Last night was quite the hootenanny over in Tabernacle NJ at the Township Committee meeting that was held at the Hawkins Road Fire station, with Mayor Mark Hartman stepping down after claiming that he had work obligations he had to deal with. Hartman handed the reigns over to veteran Committee person Noble McNaughton, who graciously accepted the role after just last Friday accepting the role of the Deputy Mayor that was left vacant by the resignation of the now internationally infamous Natalie Stone.

McNaughton began his term by telling the packed house of over one hundred Tabernacle residents that “after your public comments, we are going to try and answer your questions, now. We are not going to drag it out…If we don’t have the answers, we’ll try and get them for you. Ok?”, which was met with a loud cheer from the the audience.

NJ politics is rough and tumble, with clear cases of political retaliation existing like the whole Bridge Gate scandal, where two lanes of the Fort Lee Bridge were closed down to cause a traffic nightmare that many speculate was done because Fort Lee’s Mayor refused to support Christie’s 2012 Governor’s campaign. Two lanes of the Bridge were closed to traffic during morning rush hour for four days until the NY Port Authority Executive Director, Patrick Foye, stepped in and ended the charade, a charade which several people went to prison for, with Foye stating that the “hasty and ill-informed decision could have endangered lives” and also violated federal and state laws.

A similar decision was made to close Medford Lakes Road back on March 25th of this year after Tabernacle’s building inspector, Tom Boyd, and the town’s engineer, Thomas Leisse, made claims that the building was in imminent danger of collapse towards Medford Lakes Road after Solicitor Burns read a law that allows towns to avoid the public bidding process if a public emergency exists. It was at that same meeting that the town clerk Mary Alice Brown, suggested that the township push back the April workshop meeting one week to allow for the enough time to legally advertise and accept bids for a structural engineer, but that suggestion was shot down by the town’s solicitor, William Burns.

While watching the video of the March 25th meeting I noticed that Leisse leaned into the man next to him and whispered a sweet nothing in his hear. You cannot hear what Leisse said to the man in the video, who was identified at last nights meeting as architect Scott England from RYEBread, who was also set to gain by helping to design the new municipal complex, and who also provided two questionable structural engineering reports that listed ridiculous “structural” issues like the artificial siding being installed with roofing nails.

But even though I could not hear the sweet nothing on the video, I knew that the town uses an audio recording system that might have picked up what those sweet nothings were that Leisse said to England, and boy was I right.

In a true hot mic moment, Leisse can be heard faintly saying “Cause technically they could under my contract” as Brown suggests to the Committee that they push back the next workshop meeting a week. Leisse goes on to say “Cause technically they could under my contract. They think I want to do that option, but I don’t.”

The option that Leisse did not want the town’s Committee to do, was to put out a bid for a structural engineer to provide an inspection of the building that Leisse and Boyd had just declared was in imminent danger of collapse, but without such a report from a licensed structural engineer stating the building in imminent danger of collapse, the Pinelands Commission wouldn’t approve the emergency demolition. So when Leisse told England that they could “do it under his contract”, I believe he did so to avoid not just the independent inspection, which I think would have shown that the building was not in danger of collapsing, but I believe it was also a not so clever way to avoid the need to wait the extra three weeks to hire a legitimate structural engineer. But why?

Possibly because the contract to sell the property that was set to house the new municipal building had an expiration date of June 27th, and once the contract to buy the property expired, there would also be no contract to do the engineering and design work required for the new multimillion dollar building that it seemed only a small handful of people wanted, which just so happened to be most of the town’s professionals.

At the March 25th meeting, soon to be ex-deputy Mayor Natalie Stone, recommended that the township bring in even more than one structural engineer to inspect the old town hall after hearing about the Pinelands Commission’s demand that they needed a report from a licensed structural engineer to approve the demolition. Stone’s request though, was met by Thomas Leisse claiming that they couldn’t wait due the imminent danger, and Tom Boyd doubling down by saying that if the Committee did not vote on the demolition contract that night of March 25th, that he would be forced to file a suit against the township and bring the Committee people in front of a Judge for not immediately abating an emergency.

So you literally had the town’s professionals lying to the committee in order to have them pass the demolition resolution to ironically give the contract to RICCO demolition, in what appears to be a possible RICO case, only we are not talking about the Suave type of Rico, we are talking about the criminal enterprise type of RICO.

NJ’s laws against causing false public alarms are pretty clear.

“A person is guilty of a crime if he initiates or circulates a report or warning of an impending fire, explosion, bombing, crime, catastrophe or emergency, knowing that the report or warning is false or baseless and that it is likely to cause evacuation of a building, place of assembly or facility of public transport, or to cause public inconveniences or alarm.”

Not only has this now months long road closure been a major public inconvenience, costing farms and businesses to lose their time and money, and created numerous issues including traffic nightmares for schools and locals ion roads being used as detours, but the closure has now caused several serious car accidents with physical injuries.

So last night when I spoke at the Tabernacle Township meeting, I let Leisse have it! I played the audio of him whispering not softly enough to Scott England, saying that they could “do it under his contract”, which “it” was the contract for the structural engineering requirement that the Pinelands Commission needed for an emergency demolition approval. Only Leisse is not a structural engineer, he is a chemical engineer, which is the very reason the Commission rejected their application for an emergency demolition.

The township’s clerk, solicitor, and township manager, who all had to know that Leisse and Boyds were not structural engineers, knew that they were not qualified to make such a determination about the Town Hall’s structural integrity. But yet they let the road be closed anyway? It seems like structural integrity, isn’t the only integrity, that is in question here.