By RICHARD KHAVKINE • STAFF WRITER • September 20, 2008

NEW BRUNSWICK —Allegations of a push-polling effort intended to discredit a residents campaign for an electoral ward system surfaced at a City Council meeting last week. Two regular council attendees said they received calls from people identifying themselves as pollsters tried to discern their opinions about the ward issue.

Push-polling is a widely discredited tactic employed to sway public opinion by including falsehoods into a series of leading questions. Push polls, which make no attempt to aggregate results, are generally conducted a few days before elections and try to reach as many people as possible.

Charles Renda, a city resident affiliated with EON, said he received a call from a person from an organization called Quest Survey who said she was conducting a poll on a wide range of political state and local issues. Renda, a former counsel to the city Planning Board and a ward backer, said the pollster first asked how he would rate state political figures such as Gov. Jon S. Corzine and U.S. Senator Frank R. Lautenberg. The pollster then asked whether Renda was familiar with Elizabeth Garlatti, the City Council president, other council members and Mayor James M. Cahill and asked him to rate those officials on a four- or five-point scale.

The questioning then turned to the ward question, which took up the bulk of the seven- or eight-minute poll, Renda said.

"There were probably 10 or 15 minutes worth of questions in a space of about five minutes," he said.

Three or four clear-cut questions outlining ward proponents' views on that electoral system prefaced another six or seven complex, multi-part questions that might summarize the viewpoints of would-be ward-system opponents, Renda said.

Those questions, Renda said, asked whether he agreed or disagreed that a nine-member council, the majority elected through a ward system, would be more cumbersome and result in higher rents, taxes and fees; would be made up of, at most, just four of a voter's preferred candidates; would pit neighborhood against neighborhood, creating deadlock; would increase the cost of government and of water and sewer rates; or would lead to corruption of the political process similar to that in Newark or Atlantic City.

"They got really heavy handed," he said. "The six or seven questions (outlining would-be opponents' viewpoints) were heavily emotional and long and involved and probably three or four sentences each."

At the conclusion, Renda said he asked the questioner to identify the sponsor of the poll and who had paid for it. She declined to answer, he said.

City resident Richard Stuart, a former official with the city's Republican Party, said he participated in a similar poll last weekend.

Several city officials, including City Attorney William J. Hamilton Jr., Garlatti, Councilman Robert Recine, city spokesman Bill Bray and Assistant City Attorney T.K. Shamy, who is also the city Democrats' organization chairman, said they had no idea who commissioned the poll. They said they were unaware of the survey until the City Council meeting.

"There is no reason for the city to conduct such a poll," Bray said, "if one even exists."

In the 1970s, New Brunswick, NJ was struggling.

Like other New Jersey cities experiencing the hangover of race riots of the 1960s, the schools were in decline, white flight began to set in, and all of a sudden, the Hub City, as it’s called, that was home to the world headquarters of pharmaceutical giant Johnson & Johnson and Rutgers University was in serious trouble.

But there had always been hope. In the summer of 1967, as peace was shattered throughout cities in the Garden State, New Brunswick held fast, no blood was shed, and the peace was preserved. Then-mayor Patricia Sheehan, a 33-year-old widow and mother of three actually went out on patrol with the police, appeared with local clergy, and made it known—in person—that whatever happened in New Brunswick, her incumbency, part of a so-called “New Five” ousting 27 years of a previous administration, would watch over the city.

That resilience and sense of hope was instilled in the residents, and in 1975, New Brunswick Tomorrow, a partnership of public and private sectors, was organized. The following year, The New Brunswick Development Corporation, a private, non-profit organization designed to serve as New Brunswick Tomorrow’s implementation partner for economic development (and is still the city’s ostensible redevelopment arm), was created, and a city was on the move again.

Johnson & Johnson announced it would stay in New Brunswick in 1978, housing its headquarters in an I.M. Pei-designed campus, near the Rutgers University campus in a run down segment of the downtown.

While it can be argued that, once upon a time, concerned residents needed needed bold, do-it-itself government initiative to revive the city, the residents, as is the case in any locality, have always been the lifeblood, though city government did not always reflect that. There had already been a problem with the extreme transience of this community of 50,000 residents, whose tens of thousands of students passed through with few staying to raise their families in the city, and the changing immigrant population—for example, a once Hungarian neighborhood is now a vibrant Hispanic area—is changing the face of the city.

New Brunswick, being in the geographic center of the state, was, for a long time, at the center of New Jersey’s infamous corrupt Democratic Machine. Mayor John Lynch, who served as mayor from 1979 to 1991 and is the immediate predecessor of the current Mayor James Cahill, is currently serving a three-year jail term immediately preceding the current mayor.

