Bergen Republicans ask feds to probe improvement authority
By Matt Friedman, PolitickerNJ.com ReporterBergen County Republican Chairman Bob Yudin today sent a letter to U.S. Attorney Chris Christie asking him to expand his probe of Bergen County officials to the operations and fee structure of the Bergen County Improvement Authority (BCIA).
Yudin pointed to County Executive Dennis McNerney’s appearance at a Glen Rock school board meeting, during which he urged members to use the BCIA to issue bonds for school expansion projects. Members of the school board, however, decided to seek the bonds on their own.
Yudin said that McNerney wanted to strong-arm the school board into accepting the bonds from the BCIA so that Bergen County Democratic Organization (BCDO) allies would stand to earn thousands of dollars in fees.
“The BCIA is at best, a shadowy organization that exists, as far as I can tell, primarily to generate fees from the sale of bonds for donors to the Bergen County Democratic Organization and to the BCDO attorney Dennis Oury, who is also the attorney for the BCIA,” wrote Yudin in the letter.
The BCIA was subpoenaed in May by federal authorities regarding a probe of BCDO Chairman Joe Ferriero and BCDO counsel Dennis Oury. Dozens of Bergen County towns were also subpoenaed.
Yudin said that, since taking office in 2003, McNerney has pressed many towns to use the BCIA for financing, and noted that the BCIA also made a $103 million loan to the ill-fated EnCap project.
“There are a great many things the public does not know about the operations of the BCIA that I am sure would be of extreme interest to taxpayers. The BCIA seems to operate with little oversight by the county’s elected officials and with practically no transparency whatsoever,” wrote Yudin.
Bill Maer, a spokesman the BCDO, said that the attack was a "a different bow on the same package.”
“It’s good to see the Republicans are continuing to come up with campaign issues by reading the newspaper. It’s their standard read the newspaper, send a press release, try to get cheap press," he said. "You would think that after all these years of defeat they would know that people are smarter than that, and do not listen to their typical campaign rhetoric.”
McNerney Chief of Staff Brian Hague said that the issue was simply a matter of finding a way for the school to save money based on the county's superior bond rating.
"We’re doing our part to save the taxpayers’ money, and one way is to use our AAA bond rating as opposed to the borough’s AA bond rating," he said. "It would be a shame for the residents to have to pay more than is necessary because a school board needs to consider better financing alternatives.”
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Better late than never
this should have been done years ago
No Comment
McNerney had a lot to say to the Glen Rock BOE and the many towns they tried getting into to fund projects like COmmunity Centers in Fort Lee, FairLawn & Bergenfield but now he is silent - if the BCIA is so good why not answer the questions?
Message to BCRO: McNerney is up for election NEXT year
Is McNerney running this year? R the Bergen Republicanz running against the Bergen County Improvement Authority? I thought they were running against Ganz & McPherson, two of most vulnerable Freeholder candidates ever? Y nothing about the actual targetz of an actual race that the BCRO is running candidates in?
BCIA is a cess pool
When are Democrats going to get smart and cut Oury loose?
Will they have to lose three freeholder seats this year before someone wakes up?
The guy is kryptonite.
Vote Column A - All the way!
Mc Nerney is next year
Ruiz, the rest of your posting needs to be translated into English. Capiche ?
Ill go slow for BRoy
No one cares about the McNerney or the BCIA. No one. People care about how hard it is to keep your crib in B.C. Why spend time inventing a bad guy (McNerney, BCIA, etc) when people want to hear some solutions to creeping tax increases, high gas prices, lost jobs, and overcrowding, poor transportation, etc? 99% of B.C. does not know who McNerney IS. This is "look I'm doing something" posturing, not a campaign strategy.
smarter than Bill Maer
ever imagined w
Process denied
Kathy, As you know Bergen County was hijacked some years ago, while the Republicans were asleep at the wheel. Since then the pay to play contractors call the shots and there is nothing you or Loretta Weinberg can do about it. The Ferriero machine trounced the Real Democrats for two years in a row now. If you really want a change this year it is not good enough to wait for Chris Christie to come down from the mountain, with indictments. You can help this years honest opposition to the status quo.
Mc Nerney
Ruiz,
if 99% of the people dont know who Mc Nerney is. How come Mc Nnerney got all those votes in 06 ? uuummm
ashcroft, gonzalez, mukasey, goodling.....
The Department of Justice should probe itself. The total amount of money that was "extorted" by the Democratic lawmakers and their cronies pales in comparison to the gift(no bid contract) that ashcroft($52 million) got to monitor the crimnals at Zimmer Holdings.
bcia
It's amazing. The County Executive urges a school board to save taxpayers money by using the county's AAA bond rating and Republican "Yahoo" Yudin issues a press release criticizing him and the BCIA. It just goes to show that the republican boss is as out of touch with reality as therest of his party. Let's face it the repubs can't win an election in bergen county so if the people won't vote for them why would they listen to Boss Yudin. But what really amazes me is the long, meandering and totally incomprehensible diatribe from one Kathy Callahan. Is this the same Kathy Callahan woh couldn't even win a county committee seat in the Democratice Primary. Who goes on other sites and accuses the Clinton campaign of stealing money from her. Who claims she was threatened at a polling place by "goons" on election day.(of course she never filed any charges). The best part of the whole thing is that the repubs and the so called "real" dems can't get out of their own way never mind win an election.The real point is why aren't the taxpayers in Glen Rock mad at the school board for borrowing money at higher rates and passing the cost on to them?
vet1948
ok are you one of the GOONS that takes down Republican signs in Bergen County. Better still are you a Ferriero DPW totie and Lacky.? Ferrieros days are numbered and you know it. Will you be joing him in the Federal Pen.? Both Kathy Callahan and Bob Yudin are good people who dont spew out the usual Goebbels propaganda in cigar smoke filled rooms.
