BY SETH MANDEL
Staff Writer
MONROE – In response to allegations that he was involved in a conflict of interest, Monroe Township Mayor Richard Pucci has decided to discontinue his consultant work for a political action committee.
Pucci said he will also take a series of other steps as a way of seeking stricter ethical codes of conduct than the law requires.
“I have always operated at the highest ethical standards,” Pucci said. “When you go through the facts and you look at the factual content of everything I did and the legal opinions we received and my actions, they have always been and always will be totally ethical, totally above-board.”
Recent newspaper articles have noted Pucci’s professional consulting work for a political action committee (PAC) linked to developer Jack Morris. Gannett New Jersey reported that Pucci has been working as a paid consultant for New Directions for Responsible Leadership, a PAC to which Morris has made contributions.
Morris, who has made applications to the Monroe Planning Board, is reported to have an interest in building a minor league baseball stadium as part of a large development called Monroe Marketplace on Route 33.
Pucci, who sits on the Planning Board, said that over the years he has requested legal opinions from Township Attorney Joel L. Shain every time a possible conflict could arise. In each of those cases, Pucci said, he has followed the legal and ethical statutes to the letter, a fact he believes has been ignored by those who have publicly levied allegations of an apparent conflict of interest.
“I don’t make the law, but I follow the law,” Pucci said.
Pucci is in his 19th year as mayor of the Middlesex County community that borders Manalapan.
In the late 1980s, Pucci joined the Middlesex County Improvement Authority, for which he currently works as executive director.
In 1991, he was hired as a part-time consultant for New Directions, which was founded by former Middlesex County state Sen. John Lynch. That position led to a full-time consulting job with New Directions.
Two weeks ago, Pucci requested a legal opinion from Shain regarding that situation.
Shain determined there is no conflict of interest; that Pucci need not recuse himself from Planning Board votes regarding Morris’ projects; and that if Pucci’s private consulting work was not for a PAC, the question would never have even been raised.
According to Shain, New Directions receives more than $500,000 in contributions annually from more than 200 donors. Morris contributes less than 2 percent of that $500,000, Shain said.
In July 2004, Morris received final approval for a commercial subdivision in Monroe. More significant, however, is Morris’ current involvement in the baseball stadium project.
Morris’ Edgewood Properties is behind one of three proposals for a development along Route 33. His Monroe Marketplace proposal would be located on the westbound side of Route 33 between Perrineville and Bentley roads. In addition to the baseball stadium, the project would include high-end retail space, luxury condominiums, a commuter lot and a performing arts center.
Morris has also donated land in that location for a new Make-A-Wish Foundation headquarters.
To avoid the appearance of any impropriety, Pucci is resigning as consultant for New Directions, and will refrain from participation in any project in the township involving Morris.
“That’s so important to the town, I don’t want to have the attention of the issue that’s been raised now take over for the decision-making process on Route 33,” Pucci said. “I don’t want that attention to be put in the wrong direction.”
Pucci said he does not feel there was a conflict, and said he was advised by Shain that he need not recuse himself from those discussions.
“I’m trying to clear my name and get to the next juncture, when I didn’t do anything wrong, and I don’t know how to get there,” Pucci said.
Pucci’s responsibilities with New Directions included assisting in planning and strategizing for political campaigns, analyzing poll data and helping to recruit new members for the Democratic Party. He was paid $4,000 a month for those services.
Pucci noted that those responsibilities did not include raising money for the firm or seeking out contributions. He added that he resents such “outrageous” implications.
Pucci announced he is working to create a seven-member panel to establish and oversee compliance with a set of more intense ethical standards.
“Simply put, true reform will not exist until publicly financed campaigns are implemented at every level of government,” he said in a statement. “But something must be done in the interim.”
Pucci said he intends to include the Eagleton Institute of Politics at Rutgers University and members of the media, and would like to invite former Democratic Monroe Councilwoman Lee Farber, former Republican Councilman and current Planning Board member David Rothman, retired state Superior Court Judge Alan Rockoff, who is a Republican and former prosecutor, and Common Cause New Jersey leader Harry Pozycki to join the panel.
Pucci said he expects to have the panel assembled in the next month, and within three months will begin holding work sessions.
Two weeks ago, the Monroe Township Republican Club of Middlesex County released a statement in response to the information reported in area newspapers. The club called for Pucci’s immediate resignation as mayor.
“Although it is noble to act as a public servant to the members of the community, it is not noble, and is actually disgraceful, to use his position as a public servant for his own private benefit,” the statement read. “This is precisely why criminal laws exist, to punish those public servants who violate the trust of the people for their own personal gain and to provide for enhanced penalties for those public servants that do so.”
Pucci responded by noting that the law supports the decisions and actions he has made regarding these issues.
“I’m not going to resign for something that is totally ethical and nothing was wrong,” Pucci said. “I wouldn’t even consider it. The bottom line is, I’ve done nothing except what’s best for the Monroe residents, and we’ll let the Monroe residents decide who should be their mayor and who should be their council people.”
The GOP club’s statement also said that the conflict of interest in this case was elaborate, but clear nonetheless, calling Pucci’s connection with Morris “high-tech bribery,” and wondering whether direct payoffs from builders and special “sweetheart” deals with attorneys could be expected in the future.
“These things could be about the only things worse and a more obvious form of bribery for this Hall of Famer,” the statement read.
Pucci said those who make such accusations ignore his record of service and could not be more wrong in their speculation of his future intentions.
“My whole career has been based on not only professionalism, but based on a high level of integrity, and I absolutely, in this case or any other case, have always kept to that and I’ll continue to do that,” Pucci said.
The Republican statement also questioned Pucci’s professional past, and the county’s hiring of Pucci to a position where his goals as a businessman and his responsibilities as a public servant could be mutually exclusive.
“It is a matter of common knowledge and common sense to anyone that objectively examines the situation that this is a man who could not make it in private industry and has chosen to make his fortune on the backs of the taxpayers,” the statement continued.
Pucci called the allegations “vicious,” and a manifestation of frustration over election results by a group that, as evidenced by their club status, is not the official voice of the Republican Party, with whom he has an established, professional relationship, he said.
“The job performance will be judged by who’s paying me, and that’s the voters of Monroe and the improvement authority board and the residents of the county,” Pucci said. “When I do my consultant service, which is for an entity that wants to produce party-building and results, they’ll make that judgment.”
Published reports, political statements and legal opinions have throughout the public discussion on this issue seemed to reflect one consistency, however: the importance of perception.
Pucci has said repeatedly that although he has followed the law, his actions have been cast as corrupt. His critics, both in public statements and published comments, have stated that logic and reason would dictate that Pucci’s political and professional connections are no coincidence.
It is a lesson Pucci said he has learned from this experience and, as he wrote in his statement, is the reason he will recuse himself from certain future Planning Board applications, distance himself from the Route 33 Land Development Task Force he created, and establish the ethics panel.
“There exists a need for a higher standard, even higher than the law, a standard the public rightly deserves,” he said.