To be sure, not all are corrupt, but there are so many tributaries that link New Brunswick government to the larger state Democratic Machine (the municipal attorney, William Hamilton, a junior grade Navy lieutenant before receiving his JD from Georgetown in the early sixties, and an overall decent man, was briefly the Speaker of the State Assembly in the 1970s) that it could take up an entirely separate article.

But back to Mayor Sheehan, who marched with police under the threat of race riots in the 1960s. Her daughter, Elizabeth “Betsy” Sheehan Garlatti, is currently the New Brunswick City Council president. Garlatti, the director of Finance & Research at the New Jersey Commission on Higher Education, was appointed—as is often the case in machine politics—to a vacant city council seat in 2004 and has since won reelection by way of the 3,000 or so party insiders and municipal employees who actually vote in New Brunswick.

Because the Democratic Party has effectively shut out the primary process, various residents have run hopeful campaigns on an independent ticket, but have always failed miserably. Forget about Republicans. They hardly exist here.

One way Council has been able to hold power is by way of the at-large Council system that was established in the 1970s. New Brunswick is divided into wards, but none has direct ward representation.

This is nothing new, of course, in so many local governments, but a recent grass-roots push to change that government structure has begun to garner some attention.

A group, Empower Our Neighborhoods, last month filed a petition with the city clerk’s office to advocate for a ballot question that would change the current form of municipal government from an at-large system to a ward-based system, as well as increasing the number of seats on Council from five to eight.

But as is the case in cities where government is threatened, on July 2, the New Brunswick City Council passed a counteracting ordinance to push the citizens’ initiative off the ballot, and replacing it with a Council-crafted initiative that calls for creating a study that would examine the need to change government.

Knowing that they have at least 3,000 votes, and that Rutgers University students rarely vote, Council would entertain this question, it would fail, and Council could claim that it reached out to the community, and the community decided that it did not want to change government.

A legal battle could ensue that would determine whether the community or the City Council had first initiated a legal proceeding on that ballot question, but experts at Rutgers’ Bloustein School of Planning and Public Policy appear to think Empower Our Neighborhoods is in the right.

Attending a New Brunswick City Council meeting is interesting. Based on what you’ve just read, you might think this is a contemptuous lot, but it’s not. They are good people who will speak to you after meetings, but seem averse to criticism, particularly when they stock Council chambers with municipal employees to attend the public meetings. At least two are dual office holders (Council Vice President Joseph V. Egan is a long-time state Assemblyman and Blanquita Valenti serves on the county governing body), and one, the aforementioned Garlatti, has bloodlines in city government.

All but one were born and raised in New Brunswick, and the one that wasn’t—Valenti—came to New Brunswick in 1956 from Puerto Rico and in 1971 became the first Hispanic appointed to the New Brunswick Board of Education.

These are community folks, no doubt about it, and their commitment to the city was never in doubt (though there are plenty of people who make strong cases to the contrary). This is not evil empire stuff: it’s simply a case of a city government that has apparently lost its way, forgetting about the fundamentals that make a city tick, like when Garlatti, and incumbents Jimmie Cook and Robert Recine cited scheduling conflicts for not being able to participate in a pre-primary forum co-sponsored by Empower Our Neighborhoods and the local NAACP chapter. New Brunswick has undergone an unbelievable downtown renaissance in the past 10 years, with an arts, culture, and culinary scene that is unparalleled in the state, but the schools still suffer (it’s an Abbott district), the residential neighborhoods near town are largely unsuitable for quiet, secure family living because of the rampant off-campus student housing situation. Absentee landlords let their properties deteriorate, broken glass, drug dealing, and homeless in neighborhood parks is the norm. Again, not surprising for so many cities, as isn’t the government’s resistance to this grass-roots effort, if not frustrating—but that doesn’t make it acceptable. If the folks at Empower win this battle, it would go to show that a once-impenetrable system can be changed, and that, just like Mayor Sheehan displayed during her courageous outreach efforts in the 1960s, residents are indeed the lifeblood of any locality.

Charles Kratovil, left, Cedric Goodman, and other members of EON at City Hall prior to Wednesday evening's council meeting.: Politicker photo 

NEW BRUNSWICK - Community activists conceded momentary defeat tonight after the New Brunswick City Council secured a stay from a superior court judge to stop a ballot question from appearing on the Nov. 4th ballot.

But they vowed to fight on to get the ballot question placed on next year’s ballot, and in fact claimed renewed energy to topple what they see as an old and ineffectual structure.

