October 24, 2002: Dover GOP Musical Chairs

Ocean County Politics .com

Aldrich

Fox

All Four GOP Musical Chairs Participants Abandoned Their Constituents And Resigned Their Elected Offices To Grab Expensive Political Payoffs Financed With Public Funds

Everybody On The Gravy Train Except The Taxpayers; Credibility Of Dover Township Government At Rock Bottom

Dover Township - A cynical game of manipulation and musical chairs has helped to reduce the credibility of local government to a new low as all four of the principals broke basic commitments to the people who elected them.

• Raymond Fox changed his phone number, moved to Cape May and resigned from the Township Committee in the wake of promises of a payoff from a compensation claim he filed against the school system.

Fiure

• Fox’s appointed replacement is Michael Fiure, a Republican candidate recently moved here from Manville in Somerset County, where he served as an elected Councilman until he broke his commitment to the people who elected him. He walked away from his oath of office and the problems of his community and resigned from the Manville Council to take a patronage job in the Somerset County Prosecutor’s office. Then, a few months later, he resigned from the prosecutor’s job.

Haines

• Virginia Haines, the other Republican Township Committee candidate, was an elected State Assembly member who resigned her elective office in the first year of her term to grab a $100,000 job as Whitman Administration Lottery “Director”, and continued to break her commitments to Dover Township - including a commitment as a legislator to confront overdevelopment and affordable housing problems.

• Haines, in another betrayal of the public trust, wanted to run for the Township Committee this year, but she needed to get Mayor Clarence Aldrich, a declared candidate for re-election, out of the way first. So Haines bought Aldrich off, using public funds of course, so Hizzoner would get a big political payoff of his own.

• Aldrich put in an application for a “Superintendent” job at the Dover Municipal Utilities Authority, where Haines controlled all but one of the rubber stamp commissioners and, following a shameless falsification of the public record, Aldrich served notice that he would not complete his term of office if he received the DMUA job with its promise of a pension in three years of five or six times the one he is currently entitled to.

• Haines "resigned temporarily" as a DMUA Commissioner in another pension scam maneuver. Then Haines was appointed to Aldrich’s committee seat and is a candidate for a three year term.

The round robin series of mid term elective office resignations and the abandonment of the most basic of constituent obligations, represented a wholesale betrayal of Republican principles by Haines, Aldrich, Fox and Fiure serving notice on 11,000 rank and file Republican voters that they were again being taken for granted.