What Does NJ’s Ethics Commission DO?

Hello there! If you are new here, you might want to subscribe to the RSS feed for updates on this topic.

Yesterday, a story went across America about the corruption in New Jersey’s political arena. In case you missed it, 11 New Jersey officials were arrested in a statewide corruption probe by the feds. Now, this certainly is worthy of a lot of discussion and aggravation on the part of New Jersey citizens. For my part, there is another story that I’d like to talk about (briefly) using the knowledge that most of our state’s government institutions are corrupt.

The first pertains to our state Ethics Commission. This is a commission that is charged with finding out the type of crap that the feds are finding out. You may think to yourself, “Well, if the feds found these 11 bad guys, imagine how many more must be at the mercy of the Ethics Commission!” Not so, my friends. The Ethics Commission finds nothing to the extent that the feds find. Nothing. Do you know what the Ethics Commission concerns themselves with?

In New Jersey we have a group called the Highlands Council that deals with preserving much of the beautiful open space and forest area up in North and Northwest New Jersey. The folks who serve on this council are unpaid volunteers; this is one of the few quasi-government jobs in New Jersey where there really isn’t much in terms of a financial incentive. The people who serve on this council serve because they love the look and feel of the Highlands (and I can’t blame them - it’s beautiful up in that part of the state).

So what did the Ethics Commission do to one of the councilmen? They fined him $50 because even though some paperwork he submitted was postmarked correctly, they received it a day later. THIS IS WHAT OUR ETHICS COMMISSION DOES IN NEW JERSEY!!!

To the Councilman’s credit, he paid the fine in all pennies, just to prove a point. My point is that we have the feds breaking their tails to root out the corruption in this state (they’ve arrested over 100 public officials in the last few years) and in the mean time, our Ethics Commission is fining a volunteer for sending in paperwork a day late.

Welcome to New Jersey - where things just don’t make sense most of the time!

This entry was posted on Friday, September 7th, 2007 at 11:22 pm and is filed under Idiots, Morons, & Fools, The State of New Jersey. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Consider Contributing to JerseySmarts.com
If you've enjoyed reading this entry, please consider making a small contribution to JerseySmarts.com by using the PayPal link below. A contribution of $5 or $10 is very helpful in meeting our monthly and annual expenses. Your contributions help JerseySmarts.com bring information like what you read above to your fingertips. Thank you!