Investigative Tools

Mark Williams sent a link to this Star-Ledger article today, about the limits to the effectiveness of the Open Public Records Act.

On a related issue – the role of the Internet in maintaining the last vestiges of a “free press” with investigative power – here’s an article at CommonDreams.

Speaking of OPRA, the word from Mr. Hollod is that, “to [his] knowledge,” after two-and-a-half years working for the Borough, there are no Villa Maria-related documents, reports, minutes, meeting notes or other records of any sort apart from the transcripts and meeting minutes of Borough Council meetings at which the zoning ordinances were discussed, and the Planning Board hearings on the Watchung Hills at North Plainfield condo development.

I think that’s false. I think, somewhere in Borough Hall, or Eric Bernstein’s office, or the Mayor’s house, there is at least a big fat folder of correspondence, notes, reports and other papers dating back to 2000 or earlier, and more likely several boxes worth. There have been several lawsuits related to Villa Maria, environmental issues, public notice issues, signs of private discussions between Borough officials and developer representatives, a veritable panoply of document-intensive activities, all of which relate to the who, what, when, where and how of that land’s development.

Furthermore, when I submitted an OPRA request seeking a look at these records back in May, I got a two-page letter back from Philip George, Esq., of Eric M. Bernstein & Associates, posted here: P. George OPRA Letter

In his many reasons why he could offer nothing other than an excerpt from the Borough’s 2002 Master Plan and a copy of the ARC ordinances, Mr. George did not put forward: “those records don’t exist.” For example, the request for “reports and correspondence” related to Villa Maria was deemed “not specified with any degree of description sufficient to determine what is requested.” In fact, there were apparently so many possibly relevant documents, that Mr. George wrote: “Such documents may be located in a number of offices and may be covered by the attorney-client privilege or other privilege from disclosure.”

As Borough residents, I think the members of NP Citizens for Community Rights, and all other residents, may well be the “client” in the attorney-client privilege and may well have the right to see any and all documents related to legal representation of our interests.

[Update 1/30/08 - Residents are not the client. The only client of the Borough Attorney is the Mayor, and, if they concur with the Mayor's actions, the members of the Borough Council. If the Council were ever to oppose the Mayor, then the Borough Attorney would only be representing the Mayor. In any case, the Mayor, Council members and Borough Attorney are all agents of the State governent, charged with ensuring local citizens' comply with state laws. None of them are there to represent the interests of the residents, because the residents are mere "tenants" in a municipal corporation revocably chartered by the State and administered by the local governing officials.]

Regardless of how it all plays out in the months ahead – whether all or some of those documents are exempt from disclosure – it just doesn’t look good. It looks like they’re hiding something, not from a partisan perspective, but from the point of view of people trying to find out what’s going on to help steer the process in a more community-supported and community-supportive direction.

It really doesn’t matter whether this Administration turns around and starts dealing with the public in an open and respectful way, or whether this Administration gets kicked out in some election down the road so that another group can start off on an open and respectful foot. Either way, the people of this town are going to get more say in what goes on around here, and that’s the whole point.

Immigrant Impacts

My husband sent me a link to this NY Times story, about the economic and legal consequences of local ordinances designed to drive out undocumented immigrant populations.

Riverside NJ – A little more than a year ago, the Township Committee in this faded factory town became the first municipality in New Jersey to enact legislation penalizing anyone who employed or rented to an illegal immigrant.

Within months, hundreds, if not thousands, of recent immigrants from Brazil and other Latin American countries had fled. The noise, crowding and traffic that had accompanied their arrival over the past decade abated.

The law had worked. Perhaps, some said, too well.

With the departure of so many people, the local economy suffered. Hair salons, restaurants and corner shops that catered to the immigrants saw business plummet; several closed. Once-boarded-up storefronts downtown were boarded up again.

Meanwhile, the town was hit with two lawsuits challenging the law. Legal bills began to pile up, straining the town’s already tight budget. Suddenly, many people — including some who originally favored the law — started having second thoughts.