"We are in need of change in the City of New Brunswick, and there is nothing they can do to stop us," said Jerry Mercado, a former unsuccessful candidate for city council, who now calls changing the form of government here mission number one.

Empower Our Neighborhoods (EON) wanted voters to consider altering New Brunswick’s form of representation from an all at-large council to a ward system, which would field elected officials from all of the city’s specific neighborhoods.

On Sept. 2, Superior Court Judge Heidi Willis Currier gave EON theCouncil Vice President Joe Egan gets an earful from EON. thumbs up sign after they submitted the requisite signatures for a ballot question. But when the city clerk and legal representatives for the activists subsequently could not agree on the language that would appear on the ballot, the council requested a stay and the judge agreed.

At 3:45 p.m. Wednesday, five activists from EON withdrew their original petition designed for the Nov. 4, 2008 election - and immediately turned in a new petition geared for the Nov. 3, 2009 election.

"We have 12 more months to build the largest progressive movement this city has ever seen," said Charles Kratovil, a spokesman for EON.

Mayor Jim Cahill and the council shrugged their shoulders at the activists’ resurgence of defiance, and tried to claim victory for having stared down the Nov. 4th question in the name of soberly assessing the situation.

Following an EON press conference this evening on the steps of City Hall, Bill Bray, spokesman for Mayor Jim Cahill, read a statement prepared by the mayor as a response.

"The withdrawal of the petitions by the committee of petitioners and the filing of a new petition that attempts to address the issues raised by the city when it declared the petition to be invalid, certainly now appears to indicate that the committee of petitioners agrees with the city’s petition," said Cahill.

"The newly filed petition will be reviewed in due course in accordance with New Jersey law, as will the impact of the withdrawal of the prior petition upon the ability of the previously adopted charter study commission ordinance to proceed," the mayor added.

Later, at the council meeting, members of the activist group scoldedErik Straub assails the New Brunswick City Council: Politicker photo the governing body for initially trying to get the petition thrown out on a technicality and then appealing to the judge to halt the ballot question.

Resident Sean Monahan quoted the city attorney from an earlier meeting in which he estimated it’s cost the city $410 per hour in legal fees for the council to attempt to quash the petition. Seeking verification, "I just want to know how much it’s costing you to fight the will of the citizens?" Monahan asked.

Three council people face no opposition on Nov. 4th. Some of the student representatives of EON cautioned the city council members not to get comfortable. The group plans to retool and regroup and will shake up the system.

If not now, next year.

In response, Council President Elizabeth Sheehan Garlatti tried to justify the council’s reluctance to the ballot question this year when she said, "We were waiting for the process to play out in the courts. There’s been an appropriate result."

By RICHARD KHAVKINE • STAFF WRITER • October 1, 2008

NEW BRUNSWICK —A residents' group Wednesday opened a new tactical front in its bid to change the city's electoral system.

After withdrawing an initial petition that would have asked city voters this November whether they would like to elect their council members either through a ward-based system or a larger at-large system, the group is now looking to put only the ward question on the November 2009 ballot.

The group submitted its new petition with 350 signatures to the city clerk's office yesterday.

The original petition had initiated a legal tug of war between the ward proponents and city officials, who, among other things, had argued that the petition's two questions were contradictory and misleading to its signatories.

Charles Kratovil, co-campaign manager with Empower Our Neighborhoods, or EON, said that the group's legal team put together the new petition to specifically address the city's objections as those were outlined in court.

"It has fixed all the flaws that were even hinted at by the city's attorneys," Kratovil said. "All the nitpicking technicalities, we've accommodated."

The single question would ask voters whether they want to increase the number of council members to nine, with six of those members elected by wards.

The question is outlined in ordinance form and refered to on the back side of the petition, two elements that would appear to dissolve some of the city legal objections.

Kratovil said that the petitioners submitted just under 350 signatories to the petition to assure that the question appears on the general election ballot rather than during a special election. That scenario would assure a larger turnout and not burden taxpayers with election expenses.

"And we also don't want the city to manipulate the timing of the special election" to insure that students who might otherwise cast ballots would be out of town, Kratovil said.

Kratovil said EON's attorneys determined that by state law, a petition signed by a certain percentage of voters as determined by turnout in a preceding municipal election, in this case 352, would oblige the question to be put to voters at a special election.

"Over the course of three days, we went out and got well more than we needed," he said of the signatures.

The withdrawal of the original petition, though, could resuscitate the city's bid to put a charter-study question on the ballot this November, according to both Mayor James M. Cahill and City Attorney William J. Hamilton.

"The newly filed petition will be reviewed in due course in accordance with New Jersey law," Cahill said yesterday evening, "as will the impact of the withdrawal of the prior petition upon the ability of the previously adopted charter-study commission ordinance to proceed."

