Western Monmouth Mayors Endorse Bennett for Monmouth GOP Chair
Freehold Township Mayor Anthony J. Ammiano, Colts Neck Mayor Jarrett R. Engel, Howell Mayor Robert F. Walsh, Farmingdale Mayor John P. Morgan, and Manalapan Mayor Susan Cohen, have sent the following letter to the County Committee members from their communities:
We are writing to request your support for Senator John Bennett as our next Republican County Chair on Tuesday, June 12th at 7:00 P.M. at the Colts Neck High School.
Senator Bennett was born and raised in Western Monmouth County and graduated from Freehold High School. During his twenty-four years in the legislature he represented our interests and remains well aware of our concerns.
Dedicated to the acquisition of Open Space, Senator Bennett wrote the legislation which allows counties and municipalities to dedicate a portion of their tax revenue to acquire Open Space with voter approval. Included among his many accomplishments in our area, is the toxic waste site clean-up in the Townships of Howell and Freehold, and his effective block of the proposed incinerator in the Township of Millstone.
Senator Bennett is a leader: he has served our State, our County, and our municipalities well. His leadership roles in the State Legislature, including his tenure as Senate President, provide him with the experience and skill set necessary to unite factions within our Party, raise necessary funding, and both recruit and get Republican candidates elected.
We have a great opportunity to get someone like Senator Bennett who is willing to serve as our County Chair and we ask you to join us in supporting him as our next Chairman. We need a strong turn out from Western Monmouth to make this happen and urge you to show up and vote for Senator Bennett. Thank you for your attention and support.
More from my site
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Bennett Announces For Monmouth GOP Chair
Current, Former Legislators Endorse Bennett for Monmouth GOP Chair- Curley: “None of the above!”
Guadagno Disavows Bennett Mailer
Bennett’s Baggage: The Monmouth GOP Chair’s Race, Part 2- Strange Bedfellows
Manalapan Elected Officials Stand With Bennett
Clifton will endorse Hanlon for Monmouth County GOP Chair- Monmouth GOP Chair’s Race, Part 1: The way the game is played
I am a newly elected CC in the Bayshore, and I am voting for Bennett.
Why in the world do Bennett and his surrogates keep talking about his legislative accomplishments? WTF does that have to do with being chair, running campaigns and getting people elected in 2012 and beyond?
Why all of a sudden is Christine Hanlon, now Christine Giordano Hanlon? Is the Giordano supposed to trigger something? Why all of a sudden is she using her maiden name? What is the rub?
Why all of a sudden is Christine Hanlon, now Christine Giordano Hanlon? Is the Giordano supposed to trigger something?
Maybe trying to reach out to the American-Italian, as well as the Irish constituency
Anyone check this out on Politicker NJ by Dick Larosa? More questionable Bennett actions at their best. Excerpt from the article:
Poison Drinking Water in Keansburg, NJ
This entire situation begs the question as to why the Borough Attorney, former State Senator John Bennett allowed them to violate DEP orders. John Bennett, makes over $100,000 a year as Borough Attorney and over $125,000 per year as the School Board Attorney and yet he saw no reason for the Council to obey the DEP? Whoa! You would think that as the Board of Education attorney he would be concerned for Keansburg’s school children.
I find it interesting that Senator Bennett says in his platform that he will now forgo any County legal work if elected chairman. Isn’t this a little disingenuous after doing this type of work for 30 years and now deciding to call it quits after he’s already made his fortune?
Bennett has at least presented a platform !! Silence is deafening as to Hanlon’s opinion on structure, management, openness etc. Added to that is no comment as to her firm’s jobs for the County, hers at Bd Elections, etc etc. and SILENCE as to considering anything a real or perceived conflict.
I have posted before, but my “wish” of a third choice that is neither a present or past lawyer looking to make $$$ seems pipe dream.
So, we have a choice of 2. My husband is CC and has not received ANYTHING other than original “move forward” (WHY that???ugh, channeling OBAMA???) and “I helped grassroots” etc piece from Hanlon.
From our end the platform is the key– what is her’s??? Really don’t care as to either Bennett or Hanlon which current or former elected officials “endorse” – they are or were “in” the “inner circle”, unlike the rank and file CC who have been under ALL recent chairs, inc. Oxley w/”right hand” newbie Hanlon NOT in loop, not in “inner circle”. It is the CC choice and many of them (plus non CC volunteers as well) have been dedicated to the party for MANY years and have many more hours and knowledge on grassroots level than not only Hanlon but most of current elected officials, many of whom we had not even heard of 5 years ago. This is truth and maybe it “hurts” but time to be real and make best choice. Going with the “non conflict going forward” choice has to be John Bennett.