So last week, the town rescinded the ordinance, joining a small but growing list of municipalities nationwide that have begun rethinking such laws as their legal and economic consequences have become clearer…

North Plainfield wrestles with these same issues of large immigrant populations and local economic development – raised most prominently in discussions about enforcement of residential overcrowding, “stacked housing,” basement sleeping rooms and rooming houses, and in efforts to expand the types of goods and services available on Somerset Street in the main business district.

As we continue public discussions about these things, it will be very important to make sure that local measures are carried out – and perceived by all residents – to genuinely protect the health and safety of all residents from preventable risks associated with overcrowding, and to really develop the Somerset Street business district to better meet the needs of all residents.

Recommended Reading

I was up at the Watchung Library this morning, and picked up a few books at the book sale, on corporate power in America, the relationship between corporations and democracy, and the effects of two-party power concentration on citizen-led democracy.

All three are recommended reading for anyone who wants to get a better idea of where we’re coming from with the ordinance, which is designed – not to ban corporate enterprise altogether – but to bring corporations within the control of citizen-directed democratic structures so as to reign in power abuses that hurt individual people, communities and ecosystems.

Political Fictions, by Joan Didion: From the book jacket:

In 1988, Joan Didion began looking at the American political process for The New York Review of Books. What she found was not a mechanism that offered the nation’s citizens a voice in its affairs but one designed by – and for – “that handful of insiders who invent, year in and year out, the narrative of public life.”In Political Fictions…Didion covers the ways in which the continuing and polarizing nostalgia for an imagined America led to the entrenchment of a small percentage of the electorate as the nation’s deciding political force, the ways in which the two major political parties have worked to narrow the electorate to this manageable element, the readiness with which the media collaborated with this project, and, finally and at length, how this mindset led inexorably over the past dozen years to the crisis that was the 2000 elections. In this book Didion cuts to the core of the deceptions and deflections to explain and illuminate what came to be called “the disconnect” – and to reveal a political class increasingly intolerant of the nation that sustains it…

Divine Right of Capital, by Marjorie Kelly:

Wealth inequality, corporate welfare, and industrial pollution are symptoms – the fevers and chills of the economy. The underlying illness, says Business Ethics magazine co-founder Marjorie Kelly, is shareholder primacy: the corporate drive to make profit for shareholders, no matter who pays the cost. We think of shareholder primacy as the natural law of the free market, much as our forebears thought of monarchy as the most natural form of government. In The Divine Right of Capital, Kelly brilliantly demonstrates that this corporate aristocracy is in fact unnatural and irrational. She articulates six aristocratic principles that corporations are built on, principles that we would never accept in our modern democratic system but which we accept unquestioningly in our economic system. People designed this system and people can change it, Kelly says. She calls for a movement to build economic democracy in two stages: first, by raising consciousness about wealth discrimination, and second, by aiming for structural change in corporate institutions…

Taking Back Our Lives in an Age of Corporate Dominance:

Never before have so many people felt the American Dream crashing down around their shoulders. The bottom-line profit mentality is bottoming out our lives and the planet. Taking Back Our Lives in the Age of Corporate Dominance presents alternatives to being victimized by a pressure-cooker lifestyle and buffeted by the winds of global change. It draws the connections between our lives and the culture, the economy, and the vast forces moving us closer to the edge…

NJ Supreme Court Ruling

The NJ Supreme Court recently upheld citizens right to the referendum provisions of the Faulkner Act, which allow citizens to put ordinances on the ballot for reversal when enough citizens object to the ordinances as passed.

Here’s an excerpt from an AP story on the ruling from Newsday:

The Trenton case stemmed from a restructuring of the Police Department approved by the City Council in 2004. Citizens objected, and they eventually obtained enough signatures to put the ordinance up for a vote. Mayor Douglas H. Palmer and the council opposed the referendum and persuaded a state Superior Court Judge Linda R. Feinberg to block the balloting.

Feinberg, relying on past rulings, found that the ordinance was administrative, not legislative, and not subject to recall. An appellate panel reversed that ruling. It noted that since other appellate panels disagreed on when ordinances were administrative or legislative, it was best to have a referendum since the state’s policy is to favor public participation.

