A Mercer County Superior Court Judge has denied Councilman Charles Morgan’s latest legal action against Mayor Shing-Fu Hsueh. According to documents, Morgan filed a motion to Judge Douglas H. Hurd, asking him to withdraw his summary judgment order and allow Morgan to amend his original complaint.
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, however, says the judge’s response was not unexpected. “What it did was bought me more time to get my appeal and my second lawsuit ready,” he said.
“The weird thing about the first one is I actually won the lawsuit, but nobody realizes I won it,” he added. “Once I filed it, the mayor had his administrator respond to my request that he had ignored. The only remaining question was whether the response addressed the request.”
He says he will go to the Appellate Division and seek reversal of the decision. He also says he will file a second lawsuit, this time raising the same issues but with respect to a different request that “has been ignored by the administration.”
The second lawsuit is also intended to fix a defect in his original complaint — the wording he used to ask for “an explanation of the statute. There are some ambiguities in the statute. One of the ambiguities is whether the mayor must respond.”
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.
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 and Geevers, as well as Herbert.
Hsueh said he hopes that “we don’t waste taxpayers’ money to have more litigation.”
“Three cases have already been rejected,” he added. “This is the first one where he asked for reconsideration, and the judge rejected it. I really don’t know how much more he can ask for.”