PS As to APP- JB old story, moved on. Hanlon/Nelson etc NEW story, new “pigs at the trough” looking for more and more and not giving up anything — how will that play????
ONE MORE chance—anyone else????
How about this article to take us down memory lane?
A
A
Written by
JAMES W. PRADO ROBERTS
and ERIK SCHWARTZ Asbury Park Press
Filed Under
News
Patronage, fat pensions, other perks all permitted
The final hours of state Sen. John O. Bennett III’s 3 1/2-day term as acting governor were good for Dover Township and good for Bennett’s private law practice.
On Jan. 11, 2002, Bennett signed into law an unprecedented bill that would provide $15 million in state money to buy up to 750 unspoiled acres of the Ciba-Geigy Superfund site in Dover — the location of a now-closed chemical factory that has been associated with a higher incidence of leukemia in young girls.
That same day, Bennett, a Monmouth County Republican, signed a contract with Dover to act as its bond counsel. The deal would be worth thousands of dollars to his law firm.
Or of course this one where prominent jailbird Mayor Matthew Scannapico of Marlboro is appointed to a pension padding position by good Ol’ John Bennett.
Public clients profit Bennett, law firms
9:32 AM, Aug 20, 2007 |
Comments
Written by
RICK HEPP
STAFF WRITER
From his first job as a Marlboro police dispatcher to attorney for more than a dozen local governments, state Senate co-President John O. Bennett III has profited from his political ties.
During a 29-year law career, the Republican legislator from Little Silver has cultivated a stable of public clients who, in the last decade alone, earned him and the firms in which he was a partner more than $7.1 million.
He also stands to collect roughly $100,000 a year from his public pension if he remains in the state system through September 2008, when he turns 60, as a result of holding several public jobs at once.
Ironically, it could be Bennett’s private practice that leads to the downfall of his political career.
In March, federal and state grand juries began investigating Bennett for his billing practices as Marlboro’s municipal attorney, a position from which Bennett has stepped aside during the probe.
“You spend a career trying to be so particularly careful not to have those kind of allegations” leveled against yourself, Bennett said in a recent interview at his Neptune law office. “It really makes you feel like, ‘Why did I do that? Why did I put myself in that position?’ . . . That’s why I’m running. I’m me. I’m not some big boss.”
The criminal probes came after an Asbury Park Press investigation found that Bennett had double billed Marlboro for legal fees totaling $8,130. The senator has publicly apologized for what he called an honest mistake, but news of the probe and other questions about his relationship with the township’s government have him fighting for his 25-year political career.
Bennett spent more than $410,000 to win the Republican primary for the 12th District Senate seat against a challenger who spent less than $20,000.
Meantime, the perception that Bennett fattened his wallet at the public trough caused his own county party chairman to publicly ask Bennett to drop his bid for re-election in November, fearing the controversy could bring down Bennett’s two Assembly running mates, Michael J. Arnone and Clare M. Farragher.
At the same time, it has emboldened Democrats statewide, who have targeted Bennett’s seat in a bid to take control of the evenly divided Senate.
William F. Dowd, Monmouth County Republican Party chairman, declined to comment for this story. But even after Bennett won the June primary, Dowd continued to ask the senator to drop out of the race.
Bennett is facing Democrat Ellen Karcher in the November election.
Hard work, political clout
There are many reasons for Bennett’s successful law career, not the least of which is a legal acumen honed during countless evening planning board, utility authority and township meetings.
“It’s been a career that’s been built with a lot of hard work,” said Bennett, 55. “At some points in the career it was four nights a week, every single week. . . . I still work seven days a week.”
But those who paid his salary say Bennett also was appointed because of his political clout. As a state legislator, he steered hundreds of thousands of dollars in state funds toward their municipalities.
Bennett also benefited from the backing of political allies, his ability to get officials re-elected through fund-raising and campaign efforts, and his charitable donations to the pet projects of those who appointed him.
Bennett also has recommended hundreds of friends and colleagues to various state posts, including Marlboro Mayor Matthew V. Scannapieco, who appointed the senator as the township’s attorney. Last year, that job paid Bennett a salary of $116,754, one of the highest in the state for a local employee.
Former Keansburg Mayor Patrick Antonacci said the borough kept him on as its attorney in part because of the state money he secured for the cash-strapped municipality. Bennett has worked as an attorney for the borough, the Keansburg Board of Education and the municipal utilities authority.
Antonacci also said Bennett gained favor with council members because of donations he has made to several causes in Keansburg, including one that helps special-education students, a charity with which Antonacci is involved.
“He’s been very generous to the town and has been instrumental in getting hundreds of thousands in grant money to refurbish the town hall,” Antonacci said. “He’s gone beyond the call of duty. If we have problems, we go and seek him out.”