The Supreme Court affirmed that ruling, but for a different reason. It found that since the state statute on referendums made no distinction between administrative and legislative ordinances, neither can the courts.

Judge Feinberg is the same judge who threw out a citizens’ initiative in Lawrence, briefly outlined in a previous post, which also includes information about a legislative effort to narrow citizen access to the initiative and referendum process our group is currently using for the Ordinance.

David Branan’s Thoughts on Citizen Activism

David Branan – school board and planning board member, wrote the following (his own views, and not intended to represent the views of any boards on which he serves):

These are entirely my own thoughts and I have not consulted with anyone else prior to writing this.

I know the people involved in North Plainfield Citizens for Community Rights are sincere in their beliefs and genuinely want to effect positive change for North Plainfield.

However, I was highly disturbed by reading this quote from the CCR blog, and I am writing with a plea that concerned residents working to resolve local issues also work to arrest what I see as a troubling trend in that work.

“the process for requesting a full financial/operational audit of NP by the State or even the GAO…” mentioning the high taxes, “unacceptable services” and the poor quality of the schools as possible signs that there’s some “fund misappropriation by the administration, and perhaps even criminal activity.”

While I generally support grass roots activities such as yours that breath new life into potentially stagnant communities, there is a danger that success can breed a crossover to an “anti” organization whose sole purpose is to tear things down without thought to rebuilding afterward. The degree of hatred I see emerging recently is unfitting to what started out as a noble enterprise to expand participation in local government. Looking beyond the issue of Villa Maria, many of the other local issues that are often mentioned, transcend the confines of the present administration, and date from times when others held the mantle of power.

My personal opinion is that there can be a very fine line drawn between activism in support of a good cause, and viciousness that serves the self-gratification of a small minority. To suggest that myself, my fellow Board of Education members, or the present school administration are engaging in self-aggrandizement borders on the slanderous. I annually sign a financial disclosure statement listing all sources of income as required under state law. My purpose in becoming involved with the Board of Education was entirely based on the fact that, at the time, I had 2 children enrolled in the schools and wanted to have some impact on what might happen to the schools in the light of the ever-increasing squeeze between operational costs and realistic tax levies.

As a parents yourselves, many of you too must feel this type of concern. I finally had the opportunity to become involved in 2005 when I transitioned to a new job within my company that did not require extensive travel. I have learned a great deal about what a board member can and cannot do, and what degree of influence we can have. I have never sought to achieve any financial gain from my involvement with the board.

Please, do not let your group get drawn down this path. Be very careful of those who may have alternate agendas that don’t necessarily align with your group’s stated nonpartisan intentions to inform and empower all residents toward more public discussion and more meaningful self-governance. I have seen many marriages of convenience disintegrate after the short term goals are achieved.

I implore all of you to take care with your group’s direction. Don’t make it an organization of hatred and destruction.

Villa Maria Ideas from Barbara Habeeb

I have three thoughts that you may want to put on the table as options.

1. Have the town make a new ordinance that reads: the lots on said property need to be a certain size ie: 2 acre lots…..which will mean less building and more open space per allotted lot. (It could help preserve some of those trees if each lot needed to be a certain size.) The builder would have to comply to that ordinance and not be allowed any variances per the Master Plan. The town needs to stick to their guns and not cow tow to attorneys who make threats.

2. Maybe suggest that the nuns divide the whole property into 2 separate pieces. One piece can be purchased by the county as a “green acres” so we can have a nice park for our children (and save some of those trees) and the other part could be purchased by a builder to create something that will bring in tax revenue for the town. A convention center would be cool. I don’t think it would impact the traffic as much as the condos would. People would be coming and going at many different times, as opposed to “rush hour” traffic. It could actually be an “attraction” for our town.

3. Suggest high end luxury homes to be built on 2 acre lots. It wouldn’t impact the schools for the simple fact that people who pay $900,000 for a home would most likely be sending their kids to private schools. Those homes would most likely sell better than the average $300,000 home. Many big business people from NY come into Jersey and look for those kinds of homes. The beauty is that the surrounding land would be “park like” as opposed to the ones in South Plainfield with little or no property.

