Your Turn
Dudley Giehl
Guest Column
Freeholders refuse to devote more time to hunting issue

I attended the Monmouth County Board of Freeholders meeting May 27 and was appalled by the manner in which this meeting was conducted by Theodore Narozanick. It is quite apparent the purpose of this and other meetings on the proposed deer hunt is to simply fulfill legal obligations to hold public meetings — not to actually have a serious discussion of the issues, or to assess public sentiment in any meaningful way.

This meeting only lasted an hour-and-a-half. Do the freeholders have better things to do than listen to their constituents for any more than an hour-and-a-half? If they are so old, tired and bored that they need to leave for home by 8:30 p.m. on a Thursday night, I think it is time for them to retire and let someone who has more energy and enthusiasm take over their job.

Carl Williams, a member of the Monmouth County Board of Recreation Commissioners, was one of the few who spoke in favor of the deer hunt. He quoted verbatim from a Monmouth County Park System report. The judgment of the board of recreation commissioners in favor of deer hunting in Monmouth Park was due largely to this report, which includes a lot of erroneous and misleading information.

When I presented information debunking some of the information contained in this report, I was interrupted by Chairman Narozanick, who informed me the freeholders did not have time to hear all of my comments. While several people opposed to the deer hunt objected to his efforts to stop me from speaking, an elderly man in a suit shouted, "We want to hear someone else!" Curiously, this man never raised his hand to speak himself.

I later discovered he was a friend of one of the freeholders. So the freeholders have now resorted to using shills to influence public hearings — or perhaps they plant their friends in the audience simply to help move things along so they can go home earlier.

At various times during the meeting, Narozanick threatened to evict people who spoke out of turn, including a time when he stated that public meetings on the deer hunt were widely publicized — a chorus of unbelievers shouted that no, it was indeed not widely publicized. Of course, friends of the freeholders, including the shill who interrupted me, were never threatened with eviction or even admonished.

Several people who attended this meeting were not allowed to speak. At one point, Narozanick stated he would only call on another person to speak if that person intended to speak on anything other than the deer issue. Well, he finally managed to get one person who had something to speak on other than the deer hunt.

It was a man with a legitimate grievance. Not to belittle the legitimacy of this man’s issue, but it was most interesting to note that the freeholders spent more time going over details with this speaker than they did with any of the people who spoke on the matter of the deer hunt.

I would certainly not begrudge this man the right to speak as long as he would need to present his case and answer questions.

However, this man’s issue was used by the freeholders as a cynical ploy. They played this issue to the end of the meeting which enabled them to "run out the clock" and avoid having to deal with anyone else who wanted to speak for the deer in our parks.

Why bother dealing any more with that issue. Their minds were already made up.

As far as they were concerned, people who came to speak for the deer were just wasting their time.

Dudley Giehl is a resident of Hazlet