Bennett defended the practice of procuring state funds for towns that pay him a salary and donating money to nonprofit and charitable causes in those municipalities.
“When you work in a town, you get time to understand its problems,” Bennett said. “I’ve always believed that if you make money in the town, you should turn around and give money back into the town. I believe that, especially in a poor community.”
He also said the no-bid legal work for which he was hired over the years was the result of his legal expertise and hard work, not because he was an assemblyman, state senator or Senate leader.
“It had nothing to do with the Legislature,” Bennett said. “I’ve gone through and worked hard and moved up. And it was a natural progression. It’s true in almost every town. I’ve made a career, and in most cases long-term careers, in the particular towns.”
Joining the club
In New Jersey, attaining elected office and holding multiple public jobs is a time-honored tradition.
It begins with an up-and-comer calling on a political patron — typically a county or municipal party boss, but possibly an elected official or a private-sector power broker — who holds sway over local nominations and appointments.
Once the ambitious public servant is in the patron’s good graces, with a campaign contribution or volunteer work, a call is made to politicos who oversee hiring.
“All you have to do is get in,” former Howell Committeeman Dan Massa said. “Once in, all a young politician has to do is show up to political functions where he meets people. Sometimes he donates to the cause and says remember me when a position comes open. If you do a decent job and you’ve got some power . . . you’re going to get appointed from one job to another.”
Professional positions, such as municipal attorney, are highly regarded posts.
Unlike most contracts, they are not subject to New Jersey’s open-bidding laws. Instead, decisions on staffing are left up to the party that controls the local government.
Most of these positions are filled at the suggestion of the county or local party chairman, who contacts elected officials with a roster of prospective hires shortly after the officials take office. The suggestions are usually accompanied by an unspoken understanding that the job requests are tied to party backing and funding in the next election.
“The suggestion of who you put in the office coming from the party chairman is the rule rather than the exception,” said Joseph D. Youssouf, a longtime friend of Bennett’s who practices as a municipal attorney from his Englishtown office. “If you’re not well-connected politically, it’s very hard to get the job.”
Bennett’s mentors
As a young politico, Bennett had the backing of former GOP Assemblymen Chester Apy and Mort Salkind, who was also a two-time mayor in the senator’s hometown of Marlboro, Salkind said.
A friend of the Bennett family, Salkind gave Bennett his first public jobs as a Marlboro police dispatcher and clerk of the township Planning Board.
It was a natural progression for Salkind to help the son of longtime campaign supporters, particularly one who baby-sat his children and started a political group: Republicans for Salkind.
Their friendship, Salkind said, involved Salkind making dozens of calls on Bennett’s behalf, to support him or to help him obtain various positions. Salkind, who has since moved to North Jersey, continued supporting Bennett this year after the federal grand jury investigations became public.
“I certainly was (his political backer),” Salkind said. “I’ve always put in a good word for John . . . with all party and political leaders. I’ve done it for decades, and I’ve believed he’s accomplished many things. For everybody who makes it, those who help along the way contribute that, and it’s perfectly fine to do that.”
Bennett met Apy, also a Republican from Little Silver, in 1972 while working as an aide in Apy’s Assembly office. The two worked together again at the Red Bank firm of Abramoff, Apy and O’Hern after Bennett graduated in 1974 from Seton Hall Law School and completed a clerkship with a Monmouth County judge.
“I did matrimonial law because I had clerked for the matrimonial judge . . . so it was kind of natural,” Bennett said. “I also started almost simultaneously doing municipal law. Chet (Apy) and Justice (Dan) O’Hern had represented several municipalities, so I started working on them.”
Apy declined to comment on his relationship with Bennett, citing his position as a New Jersey Workers’ Compensation judge in Freehold.
Bennett’s first municipal job came in 1977 as attorney for the Englishtown Board of Adjustment, and a year later, he won his first elective office as a member of the Little Silver Board of Education.
But his political career started in earnest in 1979 with his election to an Assembly seat over longtime Democrat Walter J. Kozloski, who spent the last month of the campaign in critical condition at Monmouth Medical Center with a kidney ailment. For Bennett, the victory was the culmination of a lifetime of political training, from various class offices in grade and high school to posts as chairman of the Monmouth Young Republicans and as a member of the New Jersey Young Republicans board.
Bennett’s Assembly victory also jump-started his law practice.
“John had in his blood politics the likes of which very few people had,” said Youssouf, a boyhood friend of Bennett’s who attended law school with him. “He was always more of a politician than a lawyer. It wasn’t by training and dedication (that he became a municipal attorney); it was by happenstance.”
Over the next four legislative terms, Bennett amassed more than a half-dozen municipal attorney’s positions. By 1986, Bennett served as attorney for Englishtown, Hazlet and Howell, the Marlboro Township Board of Adjustment, Colts Neck and Roosevelt planning boards, and the Keansburg Board of Education.
