By Victoria Hurley-Schubert, Staff Writer
Three members of the Borough Council, then Mayor-elect Yina Moore and then Councilwoman-elect Heather Howard violated the Open Public Meeting Act when they met unannounced on Dec. 28 to trim the number of applicants to the consolidation transition task force, according to an opinion from Borough Attorney Maeve Cannon.
The violation was inadvertent because the council members thought that because the mayor-elect and councilwoman-elect had not yet been sworn into office their presence would not violate the law, said Ms. Cannon at the council meeting on Tuesday night.
”Because you were going to be sworn in a few days and then voting on that very issue, I believe it violates the act,” she said.
In addition to Ms. Howard and Ms. Moore, Councilwomen Jo Butler, Jenny Crumiller, and then Council President Kevin Wilkes met on Dec. 28 as an ad hoc committee to discuss the information and narrow the field of 28 applicants to eight.
”I didn’t realize the other two were going to attend that meeting. That was unfortunate on my part,” said Ms. Cannon on Wednesday. “I would have cautioned them.”
”Both Councilwoman-elect (Heather) Howard and myself as mayor-elect were invited to attend,” said Mayor Moore. “We’ve since been advised by our attorney that . . . we may have run in error of the public open meetings act.”
Mr. Martindell said at the Tuesday meeting that the selection process has been tarnished and needs to be corrected.
”He said the information before the council “has come to us through a tarnished procedure and we need to cure that procedure. We need to cure that by discussing openly and publicly and not in closed session the criteria by which persons were selected on Dec. 28.”
Mr. Martindell said the eight finalists were chosen arbitrarily and capriciously.
”We have barred anyone else because we only opened the interview process to eight people,” he said.
Ms. Butler described the process by which resumes were sorted at the Dec. 28 meeting. Five of the resumes were eliminated because they were from township residents and the mayors agreed to select from among their own residents. Eight were set aside because the applicants only wanted to serve on subcommittees.
Council members interested in serving Ms. Butler and Mr. Martindell were grouped, as were members of the Joint Shared Services Consolidation Commission (JSSCC), including Anton Lahnston, JSSCC chair, Patrick Simon and Alice Small.
Several Princeton University personnel applied. Some were eliminated because they were non-residents. And applications that came from the Office of Community and Government Affairs, rather than the applicants themselves, gave “us some pause as to whether this was an institutional representation rather than a citizen representation,” said Ms. Butler.
The eight finalists W. Bradford Middlekauff, Bruce M. Topolosky, James Levine, Alexi Assmus, Hendricks Davis, Adrienne Kreipke, Patrick Simon and Mark Freda were subsequently interviewed at an open session of the council on Jan. 3.
The resumes not selected for interviews will be given to the task force once it is formed for possible selection to subcommittees, said Ms. Butler.
Borough Attorney Cannon said releasing the details of the Dec. 28 meeting was the measure needed to correct the violation of the open meeting act.
”You are having the same public discussion you had at that meeting,” she said. “The act provides that a governing body can take corrective remedial action by . . . revisiting the issue and having the dialogue and discussing what the criteria were and what was established and at this point you can move forward by establishing a new subcommittee.”
Three council members Ms. Trelstad, Ms. Butler and Mr. Wilkes were chosen as that subcommittee to pick a slate of four candidates from the eight candidates interviewed on Jan. 3 who will be voted on at special full council meeting next Tuesday.
This action would be a part of the corrective actions from the Dec. 28 meeting, said Ms. Cannon.
A committee of three council members is acceptable under the open meeting act because four members are needed for a quorum.

