MEETING

(Continued from Page 6) by the meeting administrator (township clerks usually have to provide telephone users and disabled parties instructions to unmute themselves).

Then, when Stuart Brooks was making public comments, someone could be heard coughing so deeply that it overrode Stuart Brooks’ remarks at one point.

Later in the session, Maryalice Brown at one point remarked, “We just lost everybody.”

“(They are) in some kind of room, it says,” remarked Mayor Samuel “Sammy” Moore, prompting the township clerk to start laughing, before quipping, “I don’t know how it happened.”

However, what unfolded Feb. 2 was clearly for common good and commonality, and appreciate each other.”

When a reporter attempted to ask him if that meant he had changed his mind about allegations in his complaint to the court that the Bass River School Board had been reluctant to sell him the property after finding he was an Orthodox Jew from Lakewood and local residents “began raising the prospect of (his) intentions for the use of the premises by Jewish people,” Blech replied that he thought the focus should now be “forward instead of delving into those details” and the matter should be viewed in a “positive” and “productive” light. He then hung up.

The bias charge, however, was really an incidental aspect of the lawsuit, which was based mainly on Blech’s contentions that the board had violated its agreement with him in regard to condition issues at the morethan-century old building and had made it more difficult for him to obtain a certificate of occupancy. The suit was one that held up the sale, which was the result of an auction held nearly a year ago and approved by the board last April 25, for months.

What his precise purpose was in bidding on the facility, which the local school district no longer needed once it entered into a send-receive relationship with the adjacent Little Egg Harbor School District, has never been spelled out. But according to what a lawyer for the Bass River School Board told its members at a special meeting when the purchase was approved, “it is not appropriate for (such) questions to be asked of Mr. Blech in public session.”

In a phone interview the day after the Feb. 6 Bass River Board of Commissioners meeting, however, Bass River commission member and Deputy Mayor Louis Bourguignon told this newspaper that he was “very happy” to hear that the facility had finally been sold, as “it was a burden on the taxpayers.”

As for the transaction having been delayed for as long as it was, he contended, that “lawyers make money, so they stretch it out.”

“And that’s what happened,” Bourguignon declared. “It caused nothing to change when it was all said and done. When it gets in the legal system, it takes time. That’s just how it is—and you can’t blame that on one side or the other.” no laughing matter to the Brooks, who have often questioned when the governing body will be returning to in-person, live meetings, as well as recent steps by the governing body to reduce public comment opportunities and seldomly address questions posed by residents.

“I mean this is serious stuff,” declared Stuart Brooks in lambasting the governing body for a “recurring problem,” while also pointing out that Maryalice Brown now holds administrator and clerk positions in both Woodland and Tabernacle township, though he noted no one has yet said to him that she can’t be her own supervisor or can’t do her own job properly. “And you can’t take action without public notice! You need to do more than just politely say, ‘Thank-you for your public comments’ and (act like) everything looks OK to us. This is an instance where there was no posting at the township, meeting the statutory requirements.”