Common Sense For New Hampshire

Here we go:

“This is a politically motivated, frivolous lawsuit that is a waste of taxpayer money,” Doherty to NJ Advance Media. “They want to raise taxes in an effort to make me look bad, but only a fool would sue their own town in an effort to raise taxes.”

Maybe they would be fools if they were doing it for the politics of it, although I would hope that the people who voted for Doherty didn’t elect him to break the law for them.  In any case, has it occurred to him that the plaintiffs might have some reason other than politics?

Doherty pointed out that the major plaintiffs in the lawsuit were all disgruntled political rivals.

“Ken Pringle (whose firm is handling the lawsuit) was the mayor here for 20 years before I took office in 2011. Jim Bean is the former councilman who I defeated for mayor last year. Mike Seebeck was recently a candidate for borough council and Joy DeSanctis was their campaign manager,” he said. “They can’t win an election, so what do they do? They file lawsuits.”

These are all people who care most deeply about Belmar so they do things like run for office and also try to stop the town from making what they believe are big mistakes.  They should be thanked for their commitment to Belmar.  And BTW, there were other plaintiffs who never ran for office in Belmar.  Two of them don’t even live here.

“When we settled, our CFO wrote the check out of the beach utility fund because that’s the account that had enough cash in it. But she always intended to allocate the money from other utilities within the budget to offset it. This is the same CFO we had when Ken Pringle was mayor and she did many of these same types of things then,”

“They could have picked up the phone to ask how we planned to allocate the money for the settlement.”

“Hello Matt?  This is Ken……”

But the fact that they’re suing us now to ask us to do something we were going to do anyway is completely frivolous.”

The money was taken out of the beach fund in February.  To my knowledge it still hasn’t been paid back.  

The parking fee increase was done at the suggestion of residents, Doherty said, many of whom were opposed to adding additional meters away from the boardwalk.

Actually many of them were non-residents.  But they were all the cool people who play volleyball and stuff.  And nobody suggested doubling the rate!

The revenue is split 60/40 between the borough’s Beach Utility and Parking Utility, respectively, Doherty said.

“Our borough has also been doing this for well over a decade, since Ken Pringle was mayor,” he said. “But now in this lawsuit, he wants 100 percent of the money to go the Beach Utility, which is something he didn’t even do himself when he was mayor.”

It was legal when Pringle was mayor.  The state EPA changed the law in 2012, according to the lawsuit.

Doherty said the case “doesn’t make any sense” and that the borough plans to file a motion to dismiss.

“I could understand if it were someone from a different part of the state who were suing us to get our taxpayers to pay more because they don’t want to pay beach fees,” Doherty said. “But this is all coming from within our town, and from someone who was mayor here for 20 years. It’s his pathetic attempt to be relevant in town when clearly he is not.”

There were a couple of plaintiffs from out of town and it’s not because they don’t want to pay beach fees.  It’s because they don’t want to pay our property taxes. 

(BTW, note some of the comments that NJ.com allowed to be made about this story if published here would result in my head handed to me.)