More on Administrator Salaries…

Update from Gina Corrao of the Community Education Coalition, on how the voting played out at the Sept. 19 School Board meeting.

Late in the meeting, the board went into voting and since Drew Smith was not in attendance for the beginning public commentary, the lawyer [Anthony Sciarello] explained to Drew what he explained to us.

Edwin Estevez motioned to separate the 3 salary votes [Birnbaum, Rich and Sternberg] and it was moved.

For Dr. Rich all the members voted Yes, except for Drew, who voted No and the 2 abstentions.

As for Sternberg, all members voted yes, except Drew and 1 abstention.

Thomas Allen and David Branan were both legally unable to vote on Dr. Rich’s salary, but only Mr. Allen was unable to vote for Sternberg.

So, Branan’s Yes vote created the majority to pass Sternberg’s salary, but Rich’s salary was not approved.

The issue will be revisited next meeting.

Bill Uptegrove’s Views on Local Oversight & Accountability

Reposted from Bill Uptegrove comment. (I’d certainly support the oversight plan he proposes, and will look into the Saturday meetings, which would be a clear violation of the Open Public Meeting Act if, in fact, the Council and Mayor meet to discuss public business.)

I’m not sure Mr. Soto’s proposal was such a hopeful sign. Except for introducing an earlier ordinance, I believe this was the only instance that Mr. Soto said anything — other than “yes” — during the entire council meeting (he may also have said a sentence about hoping that the Villa Maria issue could be resolved, as did every other council member).

(To be clear, my comment is not intended as a disparagement of Mr. Soto. Most of the other Council members, except for the acting President and Bob Hitchcock, also said very little. As I explain below, the problem is structural, not personal.)

Even then, Mr. Soto simply read from a previously prepared paper and said ONLY that he would like to see “a review of the mechanisms used for enforcement of ordinances” on the Council’s upcoming agenda. Mr. Soto, who was appointed to replace his son on the Council, is running in his first election this year. Accordingly, one has to wonder whether his statement was more about politics than policy.

That said, I believe Mr. Soto likely did not make the statement with dubious intentions. But no matter how well intentioned, I’m not hopeful that anything will actually get done. While his statement appeared to be a step in the right direction, it seems unlikely that such a review will ever happen. As I believe was discussed at a NPCCR meeting, the reason the Borough doesn’t enforce its ordinances is because the prosecutor drops the case or asks the judge to commute or significantly reduce the fine. My understanding from the NPCCR meeting is that the prosecutor has failed to enforce the ordinances AT THE DIRECTION of the Mayor.

Yet even if the Council decided to undertake a review, it’s even more unlikely that it would be effective or that, in the event it did uncover something, any of us would learn of the results of that review. Who would conduct such a review? The mayor or the administrator, David Hollod, who she hired and who works for her? If the mayor really has played any role in preventing proper enforcement, would she blow the whistle on herself?

There are two more global problems here. First, the Council meetings are nothing more than window dressing. Nothing happens at them. Council members do not discuss town business, they do not ask questions about the very ordinances on which they are required to vote, they rarely raise issues that concern residents, but even then they do not discuss the issue at all, and, as was painfully apparent at the last meeting, they do not even have a working knowledge of the items they’re voting on — it seemed no one had read the new Villa Maria ordinance that they expected to vote on (only Mr. Hitchcock nodded as though he had read it), and while it was clear that no one other than the town attorney knew what was going on with the parcel of land the town is buying — and even he didn’t seem too clear on the subject — and three council members (including Mr. Soto) still voted to buy it anyway.

Part of the problem is that the Council does the vast majority of its business in private. As I understand it, the Council conducts its business at the mayor’s house on Saturdays. All the public ever sees is the end result — the Council’s vote. Not very democratic. The second problem is oversight of town affairs. As residents, we have access to very little information about our government. There is, of course, OPRA, but that can cost taxpayers a lot of money — especially if you really want to dig into an issue. Furthermore, I’ve been told of at least one lawsuit involving the town refusing to produce documents of the type that should be readily available to residents.

