Common Sense For New Hampshire

I’m sure many of you heard yesterday’s news:

As we know, when Mr. Fox was not busy helping to extort favors from United Airlines for then Port Authority chief David Samson, he was busy helping Maggie Moran and Forward NJ in their goal of raising our gas tax.  (Getting the tax hike through was the reason they gave him a second stint as Transportation Commissioner in the first place.)

Before all this, Belmar resident Ted Ehmann recognized ethical problems with Fox and attempted an intervention before Fox’s actions had descended into outright criminality.  You may remember this from two years ago:

Of course just like Matt was cleared by his friend and ally Jaimie Fox, Fox himself was cleared by the State Ethics Commission.  And Mr. Fox was allowed to go on and inflict harm to the Port Authority, to Newark Airport, to United Airlines and to New Jersey taxpayers.

While I’m sure the news about Fox came as good news for Ted Ehmann, Mr. Ehmann had something even more important to celebrate yesterday.

His friend Bill Straus received and accepted an offer for the house that the two of them share in Rhode Island Point.  A while back they had decided to move to Florida’s Gulf coast, where Mr. Straus has family.  The area is beautiful and much more affordable than Belmar.  And given the current state of Belmar’s civic culture, it’s just too much work living in Belmar if you care about that sort of thing.  That’s a sentiment I can completely understand.

It would not be fair to just mention Ehmann’s and Straus’s contributions to Belmar’s betterment at the end of a blog post about Jamie Fox.  Those contributions are too numerous and too important.  Some time in the next couple of weeks I will write about it but it’s going to be a big job because there is so much.  But what I will say right now is that they will be missed dearly by me and everyone else in Belmar who wants honest and transparent government.