Tools for Action: Town Meeting 1

Most of the Tools for Action information presented at the first Town Meeting in August. I pulled it out of an earlier post to make it a stand-alone.

FAULKNER ACT PROVISIONS – N.J.S.A. 40:69A-1 et seq.

Initiative: The voters of any municipality may propose any ordinance and may adopt or reject the same at the polls, such power being known as the initiative. Any initiated ordinance may be submitted to the municipal council by a petition signed by a number of the legal voters of the municipality equal in number to at least 15% of the total votes cast in the municipality at the last election at which members of the General Assembly were elected. (For North Plainfield, that’s 4,133 votes cast in the 2005 General Election; 413 signatures equals 10%; 620 signatures equals 15%).

Updated 1/30/08: There were 2,432 votes cast in the 2007 General Election, so 10% is 243 signatures.

Referendum: Voters also have the power of referendum, which is the power to approve or reject at the polls any ordinance submitted by the council to the voters or any ordinance passed by the council, against which a referendum petition has been filed. No ordinance passed by the municipal council, (with a few exceptions), shall take effect before twenty days from the time of its final passage and its approval by the mayor where such approval is required. A petition must be filed within 20 days after final passage and approval. The petition must be signed by registered voters equal to 15% of the total voter who cast in November 2005 general election.

Petition papers for initiative or referendum must be uniform in size and style and must have the full text of the proposed ordinance. The signatures to initiative or referendum petitions can be on more than one page, but each separate petition has to have an atttached statement of the circulator, saying that he or she personally circulated the petition, and that all the signature were made in his or her presence. Signers must sign their names in ink, and include their street address. There has to be a Committee of the Petitioners, showing the names and addresses of five people responsible for circulating the petition and responsible for making decisions about it as the process goes on.

All petition papers for initiative or referendum must be given to the Borough Clerk at one time. The Clerk then has 20 days to check and make sure the signatures and affidavits are proper. Once the Clerk is done with that review, she certifies the result to the Borough Council at its next regular meeting. If she says the petition is insufficient, she has to say what defects the petition has, and notify at least two members of the Committee of the Petitioners. After that notification, the Committee of Petitioners has 10 days to recollect signatures on a corrected petition and refile. After the refilling, the Clerk has 5 days to check again. Once the Clerk has presented a proper petition to the Borough Council, that counts as a first reading, and provisions for public hearing must be made.

The council then has 20 days to either pass the requested initiative ordinance or repeal the referendum ordinance. If they don’t act, the Clerk submits the ordinance to the voters no less than 40 days but no more than 90 days from the council’s failure to act, requiring a special election if need be. Ordinances going to voters must be published in at least two of the newspapers published or circulated in the municipality, no less than five days and no more than 20 days before the election.

If a majority (greater than 50%) of the qualified electors voting on the proposed ordinance vote in favor of it, that ordinance becomes a valid and binding ordinance of the municipality and is published other ordinances are. No such ordinance can be amended or repealed within 3 years immediately following the date of its adoption by the voters, except by a vote of the people, either brought about by another citizen petition drive or a council submission of a ballot question.

NOTE: NJ Senate Bill 1762, which was introduced in 2004, and came back this session as Senate Bill 1177, would severely restrict citizen rights of initiative and referendum, and would add a step to the initiative process, sending each proposed ordinance to the municipal attorney to review and discard citizen-driven laws that conflict with state and federal laws. The 2004 version passed the Senate and died in Assembly committee. But this session, S 1177 (the same bill) passed in the Senate and is currently in Assembly committee (A 3436). Full text here.

OPEN PUBLIC RECORDS ACT - P.L. 2001, CHAPTER 404 N.J.S. 47:1A-1 et seq.

New Jersey State Law, passed in 2002, to expand public access to government records and thereby improve accountability and transparency in government.

According to the law:

“Government record” or “record” means any paper, written or printed book, document, drawing, map, plan, photograph, microfilm, data processed or image processed document, information stored or maintained electronically or by sound-recording or in a similar device, or any copy thereof, that has been made, maintained or kept on file in the course of his or its official business by any officer, commission, agency or authority of the State or of any political subdivision thereof, including subordinate boards thereof, or that has been received in the course of his or its official business by any such officer, commission, agency, or authority of the State or of any political subdivision thereof, including subordinate boards thereof. The terms shall not include inter-agency or intra-agency advisory, consultative, or deliberative material.”

There are a few exceptions to the law – things that don’t have to be made available for inspection and copying, or things that can be redacted to black out personal information, for example. And the government agency can charge you for the copies, regular copying fees of $0.10 to 0.75 per page.

But overall, OPRA can be a powerful information-gathering tool.

To comply with the law, every state agency, town and other government entity has to have a custodian of records – In North Plainfield, that person is the Borough Clerk, Gloria Pflueger. At the clerk’s desk at the municipal building at 263 Somerset Street, there’s a stack of the forms. All you do is walk in, fill out the form and wait seven to 10 business days for the Borough Clerk to call back letting you know what information she’s been able to gather for you. You go in and look at it, you get whatever copies you need, and that’s that.

The key is asking the right questions – knowing what information you want, from which department, and then phrasing the question to get that information.

If the response from the department is that you can’t have the information you want, the law also established an informal mediation system. You place a toll-free call to the Government Records Council at 1-866-850-0511 and tell them what records you were trying to get access to, what the government agency said when they denied your request, and then the GRC looks into it to see if the denial was authorized or not.

ENFORCEMENT

This is a key problem for North Plainfield, because many of the ordinances already on the books are not enforced by the Department of Public Works and Police Department.

However, citizens are allowed to enforce laws themselves. It may make us wonder why we have town employees, but it’s a possible solution anyway.

First step is to file a written complaint about the problem – noise, trash, speeding, whatever. The full text of the North Plainfield Borough Code is on-line, so you can go there and find the exact number and provisions of the ordinance being violated.

Complaint forms are also available on the Borough Clerk’s desk, at least for property violations, and we can find out how to file a complaint about something like speeding.

After you submit the complaint, wait awhile to see if the Police or DPW enforce the law and correct the problem: how long is up to you. If they don’t correct the problem, then you can follow-up with a complaint in the North Plainfield Municipal Court, currently being held Tuesday and Thursday evenings up in the Watchung Municipal Building (during construction), although the Court Clerk is still working in the 263 Somerset Street building, phone: 908-769-2265.

It’s easiest to do this with very simple violations that don’t require much legal interpretation but do require someone to show up in court and demand compliance with the law. For example, if hedges at corners can be no taller than 30 inches, but your neighbors’ hedges are more than six feet tall, take a photo, file the complaint and if nothing is done by the town administration, go to court, tell the Judge, and the Judge will order the homeowner to trim the hedges and possibly pay a fine and/or court costs.

This is something we need to explore and try and find out more about. It’s not something everyone will be interested in doing, because it puts you in a public position of enforcing laws that your neighbors may want to continue violating. But it is an option.

CORPORATE PERSONHOOD

Great timeline showing how mess started and got as messy as it is. Our proposed local ordinance.

Great letter from Thomas Linzey of CELFD on the subject, concluding with this quote from Virginia Rasmussen:

“We’re fed up with behaving like subordinates content to influence the decisions of corporate boards and the corporate class. Having influence is valuable, but influencing is not deciding. We’re weary of waging long, hard battles simply for the “right to know.” Knowing is critical, but knowing is not deciding. We’re tired of exercising our right to dissent as the be all and end all. Dissent is vital, but dissenting is not deciding. Influencing, knowing, dissenting, participating — all are important to a democratic life, but not one of them carries with it the authority to decide, the power to be in charge.”