Paul Mulshine and I, to put it bluntly, come from different universes.
I’m an unreconstructed leftist, a liberal, a progressive — whatever you want to call it. He’s an old-line New Jersey, small-government, libertarian conservative whose logic I find maddening (I’m sure that, were he reading my columns, he’d say the same about me).
And then he writes a column like the one in today’s paper, which takes the state’s School Ethics Commission to task for clamping down on the free speech rights of school board members.
The column caught my eye because of two complaints filed by Monroe resident Jennifer Dressel against a pair of Monroe school board members alleging, in part, that they misrepresented themselves before the public.
As we’ll be writing in tomorrow’s paper, Ms. Dressel is accusing school board President Kathy Kolupanowich and board member Amy Speizer of speaking “separately at parent group meetings without school board approval, while leaving the impression that they represented the board. The complaint also alleges that Ms. Kolupanowich write a letter that implied she was speaking on behalf of the board without board approval and that Ms. Speizer should have
recused herself from matters dealing the board attorney.”
I don’t want to address the specifics of the complaints. It is the process that concerns me, the way in which the ethics rules can be used to quiet board members — whether they be critical of the board or board members defending board actions against critics.
Mulshine describes a Morris County case recently decided by the commission:
The incident began when Harmon, who is a pharmaceutical executive and lives in Long Valley, cast the sole dissenting vote against the school budget last year. His reasoning was that the budget was up 11 percent over the prior year and that this would lead to an increase in property taxes for the hard-working people of the township.
Voting against a budget isn’t illegal — yet. But then Harmon made the mistake of sending a letter to the editor of the local newspaper explaining why he thought voters should oppose the budget.
“The ethics code is just so squishy,” Harmon told me. “Any bozo with a beef can file a complaint against you.”
The bozo in question was a former school board member named Ruth Lisa McCurdy. She also wouldn’t return my call. I suspect these people think speech itself is illegal. In any event, McCurdy filed a complaint under a provision of the school board ethics code that says a member may not “take any private action that may compro mise the board.” She also disagreed with the budget figures in Harmon’s letter.
The commission dismissed the complaint but left intact an advisory opinion that allow board members to write letters as private citizens but to “not hold (themselves) out as a board member.”
Abbott Koloff, writing in the Morristown Daily Record, calls it a “challenge to democracy.”
The point is that school board members are always school board members. To pretend otherwise is disingenuous and to assume that everything that comes out of their mouths, whether it be an opinion on a controversial high school plan, state legislation or the Mets’ pitching staff.
And, in the case of letters to the editor, school board members have no control over how they are identified — our politcy is to always identify board members as board members.
The intent of the rule may have been good — to prevent board member comments from being mistaken as the opinions of the board — but it is overly broad and makes it more likely that board members will just keep quiet. That’s not good for voters, for public policy or democratcy.
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