Little Holds Her Ground

By Art Gallagher

Declaring that it was not a partisan issue but an individual decision, Highlands Mayor Anna Little again joined the two Democrats on Highlands Council in approving a amendment to the Highlands PBA contract, over the objections of her Republican successor, Council President Frank Nolan, and her Republican predecessor, Councilman Rick O’Neil.

In introducing the resolution to the public, Little distributed the statement she posted on her facebook page over the weekend.

Little said that the new agreement would result in a saving of $500,000 to Highlands taxpayers vs. a net savings of $34,000 had the resolution failed, which would have resulted in layoffs of three police officer.  During her remarks, Little admitted the numbers in her statement were her “beliefs” and the result of assumptions regarding police overtime of $18,000 per month provided by the Police Chief.  She admitted that her numbers had not been certified by the Chief Financial Officer.

Little addressed the penalties in the new agreement only after Nolan brought them up.  Nolan asserted that Little’s calculations were off by at least $300,000, which she disputed.  Nolan argued that the council should not accept the penalities knowing that there will very likely layoffs necessary that will trigger the penalites.  At that point Little scolded Nolan for speaking out of turn regarding Executive Session matters that council had not agreed to make public.

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All Eyes On Highlands Tonight

Will Anna Little End Her Term As Highlands Mayor As A Christie Republican or As A Corzine Democrat?

Dramitization. Neither Anna Little nor Jon Corzine really look like this.

By Art Gallagher

Tonight in Highlands we find out if Anna Little has come to her senses or if she really has forsaken any future in the Republican Party.

In case you missed it, on December 1 Little inexplicably returned to Highlands from the campaign trail for the 2012 congressional race to join her Democratic colleagues on the governing body in approving a hastily drawn labor agreement with the Highlands PBA that undermines the plans of her Republican successor as Mayor, Council President Frank Nolan.

Her actions have lead many of her recent supporters, including yours truly, to question who Little really is. Others have been saying, “I told you so.”

Is Little the “Christie Republican” she campaigned for Congress as, or is she a political opportunist “Corzine Democrat?”   Did she vote with the Democrats on December 1 to give herself some time to study the agreement  before making her final decision with the vote that will occur tonight?  Will she make the tough, yet potentially unpopular choice to reduce the size of government and save taxpayers money, ala Governor Christie, or will she hamstring her successor like Corzine did to Christie in 2009 when he made a hasty deal with the state workers union out of political expediency.

Early indications are that Little has left us for the leftists.  Late Sunday night, apparently in response to my post this weekend, Will The Real Anna Little Please Stand Up, the Mayor posted a grossly inaccurate and incomplete justification of her support for the PBA deal on her facebook page.  “Fuzzy math on facebook,” is how one former supporter described it.

There are two major items missing from the “Fuzzy math on facebook” piece. 

1) The penalties included in the agreement, payable by Highlands taxpayers to members of the Highlands PBA, that could run anywhere from $60,000, to $150,000 should layoffs become necessary in the next 18 months.

2) Little knows that Nolan has started conversations with Middletown about a shared services agreement for police that could potentially save Highlands taxpayers high six figures or more, and return Highlands to solvency, for many years to come.    This new deal complicates a potential shared services agreement and reduces the savings should it occur. 

Democratic Councilman Chris Francy, who promised regionalization in his unsuccessful campaign for Mayor last November, said “Its only $60,000,” when asked to justify his vote for  the agreement on December 1st when he knows about the potential shared services deal coming in 2011.    Maybe Little is thinking the same way.

Hopefully Little will come to her senses tonight.

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Will The Real Anna Little Please Stand Up

By Art Gallagher

Has anybody seen the real Anna Little lately?   I haven’t seen her in months.

I’ve been intentionally restraining myself from writing about Anna Little since election day.  We have a long history.  Given that history, I offered her inner circle, which despite perceptions to the contrary I am not a member of, a private critique of what worked and what didn’t work about her congressional campaign.  If not for our relationship, I just would have written my observations as I have after every election since I started this blog.

Little’s recent actions as Mayor of Highlands, my hometown, and the decision she will have to make next week over a labor agreement with the Highlands PBA compel me to treat her as I would any other public figure and write my observations with the candor I’ve been known for, yet have been withholding in her case.

