When a good guy goes bad

Not everybody was surprised last month when Morton Salkind, former chairman of the Secaucus Municipal Utilities Authority, pleaded guilty to charges that he allegedly made false accounting entries into the books and records of Fox Development concerning a Rockaway Township development.

Last year, Salkind, representing Fox, pitched a development project at Bayonne’s Military Ocean Terminal.

His admission that he recorded almost $6 million in expenses his company never incurred stained a previously sterling reputation as one of the good guys in Hudson County politics, a knight in shining armor who had helped the SMUA recover from a huge corruption scandal in the 1980s.

A former mayor of Marlboro, Salkind was an early critic of Hudson County Executive Robert Janiszewski, pointing out unethical and possibly illegal activities in the early 1990s that did not come to light until Janiszewski’s arrest in 2000, and the subsequent trials a few years later.

Salkind ran for state Senate in the Democratic primary in 1993 as part of a reform ticket, losing out in a hotly contested race.

But a longtime Salkind critic from the SMUA days of the early 1990s, former Secaucus Board of Education member Tom Troyer, said he was not shocked, saying that he butted heads with Salkind over disclosure issues regarding the bid-rigging scandal at the SMUA, prior to Salkind’s taking over.

Regardless of the critics, Salkind’s admissions in federal court last month end a sad chapter in what should have been a positive career, one more good guy gone bad.

Move over Fulop

Councilman Steve Fulop has been sent a message: Move up or move out, meaning that he should make his move to run for mayor because other candidates are interested in taking his council seat.

Shelley Skinner, a founding member of Jersey City Families for Better Schools, is apparently one contender, but so is Junior Maldonado, the man Fulop unseated from the downtown Jersey City seat.

Maldonado said potential candidates need to make up their minds by July, and reports suggest he is shopping around for a slate to join.

Fulop’s pay-to-play referendum was supposed to propel him into the mayor’s office, but several key players on the scene suggest that the referendum is too confusing.

“He should have simply tried to ban City Council members from having county jobs,” said one observer. “That’s simple. People can relate to it. But by dragging in pay-to-play it gets too complicated for voters to digest.”

Healy is vulnerable

Meanwhile, Mayor Jerramiah Healy appears to be the person to beat in 2009. While he has a significant number of negatives that would allow a worthy opponent to run against him, he also has a significant political war chest – and already has begun running positive TV ads to win the public’s admiration.

Everybody is wondering, of course, whether or not state Sen. Sandra Cunningham will throw her hat into the mayoral race.

Although a powerful political force in Jersey City, Cunningham might not be strong enough to win in a mayoral race. But she can do significant damage to Healy if she does run.

“She can keep Healy out of the runoff,” one observer said. “Healy needs Cunningham to win. If she is running against him, he loses a lot of his support.”

Former Jersey City Mayor Bret Schundler, meanwhile, has been making the rounds of the political circuit, apparently trying to see if he has support for a mayoral race of his own. While this is an intriguing concept, it is difficult to see where he will get his funding since most of the developers in Jersey City already got everything they wanted from Healy.

Committee battle no drain in Bayonne

Last week, Bayonne Councilman Anthony Chiappone chimed in on the mayoral race in Bayonne saying that a committee fight already helped drain the political coffers of Mark Smith, who is running for mayor with the blessing of the Bayonne Regular Democratic Organization. Smith is running against retired Municipal Judge Patrick Conaghan and independent Yitzchak David in a special election in November.

“We spent a total of $1,200 on contested committee seats,” said Jason O’Donnell, who chairs the Democratic organization.

The June committee battle occurred after negotiations between the regular Democrats and Chiappone broke down.

Chiappone had suggested to Hudson County Democratic Organization chairman and Jersey City Mayor Healy that as the highest elected official in Bayonne, Chiappone should be able to name 52 of the 102 committee seats, or control the Democratic organization in Bayonne.

This was apparently said “tongue in cheek,” but Healy quickly rejected it, offering Chiappone about 16 seats.

Chiappone claims that O’Donnell filed all 102 committee nominations without taking Chiappone’s 16 names, forcing Chiappone to file challenges in the primary.

O’Donnell said Chiappone missed the deadline he set, failing to get the names to him in time to file, so he filed the names he had.

Regular Democrats, however, managed to prevail, which may well give Smith the edge as the organization works toward the November election.

The Conaghan campaign will be trying to tie Smith to former Bayonne Mayor Joseph Doria, whose sudden departure for greener pastures on the state level last October prompted the special election.

Doria, meanwhile, as the commissioner of the Department of Community Affairs, has resurfaced in a political dispute in Hoboken, where the state has taken over the city’s 11-months-late budget.

This is a bit ironic, since Doria left Bayonne in a budget crisis when taking the state job, and must now oversee some of the hard choices he managed to mostly avoid in Bayonne such as laying off municipal employees.

The central question in Hoboken, however, is who will oversee the naming of professional contracts?

Will the City Council be allowed to put out requests for proposals that will get a range of responses, or will the state be naming those professionals as part of a no-bid process?

email to Al Sullivan

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