The West Windsor Township Council unanimously elected George Borek as this year’s council president. Council also elected Linda Geevers as its vice president.##M:[more]##
The votes came during the reorganization meeting after Kamal Khanna took his seat at the dais for the first time after being elected in May. Khanna, along with Mayor Shing-Fu Hsueh and Geevers, all took his oath of office during the noon meeting on July 1.
The inauguration of the mayor and his two running mates opened the new governmental year following a contentious election season.
The event was marked by the attendance of the slate’s supporters, crowding council chambers so tightly that one resident asked during public comment that the township choose a different venue the next time an inauguration ceremony is held.
Among the attendees were Mercer County Executive Brian Hughes, State Senator Bill Baroni, Assemblywoman Linda Greenstein, Assemblyman Wayne DeAngelo, WW-P Schools Superintendent Victoria Kniewel, Mercer County Clerk Paula Sollami Covello, Princeton Township Mayor Bernard Miller, Planning Board Chairman Marvin Gardner, Zoning Board Chairman John Roeder, and former councilwomen Heidi Kleinman and Jackie Alberts. Members of the Mercer County Board of Chosen Freeholders were also in attendance.
Once Borek and Geevers were named to their new council positions, the council nominated its officers for the 2009-’10 year. Khanna was selected for the Affordable Housing Committee; Diane Ciccone was appointed as the council’s representative on the Planning Board; Borek was assigned as the Emergency Management Council representative; Khanna was assigned as the liaison to the Cable TV Advisory Board; Ciccone was assigned as the liaison to the Environmental Commission; Geevers was assigned as the liaison to both the Parking Authority and the school board; and Charles Morgan was assigned as the liaison to the Zoning Board of Adjustment.
“There’s a lot of things that are going to be before us in these trying times — in this economy, with a lot of unknowns,” Borek said in his first comments as the Council President. He urged officials to “work collectively” together to “stay focused, move forward, and do the right thing,” now that a redevelopment plan for the 350-acre Princeton Junction train station area has been adopted.
Geevers echoed the sentiment in her comments, saying she felt “it’s time for all of us to work together on the challenges ahead.”
“I have done many crazy things, but this surpasses them all,” Khanna said in his first comments at the dais. He said he has watched township officials over the years in handling the township’s business, and that it was “the most selfless service I have ever seen.” He said he watched the growth of what once was a “sleepy little town with little development,” as four generations of his family have lived in West Windsor. “What we will have to do as the council and the mayor is ensure the quality of life,” Khanna said.
He said he hoped to promote green culture, not only at the township level, but in all levels of society, and would not support a redevelopment plan that is not tax-neutral for township residents and that does not improve the parking situation at the train station.
He wants to see a “decisive, not divisive government,” he said.
Ciccone also said it was a “time for new beginnings” and urged the township to continue with its sustainable practices.
Morgan said he walked door-to-door during his campaign to talk to residents who said the most important issues to them were to have lower taxes and “something smaller for redevelopment. I hope we listen,” he said.
With regard to lowering taxes, Morgan said he planned to continue to push for lower taxes, although his proposal to decrease taxes to reduce the township’s surplus by $2.45 million, which he claimed would lower the tax rate in this year’s budget by 4 cents, failed to garner council support. He also said he regretted that a proposal for the formation of a 501(c)(3) community nonprofit foundation also got “tangled up in politics.”
He said he was glad to see that the township attorney had “reversed his position” on the illegality of the foundation and said that he planned to pursue what he called a “serious opportunity to really address the tax issue” in his idea for the nonprofit organization.
Debate Over the Calendar. While members of the council agreed that they would address the 2010 budget this year much earlier than they usually do, leaving time for discussion and consideration of ways to reduce the tax burden on residents, council decided to hold off on officially setting those meetings during the approval of their calendar and meetings dates for the upcoming year.
This was much to Morgan’s chagrin, as he proposed adding August 24 and November 16 as meeting dates specifically aimed at addressing the budget. Borek suggested adopting the calendar as is and instead discussing the meeting dates during the council’s next meeting on Monday, July 13. “But we are certainly going to have these meetings,” Borek said. “The commitment is there.”
Morgan disagreed, however, saying “we say we’re going to do things, and we never do it,” said Morgan. “Inertia can work for or against us.”
Geevers also said she would prefer that the dates be first discussed at the July 13 meeting. Acting Township Administrator Robert Hary agreed, saying he wanted to first talk about the meetings since talking about the budget at an earlier time is different from the procedures the township has utilized in the past.
Morgan agreed to put the issue on the agenda for the council’s next meeting on Monday, July 13, and the council voted unanimously to adopt the calendar.
Township Attorney Issue. Morgan was the sole vote against two issues pertaining to Township Attorney Michael Herbert.
The first issue was with regard to Herbert’s appointment as the township attorney. Morgan said there have been some questions about whether council has tied its hands with the attorney issue by specifying the length of the appointment of the attorney to last throughout the four-year term of the mayor. Rather, he suggested that the resolution should only specify a one-year term.