When I started preparing this piece, it reminded me of the long running TV game show To Tell The Truth which ran in various forms from 1956 through 2002.  The show featured a panel of four celebrities who were charged with correctly identifying a described contestant with an unusual occupation or experience.  The “real” contestant and two impostors won the game if they fooled the panel.  The real contestant was sworn to tell the truth when answering panelists’ questions.  The impostors could lie. The game was over when the host said “Will the real X please stand up?”

The more I worked on the piece, the more I realized that To Tell The Truth didn’t fit.  There were more than two impostors and they all inhabited the same body.  Maybe Sybil is a more appropriate analogy.  I don’t know that the psycho drama fits, but the multiple personalities and characters may be the majority of Little’s remaining supporters. Her Army is quickly becoming a figment of her imagination.

I think the real Anna Little is the woman I’ve known for almost 10 years.  She’s been a principled public servant who would fight to do the right thing.  She would fight for an ideal, regardless of the power and resources of her foes, winning and losing political battles, with scars.  Often she produced improbable results.  She always landed on her feet and emerged from battle with a smile.  She was uncompromising to the point of being a pain the ass, but she was usually right.

The real Anna Little started the year as a Tea Party mama grizzly with charm.  Tri-City News publisher Dan Jacobson called her “Sarah Palin with brains.”  Her stump speech for the CD-6 congressional primary was musical and inspiring. It hit all the patriotic notes and inspired the best in her audiences.  While she was challenging the establishment, she positioned herself as a uniter, promising the local and state party leadership that win or lose the primary she would rally her Tea Party supporters behind the Republican ticket. 

Little delivered on her unity promise, partially, when she supported Joe Oxley for reelection as Monmouth County GOP Chairman hours after her stunning and improbable primary victory over Diane Gooch was official.  However, she only went so far in uniting the troops.  She never healed the primary wounds with the Gooch camp.  There was griping and sniping from the Little camp throughout the general election campaign that the local GOP was not doing enough for her. She let that fester.  While there was public unity with the Monmouth and Middlesex leadership, Little repeatedly snubbed the Union County GOP leadership.  For now, let’s just say that Little’s horrendous showing in Plainfield was not solely the result of Frank Pallone’s superior ground game in the city.

The “real” Anna Little would not let those wounds fester.

Once she got her bearings in place for the general election, Little positioned herself as a “Chris Christie Republican” rather than a “Mama Grizzly.”  This was not a Sybilesque malady, but smart political strategy.   Christie had won the 6th congressional district in the previous election and his popularity was strong among the constituencies Little would have to win over in her quest to unseat Pallone.

When Little is on her game, her communications skills rival Christie’s and Palin’s.   However, as the campaign progressed the inspiring stump speech she consistently delivered during the primary was often replaced with a defensive justification of her candidacy that fell flat.  At home she would tell her audiences how much the national GOP and PACs in Washington loved her, as if the campaign was about her and as if her audiences cared.   In Washington, she would tell her audiences how loved she was at home.

She was on her game and at her very best when among her enthusiastic supporters.  Her performances at the debate at Temple Shalom in Aberdeen and at the health care forum in Red Bank were extraordinary.  However, when in the presence of those who challenged her and without her “Army” to back her up, Little was often strident and argumentative. Her appearances with NJN’s Michael Aron, before the editorial boards of the Star Ledger and Asbury Park Press and one on one versus Pallone on News 12 are examples of when she was not at her best and needed to be.

Where was the “real” Anna Little?

Behind the scenes, Little actively alienated herself from long term supporters who would frankly tell her the truth about what was working and not working.  It was as if she took constructive criticism from team members as personal attacks.  The “real” Anna Little wouldn’t do that.  She would argue and debate with trusted team members and then make a decision.  The Anna Little that showed up during the general election campaign turned her back on her best local advisers and surrounded herself with “yes” men and women and people who did not know the district.  She’d gone from a Palinesque Tea Partier, to a Christie Republican, to a Nixonian paranoid.

As the campaign reached its critical peak in mid-October, Little introduced yet another personality.  She took a hard right turn and morphed into a Mike Huckabee Republican, only without the cornball charm.  The fair tax, abortion and strict Ron Paulesque constitutionalist philosophy were not issues to emphasize during the last weeks of a general election campaign. Not when she had polling data that indicated a moderate Republican could defeat Pallone.  She was pandering to her Right to Life supporters who were upset with how she handled the life question during her NJN appearance with Aron.