Those appointments were based on merit, or in the case of Democratic-controlled Keansburg, a bit of serendipity, according to Bennett.
All the Democratic lawyers must have turned the borough down, and the council started calling lawyers alphabetically, Bennett said. “I didn’t know a solitary soul there.”
But when Marion Masnick and her fellow Republicans took control of the Howell Township Committee in 1984, they were paid a visit by the county and township Republican organizations. One of their recommendations was Bennett for township attorney, Masnick said.
“He knew not only the municipal law but politically, too, what would be good and what wouldn’t be good,” said Masnick, who now works as a secretary for Republican Freeholder Ted Narozanick. “I never doubted what John said.”
Prominence as attorney
As Bennett gained power in Trenton — he was appointed in 1989 to fill an unexpired term in the Senate. As he rose to become the most powerful elected Republican in the state, so did his stature rise as a municipal attorney.
His success, in part, was attributed to the knowledge he accrued over his career.
“That (experience as a municipal attorney) clearly is something that Sen. Bennett had to sell,” said Gary Fox, who with Jerry Zaro in 1989 recruited the newly appointed senator to their Eatontown firm of Ansell, Fox, Zaro, & McGovern. “I’m also certain that municipalities who daily have to deal with state government were impressed by the fact that (Bennett) was somebody who knew his way around state government.”
When Asbury Park tried to jump-start redevelopment of its waterfront, the City Council in 1997 turned to Bennett, who was then Senate majority leader, with hopes of capturing state funds for a city on the financial brink.
“It was certainly looked at that . . . his position in the state certainly wouldn’t hurt the city, especially with his knowledge and his longevity,” Asbury Park Councilman John J. Hamilton said. “It certainly wasn’t looked at from a negative perspective, and at that time it was a Republican administration.”
Municipal officials also know it doesn’t hurt to appoint a state lawmaker who admits to recommending hundreds to various state and judicial posts, including most of the Superior Court judges in the Monmouth County Courthouse.
Take Marlboro Mayor Scannapieco, who nominated Bennett in 1992 for the township attorney position. Four years later, Scannapieco was appointed by then-Gov. Christie Whitman — at Bennett’s request — to the Victims of Crime Compensation Board, a job that now pays $104,118 a year.
Bennett and Scannapieco have denied there was a quid pro quo. Bennett defended his recommendation of Scannapieco because of the Marlboro mayor’s years of experience as an accountant for Public Service Electric and Gas Co.
Acting governor
In one of his proudest political moments, Bennett served last year as acting governor for 3 1/2 days due to a constitutional quirk that left the state with no governor for a week between the terms of acting Gov. Donald T. DiFrancesco and Gov. McGreevey.
He moved into the governor’s mansion, printed stationery and letterhead at his expense, signed legislation and threw an engagement party at Drumthwacket for his daughter, again at his expense.
He also pardoned a former business partner and Keansburg Board of Education member, Hugh G. Gallagher, who voted to hire him as school board attorney. His response was “I was never asked” about the business relationship at the time of the pardon.
In July 2002, Bennett joined the Philadelphia-based law firm of Dilworth Paxson and opened a branch office in Neptune across the hall from his old firm.
In addition to the handful of municipalities Bennett represents, his team of lawyers, including Bennett’s daughter Meghan, work for at least a dozen municipalities and various area authorities, although business has declined since word of the federal and state probes surfaced this spring, Bennett said.
He stepped down as Marlboro’s attorney pending the outcome of the probes.
He also has been criticized by those inside and outside the GOP for subcontracting legal work on a Marlboro recodification project that has already cost taxpayers more than $100,000.
The Stafford lawyer who did the work was paid $60 an hour while Bennett charged the township $150 or $160 an hour for the still unfinished project. The committee last month hired a private company to redo the work for $24,910.
With his duties as Senate co-president demanding more and more of his time, Bennett has also changed his role to become more of a rainmaker — someone whose job is to drum up business for the firm — even though he still attends a fair share of night meetings and manages his law practice.
“Every piece of paper that goes out of this office I read,” he said. “I pretty much have an idea of every file that’s going on in the office. I still try to do hands-on management.”
He does this all while running a campaign in the most heated race of his career, one in which he will have to dissuade voters from labeling him as a political insider who profits from the system.
“It’s difficult because there’s a perception to categorize everybody as the same,” he said. “And while there are exceptions to every rule, you get painted into a picture.”
Notice that the endorsement of one western Monmouth county town is conspicuous in its absence. That being Marlboro. Could the above referenced history be the reason for that?
Reember this was an endorsement from Republican Mayors of Western Monmouth. Marlboro has a Democratic Mayor.