'Nonpartisan' Mask Dropped In Brick School Board Battle

BRICK, NJ — In New Jersey, school boards are supposed to be nonpartisan. School board candidates are listed separately on the election ballot, and with no reference to party affiliation.

Partisan connections remain, of course, but in most school districts they exist primarily behind the scenes. School boards in most districts go about the work involved with overseeing matters with barely a mention of political party.

In Brick Township, the opposite has long been true. Partisanship has been a constant going back to the 1980s at least, though usually it's existed just under the surface.

Last week, the pretense of nonpartisanship was completely ripped away.

A week ago, Allan Cartine stepped to the microphone at the Brick Township Board of Education meeting and accused two current and two former board members of "serious" campaign violations, based on complaints issued in late June by the New Jersey Election Law Enforcement Commission. The ELEC complaints relate to the 2015 school board campaign where Board President Stephanie Wohlrab and board member Victoria Pakala, and former board members John Lamela and George White, won seats on the board.

The seven-count complaint says paperwork was not filed on time, in one case 74 days late, and that the source of campaign contributions exceeding $300 were not reported as required. In addition to Wohlrab, Pakala, Lamela and White, the complaint names Clean Slate for Brick BOE treasurer Joseph Nezgoda, who is Pakala's husband.

"You're supposed to be nonpartisan," said Cartine, the chairman of the Republican campaigns in Brick. Cartine identified himself as such at the meeting before raising the ELEC complaint. "You need to correct this issue."

In the days since the meeting, Cartine and others have escalated the rhetoric, with the Brick Republican Club demanding in a post on its Facebook page that Wohlrab and Pakala resign from the board.

Wohlrab this week said she was aware of the ELEC complaint, filed June 26, before Cartine brought it up at the school board meeting. She said she has been speaking with officials at ELEC to resolve the matter and on Friday mailed a package containing all of the missing information and forms to ELEC by overnight mail.

An ELEC employee said by phone on Tuesday they could not address anything regarding an active complaint.

"This was an issue of an inexperienced treasurer," said Wohlrab, a professional fundraiser for various Democratic candidates. Wohlrab said some of the requested documents had been completed by Nezgoda but never filed. All of them were included in the package she mailed Friday, she said.

In New Jersey, candidates seeking office in elections are required to file a variety of reports, depending on how much money they raise, who contributed it and how, and how the money was spent. Some forms are required regardless of the amount of money; others are only required if a certain threshold is met. In addition, there are three mandatory reporting dates: 29 days prior to an election, 11 days before an election and 20 days after an election.

The most common form, beyond the paperwork establishing someone as a candidate with ELEC, is the C1, where contributions exceeding $300 from a single donor are reported.

And it's the C1 filing that has raised the ire of Republicans going back to 2015. Nezgoda filed a C1 for the campaign listing four $1,600 donations from each of the four individual campaigns, a total of $6,400. That filing has been persistently questioned.

Wohlrab said the $1,600 was money contributed to each candidate — not a single donation from any contributor — that was then transferred to the joint committee.

The ELEC complaint includes four counts, one for each candidate on the slate, regarding reporting of a contribution each received in the amount of $750. Wohlrab said those donations have what are called "allocation letters," which she said she submitted to ELEC. An allocation letter says multiple donors contributed to a joint contribution, and spells out who and what each donor's share is of that contribution.

The $750 contributions are split among multiple donors and the allocation letter brings their individual donations below the $300 threshold that requires reporting under the law, she said.

Wohlrab also expressed incredulity over Cartine's statements about the need for nonpartisanship.

"His own party gave over $6,000 to Canfield and Young last fall," she said, referring to Robert Canfield and Edward X. Young, who ran together and tried to unseat Wohlrab and Pakala last November.

Canfield, who first began seeking public office two years ago when he ran as an independent against Mayor John Ducey, joined the Republican Party and the Brick Republican Club last year.

ELEC filings for Canfield and Young show two large contributions in the final three weeks before the 2018 election.

John Catalano, president of the Brick Republican Club and currently a candidate in the 10th District Assembly race, is recorded as giving a $1,720 in-kind contribution on Oct. 15, 2018, to Canfield and Young, purchasing election campaign lawn signs. Catalano, who is listed as chairman of Canfield's campaign, was later reimbursed by the Brick Republican Club for the $1,720, according to the club's year-end campaign filings.

The Brick Republican Club also made an in-kind contribution directly to Canfield's campaign, paying $4,421.17 on Oct. 22 for the mailing of a letter from Canfield to Brick Township voters.

Of the $11,957 spent by the Clean Slate team in 2015, beyond the $750 contributed to each candidate, there are no other large donations in 2015 cited in the ELEC complaint. No complaints have been raised about contributions to the Believe in Brick slate's 2018 campaign, which comprised Wohlrab, Pakala and Nicole Siebert.

Wohlrab said she expects the Clean Slate group will face a penalty because the forms were not filed on time. But she said there was no deliberate attempt to hide information, and supplied copies of the forms she filed, including R1s that were not required because neither the Clean Slate candidates nor the slate itself reached spending thresholds.

The partisan rancor traces its roots to the 2015 school board election campaign, where the Clean Slate team focused on the May 2015 arrests of then-superintendent Walter Uszenski and former interim special services director Andrew Morgan. The hiring of Morgan, who had a drug dealing conviction in 1990 but had been cleared to work in education by the New Jersey Department of Education, was cited often and the sitting board members unfairly painted not doing their due diligence.

The arrest of Uszenski and the board's actions to pay him until he was indicted, also was turned into a campaign issue — despite the fact that the board's actions in the case were dictated by state law.

Uszenski was recently approved for entry into the pretrial intervention program after a protracted battle, primarily with former Ocean County Prosecutor Joseph Coronato, who's a Republican, over charges of official misconduct. The PTI deal prompted angry comments and a demand for apologies for the 2015 campaign rhetoric.

The partisan anger also was fueled by the sweeping changes to professional staff (attorneys and engineers) made when the Clean Slate group was sworn in at the 2016 reorganization meeting of the school board, as well as repeated arguments between Pakala and former board member Karyn Cusanelli that punctuated a number of board meetings the first year.

Some of the professional who were put in place during that change are no longer being used, Wohlrab said. Among them, the district is using a different law firm to handle its special education cases. Initially, the law firm of Montenegro, Thompson, Montenegro and Genz received extra compensation to handle those cases. It also replaced Fairview Insurance as its health insurance broker earlier this year with Gallagher Insurance of Whippany.

The dramatic cuts in state funding to the school district instituted in S2, the state law Senate President Stephen Sweeney pushed through that cuts so-called adjustment aid to Brick and other districts have prompted comments saying Wohlrab should have more power with Sweeney to the cuts because she is a Democrat. Sweeney, however, has demonstrated an unwillingness to listen to anyone, Republican or Democrat. That includes Gov. Phil Murphy, whom Sweeney forced to bend to him with the most recent state budget.

You can see the documents filed and submitted in connection with the NJ ELEC complaint below:

• NJ ELEC Complaint, Clean Slate For Brick BOE
• Clean Slate For Brick BOE C1 page 1
• Clean Slate for Brick BOE C1 page 2
• Canfield Young Final Campaign Filing 2018
• Brick Republican Club 2018 Campaign Filing
• Clean Slate For Brick BOE R1
• Clean Slate Stephanie Wohlrab
• Clean Slate Victoria Pakala
• Clean Slate George White
• Clean Slate John Lamela R1

Have a news tip? Email karen.wall@patch.com Follow Brick Patch on Facebook.