July 17,2016
the staff of the Ridgewood blog
Ridgewood NJ, a reader said the ,Financial Advisory Committee was created by the mayor solely as a breeding ground for future council members willing to live in his shadow and image. It didn’t work. Disband it!
The new council need a clean sweep of Village Hall and the Financial Advisory Committee which has added little to no input to Village budgeting should be eliminated.
The Financial Advisory Committee was created on April 24th 2013, resolution 14-171. The leadership of Financial Advisory Committee is there just to stamp the Village Manager’s decisions. So she can say ‘an expert panel has looked at it and they agree with my approach”. She comes from the corporate world and knows how to put everything on outside ‘consultants’.
What is the purpose of the Financial Advisory Committee? They were cheerleaders for the three council members? Populated by partisan Bergen Leeds people ,they should be neutral. So, they are not a financial advisory committee, they are nothing more than a political action committee.
The Financial Advisory Committee has been populated with political hacks and friends of the former mayor and supporters of the Village manager with their own agenda’s leaving out Village tax payers .
The Financial Advisory Committee does not even have bylaws or keep meeting minutes .Lets face it , it was beyond funny that the Chairman of FAC, was a candidate for the council election, and Weitz is not even a finance guy.
The new Council needs to be prudent but decisive in their actions. Let’s not replicate the mistakes of the past
I agree. Like most actions by the former mayor, this group was created for his personal purposes, in this case at least two: to rubber-stamp his decisions with a faux economic rationale (e.g., the largest garage drawing) and as a feeder group to provide a credential for placing people loyal to him in various positions that he intended to fill with sycophants (village manager, two council candidates). We have a highly paid CFO who should be doing all this work and making these recommendations. (We also have a well-paid planner, but he’s useless and should be replaced.) The two defeated council candidates, with unknown continuing ties to the outgoing council members who endorsed them, remain on the committee; disbanding it would remove them from an advisory position to the council without having to “fire” them individually. And by the way, the FAC was originally going to be a board, not a committee, which would have had more clout; the other boards are Planning and Zoning. When establishing this group was under discussion, then-councilman Tom Riche voted against it, stating that the requirements for disclosure of potential conflicts of interest were insufficient. He was right. In addition, giving a bunch of barely vetted residents access to confidential financial and other information that only the council should see just because they work in banking or whatever is another creepy-crawly. Just dump it.
P.S. Another board is the Parks, Recreation, and Conservation Board.
All boards should have by laws and minutes.
The FAC seems like a tool of the council and not an independent body. They did not help to dispel this image when two members ran for council supported by the current council majority. Their letters to the editor in support of the council majority causes showed that they did not exercise good judgment.
They seemed to be doing favors for each other.
I would think that a “true financial advisory committee” could actually be an asset to the Village. It would have to be staffed with individuals who HAVE financial qualifications and not the type of people who were the majority in the last such group. Not all the council members claim to be financial wizards and qualified individuals could be very helpful for advising and suggesting–not controlling–new ways of looking at things. I think it could also be a time saver for the council members.
All committees should be independent of Council influence and they should not be forever appointments. The Planning Biard has a position for a village employee. I am not diuretic if this is even a good idea but if this position is to continue , it should rotate every few years to guard against any conflicts of interest.
Not diuretic but the word sure in its place! So much for auto correct!
Well for starters get rid of Janice Willett who sleeps through meetings. And Evan Weitz.
It was actually a good idea to have something like this in place. But, yes, Aronson destroyed it before it could get off the ground by packing it with those aligned to his narrow minded needs. The selection of Weitz is indicative of the problems Arongnson created. Weitz seems to be a top notch lawyer – – but is he a trained finance expert? Should he be chairman of a group whose purpose is to vet financial impacts of our Village projects? Its not to say a trained lawyer doesn’t have a place on the committee. But the idea was to tap into the finance expertise of those in town who were willing to share it. Instead, Arognson politicized and kept it from operating as it was intended.
Let’s see if this council can make a real go of it.