Maer. Roginsky, et al
These guns for hire are at the center of the "rotting core" of politics.
They contribute little, if anything to the discourse except "fat" fees and the notion that because someone is dumb enough to pay them, that somehow they know what's best!
Notice how they never have a "private" sector account or customer? They couldn't get away with it in the real world of business.
Vote Column A - All the way!
broy
Republicans don't have money to put up signs in Bergen so there is no need to take them down. read the election results. The only one "spewing"is you and you are spewing sour grapes.
BCBOE
I have made the following letter public. See Letter Below that I sent to BCBOE
a Former Candidate
i ran for county committee
above
I notice she does not name the Assistant U.S. Attorney thatshe spoke to so it could be verified. At this point in time there is no report filed with the Closter police about all these supposed illegal activities that went on in the polls. Why didn't she file criminal charges with the Closter Municipal Court.I know if someone harrassed me like she says she was I would certainly file criminal charges with the Closter Court.
Sour Grapes and propaganda
VAT1948 aka Bill Maer. Hope you brush up on your jailhouse reporting of your pals in a few months
Scandal
http://www.phillyburbs.com/pb-dyn/news/112-08032008-1571929.html
For some reason PolitickerNJ stays away from Burl Co GOP scandal stories. Makes you wonder.
I am certainly not telling VET1948, Bill Maer or anyone
.................
I am certainly not telling VET1948, Bill Maer or anyone else on line the name of the U.S. Assistant Attorney who read the entire report that I wrote from start to finish and listened closely to me.
The office of the U.S. Attorney responded to my very serious allegations, anxieties, worries and concerns... And then the U.S. Atorney's office and Assistant US Attorney told me precisely what he was going to do...They made a formal decision and took the entire matter out of my hands
And I have every good reason to believe and trust that he and they followed up and through on their plans!
.....................................
As I Recall The Republicans Were Mired In...
...some scandalous shenanigans before the Dems took over in Bergen County.
Simply going from tweedledee to tweedledummer is no solution. The solution is to actually make it a criminal offense to take a bribe. (What a radical concept, eh? ;-)
As it is now, bribery is 100% legal!!! It's the way we finance our campaigns. No effing wonder things are all screwed up.
Most of our elected officials are far more beholden to their "contributors" than they are to ordinary constituents with no money to give them.
What BC and NJ need are 50 thousand Kathy Callahans in BOTH parties all running for county committe slots and taking back NJ governance from the political vampires that are deeply embedded into New Jersey's economic/political bloodstream.
As for Christie, he remains a political hack who's trying to run for governor as if he were some crime busting hero, when the opposite is true.
He will only bust the most blatant corruption. He will never deal with the underlying systematic/endemic patterns. Why? Because he's a corrupt partisan creature of the Bush administration. If he was truly honest he would have been fired along with the rest of the Federal Prosecutors who lost their jobs for being too fair and decent. Christie passed Bush's "loyalty" test.
The patterns of corruption in NJ clearly meet the requirements for RICO investigations/prosecutions. If Christie had been serious about cleaning up this state from the beginning of his tenure we would have had at least a THOUSAND convicted pols, associates and patrons by now! That's how pervasive is the culture of corruption in NJ!
When you trace the corruption to the top of the dollar food chain; it's totally bipartisan. The same industries and "interests" that own the establishment Republicans own the establishment Democrats. They must laugh at all the "little people" who pay taxes and fight with each other over "gays, guns, abortion etc etc".
Meanwhile, the corporate media keep us all nicely distracted and diverted from the reality that the political vampires are feeding off of our life's blood.
It's the SYSTEM stupid!!!
From Frederick Douglass
Current Corruption
Mr Lento, Please name anything under Bergen County Republican control that even comes close to anything like we see in the Ferriero gang today ?. The Republicans have been out of power in Bergen for so long. Name one Bergen County Republican current candidate for office who is corrupt or is tweedledee or Tweedledum ?
Ignore him.
He's a whining liberal fool who's opinions and takes have no basis in reality.
He couldn't find Hackensack if you dropped him on Essex Street!
Vote Column A - All the way!
Broy, When Republican's Start Coming Out For...
....100% public financing of campaigns; then I might consider voting for them.
Due to a corporatist/anti-government ideology, most Republicans would give away for free what corrupt Democrats have to be bribed to do (and that's charitably assuming that all Republicans would be honest ;-) .......at least with Democrats (even crooked ones!) some meagre benefits do find their way to the poor and working classes.
The answer isn't to elect Republicans; it's to reform the Democratic party from the grass roots on up.
Beyond that, there SHOULD be bi-partisan coalitions to institute radical campaign finance reforms and to change to sentencing for crimes that involve the betrayal of a public trust/white collar crimes.
I doubt many smart pols would take (or be offered) illicit inducements if the penalty was 25 years with no parole for a first offense!
I have no problem with corrupt Democrats spending the rest of their lives in prison.....and then being replaced by decent progressives! :-)
From Frederick Douglass
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