Dispatches from M.Emory Layne – Who ARE these people?

By Emory Layne

It’s come to this.

At an OFFICIAL meeting of an official North Plainfield committee (the Planning Board meeting, not a soiree at someone’s house or a bar), the attorney for someone who doesn’t live in North Plainfield, but who owns land here and wants to make a nice profit from it, LAUGHS at the suggestion that his client pay his taxes.

Our mayor, in attendance at the meeting, who is always so quick to voice her “pride” in North Plainfield, apparently doesn’t even recognize this slap in the face to the town, and stays silent. Not even a whimper of righteous indignation.

Our Borough Administrator, who resides elsewhere but is paid a fat six-figure annual salary from North Plainfield TAXES (the things the guy’s client doesn’t want to pay) stands up for the town by asking to recuse himself from the issue.

Did he wet his pants, too?

Everyone reading this knows darn well that the only reason Hollod raised the issue was because Councilwoman Barbara Habeeb asked him to – but also posted her request to him on this blog. Kind of hard to not do it when the whole town knows you’ve been asked to.

Funny, though, how the OTHER SIX COUNCILPEOPLE never saw fit to bring this up until Ms. Habeeb did: Ms. Habeeb, the least ‘tenured’ member of the group, and the only Republican.

Real funny. Especially with all their campaign talk about ‘stabilizing’ taxes. I guess collecting them from deadbeats doesn’t count, because they didn’t use that word.

Quick summation on that topic: I want the same rights as Mr. McNerney. I want the right to own my property, but not pay any taxes on it. And when they get around to asking me for it, I want a mouthpiece to laugh in their faces, but go on getting a free ride. Fair enough, folks? It’s not like I can’t point to a precdent, is it?

Who ARE these people?

They used to try to get our votes by pretending to be “one of us.” Then, they went out and hired a bunch of people who have big-time authority in town, but don’t live here and don’t pay taxes here. An administrator from Somerville; a Zoning Officer from Westfield; a Police Chief from Green Brook; a Tax Collector from Hillsborough; a Construction Official from Green Brook, a Borough Attorney from Warren.

I half-wondered whether this was yet another example of Cover-Your-Ass politics, like when the whole administration was willing to sell John Katilas up the river and play Blame-the-Dead-Guy when the missing money scandal hit, but then didn’t have to when they found a white knight (Hollod) to pronounce everything hunky-dory. I wonder if all these non-residents provided a hedge against taking responsibility should the bubble burst on them and get ick all over their faces.

Of course, I could be giving them far more credit for slyness than is due.

Maybe the people who have run for office in North Plainfield, to this point, just don’t give a rat’s ass about North Plainfield. Maybe their social circles and backroom ties are scattered all over the state; we all know it’s small pickin’s here compared to the bonanza that’s available from state politics.

Maybe we’re all just beneath them in intellect and in social strata. Maybe we’re the trailer park to their Central Park-view penthouse.

Who ARE these people?

I’ve advised my closer friends to clam the hell up when they’re around not only any of these people, but around anyone who might be even remotely friendly with them. Stalin gave such a damn about the Soviet Union that he helped ‘thin it out’ by killing off about a quarter of its population. I don’t see these despots in too different a light.

 What do we know about these people? Well, we don’t have to look much further than this blog to answer that question.

 So far, in this calendar year ALONE, we’ve found out a lot about them.

The borough attorney, hired by the mayor on her very first day in office back in 1996, makes a cool $200 grand plus from the Borough each year. We learned that although he was ready and willing, at the mayor’s instruction, to have his firm threaten Katherine Watt with a lawsuit, he also believes strongly in the rights to free speech of pornographers, which he trumpets on websites around the world. And he has gone on record as believing that it isn’t feasible to go after back taxes on the Villa Maria property, but residents receive fines and penalties on their taxed properties.

The mayor and council approved a property reevaluation contract just before the turn of the calendar year. No great shakes, they were bound by law to pursue the reevaluation. In other words, they pushed papers through. But when residents began asking questions and showing well-founded concerns with what exactly was going to happen, did they step in as public servants and respond? Nope. A relatively-new community group, NPCCR, organized a town meeting to address the issue – with no help from Borough Hall, who laid every possible obstacle in their way.

As this independent meeting approached, the mayor and council suddenly realized there might be a need for such a gathering, and slapped together their own meeting; the announcements for it never so much as acknowledged the efforts made to that point by the NPCCR. Meeting notices were hand-delivered by union-salaried DPW workers, a service no one else in town seems to have access to (at least they didn’t hire limousines). And when the meeting actually occurred, it showed no leadership, no management skills, and resembled less an event sponsored by responsible representatives and more a free-for-all. Current mayoral candidate Mike Giordano certainly seemed to think so.