It’s not even easy to get a hold of information about the council’s agenda. The town website only publishes past agendas. You have to actually go to Borough Hall or subscribe to an internet-based program (google group), which very few people know about, to get a copy of the agenda. Why doesn’t the town just post the upcoming agenda on its website BEFORE the meeting?

But even if you get a copy, you have to decode it. If it weren’t for other sources on the internet and word of mouth, I probably wouldn’t have known that the one sentence reference to “age-restricted” in the agenda dealt specifically with the Villa Maria property.

Katherine has done a good job of demonstrating how other towns make information, such as the town budget, easily accessible to residents. Why do we have to fight with the administration — sometimes all the way to the courthouse — just to get basic information about our government?

This lack of access to basic information is compounded by the complete absence of transparency into the workings of our elected officials. How do we petition our local government to address our problems if all of the relevant discussions about what happens in our town go on behind the closed doors of a private house?

To be honest, I’m not sure what the solution is other than voting out the mayor and the majority of the council. Although residents have raised concerns about the lack of information and transparency for many years, these problems have persisted. And I don’t think these problems will be completely solved until there’s a new mayor who values an open and responsive government. But that’s not going to happen for at least a year, and given recent history, maybe not even then.

Perhaps, since it seems unlikely that the council and mayor will police themselves anytime soon, the Borough could establish a formal citizen’s committee that has oversight responsibility. Such a committee could be established by the council via an ordinance or by voters via a referendum.

The committee could be similar to the planning board or economic development committee. It could be governed by a charter that defined its role and responsibilities. It could have six to nine members, consisting of two or three registered republicans, democrats, and independents. While not perfect, the idea here is that no one party can dominate the committee — the NJ Supreme Court is set up in a similar way.

The members should probably have a single one year term and then should not be on the committee again for at least two years. This again would help to prevent a single party from shielding their friends in the administration from scrutiny. The mayor would be obligated to give the committee access to any and all documents it requested and to answer questions at the committee’s public meetings.

I suggest this committee simply in an attempt to begin a discussion about how we might go about streamlining the type of oversight that I think the NPCCR is trying to do and that all residents would want to participate in if they had the time.

In theory, I think this oversight role is really the responsibility of the council. But, to date, it’s a role that they’ve abdicated. Perhaps a robust discussion about creating some formal mechanism for oversight and accountability might help to shed light on the issues we all care about, but cannot get answers to from our local officials.

Step by Step

Here’s the plan for moving forward with the Borough Administrator, Borough Council and Mayor to craft a workable, community-supported solution to the Villa Maria development challenge:

1) The Villa Maria property is currently generating tax revenue for the town, may generate additional tax revenue if we are able to seek back taxes, and the property as-is requires very few town services and is not a drain on local resources. Therefore, the Borough is under no time pressure to facilitate the damaging development currently sought by the landowners. We have time to find ways to increase the pressure on the nuns to cooperate with our vision for the Borough in making their sale/development plans.

2) Our community vision for the Borough places a high value on open space conservation and historic preservation, in concert with sustainable economic development that maintains and enhances the unique character of the Borough.

3) We have already begun sending out feelers to locate potential buyers who could pay a fair price – not the exorbitant profits offered by the condo developers, but a reasonable price factoring in the decades of tax-exemption and the current back taxes owed – to buy the wooded land, conserve the trees, and renovate the eclectic mix of existing historic buildings for a variety of uses including schools, nursing homes/assisted living, conference centers, hotels, bed and breakfasts, upscale professional office space, upscale historic apartments.

We continue to urge all interested NP residents to spread the word among your business and personal networks that we’re looking for a collaborative solution to this community challenge, and to help interested parties get involved in good faith negotiations with the landowners.

4) However, to move forward with developing those leads, our group needs to know and fully understand exactly what has occurred during the last five to seven years of negotiations between the Borough and the landowners. What have the nuns’ stated goals been? Who has corresponded and/or attended meetings related to Villa Maria development and in what capacity? What hurdles have the landowners thrown up to development proposals more compatible with our community vision, how and why? What environmental, legal and other problems have come up, and how have those limited the proposals in the past? And many other issues.

