5.”
That answer means the Township located no such records. It does not show whether anyone has stayed longer than 28 days. The county board declined to produce a count of stays longer than 28 days, and the payment records cannot show it.
A pending lawsuit
NJ 18 Enterprises LLC has an active case against the Township of East Brunswick in Superior Court in Middlesex County, filed June 24, 2025 (docket MID-L-003818-25). A lawyer for the company described it to Eyes on EB as a pending civil rights case. The complaint is not available through the court’s online case file without attorney credentials, so Eyes on EB could not independently verify the specific claims or whether the case involves Ordinance 25-18.
What remains unanswered
- How many people have stayed at the property through the county, and for how long. The board declined to produce those counts.
- What share of the property’s guests are placements by the county, other agencies or charities, and what share are paying guests.
- Whether any of the police, fire or ambulance calls involved people placed there. The records list an address, not a housing status.
- Whether any stay has run past the Township’s 28-day limit, and how the Township applies the limit to government placements.
- What happens to people after they leave, and whether a stay at the property leads to permanent housing.
- How motels are chosen. The board’s list names 12 motels in the county; the Motel 6 is the only one in East Brunswick. Asked for a policy on selecting motels, the board produced the list and a state regulation, neither of which sets out criteria.
- What the owner’s lawsuit claims.
Responses to requests for comment
Robert B. Hille, a lawyer with Greenbaum, Rowe, Smith & Davis, which represents NJ 18 Enterprises LLC with the Bianchi Law Group, responded to Eyes on EB’s request for comment. He said that because the lawsuit is pending, the company is limiting substantive comment on it to what is in the court filings.
He confirmed that NJ 18 Enterprises owns the Motel 6 and Studio 6 on Route 18 and said the motels “receive temporary placements from agencies, including the Middlesex County Board of Social Services’ Office of Temporary Assistance, the Salvation Army, local churches, and the Division of Child Protection and Permanency in providing temporary lodging to vulnerable individuals,” among them “victims of domestic violence and those facing housing instability.” The motels accept vouchers from those organizations, which he called “a long-standing industry practice nationally and in New Jersey.” “Our client remains committed to working collaboratively with the Township and government authorities to ensure it effectively serves the needs of temporary guests placed through the Middlesex County Board of Social Services and other entities,” he wrote.
Eyes on EB also asked the Middlesex County Board of Social Services for comment, with a deadline of Oct. 16. The board’s e-mail system sent automated replies, but the board did not provide a substantive response.
Where the records came from
Payment, rate and school figures come from records released under the Open Public Records Act by the Middlesex County Board of Social Services, East Brunswick Public Schools, the Township of East Brunswick and the New Jersey Department of Human Services between Sept. 18 and Oct. 8, 2026. The 2022-to-2026 dispatch log was released by the East Brunswick Police Department under the same law on Sept. 10, 2026. The 2017-to-2022 incident list and the chief’s 2023 letter were published by the Township with its October 2023 redevelopment investigation report. Eyes on EB counted incidents in both police records itself. Details of the lawsuit come from the state court system’s online case file.
