Mayor Adrian O. Mapp is asking City Council approval to name Thomas J. Crownover to fill the last vacancy on the Plainfield Municipal Utilities Authority.
The council meets at 7 p.m. Monday to consider the agenda for the April 15 regular meeting. Both meetings will take place in Municipal Court, 325 Watchung Ave.
Mapp is nominating Crownover for the position of Alternate No. 2. The PMUA board of commissioners has five voting members and two alternates who may vote if neccessary to make a quorum of three. The most memorable instance of such a vote occurred in January 2012, when former Alternate No. 2 Cecil H. Sanders Jr. joined Commissioners Malcolm Dunn and Alex Toliver to approve a controversial settlement with former PMUA executives Eric Watson and David Ervin.
Sanders, who became an alternate in November 2011, became a full commissioner in January 2013, succeeding Rev. Tracey Brown when she took office as the City Council's at-large member. If approved, Crownover will succeed Sanders as an alternate.
In 2011, Crownover was named to a group that studied the authority and gave its report in March 2012.
Soon after Mapp took office in January, he sought to replace Dunn with Crownover, Sanders with Tom Kaercher, Toliver with Charles Tyndale and Harold Mitchell with Nan Anderson-Bennett. A City Council majority rejected all four, though in February Tyndale won council approval to replace Toliver, a day before the authority's reorganization at which Mitchell replaced Sanders as chairman.
Crownover's name surfaced at the council's March 3 agenda-fixing session when Councilwoman Gloria Taylor blasted Mapp for allegedly offering a quid-pro-quo involving approval of Crownover for a PMUA seat in return for the administration agreeing to a legal services plan backed by a council faction.
The PMUA's monthly board meeting is 6 p.m. Tuesday at 127 Roosevelt Avenue, If approved on April 15, Crownover will join the PMUA board in time for its May 13 meeting.
--Bernice
well... it's the election cycle... Guess we'll see how well the RDO's are playing the KOUMBAYA GAME. Shall there truly be peace in the land with all the normal love and hugs to go around ? Or will the RDO's keep offering Charlie Brown the football to kick ???
ReplyDeleteSomehow they think if no changes are made to the Board of Commissioners it will deflect attention to PMUA's activities, but it actually invites further scrutiny as they batten down the hatches and go into their hedgehog defensive posture. I'm sorry to see the Administration apparently backing off, now that Mr. Crownover's nomination has been degraded to alternate status. The quid pro quo that steamed up Gloria Taylor was really foolish to begin with. A much better tack would have offered new commissioners in exchange for not immediately cutting off the City's illegal payment to the PMUA of $1.2 million annually. This was engineered on the sly within weeks of the effective date of the Inter Local Agreement, probably as a means to give potential bond investors a false sense of PMUA's financial position and contractual obligations. Based on City Council meeting minutes from the period, PMUA commissioner Malcolm Dunn, who was then the council president, knows all about this, as I imagine so do other members of that City Council who are still in public office. Mr. Dunn had no problem telling the public on January 1, 1998 "that the City would be giving them no money for operations", according to the minutes, when the opposite was true in the amount of $100,000 monthly. Apparently today's Council faction that opposes change at the top of PMUA, as well as Democratic chairman Jerry Green, who has said as much too, are complicit in continuing the fraud that was foisted on the city and its residents, and look to be fighting exposure at every turn. The RDO Council candidates, including one PMUA alternate commissioner, one beneficiary of illegal commissioner compensation, and one Council member who has already voted to deny proper oversight, look to be nothing more than a last ditch effort to keep the charade going.
ReplyDeleteUnfortunately we got low life people who don't care about the rate-payer, but too many people on the Council are still on the Shady Sharonda track and don't realize that it's time to move on.
ReplyDeleteBob, do you mean the grimmie Green track?
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