The Story Behind The Story: WHAT IS GOING ON HERE?

(GLOUCESTER CITY, NJ 08030)(January 13, 2023)–At least one person and probably several people in our city government don’t want us to ask too many questions and they definitely don’t want to give the city taxpayers the answers.

The average person has no idea how many police cars the city has.  Is that accidental or by design?  If you follow the city council’s resolutions and ordinances you will see SUV after SUV being bought but rarely if ever, see any cars being sold.  Judging from the price of the new vehicles, it does not appear that older vehicles are being traded in on the new.

As stated before, there always seem to be six cars in the church parking lot and/or the former firehouse on Bergen Street.  From time to time there will also be a big a$$ black SUV with heavily tinted windows (is that legal in New Jersey?)  This vehicle is presumed to be the part-time chief/part-time Administrator’s car. 

An OPRA (Open Public Records Act) was submitted for a list of city vehicles.  The list was provided but it was current to April 2022.  A lot has changed since then.

The next question – how many police officers do we have?  Go back and read the council’s resolutions and ordinances.  Four new officers have been hired in the past few months.  One was a Special Officer, basically, a part-time officer called in when needed.  Is this person receiving benefits (health insurance, time off, etc?)  In the real world, a part-time person would not receive benefits, but this is not the real world.  It is Gloucester City.

Other new officers are Class II or Class III.  To qualify for that job (usually a school resource officer) the candidate must be a retired police officer.  Why not a veteran?  One such officer has been collecting a pension from the Police and Firemen’s Pension System for years and he is collecting a paycheck from the Board of Education.  Is he and the new School Resource Officers collecting benefits?  Maybe working toward a second pension plan?  That is called “double dipping.” It will take a lot of OPRA requests to get that information.

OPRA requests don’t always provide the desired results.  A request was recently submitted for six months of credit card statements.  ALL credit card statements were requested but what came back was three months of statements for only Home Depot.  It was necessary to waste everyone’s time and effort to get the other three months’ statement.  In addition, it will take even more time and effort to prove or disprove that the city has other credit cards and who is authorized to use them.

While spending more unnecessary time and effort trying to figure out how many vehicles the city has, an OPRA request was submitted for gas receipts with the vehicle

 identified \

(license plate number, perhaps.)  The answer was that Gloucester City buys our fuel from Bellmawr and only the total amount due is on the bill.  There is no information concerning which car, what date, or how many gallons per car.

What jumped out on the bill was at the bottom “A copy of the Fuel Master Transaction Listing.”  If the Chief of Police (or is he the part-time Administrator for this?) had just provided the information requested, it would make life much easier for everyone involved.  But, it would also have provided the number of vehicles in use.  Are the taxpayers not supposed to have that information

The more the city officials refuse to give requested information to the taxpayers the more it looks as though something is being hidden.  The question is – how much?

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