“We’ve been tying our hands for four years,” said Morgan, who suggested the council should be able to examine proposals from any interested firms on a yearly basis. “It keeps our options open.”
After the meeting, Morgan also explained that he felt that “this attorney has shown time and time again that he slants interpretations of grey areas of the law into the direction of what the mayor wants to do rather than giving us balanced opinions for council to make a choice.”
Given Herbert’s experience and background as an attorney, council members, especially new members Diane Ciccone and Kamal Khanna, may be pushed into making a particular decision based on information Herbert gives because they trust his professional judgment, when “it isn’t all that clear that the law necessarily slants us toward that direction,” Morgan added. “He does not serve council’s interests or the community’s interests. He serves only the mayor’s interests.”
More importantly, Morgan says, limiting Herbert’s term to one year will “create considerable pressure on the attorney to be less one-sided and more balanced. When he knows he’s going to have to serve council as well as the mayor, it keeps him honest.”
But Morgan’s colleagues on council did not agree. Geevers said the term of the attorney as it relates to the mayor’s term has been specified in the code. “I don’t think we can ignore that,” Geevers said.
“This is the mayor’s appointment, and I don’t see any reason to change it,” Khanna said.
Borek said that as far as he was concerned, if an appointed official did something that was wrong, there are procedures in place for review.
The only thing the mayor would say during the meeting is that “I’m not going to change my appointment.”
Morgan also voted against the professional services agreement with Herbert, Van Ness, Cayci & Goodell, following the appointment.
Procedural Issues. Stemming from an incident in April, in which Geevers walked out of a budget workshop meeting in protest of what she said was a lack of a quorum to a noticed meeting, Geevers pushed the council to adopt new language in the procedural guidelines pertaining to the quorum issue.
At the time, Herbert determined that then-Council President Morgan did not violate the Open Public Meetings Act (OPMA) — as suggested by Geevers. Geevers took issue when Morgan called the workshop meeting to order at 5 p.m. on April 16 when only she and Morgan were at the dais and did not immediately adjourn it until there was a quorum.
Herbert had later said that so long as no decisions were made during the workshop meeting, Morgan, who continued having discussions with township staff regarding the budget for about another 25 minutes until other council members arrived, was free to hold a discussion. Herbert said that “where there are less than three members, then a meeting is not taking place.”
However, he did suggest that in the future, once a quorum is actually reached during the same meeting, the clerk should read the standard certification for the record, which states that the meeting was properly noticed for council action.
He also recommended that in the future, the meeting be adjourned until three council members are available, to ensure accordance with Robert’s Rules of Order — the widely published book of rules for presiding over a meeting — which do not fall under state law. The council has continually referred to the rules in deciding its own procedures for carrying out meetings, however.
During the reorganization meeting, Geevers asked that language be added to the guidelines that state that “no meeting should be called to order unless there is a quorum.” Both Deputy Township Clerk Gay Huber and Herbert told Geevers that the Robert’s Rules had already been placed in the procedural guidelines.
Still, Morgan was the only council member to vote against the procedural guidelines because he disagreed with Herbert’s interpretation of a “meeting,” as defined by the Robert’s Rules.
According to state statute, a meeting “means and includes any gathering whether corporeal or by means of communication equipment, which is attended by, or open to, all of the members of a public body, held with the intent, on the part of the members of the body present, to discuss or act as a unit upon the specific public business of that body. Meeting does not mean or include any such gathering (1) attended by less than an effective majority of the members of a public body, or (2) attended by or open to all the members of three or more similar public bodies at a convention or similar gathering.”
Morgan says that “the term ‘meeting’ does not include any meeting where there is less than a quorum. Legally, you can sit here and you can have a meeting that is a meeting in that people are sitting there and talking to each other, but there is no meeting” without a quorum, Morgan says.
Morgan takes issue with what he says is Herbert’s interpretation of the provision in the procedural guidelines that takes language from Robert’s Rules. “In accordance with Robert’s Rules of Order in the absence of a quorum, the meeting shall be called to order and immediately adjourned until such time as a quorum is obtained,” the adopted provision states.
Morgan says that in this case, the definition of a meeting in Robert’s Rules is being preferred over the state statute.
“It’s contradicted by the Open Public Meetings Act, and it seems to me the Open Public Meetings Act should be the primary driver in what we should do when the Robert’s Rules are different from the OPMA rules.”
Morgan says Herbert is “wrong in that there are no conflicts between Robert’s Rules and the Open Public Meetings Act.” Morgan said he felt that calling the meeting to order to adjourn it and readjourning it when a majority is reached is “absurd.”
“What we have, then, is a situation where we will call a meeting to order that doesn’t exist under the OPMA,” he said. “Then when a quorum is achieved and we now meet the definition of a ‘meeting’ under the law, we will have to call the official meeting to order. Why would we do that?”
