Reader says Nobody cares whether RPD or RFD test-takers have any relationship with a current member of the Village Council or not.
Nobody cares whether RPD or RFD test-takers have any relationship with a current member of the Village Council or not. Yet you won’t stop talking about it. It has no relevance to the topic at hand. Your continued harping on it seems to show that you are trying to sow general confusion or to deflect attention from the topic immediately at hand (namely: non-police and non-firefighter municipal hiring practices in Ridgewood). Is this not the textbook definition of a red herring? If so, can we please be forgiven for ignoring it?
A municipality that flouts or ignores the law in question for 25 years MUST BE consistently failing deliberately to give priority to qualified candidates who actually live within its borders. Thus, its hiring practices are literally out of control and must be amended immediately.
Most qualified potential candidates who are also local residents are likely to be unaware of the law operating in their favor because the management of the municipality has itself forgotten about its requirements. That’s a heck of a lot of ignorance, institutional and otherwise. The likelihood of such collective ignorance and lack of management control producing many, many violations of the law in question over a twenty-five year period is objectively high.
More particularly, the municipality in question will be extremely lucky if one or more such violations did not occur within the one, two, three, six-year period (whatever it happens to be) specified by the statute of limitations (i.e., the recent past) such that the hiring decision(s) is either currently subject to being ‘undone’ as a result of a well-pled lawsuit, or will be held to have triggered liability for money damages awardable to the plaintiff behind the suit.
You are asking someone to simply name for you any and all Ridgewood residents in the past twenty-five years who were qualified and applied for a position with the village and were improperly turned down in favor of respective out-of-town applicants.
With all due respect, and at least in this forum, this is a preposterous demand. If you are curious about the potential scope of the village’s liability for current and past violations of the hiring practices law in question, you should conduct your own investigation. Pounding your fists at the insufficiency of a collection of comments on a local blog accomplishes nothing and, frankly, makes you look like a fish out of water (or worse).
OTOH, Nobody here ultimately wishes anyone ill. The issues and good governance are what count, and your time was not wasted if you would just try to broaden your perspective to include more than just the political, or the tactical.
