Why is Galloway Going Down This Road Again?

The people we elect to serve on Council are in turn responsible for hiring the people who serve in the township administration.  In the past two years, Galloway has become the laughingstock of Atlantic County due to the dysfunction on council and in the township administration because of these incidents:

1.     firing of the township clerk and her subsequent lawsuit against all of Council and township administration

2.     the prior mayor being forced out of office

3.     three people churned through the township manager  position before we finally got to the person serving currently

4.     newly hired CFO attempted to extort “lunch money” from the township taxpayers while earning $105,000 per year in salary

Before the circus of the past two years, we were treated to the forced resignation of a member of council who was arrested for stealing beer from a liquor store.

Meanwhile the town is in a deep financial hole due to the reckless manner in which money was spent in the years when the local economy was in good shape and the town was receiving large sums of money generated by impact fees being paid by developers who were building Four Seasons and Blue Heron Pines to name only two sources.

All of this points to the fact that for eight years, Galloway Council has been controlled and mismanaged by the Republicans. The common denominator in this scenario is that Theresa Lucarelli, the Republican Municipal Chair, has been the chief architect of this mess. She is the local Republican “leader” who has chosen who runs on the GOP ticket.  Now coming off of that hideous record, she is pushing John Mooney on the public.

This is the same John Mooney who has a lawsuit pending against Atlantic City. This lawsuit was generated by his resigning over the fact that he was demoted from chief of police to deputy chief and was being replaced by a public safety director.   When he was promoted to chief in 2006, he collected $218,000 for 390 days of unused sick leave plus another $31,000 for unused vacation!  And those figures are from 2006 when he was promoted to chief, God knows what he walked away with in 2010 when he resigned and then decided to sue Atlantic City charging “reverse discrimination.” (Thanks to Galloway Township News for putting this up on their website.)

The governor of NJ has been an outspoken critic of this kind of “payout” to people who leave office with a large pension and lifetime health benefits after having earned a very good salary paid by taxpayer dollars and then want another large sum dropped on them for not having taken days off from work due to illness.  It is unspeakably hypocritical for a Republican to campaign on bringing good government and fiscal responsibility to Council when that individual (Mooney) has benefited enormously from a broken and corrupt system.

Galloway taxpayers should think twice before voting for Mooney.  Voters should be aware of his attitude in regard to suing the taxpayers,  “the hand that feeds” him, and the fact that he’s been handpicked by the person who has put people on Council that brought us incompetence, financial chaos, and not one idea of how to solve the issues facing the township.

Michael Conley

Galloway Township, NJ