Unless residents of our town, our county, our State, or these United States don’t start paying attention, learning more and taking action, it’s a foregone conclusion that they will never know what’s coming in their schools, their towns, their county, their state, or the United States of America. Certain Unalienable Rights Certain Unalienable Rights
It has to start at the local level and every citizen should be concerned.
The people’s Right to Know has been chipped away at for years, but it is now at the point that giant chunks are being removed right before their eyes. And not enough people are doing anything about it. Certain Unalienable Rights Certain Unalienable Rights
Right now, at the national level, we have a United State Senator, Menendez, undergoing court proceedings on bribery charges. We’re learning that he had a whole stash of private e-mails, letters, photos and other communications with officials in Egypt and Quatar that he didn’t want anyone to know about. A senior Senator heading an all-important Senate Committee charged with bribery and lots of private, not-open-to-the-public correspondence between him and the folks named in the bribery charges are just coming up now.
Another state-wide disaster is the recent action taken by a majority of the New Jersey state Legislature. Their approval of the NO-OPRA bill is designed, they say, to save paid government employees time but is more accurately described as making it closer to impossible for taxpayers to know what’s going on with their communities, their tax dollars, and the people who make the decisions. Certain Unalienable Rights Certain Unalienable Rights
Currently, Governor Murphy is straddling that line right down the middle, fearful of signing or not signing the approved legislation, because of the politicians it impacts, himself included. Curtailing OPRA, the people’s right to know, opens the door for more secrecy.
In addition to that, the Governor is also moving aggressively to promote those offshore wind farms which appear to be dangerous and expensive for taxpayers, rather than allowing enough time for studies and answers before money is spent and the environment and state destroyed.
At the Monmouth County level, the Monmouth County Board of Education, and the National Park Service, are letting one of the historic buildings continue to deteriorate and spending lots of dollars for some unknown reason rather than making improvements.
But officials don’t have anything to say about it.
The Park Service wants to help fund the Stillman Corporation who have the option to rehabilitate 21 buildings on Fort Hancock rather than tell him they’ve had years and haven’t done anything yet. Let the guys who have already been successful out there with their own money take charge. Very little of those negotiations, either with private industry or public boards, is done openly.
Several municipalities and school boards laugh in the faces of their taxpayers by simply never offering their meetings virtually in the 21st century, something everyone learned to do during the Covid fiasco that closed churches and businesses.
Henry Hudson Regional High School has already gotten a reputation for working hard to be sure even those who attend meetings can’t hear. They can’t afford more microphones, they said at one meeting. They hold their meetings in a cavernous room where mumbled words bounce around in space; the public is seated far more distant from the board than necessary, some Board members with their sides to the public so even a lip reader can’t catch what’s going on.
Mr. Cory Wingerter
When Highlands held an important and well attended informational meeting to hear what the folks had to say about the possibility of flood gating the town to avoid flooding, even the clerk couldn’t catch the names of the public who spoke, let alone let everyone in the room hear the experts. That’s because the meeting, in order to accommodate the number of residents the governing body expected to attend, was held at Henry Hudson, the same place where board meetings can never be heard. The Highlands school on Route 36 or the vacant parochial school on Highland Avenue would have been better choices.
And now, the ultimate. The members of the three boards of education in Highlands and Atlantic Highlands, the very same three boards that are not going to exist 30 days from now, adopted a resolution whose terms they decided in private and which they have no intention of sharing with the taxpayers until the deed is done, the papers signed, and the public is stuck with whatever the secret is.
Are we that stupid we cannot handle the truth? Are we that incapable that our future is put in the hands of people who don’t want us to know what they’re doing with our time, our money, our resources? Certain Unalienable Rights Certain Unalienable Rights
Indeed we are, if we don’t wake up and do something about it.