That ordinance, passed by the City Council after residents turned in their the original petition, would ask voters whether they want to empower a five-member commission to determine what form of government best suits the city.

The commission, whose five members would also be elected in the November general election, would have nine months to conclude its study. Should it recommend a change, which would be put to a subsequent city-wide vote, or even propose no changes, a four-year interval would have to pass before any electoral changes could again be considered, either through the council or a residents' initiative.

The group withdrew the petition just over a week after a state Superior Court judge issued a stay of her Sept. 2 order, which had deemed the petition "proper, valid and sufficient in all respects." That order also barred the city from putting the council-sponsored charter-study commission question on the ballot.

But taking note of the city's arguments in its bid for a reconsideration of her decision, as well as an electoral timeline that made it impossible for the residents petition to make it onto the November ballot, Judge Heidi Willis Currier, sitting in New Brunswick, issued a stay of her order.

Hamilton said the petition's withdrawal "leaves the status of (Currier's) earlier order up in the air."

But city officials' bid to put the charter-study commission to a November vote could be stifled by an electoral timeline. Among other things, the Middlesex County clerk's ballot-printing deadline was in late September.

Cahill, who said he only glanced at the new petition, nevertheless said that its filing bore out the city's arguments that the original petition was unclear to its signers and therefore invalid.

"The withdrawal of the petition by the committee of petitioners and the filing of a new petition that attempts to address the issues raised by the city when it declared the petition to be invalid certainly now appear to indicate that the committee of petitioners agrees with the city's position," Cahill said.

Hamilton said he thought the petition's withdrawal might cancel the need for Currier to call hearings to reconsider her earlier ruling.

Richard Khavkine:

(732) 565-7263;

rkhavkine@mycentraljersey.com

By RICHARD KHAVKINE • STAFF WRITER • September 20, 2008

NEW BRUNSWICK —With a ballot-printing deadline looming this week, attorneys on both sides of a contentious battle over the city's electoral system are preparing their final salvos.

Monday, the attorney for ward advocates will file his response to city officials' bid to have a Superior Court judge overturn her order which allowed a residents' petition question on the ballot.

The attorney representing city officials, who say the petition is invalid, will then have a chance to rebut those arguments the following day.

Judge Heidi Willis Currier, sitting in New Brunswick, said she would rule on the city's motion very soon after that — unless the two sides can come to an agreement before that, persons involved in the proceedings said last week.

But with both the rhetoric heating up and the legal wheels notched up a gear in the electoral dispute, any such agreement appears unlikely at best.

In a commentary appearing in Sunday's Home News Tribune, Mayor James M. Cahill argues that by including a companion question to the ward option that would ask voters whether they support expanding the council to nine members, all elected at large, the petitioners undercut their unequivocal support for a ward system. That at large question, Cahill wrote, is an inconsistency that signatories of the petition could not have readily resolved.

And, he writes, such an ambiguity cannot be rectified by interpretive statements that Currier, on Sept. 2, ordered accompany the ballot questions, a contention that forms the base of the city's motion.

"It is important for the court to implement not the will of the Committee of Petitioners, but the will of the people who signed the petition," Cahill, mayor since 1991 and a practicing attorney, wrote.

Still, late last week the attorney representing the petitioners group, Bennet Zurofsky, and Marvin Brauth, the Wilentz, Goldman & Spitzer attorney representing the city, exchanged correspondence regarding the interpretive statements that would accompany the two ballot questions. While Zurofsky said that Brauth's tone was unnecessarily combative, he nevertheless commended Brauth's criticisms and included them.

"Most of his objections were not bad," Zurofsky said. "We took both of them to heart. I think we have a better statement than we had before."

Brauth did not return telephone messages left at his office seeking comment on that and other aspects of the issue.

To bolster the city's motion for reconsideration, Brauth appended affidavits from 10 residents who signed the petition who now say they were either misled or pestered into signing it.

In 20-minute briefing with reporters last week during which he outlined the reasons for the motion, Cahill said that dozens of people who signed the petition have since come forward with similar arguments.

But at least three of the affidavits appear to be signed by employees of the city or of the city schools. At least two others might have had, or have, close ties to city officials.

Ward proponents say that is yet another example of the city's stranglehold on the political process and a cynical attempt to derail what they say is the will of the people as evidenced by the 1,116 signatures they collected in their petition drive.

During a sometimes raucous City Council meeting last week, about a dozen ward proponents chastised council members for what they characterized as city officials' disregard for the democratic process.

