The other ethics issue Belmar had before the Dept. of Community Affairs has been adjudicated.
Bean, Doherty and DuPont each received a letter informing them of dismissal of ethics charges lodged against them last year during the dust-up over Bean’s vote on changes to the accessory dwelling law.
Letter to Bean
Letter to Doherty
Letter to DuPont
.
Basically the Dept. found that Bean did not have a conflict because, as he stated repeatedly, his unit was already year-round so the rule change had no bearing on him. It also found that the mayor, even though ultimately he was wrong in his opinion that Bean had a conflict, had the authority to schedule a re-vote to allow Bean to recuse himself. Its letter to DuPont indicates that he was within his authority to give his (bad) legal advice to municipal clerk April Claudio and ask her to strike Bean’s vote from the minutes. I don’t know if Ms. Claudio knew that she didn’t have to follow DuPont’s wrong advice. It’s certainly not reasonable to expect her to go against the wishes of the mayor and the borough attorney and refuse to strike the vote, but since Bean’s vote was found to be not at all conflicted I guess technically that’s what she was supposed to do.
The minutes of that meeting now need to be corrected to include Bean’s vote.
And I still wish someone would investigate the origin of that “anonymous” letter. To me it has “bogus” written all over it, in fact it reads more like a ransom note (“I will be in the audience”) than anything else. Who would write such a weird letter and then deliver it in such a way that nobody can even explain where it came from?
One more thing: This guy DuPont, he really seems to be the George Constanza of borough attorneys……..whatever he advises us to do, we should just do the opposite!
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