S. AMBOY REORGANIZES

Officials Heed Judge’s Warning By Delaying Appointments

(Reprinted from Amboy Beacon, Jan. 12, 2011)

SOUTH AMBOY — With former City Council President Fred Henry and

Councilmen-elect Donald Applegate, Joseph Connors and Michael “Mickey” Gross sworn-in

privately by City Clerk Kathleen Vigilante at City Hall, N. Broadway, on

Saturday, Jan. 1, at various times, last week’s Council Reorganization took

less than 15 minutes.

Applegate was sworn-in to an unexpired two-year term as First Ward

Councilman, succeeding the late Councilman Russell Stillwagon, while Connors and

Gross were sworn-in to full four-year terms as At-Large Councilmen.

At the meeting, Connors, Council Vice President under Henry, was elected as

Council President by the five-member, all-Democrat governing body, and

Second Ward Councilman Mark Noble was elected to succeed Connors as Council Vice

President, both by unanimous votes.

Connors — sporting a new beard — spoke briefly during the “Comments”

portion of the short meeting, announcing that his major goal is to “improve

communications” with the public through “town meetings” and “project-updates

to keep everybody up-to-date.”

Connors explained that the reason he decided to do this was because, as a

result of his campaigning door-to-door in 2010, he found that “the people in

this town didn’t know what was going-on.”

In addition, Connors said after the meeting that he had “pretty-big shoes

to fill” in succeeding Henry. “I hope I can do as-well as Fred,” he said.

As ordered by Superior Court Judge Phillip Paley, sitting in New Brunswick,

Henry — who was leading Independent mayoral candidate Mary O’Connor by

three votes at last count — may have been sworn-in as Mayor, but he had little

to do at last week’s Reorganization because the Judge prohibited him from

making any permanent appointments, pending a hearing scheduled for early this

week.

In compliance with Paley’s order, all appointments which would have expired

and been up for consideration last week were continued with holdovers who

had been appointed by former Mayor John O’Leary.

The only appointments listed on the slender 25-page meeting-agenda were

three Council members appointed as representatives to the Planning Board and

Redevelopment Agency and to the Middlesex County Housing & Community

Development Committee.

The respective Council members unanimously appointed to those positions, in

Resolutions moved by Noble, seconded by Councilman William Schwarick and

adopted 5-0, were Connors, the Board’s former Chairman; Schwarick and

Applegate.

The audience — normally robust at the yearly Reorganization, with

officials’ family members present to observe their relatives taking their

oaths-of-office, and appointees and their family members present to observe their

relatives’ appointments — was slimmer than the agenda, numbering only a

half-dozen.

The Council also voted unanimously to appoint the 24-member Emergency

Management Council, with Henry listed as Mayor; to re-establish eight petty-cash

funds, to designate 11 banking institutions as “official depositories” and

to fix interest-rates for delinquent tax and sewer bills.

Henry, who sat at the dais, spoke to reporters after the Reorganization

about the upcoming decision expected to be made by the Judge yesterday on

whether to certify Henry or O’Connor as the winner or order a new election

following a hearing on Monday and his review of 23 contested election-ballots.

“We’ll find-out more next (this) week, but that may not be the end of it,

as I assume she’ll have the right of appeal,” he said, referring to

O’Connor.

“This is all new to all of us,” Henry said of the post-election challenge.

“These are new areas that we’re exploring. Hopefully, it works-out for me.”

Normally, a ceremony follows the Council’s Reorganization, but not this

time.

“With all of that behind us, we’ll probably have a ceremony,” Henry said.

“No, we WILL have a ceremony.”

“I think we’ll wait until the Mayor thing is over,” Connors said.

Henry also took the opportunity to clarify a quote which appeared in the

Jan. 5 Amboy Beacon.

Henry had stated before the cross-petition’s filing that “it’s the

American way of doing things that all the votes are counted,” and “to suppress

them as she (O’Connor) wanted to do is wrong.”

The Beacon had noted the irony of such a statement, given the fact that

Henry’s attorney was challenging some presumably O’Connor votes.

Henry said that what he really-meant was that if votes “are illegal, they

shouldn’t count.”

Last week, Paley received a seven-page petition by Christopher Struben,

attorney for O’Connor; a six-page cross-petition by Michael Baker, attorney for

Henry, and a 19-page brief submitted by by Senior Counsel Flavio Komuves of

the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of New Jersey Foundation, Newark,

participating in the case as an “amicus curiae” (friend of the court),

detailing its legal arguments concerning three voters allegedly denied their

rights by election officials.

The Middlesex County Board of Elections, represented by Deputy Attorney

General Donna Kelly, also a party to the case, did not file any documents.

Copies of all filings in the case, which are legally “public documents,”

have been obtained by the Amboy Beacon, which disclosed the names of the

voters connected to all 23 contested ballots in its Jan. 5 edition.

The election dispute arose over the closeness of the vote for Mayor on Nov.

2 following what most observers agreed was among the dirtiest campaigns in

county history.

In addition to the usual rash of reports of campaign-signs being torn-down

or put-up without authorization, last year’s local contest saw the

resurrection on a weekly basis of a bimonthly community newspaper which was defunct

for about 10 years, now unabashedly promoting the Democratic ticket; the

anonymous distribution of one flier depicting an O’Connor supporter in a Nazi

uniform, and another flier attacking O’Connor as a “terrorist,” and the myste

rious “endorsement” of Independent Vincent Mackiel’s mayoral candidacy by a

non-existent “South Amboy Tea Party.”

The unofficial vote-tally on South Amboy’s nine voting-machines had Henry

as the winner over O’Connor and the two other Independent candidates, Mackiel

and John Dragotta, by 14 votes.

On Election Night, the counting of Mail-In Ballots (MIBs), formerly-known

as “absentee-ballots,” had Henry as unofficial winner by eight votes, which

was shaved to three votes after additional MIBs were found.

That left the counting of 22 provisional ballots by the county Board, which

produced a margin of one vote for Henry.

O’Connor requested, paid-for and was granted a recount, which led to the

same one-vote lead for Henry. However, O’Connor later discovered that the

Board miscounted not once, but twice, a provisional ballot cast by a Sayreville

resident for Henry which was supposed-to have been covered by a sticker.

That ballot’s disqualification was affirmed by the state Attorney

General’s Office, whose investigators were — along with several FBI agents —

conducting an ongoing probe of alleged voter-fraud at the Board’s Headquarters on

Jersey Avenue at the time.

If certified as final at that point, a tied-vote would have triggered a

special election between Henry and O’Connor on Tuesday, Jan. 19.

There were 22 provisional ballots submitted, three of which were voided by

the Board’s staff after painstaking research of the registration rolls,

leaving 19 remaining ballots that should have been put-through the scanner, but

there were only 13 when they were counted — and later, recounted — by the

Board.

The six “misplaced” provisional ballots were discovered on Nov. 23 — three

weeks after the election — at the Jersey Avenue facility by workers who

broke the seals on the envelopes.

After a hearing, the Judge ruled that the six ballots, now-resealed, be

opened and counted, and three votes each were found to have been cast for Henry

and Mackiel, leaving Henry with a three-vote lead prior to the individual

ballot-challenges scheduled to be heard by Paley.