Despite these problems which were grumbled about behind the scenes among Tea Partiers and Regular Republicans alike, Little’s political stock was flying sky high, even after the polls closed and she lost by double digits when most observers were expecting a nail biter.  In the final days of the election Monmouth County politicos were rooting for her victory because they didn’t want to have to compete with her in the event of a vacancy in the State Legislature after redistricting.   Win or lose, she was expected to be a force to be reckoned with in Monmouth County politics.  

In perhaps the fastest fall from grace since the Howard Dean scream, Little squandered torched that hard fought for political capitol before she got off the stage at her Shore Casino headquarters on election night.  Apparently concerned about insulting either her Tea Party supporters or Regular Republicans who she never truly united, Little insulted both in her concession speech which was short on humility and gratitude and included an announcement of her 2012 candidacy for congress in a district that hasn’t been drawn yet, and the formation of three new political organizations, including one called “Anna’s Army” which she apparently presumed all of her hardworking supporters would just sign on for without any acknowledgement of what they had just finished doing and sacrificing.   Did she expect to lose?  How else could she have planned and even named these three new organizations within two hours of the polls closing?   One television reporter commented on the air that Anna Little just wants the limelight. 

Was this the “real” Anna Little?  Did she have me fooled all these years?  Was I the one who misunderstood her when I argued with others that they didn’t really know who she was?  Maybe so.

This brings me to the present and why I’m writing this piece that has been eating me up inside since November 2.

I can support the Tea Party Mama Grizzly, the Christie Republican or the Huckabee Republican.  The Nixonian paranoid is tough to deal with, but I’m Irish too and have dealt with such passive aggression for 52 years.   I could forgive the election night performance and help her recover some of the political capitol she squandered.  But I can’t support a Republican Mayor who is turning into a Corzine style Democrat as her latest character.

On December 1^st Little sandbagged her Republican colleagues on the Highlands Council.  She showed up unexpectedly and joined the Democrats on the council in approving a hastily drawn labor agreement that will either needlessly increase the costs of Highlands government or handcuff her successor in managing Highlands budget like Jon Corzine did when he made a hasty deal with the state workers unions on primary day in 2009 so that Vice President Joe Biden would join him on the stage for his campaign kickoff. Corzine’s deal prevented Governor Christie from laying off state workers during the first year of his administration.   Little’s deal probably won’t prevent layoffs in the Highlands Police Department.  More likely the deal will end up costing Highlands taxpayers between $60,000 and $150,000 over the next two fiscal years.  Little knows this.

The payoff for Corzine’s expensive sellout was clear. What Little thinks she accomplishing, after assuring her Republican colleagues that she was with them, is a mystery.  Maybe she’s delusional enough to think that her actions will win her union support in her hypothetical rematch with Pallone in 2012.  Hopefully she just had a bad night and didn’t realize the consequences of her actions, despite her words to the contrary that evening and since.

Fortunately Little has a second chance with this one.  The PBA agreement has to be voted on again on Wednesday December 15^th.  Little could miss the meeting, which means the agreement would not carry on a 2-2 vote. Or one of the Republican Littles could show up.  For the sake of Highlands taxpayers, I hope the Little Corzine does not show up.

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Little Addresses The Highlands PBA Deal

By Art Gallagher

Highlands Mayor Anna Little issued the following statement on her facebook page and in an email to MMM this morning:

Highlands Borough Budget and the PBA Agreement

The following is an explanation of the facts regarding a decision of the Highlands Borough Council on December 1, 2010.  

The Borough Council asked the Highlands PBA to agree to a wage freeze to allow the Borough to evaluate our budgetary circumstances in light of the 2.0 cap imposed by the State of NJ upon Municipal budgets.  After analysis of the Borough’s budget, the Borough Council asked the PBA to find $420,000 in savings.   The Highlands PBA contract had already been finalized and there was no obligation on the part of the Highlands PBA to negotiate.   The Highlands PBA reviewed the State Health Benefits Plan recommended by the Borough and agreed to accept it.   The Highlands PBA and the Highlands Chief of Police have regularly reduced overtime during my tenure as Mayor.   Younger officers were hired in order to reduce exorbitant overtime costs necessary to cover State mandated shifts round the clock in the Borough.  As of December 1, 2001 the Highlands PBA has agreed to forego overtime completely in exchange for compensatory time.   This will guarantee over $100,000 permanent savings to the Borough per year.

