Commissioner Haelig In DMUA History Lesson, Says Observer Used "Ugly Double Standard" In Editorial Which Overlooked Huge Patronage Grabs By GOP Big Shots And Money Grubbing Political Flunkies

January 2, 2005

To the editor of the Observer:

After years of hideous payroll padding and financial mismanagement at the DMUA, three new Republican commissioners inherited an agency that was virtually insolvent in 1982.

We quickly adopted new policies that gave us immediate credibility with the public by getting rid of the political flunkies and their relatives (20% of DMUA jobs).

We rescued the DMUA from near-insolvency by basing financial policies on reality instead of wishful thinking – and cut the 1982 operating budget by 19% on a year-to-year basis.

We established a culture of service and pride among DMUA employees who showed they were there to work - and we set a sewer rate of $225 which has held for 21 years.

If the big budget cuts and conservative fiscal policies we implemented in the 1980’s had not occurred, the basic sewer rate would have averaged $350 (instead of $225) for the last twenty years, a difference of more than $120 Million factored over 50,000 ratepayers.

Our conservative fiscal policies all derived from basic Republican principles which, coincidentally, were also being proposed for the federal government at the time by Ronald Reagan, the new Republican president.

Our success in preserving the ratepayers’ interests at the DMUA had consequences for me personally and professionally: We rubbed some of the Republican patronage gentry the wrong way, and their method of revenge and retaliation was to try to hurt my business, and try to smear me and members of my family.

Revenge and retaliation losses by my company averaged at least $70,000 a year, which was painful, but a small price to pay for the privilege of charting what was clearly the right course of action at the largest local sewer authority in New Jersey.

Over the years, my pay at the DMUA worked out to about $9 an hour (including the cost of health benefits) for efforts which saved our ratepayers more than $120 million.

Our policies at the DMUA survived until June 2001, when the commission majority appointed by the local Republican Club began draining and squandering vital authority reserves to buy votes in the 2001 and 2002 elections, destructive decisions causing a series of big deficits.

The $225 sewer rate, which could have survived until our grandchildren had grandchildren of their own (really), is now in jeopardy because of the greed and incompetence of these commissioners and their successors and the political bosses who control them.

My recent criticism of their bad decisions has produced the usual frenzy of ridicule, factual misrepresentations, threats against my basic rights as a citizen, and more attacks on my business.

You describe me in your editorial as “fed for decades at the public and political trough” and “rewarded for his past help to the GOP by being appointed and reappointed” to the DMUA, claims which are less than quarter-truths at best.

Put in context with the grotesque pension and other political payoff scams run for years on the taxpayers by a gaggle of political “leaders” who give only gratuitous lip service to the Republican principles which rescued the DMUA, your claims about me “feeding from the public trough” are ludicrous and representative of an ugly double standard.

Consider, for example, the failure of the Observer to pick up on the recent crony feedings at the County College where your ace reporter and editorial staff even missed the huge salary and pork barrel “job” recently handed to Assemblyman/Teacher David Wolfe (R-10^th District).

Mr. Wolfe is the new “Government Relations and External Affairs Liaison,” at the college, with annual compensation which includes a base of $123,203, teaching two sections per semester for another $8400 and a “health waiver payment” of $3410, in addition to his $49,500 salary and $11,000 health benefit as a member of the legislature.

Mr. Wolfe’s total annual compensation from “the public trough” is now close to $200,000, most of which is for a “job” many taxpayers would consider useless and a waste of public funds.

The new “job” was conferred on Mr. Wolfe by a college board of trustees that is front loaded with patronage recipients of both political parties, two of whom may shortly become beneficiaries of the largest single political payoff ever transacted in Ocean County.

By comparison, the cost for my services, including all benefits and the salary of $2000, has averaged under $7000 a year since I was first appointed to the DMUA.

I had numerous chances to engage in pension and payoff scams similar to those currently being run on the taxpayers by the political bosses and their flunkies, but I never did. I am now 68, an age where it would be unseemly to begin ripping off the taxpayers, even if I wanted to.

Robert K. Haelig Jr.
Commissioner-Dover Municipal Utilities Authority

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