 We found out that, for years, attorneys involved with work for the Borough regularly made contributions specifically to the North Plainfield Democratic Organization. While pay-to-play legislation, passed and adopted by the Borough in 2006, is supposed to have put an end to that, we never saw any changes in the faces of the people who appeared to have bought their way in previously.
And we’ve discovered that the aforementioned NP Democratic Committee feels it has the right to name candidates to run for office here, but has no responsibility or even motivation to tell the residents how they do it. The GOP’s approach, while admittedly none-too-sweet-smelling in the past, was laid bare for all to see this year, and at the very least, the voters got a glimpse into how the system works. The Democrat Committee apparently believes we’re too stupid to understand it, or, perhaps, just stupid enough for them to continue keeping it a secret.

We learned that when scores of people show up before the Planning Board and express their opposition to plans involving the Villa Maria property, the entire board goes deaf, until one person, who doesn’t even live in North Plainfield anymore, Dan Glicklich (a former Allen crony) voices his support, then they hear every word, and progress along a path that eerily matches what this former Councilman supports.

 We began to discover a lot of information concerning public employees’ salaries, but ran into a complete stone wall when attempting to discover whether there are any oversight controls used in conjunction with these wage levels. We found out, for example, that the School Board had added some nice little perks to the Schools Superintendent’s compensation package, but never felt it was necessary to let us know they were doing that when we were voting on school budgets – then, they just told us to pass it or we were child-hating ogres.

 Speaking of salaries, we found that we, apparently, pay our zoning officer to not do his job. On the one hand, he seems perfectly capable of getting in locals’ faces and harassing them with imaginary zoning regulations (the most recent, but far from only, example being his dealings with Martin Greenblatt which led to a lawsuit), but seems utterly incapable of having proven zoning violations pushed through the courts to completion. And we found out that he’s supposed to exercise authority in granting or denying development permits in accordance with the provisions of Flood Prevention laws … but can we honestly count on this being done properly when the Greenblatt situation proved he doesn’t even know the zoning laws?

There was a lot of talk about illegal housing on the blog, but it certainly doesn’t seem there’s been any about it in Borough Hall, because in continuing a streak of 12 years of inaction, nothing remotely resembling a plan of action (let alone action itself) was implemented. Yet, once again, when the campaign fliers hit the doorsteps, there are the incumbents again raising the issue as if we’re supposed to believe, like Cubs fans, that This Is The Year.

We found out that when the position of Recreation Director came open in North Plainfield, the administration apparently felt there was not a single person in North Plainfield or currently in the department capable of handling the job … because, yet again, they went to another town to make a hire.

We found out that the Borough Hall Renovation Project is a complete mess. Mind you, we found all of this out only after strenuous digging, because after the current administration did their perfunctory digging by ‘breaking ground,’ all we’ve heard since are sounds that resemble breaking wind. Among things far too numerous to encapsulate here, official contracts went unsigned (our $200,000 attorney must have been busy with other things to eyeball them), a budget that we were told is not overbudget is way overbudget; the contractor may have gone bankrupt but work (and payment of bills) continues somehow; property was purchased for far more than its value and the bid process had that stink of “hand-picked provider” to it yet again. And amid all this, people who pushed the project along are running on a platform including sound fiscal management.

We found that the public library is about as important as a public bathroom to the people who run this town and the people paid to do work in this town, going by their delays and ignorance of needed repairs.

The bureaucrats downtown were busy stoking the rumor mill this past year. Among some of the beauts, they had Katherine Watt running up to a judge and threatening her, and having to be physically restrained by a bailiff. And they had our poor, sweet mayor possibly being subjected to a recall vote, and their rationale for why it would be wrong to do that (please try not to spray your computer screen)? Because it would cost too much money!

We find out that Borough Hall believes the fourth word in “Open Public Records Act” means that they can act like they give a damn. I don’t care if our Borough Clerk is a nice older woman or an 18-year-old wiseass kid – if she’s not doing what she’s being paid very well to do, she’s not doing her job. And if she’s doing what she’s instructed to do – or not to do – by our leaders, then perhaps she could open up and TELL US this someday before the next millennium. People being too apathetic to pursue information is one thing – the people who are legally obligated to provide it telling them to go pound sand is a whole ‘nother story.

The Mayor and Council were asked if they would be interested in holding a joint town meeting where residents could actually ask questions of them about town issues. They were most certainly not interested. When the NPCCR asked if they could meet with representatives involved with the whole Villa Maria fiasco, they were told, in as many words, yes, if only four of you come, agree to be frisked at the door for tape recorders and pads and pencils, and also agree to be hypnotized on leaving so as not to recall anything that was discussed at the meeting. Maybe not those EXACT conditions, but pretty damn close.

Folks, do you realize that I’ve gone this long so far, and I still have SIXTY-EIGHT pages of the blog to go through for this year?

I started off with a question, but I think it’s become a rhetorical question.

Who ARE these people?

I’m replacing that question with a new one.

Do I really have to wait another five weeks to get rid of some of them?

[Editor's Note: I didn't take the time to cross-reference all of Emory's cites, and I'm taking a break for the weekend - new posts Monday morning. Cheers.]