The Ruins of Trenton

An arrogant Mayor Douglas H. Palmer told those questioning the residency of Communications Director Irving Bradley that the director is in fact abiding by the city’s residency ordinance on Tuesday, despite mountains of evidence to the contrary.

Photos of Mr. Bradley’s various city-owned vehicles were shown at his downtown city apartment building, but later photos showed one of the same vehicles 50 miles away at his old family residence in Rahway.

But the city law requires employees working for the City of Trenton to maintain bona fide domiciles within city limits, with part of the definition of that term requiring the city home to also be the home of the immediate family of the employee.

If Mr. Bradley’s family is still living in Rahway then Mr. Bradley is living in open defiance of the law, with the support of an arrogant and despotic Mayor Palmer.

Despite the reality of the situation, Mayor Palmer said Tuesday that Mr. Bradley is abiding by the residency ordinance, and Mr. Bradley would not say whether his family is moving to Trenton calling the matter “private”, according to the Times of Trenton.

Mayor Palmer also used the news piece to continue his efforts in distraction, with a verbal attempt to muddy the issue by declaring that those who are complaining about the breaking of city laws were taking the city government’s attention away from other more important matters.

“It continues to amaze me that with public safety being the most important issue facing the city, people are raising distracting ‘non-issues’,” said Mayor Palmer in Tuesday’s Times.

When is the open violation of the law by our elected officials a non-issue, especially in the American system of government?

It seems that according to Mayor Palmer’s contradictory logic, “crime is down” and the city is experiencing a renaissance, but the public safety issue requires so much attention that the suspension of established law is acceptable for some employees but not for others, as if Trenton was in some sort of state of emergency.

Almost equally contradictory is the mayor’s declarations about the financial woes of the city – including the mortgage crisis – and the need for a tax hike, while simultaneously allowing his underlings to literally milk the city of taxpayer dollars to fund the commutes of real and pseudo city-employees.

Also, isn’t this supposed to be a “green” city?

City Spin Dr. Kent Ashworth told the Times Tuesday that the city allowed employees to take their cars home because there was no safe place to keep the vehicles, but that makes no sense.

As city resident Dan Dodson once said on his Web site, the capital is literally awash with both surface parking and parking decks that are almost never used at night, and it is entirely feasible for the city to use one of these empty structures as a repository for city-owned vehicles.

Hamilton Township’s Mayor John Bencivengo recently clamped down on the abuse of municipal vehicles, and it is time for Trenton to do the same.

When Trenton residents face potentially-crippling increases in their tax bills, the municipal belt needs to be tightened, and a perfectly logical place to begin would through taking away the ridiculous perks provided to many of Trenton’s highly paid employees.

Everyone else pays for their own gas and everyone else commutes to work in their own vehicle.

It should be the same for city employees.