JACKSON – The communication divide between the administration and council was clear during a recent Township Council meeting where the mayor’s absence was noted.
Council President Jennifer Kuhn discussed an email she sent to Mayor Michael Reina in April that involved township policy and procedures. That email asked a question. “Mayor this is not allowed according to the (township) employee handbook. Correct? Why are these issues not being addressed by the administration?”
“As you can see, we have no mayor nor a business administrator nor an assistant business administrator at this meeting. I don’t think we’ve had a mayor here in a year,” she told the audience.
She referenced her email to the mayor saying that she had been told previously, “there’s a new sheriff in town” meaning he’d be in the mayor’s office at town hall more often and at consistent times of the week.
“So, I’m asking where he is at because you are not here and you are not answering your emails or the concerns of your residents and it is a problem,” Kuhn added.
Mayor Reina followed up with an email stating “council president, thank you for your offer.”
“I didn’t make him an offer I asked him to show up,” Kuhn clarified during the council meeting.
Reina’s response stated, “after the Passover holiday I’d like to invite you and the vice council president (Mordechai Burnstein) to meet and discuss all the issues and gaps that have slowed down the challenges we face as the governing body.”
Kuhn said she replied to his email stating “Mayor can we can we get something on the calendar? What works for you?”
She said she sent another email marking it as being of “high importance” that said, “Mayor just following up here this is April 24.”
The council president said she “never heard anything. That was 10 days in between. She added that when she did hear back from him with the message, “we should be able to meet one day next week and catch up” it was on April 24 at three o’clock.”
“That was the last message I got and I wanted to set the record straight on that,” she added.
Kuhn then brought up the issue about the township’s email system that went down during Easter weekend.
“Our town email went down for four days. It’s absolutely unacceptable. Our police department had no emails, our council had no emails, our administration, our professionals, our township employees had no email and we had no communication with administration,” she said.
She said she went to Assistant Business Administrator Samantha Novak’s office a few days after the email outage, on a Wednesday, saying, “we need to direct our department heads. I know in this form of government, I’m not allowed to go into every office and do it but I’m going to do it because they need to know what is going on.”
The council president added, “people are concerned. They have no idea why we have no email. We are being told that it was a global outing for Microsoft. Then we were told we were hacked. No answers, no communication.”
She asked whether the Ocean County Prosecutor’s Office had been contacted about the situation or the FBI notified as it involved police, clerk’s office documents and personal data. “Nobody knew what was going on?” The township uses civicplus.com for its listserv email system.
Novak told her that they would go to each department. During a phone call to Public Safety Director Joseph Candido, Kuhn said she requested that he call the mayor and have the “police IT guy go over to our IT guy to work together to get this email up.”
She thanked Candido who was in the audience at that council meeting noting that, “two hours after that phone call, the (police IT) guy was there in 20 minutes and within two hours our whole town (government agencies) had their email up.”
Kuhn went on to say that she and Burnstein have been asking what actually happened. “There will be a third-party investigation. We have still not heard what happened to our emails. It is not acceptable. Do we have encrypted emails? What do we have going on? What kind of systems are we using? Are we upgrading them? Every department has internet issues.”
The Jackson Times reached out to Mayor Reina and the administration concerning the issues of communication between the mayor’s office and the Township Council as well as what caused the township email outage in April and the status of hiring a new township business administrator.