5) Therefore, before we arrange a CCR meeting with Borough Administrator David Hollod and the Borough Council, we need unrestricted access to public documents, correspondence, meeting minutes, reports, etc., shedding light on all that background, so we can analyze and identify the bargaining strengths and weaknesses of all the current players: the Borough, the landowning nuns, and the condo developers, to craft a well-informed, workable proposal that factors in the key problems and opportunities.

6) We notified Borough Administrator David Hollod of this requirement in writing yesterday, seeking a combination of extensive document review and candid interviews with knowledgeable Borough officials, and are awaiting his response to schedule those information-gathering sessions at his earliest convenience, hopefully for sometime late this week or early next week.

Here are some other subjects our group can research independently:

1) How much back taxes can the Borough pursue under federal tax law?

2) Are buyers who were interested earlier in the process still interested?

3) Are pharmaceutical companies or philanthropists interested in financing a historic project to purchase and restore Villa Maria as a historic landmark? (Antoinette is writing letters)

4) What other uses would be permitted for the property under current zoning?

Any light readers can shed on these questions would help the process move along.

Also, reader ideas will be posted as “So-and-so’s Ideas” as regular posts if you e-mail them in.

Citizen Enforcement

The same topic as the previous post – residents’ frustration with non-existent, lax or spotty enforcement of local ordinances on things like property maintenance, littering, overcrowded/unsafe housing, parking, speeding, etc. – was a focus of last week’s Town Meeting.

Frank D’Amore Sr. gave a presentation on how regular people can enforce ordinances independent of the Borough employees responsible for enforcement.

Step 1 – When you see a possible violation, check in the Borough Code to make sure you know exactly what the ordinance requires.

Step 2 – If there actually is a violation, document it by writing a letter and/or filling out a Property Maintance Complaint form, available at the Borough Clerk’s desk at Borough Hall. Take photographs if visual evidence will support your complaint. In your letter, request a written response from the responsible authorities. Then send or hand-deliver copies to the Mayor, Council, Borough Administrator, Department of Public Works Director and anyone else who might be responsible for that kind of violation. Especially send a copy to the Council, because that guarantees the letter will be recorded in the next meeting’s minutes as “Correspondence.” You can also ask at the Borough Clerk’s desk to have your letters or complaint forms date-stamped – keep a date-stamped copy for yourself so you have proof that you notified the proper authorities and when.

Step 3 – Wait some number of months (it will vary depending on each person’s patience, 6 months, a year, a year-and-a-half) and observe the situation. If the problem is resolved, well and good. If not, send a follow-up letter to the same people, noting your prior written notice about the problem, and again requesting a date-stamp on each copy including your own copy, and again requesting a written response.

Step 4 – If still no response, request, through OPRA (forms available at Borough Clerk’s desk), a copy of any Summonses issued to the person in violation of the local ordinance.

Step 5 – If, after that, there’s still no response and no Summons has been issued, you can go to municipal court and file a Complaint yourself. There are no fees for filing Complaints for local ordinance violations, and, so long as the case is fairly straightforward (i.e., collapsing porch, too-tall corner lot shrubs blocking drivers’ sight-lines, litter, commerical vehicles parked in residential neighborhood, etc.), you don’t need an attorney. You’ll just write and sign an affidavit, or statement, about what the problem is, and attach copies of the letters and forms and photos you’ve already delivered to the responsible local authorities.

Step 6 – When the Court date comes up, you’ll go to Court, present your information, and, in all likelihood, if it really is that straightforward, Frank has found that the Judge usually just orders the violator to correct the violation – i.e., fix the porch, trim the shrubbery, pick up the litter, move the commercial vehicles elsewhere. It’s helpful to take notes on the Court proceedings, and the Judge has generally been helpful and supportive of Frank’s efforts at citizen enforcement.

If you have a concern about some kind of possible ordinance violation, Frank said he’d be glad to help with looking up the problem in the Borough Code to make sure it’s something citizens can enforce, and with preparing the letters and complaint forms. His phone is 757-6353 and e-mail is frankdsr@att.net.