 

The Agreement with the Highlands PBA for which I voted on December 1, 2010 includes:

1.  Highlands PBA concession to accept the State Health Benefit Plan, amounting to $320,000 in savings to the Borough of Highlands.

2.  Overtime savings in this budget of $66,668.

3.  Court time savings in this budget of $8,140.

4.  Overtime savings in 2011-2012 budget $106,205.

5.  Court time savings in 2011-2012 budget $13,000.

6.  Waiver of Retroactive contractual wages that the Borough owed the PBA from July 1, 2010 to December 1, 2010, a savings in this budget of $140,000.

7.   The single raise of 4.25% for a six month period from January 1, 2011 until June 30, 2011 allows retirement eligible officers to retire at a wage level less than but nearer to what they would have received under the contract to which the Borough was obligated.   This concession also produced a savings to the Borough in the 2011-2012 budget.   If retirements which have been mentioned actually occur as verbally represented, substantial savings to the Borough will result.

 

In conclusion, we must support Governor Christie’s tool kit.   Toward that end we must ensure that in the 2011 election cycle, WE THE PEOPLE deliver to Governor Christie a State Legislature that will work with him on the Tool Kit and other tax saving initiatives.   Until the Tool Kit is in place, agreements with bargaining units are the ONLY way to ensure savings to municipalities.   Layoffs of three police officers in the Borough of Highlands surely would have resulted in additional overtime costs to the Borough because of State mandates.  Initial calculations indicated that the Borough might have been charged up to $18,000 per month in overtime.

 

Therefore, the PBA Agreement for which I voted on December 1, 2010 and which secured savings to the Borough of $654,000 (not including the contractual reduction in raises and expected retirement of senior officers) was in the best interests of the People of the Borough of Highlands.   It is the People and only the People whom I serve during my tenure in elected office.

 

Little’s statement begs scrutiny.

She says the Highlands Borough Council requested the PBA come up with budget savings in light of the 2% cap imposed upon municipal budgets by the State.  However, Highlands fiscal year runs from July 1 through June 30. The first Highlands budget governed by the cap will not take effect until July 1, 2011.  The deal Little joined her Democratic colleagues on the Council in approving impacts the current budget, retroactive to July 1, 2010.  It would seem that the PBA deal impacts deficits in the current budget.

Highlands Mayor-elect Frank Nolan, the Republican Council President, told MMM that the PBA negotiations were part of an effort to plug a $400,000 hole in the current budget.  Nolan said he proposed a no layoff pledge through the current fiscal year in exchange for the PBA foresaking their 4.25% salary increase and switching health insurance plans.  He said Little and Democrats Chris Francy and Rebecca Kane approved the PBA’s counteroffer which carries into the 2011-2012 budget that is subject to the 2% cap and includes retroactive penalities that would benefit all union members should even one officer need to be laid off.

Nolan said that Little was absent from 40% of the Council’s meeting since March when she started running for Congress and is not up to speed on all that has gone on during the negotiations with the PBA.

Little’s statement does not address the penalties to the Borough should layoffs be necessary. 

Nolan said that Highlands CFO Steve Pfeffer is on record advising the Council that there is a 60% chance that additional layoffs will be required in the current fiscal year.  Nolan does not understand why Little, Francy and Kane would approve an agreement that imposes penalties for layoffs when they know such layoffs will be necessary.

Nolan said that Highlands fiscal crisis has been caused in large measure by the fact that the Borough has spent its entire surplus of $1.2 million since Little became Mayor.  Nolan was on the Council during Little’s first year as Mayor, 2008.  He was defeated in his reelection bid in the Obama wave of 2008 and elected again in November of 2009.  He has been Council President since taking office again in January of this year and will be sworn in as Mayor on January 1st.

The Highlands deal with the PBA will not take effect until approved by the Mayor and Council at their December 15, 2010 meeting or a subsequent meeting.

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