The West Windsor Township Council will be asked to approve spending $10,000 more to continue defending the mayor in another lawsuit brought by a member of that council.
Mayor Shing-Fu Hsueh said his attorney’s fees are on the agenda for Monday, June 13, after Councilman Charles Morgan filed an appeal and a second lawsuit alleging the mayor failed to provide a report as requested by him during budget deliberations in 2010.
Morgan filed the civil suit in Mercer County Superior Court claiming that the mayor failed to provide a report with information about the 2010 municipal budget that the councilman believes he is entitled to under the township’s Faulkner Act form of government.
Mercer County Judge Douglas H. Hurd dismissed the lawsuit on February 18 in a less-than-two-page ruling, stating that the court considered briefs and oral arguments from both attorneys and granted Hsueh’s cross motion for summary judgment and denied Morgan’s motion for summary judgment.
However, Morgan subsequently filed two new motions with the court — one to reconsider and another to amend his original complaint, as well as a 14-page brief. His motion was denied on April 1.
Morgan submitted an appeal to the Appellate Division at the end of April seeking reversal. The News obtained a copy of the lawsuit this month after learning from township officials that it had been filed. He has also filed another lawsuit, this time raising the same issues but with respect to a different request he says has been ignored by the administration.
When reached for comment on the lawsuits, Morgan said that during the hearing, the judge “ruled from the bench that I was correct — that the statute cannot be ignored by the mayor, that he must respond, and that he has to do it in a reasonable period of time, but he declined to define what is reasonable,” said Morgan. “He also declined to interpret the statute as requiring a written report. He also declined to interpret the statute as to state that the mayor could not delegate” the responsibility to respond to a staff member, he said.
Morgan is seeking to have the Appellate Division find that the mayor cannot ignore a council member’s request for a report. His appeal also asks the court to find that a period of four months — the time Morgan said it took for the mayor to respond to him — is not a reasonable time period. “Providing a response after a lawsuit is filed is unreasonable, which is the case here,” he said. “The court was wrong in interpreting the statute that it need not be in writing.” He said the court was also wrong in finding that the mayor could delegate his staff to respond to requests.
He also claims that Hsueh and his attorney are lying when they say Morgan is filing litigation against the mayor for political reasons and stating that Morgan’s motivation was stemming from the upcoming mayoral election. “The fact of the matter is that election for mayor, which I lost, occurred in May (2009),” he said. “That lawsuit wasn’t filed until almost a year later.”
“I’m dealing with a situation where the mayor is lying with his sworn statements and creating a smokescreen about politics when all this is about is that the mayor refuses to respond to a councilman’s request for information,” said Morgan.
In the new lawsuit, which he filed in May, Morgan brings new issues to the table — first that another request for more information related to liquor license revenue during budget discussions was ignored.
Says Morgan: “A new ruling I’m seeking is that when a member of council sends a request for information, the member of council does not specifically need to state the laws, and the administration cannot ignore it,” Morgan explained. “That’s a different issue from the first lawsuit, but the rest of the issues are the same.”
When asked to comment, Hsueh said Morgan’s new lawsuit is “all the same things being repeated again and again and again.”
“All it does is cost a lot of resources and taxpayers’ money,” Hsueh added. “I just don’t think it makes any sense for him to go to court and file litigation. All of this can be talked about and worked out, and I don’t understand why he’s doing it.”
Morgan, however, said the lawsuits would not be filed if the mayor “would do his job and follow the law or respond to requests for information. None of this would have happened if my reasonable requests were not ignored.”
This is not the only legal action Morgan has taken against Hsueh over the past two years. A week before the May, 2009, election, in which Morgan ran against Hsueh for the mayoral seat, Morgan filed a complaint with the county prosecutor’s office, alleging that the mayor and Councilwoman Linda Geevers “illegally used Township administrative staff, and hence the public money, in furtherance of their political campaign.” The suit also named Township Attorney Michael Herbert. The prosecutor’s office cleared the mayor, Geevers, and Herbert.
