Common Sense For New Hampshire

Former Mayor Ken Pringle has a letter in today’s Coast Star.  It is reprinted here with the permission of the Coast Star Newspapers.

Submitted by KENNETH E. PRINGLE

Belmar Mayor Matt Doherty gave what is by now an all-too-familiar response in last week’s Coast Star article about the Monmouth County Prosecutor’s findings that his administration failed to properly account for thousands of dollars in gift cards purchased with Sandy donations.

Instead of accepting responsibility for this lapse, the mayor has once again hidden behind “Belmar’s Recovery.” And just as predictably, he attempted to shift the focus away from the prosecutor’s criticism by leveling yet another attack at Councilman Jim Bean, this time for asking the prosecutor to look into how $9,050 in Shop Rite gift cards could have gone missing, something the mayor should have been the first to do.

Sandy’s severity is no excuse for what happened. Good financial controls are like high ethical standards. Their importance only increases with the severity of a crisis.

Leaving aside that it would have taken all of 10 minutes to set up a spreadsheet ledger to track who received these gift cards, the important question is not why the borough failed to properly account for these cards. It is why the borough was doling out private donations intended for Sandy victims in the first place. Less than a week after the storm, the State office that oversees municipal governments issued a formal notice to affected towns that “strongly encourage[d] local governments to instruct persons to make donations directly to appropriate nonprofit organizations rather than assuming the responsibility for re-distributing donations.”

Numerous nonprofit organizations, from the American Red Cross to Catholic Charities, were in a position to get those donations quickly — and fairly — into the hands of those who were genuinely in need, and could have operated right from Borough Hall. Yet, the mayor chose to ignore the State’s advice.

That’s because delegating this task to qualified nonprofit organizations would have meant passing up the political benefits to be derived from handing these cards out directly to residents. For an administration whose every move appears to be driven by the mayor’s political ambitions, that was obviously too much to ask.

Apparently, so is hoping the mayor would finally begin accepting responsibility for the consequences of his decisions.

KENNETH E. PRINGLE

OUCH!

One minor correction, Mayor:

I can understand why you thought that Jim Bean approached the county prosecutor’s office.  It is because Doherty has in the past incorrectly stated that.  But it is not true.  Bean only asked the Belmar Police to investigate.  It’s the Belmar Police that sent it over to the county.

(It is true, though, that the case would have fallen into a black hole over there if Bean hadn’t called them a few times to ask what was going on with it.)