Charges against Thibault in NC dropped
By Joanne Degnan, Staff Writer
HIGHTSTOWN — Mayoral candidate Rob Thibault, who alleges borough police were harassing him Aug. 6 when he was issued a traffic summons for allegedly driving with a suspended license, will have his case heard by a West Windsor judge to avoid the appearance of a conflict of interest.
Mr. Thibault, 53, of South Main Street, who says a clerical error on someone else’s traffic ticket was at the root of his recent troubles with the NJ Motor Vehicle Commission, entered a plea of not guilty Wednesday.
He also showed the Herald documents confirming that the charges from North Carolina have been dropped.
After conferring with the prosecutor, Mr. Thibault also asked Hightstown Municipal Court Judge James Newman for a change of venue, which was granted.
”As I understand you’re running for office, and although I don’t know you and have never met you, in light of that circumstance I think it would behoove everybody…,” Judge Newman said.
The judge noted it would be inappropriate to transfer the case to East Windsor, as is often done with conflict cases, because Mr. Thibault has been a vocal proponent of consolidating the East Windsor and Hightstown courts.
”We’ll send it over to West Windsor. In light of everything that’s being talked about and going on between East Windsor and Hightstown, I don’t want to send it there,” he said, referring to East Windsor.
Mr. Thibault, the GOP candidate in the Nov. 2 election, said Wednesday that he was pleased with the judge’s decision. He said he expects the charges to be dismissed and that ruling should come from a court unaffected by the merger proposal he advocates so that decision isn’t political fodder in the fall campaign.
In addition to the court merger proposal, Mr. Thibault has also made the outsourcing of the Hightstown police functions to the East Windsor Police Department one of the linchpins of his mayoral campaign’s platform of lowering municipal property taxes. Police outsourcing has bitterly divided the community and Mr. Thibault has said he thinks his outspokenness on the police issue could have been behind Detective Ben Miller’s decision to pull him over Aug. 6.
Mr. Thibault said as he was leaving his home early Aug. 6 he noticed a police car parked across the street. Mr. Thibault said that after he pulled out of the driveway in his wife’s car, the police car followed him and pulled him over.
According to Mr. Thibault, Detective Miller told him his license was suspended because of an incident in North Carolina and issued him two tickets: one for driving while suspended, and one for failing to surrender his license to authorities after it had been suspended.
Mr. Thibault said he never committed the motor vehicle infractions in North Carolina that led to the suspension mistake in the first place. In fact, he says, he wasn’t even in North Carolina when the tickets were issued Aug. 31, 2007 to another New Jersey motorist with similar driver’s license number.
When that unidentified New Jersey motorist failed to appear in court in Halifax County, North Carolina several months later to answer charges of speeding and reckless driving, Mr. Thibault said a clerical error in the recording of that person’s driver’s license number apparently led to the erroneous suspension of his license in early 2009, instead of the scofflaw’s.
Mr. Thibault said Wednesday he does not recall receiving the required notification in the mail from motor vehicle officials in 2009 about his license being suspended and was surprised to learn about it last month from Detective Miller. He quickly hired an attorney in North Carolina to clear up the mess and the 2007 charges were dismissed Aug. 27, according to a copy of a Halifax County, North Carolina court document that Mr. Thibault showed the Herald on Wednesday.
New Jersey motor vehicle officials restored his driving privileges Monday and waived the normal fees associated with restoring a suspended license because the original suspension was in error, Mr. Thibault said. He showed the Herald the NJ Motor Vehicle Commission documents as well.
Judge Newman did not review any of those documents Wednesday because of the change of venue order. So while Mr. Thibault may now have legal permission to drive again from the NJ Motor Vehicle Commission, the summonses stemming from the Aug. 6 traffic stop in Hightstown are still pending against him until the West Windsor judge rules in the case.
Mr. Thibault was not immediately given a new court date.
Also still unresolved is the complaint that Mr. Thibault said he filed with the Mercer County prosecutor’s office against the Hightstown police. Mr. Thibault sees the traffic stop Aug. 6 as retaliation by borough police, whose jobs are jeopardized by the controversial outsourcing proposal.
Mr. Thibault claims he was harassed by police because the officer was parked outside his house, apparently waiting for him to leave for work. He also says the officer wrote the wrong court date on the ticket, which would have caused him to miss the required appearance before the judge, had the court clerk not alerted him to the mistake over the phone.
He says an anonymous phone tip to the editor of the Herald about his Hightstown tickets shortly after they were issued also seems to suggest to him that the entire episode was politically motivated.
Detective Miller has not responded to requests for comment, and Police Chief James Eufemia has said he can’t comment, per instructions from the Mercer County prosecutor’s office. That office, in keeping with its policy, has declined to discuss the status of its ongoing investigation into Mr. Thibault’s complaint and did not return a call Thursday.
Mr. Thibault has said the state police also are investigating. They, too, have declined comment, but a spokesman for the state Attorney General’s office, which oversees state police, said that office is aware of the complaint.
The police outsourcing proposal was recommended in an independent consultant’s report and estimated Hightstown could save $800,000 a year by contracting its police functions to East Windsor. A citizens’ group called Voices of Hightstown disputes that figure and intends to make a presentation of its analysis to the Borough Council at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday.
Borough officials have moved the council meeting to the upstairs room at the firehouse to accommodate the large crowd expected.
VOH says the $800,000 cost-saving figure contained in the consultant’s report is wrong because the borough police force costs $449,952 less to operate now than at the time the study was done in 2007. There are now 11 officers on the force compared to the 14 police officers who were on the payroll in 2007.
However, Council President Walter Sikorski has said the borough would need to hire three new officers to fill vacancies if the outsourcing does not occur.
The loss of revenue from Hightstown municipal court fines if the court merger goes through means the deal would end up costing the borough money, not saving it money, according to VOH. The consultant’s report had recommended that all court fines collected by a joint court system be kept by East Windsor.
Hightstown, its special labor attorney, and East Windsor are in the midst of negotiations to determine if a police/court outsourcing agreement can be reached.
Mr. Thibault, an outspoken supporter of the independent consultant’s study and the outsourcing negotiations, criticized the accuracy of VOH’s numbers at the last council meeting. He also has backed Democratic council candidates Sikorski and fellow incumbent Jeff Bond, who also support the outsourcing, announcing that in a Herald story that ran the same day he was issued the tickets.

