Sussex County Freeholder Director Jeffrey Parrott last night endorsed Green Township farmer Richard Vohden to be his running mate, giving Vohden the inside edge to fill a spot that is expected to be left vacant by when Freeholder Hal Wirths is confirmed as labor commissioner. 

Parrott made the announcement at a Republican county committee meeting last night in Sparta.

“He’s extremely versed in politics. He has the energy, desire and certainly the integrity,” Parrott told PolitickerNJ.com in a phone interview this morning.

But while Parrott’s endorsement makes Vohden the favorite to win the party’s upcoming convention to fill Wirths’ unexpired term, he is going to face at least one challenger in the June primary.  Four candidates are running for an open sheriff’s seat, leaving plenty of opportunities for candidates to form alliances and bracket together. 

Wirths will remain on the freeholder board until the state senate confirms him for the cabinet post – a process that is not expected to hit any major bumps but could easily take over a months (Wirths, who is currently acting labor commissioner, stopped taking his freeholder salary yesterday).

Once Wirths resigns his freeholder seat, the Sussex County Republican Committee will have 30 days to choose an interim replacement.  County Republican Chair Alice Hambell has tentatively scheduled the convention for late March, but she said she might bump it back to mid-April, depending on how fast Wirths is confirmed. 

Vohden, 72, spent 35 years in the construction industry before retiring in 1993.  Since then, he’s run his own farm full-time and has served on several open space and land use committees at a municipal and county level.  He is also the Sussex County Republican Committee’s first vice chair.

After initially fretting over her background as a big firm attorney, state Sen. Ronald Rice (D-Newark) today signed off on Lori Grifa of Montclair, Gov. Chris Christie's choice to run the state's Department of Community Affairs (DCA).

Rice said he is convinced Grifa would aggressively follow-thorough with a DCA audit of of the City of Newark. 

“The taxpayers, voters, legislature and the media have been very much concerned about the hiring practices in the City and the awarding of contracts for professional services as regularly depicted in the news media,” said Rice in a statement.  “While the original audit was a good starting point to begin discussing improprieties in Newark, we need the State’s law enforcement organizations to take a deeper look and ensure that no laws were broken in the awarding of contracts and lucrative jobs to campaign donors.”

Rice had written a letter to former Commissioners Joseph V. Doria, Jr., questioning the city's termination of employees "under the auspices of fiscal problems, (while) friends and political supporters of the mayor from out of town and within were being hired at high salaries and given pay raises on top of salaries that were already over $100,000."

There are no more candidacies in Michael Murphy’s future.

“People ask that question all the time, and my glib answer is I’m making too much money to run and not enough to win,” said Murphy, a former Morris County prosecutor who came in third in the 1997 Democratic gubernatorial primary, in a brief interview yesterday.

Although he never sought elected office again, Murphy, now a lobbyist, has remained politically active, running U.S. Rep. Rob Andrews’ (D-Haddon Heights) unsuccessful primary challenge to U.S. Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-Cliffside Park) in 2008.  He is the stepson of the late former Gov. Richard J. Hughes and stepbrother of Mercer County Executive Brian M. Hughes.

Murphy’s name continues has surfaced frequently in recent years as a potential candidate for one office or another.  

“If there’s someone with higher political aspirations and who’s extremely qualified in my family, it’s my brother Brian," he said. 

Former Bogota Mayor Steve Lonegan wants Gov. Chris Christie to eviscerate the Council on Affordable Housing (COAH) - not back what Lonegan sees as a so-called reform proposed this week by state Sen. Ray Lesniak (D-Elizabeth).

"The legislation will create even more powerful and destructive affordable housing bureaucracy than curently exists: hybrid super-bureaucracy that combines the State Planning Commission, the Economic Development Authority, the Home Mortgage Finance Association and the Commissioner of the Department of Community Affairs into a super bureaucracy that puts COAH on steroids," fumed Lonegan, who intends to  launch a radio and Internet campaign in opposition to the proposal in his capacity as state director of Americans for Prosperity.

Lonegan and Christie spent a portion of their GOP primary battle scrapping semantically over how to best demolish COAH, a state board shouldered with the obligation of creating fair and affordable housing options for all of New Jersey's towns, in accord with the Mount Laurel court decision. Both men argued that COAH has placed an undue burden of cookie cutter affordable housing development requirements on suburban towns.

"This bill does not 'gut' COAH," said Lonegan, selecting Christie's action verb of choice during last year's primary. "It shifts its power to a more complex and authoritarian bureaucracy. ...Chris Christie must live up to his commitment to end COAH, not make it even worse."

The latest political problem for Bergen County Executive Dennis C. McNerney: a state Department of Education report that found extraordinary waste and mismanagement at the Bergen County Technical and Special Services school district.  McNerney, flying solo these days following the criminal conviction of his mentor, initially sought to blame the GOP by noting that the former Superintendent of the school district, Robert Aloia, had been the County Administrator under his Republican predecessor, who left office seven years ago.  But McNerney was forced to back off after a reporter noted that his former chief of staff, John Susino, had signed several reimbursement checks to school officials as the district’s business administrator.  The conventional wisdom is the Susino, a Democratic State Committeeman and a former Executive Director of the Bergen County Democratic Organization when Joseph Ferriero was chairman, will be out of a job soon.

