Councilwoman probes, meets with resistance
Gallo criticized for challenging hirings, budget
BY ERIN O. STATTEL Staff Writer

ABERDEEN — Amid the shouting and dissent that could be heard through the closed doors of an executive session, attendees at the Sept. 2 Township Council meeting were left waiting before the meeting got under way almost two hours after its scheduled start time.

According to Municipal Clerk Karen Ventura, the council meeting, which was scheduled to begin at 8:30 p.m., ran past 11 p.m. The meeting did not begin until approximately 10 p.m., ending an executive session prompted by discussions of various professionals' contracts and the municipal budget.

First-term Councilwoman Janice Gallo posed numerous questions about the $15.3 million budget that was adopted despite her no vote and the lack of a vote by Councilman Thomas Perry, who was absent from the Sept. 2 meeting.

Mayor David Sobel, Councilmen Owen Drapkin, Vincent Vinci, Joseph Raymond and Deputy Mayor Wilhelmina Gumbs voted in favor of the budget's passage.

During the workshop session, several members of the council appeared to lose patience with the questions Gallo raised. Township Attorney Diane DeBulis, of Rogut McCarthy, Hazlet, attempted to quell Gallo's inquiries, but also quickly lost patience.

After Gallo said she didn't understand a line item in the municipal budget, Sobel asked Gallo,

"What do you mean you don't understand, Janice? Have you been voting on issues you don't understand?"

Gallo fired back,

"No, I understand what I vote on, it is just that now, everything is starting to click."

Several professionals' contracts appeared on the consent agenda for the Sept. 2 council meeting.

Included on the consent agenda were an engineering services contract with CME Associates; a contract for professional legal services from Daniel Mc- Carthy of Rogut McCarthy LLC; a contract for planning services for the fulfillment of the town's Council on Affordable Housing (COAH) obligations with Coppola and Coppola Associates; a contract for general planning services from the same firm; and an auditing contract with Fallon and Larsen.

According to Ventura, the consent agenda passed despite a no vote from Gallo and the lack of a vote from the absent Perry.

Gallo said that she was not in favor of the process by which the no-bid contracts were awarded.

"I feel that the public should have been privy to those contracts, and that made me ask questions regarding appropriations in the budget," Gallo said in an interview Sept. 8. "I would prefer not to discuss what was said in executive session."

Gallo said that the contracts were not given to her for her review until July, after certain appointments were already made in January.

"Unfortunately, I wasn't sworn in until February, and I was not involved with the no-bid contracts and the request for qualifications (RFQs)," Gallo said. "Around Aug. 19, I asked for more documentation regarding the contracts in regard to the appropriations. Unfortunately, the financial officer was on vacation as well."

Gallo declined to comment on her reasons for not agreeing with the hiring of certain professionals.

"The whole process needs to be changed, the going out for bid, the RFQs," Gallo said. "I don't want to see a contract in July for a professional who was appointed in January. If the RFQs do not have the specifics, you could be approving something else down the road."

Gallo reiterated that she feels the public should be privy to the process by which professionals are hired in Aberdeen.

"The public should be privy to this," she said. "They should be able to see what is going on. I would like to see their contracts before their appointments."

As for whether Aberdeeners will see Gallo at the next council meeting, she said it depends, citing personal issues.

"At this point, I don't know, it depends on my family situation," she said. "The focus has to be on … let's put it this way, I am torn."

According to Ventura, this year's contracts were left for the council's approval until September because necessary paperwork was left on former Township Manager Stuart Brown's desk.

"We advertise for RFQs in December and go with it from there," Ventura explained. "The professionals are appointed at the first meeting and the professionals submit their contracts in January and usually the very next meeting they are put on the agenda.

"But this year, there is an issue because contracts were left on Stuart's desk and they weren't found. We found them and put them on the last agenda. As soon as we got them, we put them on the agenda."

Ventura said that she had received Coppola's contract for the COAH planner position and questioned what happened to the other professionals' contracts.

"I received Coppola's contract in July, and I wondered what had happened to the rest of the professionals' contracts and we found them on Stuart's desk," she said.

Sobel said that CME Associates is a no-bid contract and that he knows some people like to make an issue out of that.

"People try to make an issue over who we use for engineering services," he said. "Sometimes smaller firms do not have the breadth of services that we need."

Sobel said that soliciting bids from other engineering firms is not convenient for the town.

"I don't know of any municipalities that bid out for jobs like that," he said. "When you go out to bid for something as large as that job, you run into cost overruns and delays. I don't think it works."

As for the contracts that were left on Brown's desk, Sobel said that he was not aware of that.

"If that is what Karen said happened, then that is what happened," he said. "We were receiving those firms' services based upon their rates from the previous year. Fees for these types of firms don't usually go up too much, and the auditor, I think, was the only one who raised his fees."

Sobel said that he is confident in the way that the professionals are hired in Aberdeen.

"People get at pay-to-play with some of our hiring practices, but we were one of the first municipalities to pass a pay-toplay ordinance," Sobel said.

Pay-to-play rules regulate the awarding of municipal contracts to firms, developers or contractors that have made contributions to local political campaigns in an attempt to discourage political patronage.