The ward advocates said that by scheduling a public hearing on the petition's questions for Oct. 1, more than a week after ballots need to be ready for printing, the council was sidestepping Currier's order to expedite the questions onto the ballot. Charles Renda, a practicing attorney who is affiliated with the residents group, Empower Our Neighborhoods, or EON, criticized the council for what he called its "machinations."

"You guys are really blowing it, you're really blowing it," he told the council members. "You don't understand that you have been elected to represent us, not to repress us, and that's what you're doing."

EON members have said that the city's intention is to, at the very least, keep the ward question off the November general election ballot, which is expected to draw record numbers of voters, including first-time voters and progressives drawn to the candidacy of U.S. Sen. Barack Obama. Those voters would presumably be supportive a ward-based system as its supporters are framing it.

A few ward backers said that by needlessly prolonging the process — the city could have scheduled the public hearing as early as last week — city officials, including council members, could be found in contempt of court.

To that end, Zurofsky said he would file an application in aid of litigant's rights, similar to, but not as forceful, as a contempt claim. "I think that the statements that have been made . . . verge on being contemptuous of the court," he said.

During a conference telephone call Sept. 19 with Currier and Zurofsky, the county's deputy counsel, Eric Aronowitz, told Currier that the deadline for the city to turn the petition's question for inclusion on the November ballot is Sept. 24, or a day later than prescribed by law.

An official in that department's elections division, though, told the Home News Tribune that the questions could conceivably be accepted as late as the end of the month.

While Currier's timeline and the county clerk's deadline are somewhat elastic, state law governing the initiative petition process is firm.

That law says that if the City Council "shall fail to pass an ordinance requested by an initiative petition in substantially the form requested" within 20 days, "the municipal clerk shall submit the ordinance to the voters."

The municipal clerk, Daniel A. Torrisi, submitted his certification of the petition to the City Council on Sept. 3.

Cahill, though, did not rule out an appeal to a higher court should Currier not reconsider her order.

Richard Khavkine:

(732) 565-7263;

rkhavkine@mycentraljersey.com

By RICHARD KHAVKINE • STAFF WRITER • September 20, 2008

NEW BRUNSWICK —Allegations of a push-polling effort intended to discredit a residents campaign for an electoral ward system surfaced at a City Council meeting last week. Two regular council attendees said they received calls from people identifying themselves as pollsters tried to discern their opinions about the ward issue.

Push-polling is a widely discredited tactic employed to sway public opinion by including falsehoods into a series of leading questions. Push polls, which make no attempt to aggregate results, are generally conducted a few days before elections and try to reach as many people as possible.

Charles Renda, a city resident affiliated with EON, said he received a call from a person from an organization called Quest Survey who said she was conducting a poll on a wide range of political state and local issues. Renda, a former counsel to the city Planning Board and a ward backer, said the pollster first asked how he would rate state political figures such as Gov. Jon S. Corzine and U.S. Senator Frank R. Lautenberg. The pollster then asked whether Renda was familiar with Elizabeth Garlatti, the City Council president, other council members and Mayor James M. Cahill and asked him to rate those officials on a four- or five-point scale.

The questioning then turned to the ward question, which took up the bulk of the seven- or eight-minute poll, Renda said.

"There were probably 10 or 15 minutes worth of questions in a space of about five minutes," he said.

Three or four clear-cut questions outlining ward proponents' views on that electoral system prefaced another six or seven complex, multi-part questions that might summarize the viewpoints of would-be ward-system opponents, Renda said.

Those questions, Renda said, asked whether he agreed or disagreed that a nine-member council, the majority elected through a ward system, would be more cumbersome and result in higher rents, taxes and fees; would be made up of, at most, just four of a voter's preferred candidates; would pit neighborhood against neighborhood, creating deadlock; would increase the cost of government and of water and sewer rates; or would lead to corruption of the political process similar to that in Newark or Atlantic City.

"They got really heavy handed," he said. "The six or seven questions (outlining would-be opponents' viewpoints) were heavily emotional and long and involved and probably three or four sentences each."

At the conclusion, Renda said he asked the questioner to identify the sponsor of the poll and who had paid for it. She declined to answer, he said.

City resident Richard Stuart, a former official with the city's Republican Party, said he participated in a similar poll last weekend.

Several city officials, including City Attorney William J. Hamilton Jr., Garlatti, Councilman Robert Recine, city spokesman Bill Bray and Assistant City Attorney T.K. Shamy, who is also the city Democrats' organization chairman, said they had no idea who commissioned the poll. They said they were unaware of the survey until the City Council meeting.

"There is no reason for the city to conduct such a poll," Bray said, "if one even exists."