McNerney also had to retract and resend his original statement to The Record after initially calling for the resignation of all school board members who served during Aloia’s tenure; he wound up only seeking the ouster of Jack Drakeford, who was the board president until just a few months ago.

Incensed that Jersey City Councilman Steven Fulop said that his hiring as an Incinerator Authority inspector was politically motivated, former mayor Gerry McCann promised to sue Fulop so aggressively that it will put an end to his higher office aspirations.

“I’m totally going to sue him. I’m going to make sure that every single nickel that he gets to run a campaign against anybody will be my nickel,” said McCann.  “…I’ll have him in court for years. And since he’s doing it as a political candidate, I will sue his campaign fund.”

McCann has held the job for only three weeks, but he served in a similar position at the authority six years ago before getting the axe for, he said, political reasons (McCann had aided the campaign of Healy rival Lou Manzo, and Healy accused him of distributing the infamous picture of him passed out naked on his porch). 

“Healy’s people fired me.  But the point of it is that my sole objective there is to help straighten out some of the problems that are costing us so much money,” said McCann. 

McCann, who in 1992 had to resign during his second non-consecutive term as mayor after a federal bank fraud conviction, has remained active in Jersey City politics and currently serves on the city’s school board.   He is a close ally and family friend of Sean Connors, a police detective and fellow school board member who, like Fulop, is considered a mayoral hopeful in 2013 (or earlier if Healy – involved but not charged in the federal corruption cases against several Jersey City politicos – leaves office early).

Fulop contends that Healy gave McCann the job to secure Connors’ endorsement in last year’s mayoral contest – a charge McCann vehemently denies and says amounts to defamation.

Maggie Moran, who served as Gov. Jon Corzine’s Deputy Chief of Staff and as his re-election campaign manager, has joined the Laborers International Union of North America (LIUNA) as the Director of Business Development for the Eastern Region.  She’ll report to Raymond Pocino, the national Vice President and Eastern Regional manager and a Commissioner of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey.  Moran, who spent more than a decade as one of New Jersey’s top political operatives, will also serve as one of six Democrats on the congressional redistricting commission; Joseph Cryan (D-Union) appointed her to the panel just before leaving office last week.

A former Schools Development Authority (SDA) employee negotiated a change order with a contractor before leaving the authority to take a job with the same firm, then lobbied the authority to pay the firm $642,990 for the same change order, according to a report released by the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) today. 

“Former State employees are expressly prohibited from representing, appearing for, or
negotiating on behalf of their new employer, on any matter in which he or she was directly involved while employed by the State. In fact, there is a life-long ban on such conduct,” said Inspector General Mary Jane Cooper in a written statement.

The employee and firm were not named in the public version of Cooper’s report.

According to the report, the employee sought and obtained employment with the firm in the midst of negotiating the change order, leaving the SDA in the dark about the new arrangement.  Instead, the employee   “misled SDA management into believing that he was going to work for another public agency,” namely the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey.

Jersey City Councilman Steven Fulop says he’ll ask his colleagues to withhold funding for the Jersey City Incinerator Authority until Mayor Jerramiah Healy removes ex-Mayor Gerald McCann from his $50,000-a-year city job.

“The idea that the City would hire a convicted felon to its payroll during the same time period that key members of the administration are being tried in Federal court is incomprehensible,” said Fulop. McCann was Mayor from 1981 to 1985 and again from 1989 to 1992, when he was terminated from office following his criminal conviction.

Fulop noted that McCann’s hiring comes at a time when Jersey City is laying off and furloughing city employees amidst a proposed property tax hike.

“At a time when the Administration should focus on how to keep money in the pockets of its hard working residents, it moves to put an old time politician to the payroll,” said Fulop. “Let’s call this exactly what it is, this is pay back for McCann delivering his nephew Sean Connors into the Healy organization and in exchange for the Connors endorsement during the election. Every politico in the city knows this quid pro quo to be the truth when Connors endorsed Healy in the election and received his new position in the police department”

Gov. Christopher Christie will name a “seven-member commission to review the way gaming, sports and entertainment are overseen in New Jersey,” according to a Star-Ledger report.  The panel will look at the role of the New Jersey Sports and Exposition Authority, Xanadu, the horse racing industry, and Atlantic City tourism. 

Senate President Stephen Sweeney (D-West Deptford) yesterday asked Christie to review the role of the Casino Control Commission, and to consider whether casinos should be controlled by a small group of owners. A U.S. Bankruptcy Court's approval of the sale of Tropicana's Atlantic City casino to a group that includes Carl Icahn might mean that two individuals, Icahn and money manager Leon Black, would control eight out of eleven Atlantic City casinos.  Icahn could own four of the casinos - with the Tropicana and the Taj Mahal being the two largest - and Apollo Management, the private equity firm run by Black, owns Harrah's, which has four casinos in New Jersey.