My history: My name is Ken Chiarella and I am running as an Independent for Mayor. I am the great grandson of a Monroe farmer who moved to Monroe after arriving at Ellis Island about 100 years ago. My father recently left Monroe because he could not afford that taxes in the town that he was born and raised in. That same story is being repeated all over Monroe Township. I graduated with a Bachelors degree in Political Science from Rutgers University. I work for CVS Pharmacy as a Regional Loss Prevention Manager. I have a wife and children. I have served on the Monroe Township Board of Education until 11 months ago. I was on the Planning Board as an Alternate for about a year and resigned after realizing that the game was rigged in favor of developers. My resignation letter is here and explains why I left. Resignation
I was also a member of the Historic Preservation Commission and I was a Liaison to the Recreation Board from the Board of Ed.
Stop development. All development! We are not looking to create new schemes for developers to enter Monroe to build anything. Light industrial schemes will bring more developers, more traffic and the need for more services. The revenue they will generate will not reduce taxes. It might help stabilize taxes but at what cost? We will have more strip malls with a pizza place, dry cleaners, a bagel place and a Subway in each new strip mall. We don’t need that. We need to clean up our local government. The time for planning development is over. We have allowed developers to run this town for nearly 30 years and we don’t even have a town center. We now need to plan to cut the fat out of government. We have to stop development, create an active chamber of commerce with a shop local program and give Monroe residents an incentive to shop locally
We do not need to continue building in Monroe to offset taxes. We can offset taxes by bringing services in house. The costs for the Law firm and engineering firm are due to development. The cost for our school district is due to rampant development. We will need more schools as development continues and that will cause tax increases. We brought our legal services in-house while I was serving on the Board of Education and we have seen a sizable savings. We can stop those increases by stopping all development at the master plan level and at the application level.
We have to take party politics outside of our borders. Under the Faulkner act, which Monroe is currently organized under, we have the option of making our elections non-partisan. Imagine elections where the integrity and ideas of a candidate matter more than the party they belong to? The elected officials from the parties would have to come to Monroe to ask for support based upon what they will do for our taxpayers.
We need to protect our utilities. The current administration acquired the Monroe Township Utilities Authority and the 50 million dollars they had in reserves. The Authority became the Monroe Township Utilities Department and the township just borrowed 20 million dollars to fund that department. What happened to the 50 million? The money was used to offset municipal tax increases. What happens now that the money is gone? Taxes will increase again. The utilities department makes approximately 4 million dollars per year. That revenue is generated by charging developers to hook up to water and sewer, and now the department is being funded with debt. This is one reason why they will not stop developing no matter what the Master Plan currently stipulates. They have shown that they are willing to change the master plan when it suits their development schemes.
We estimate that our utilities are worth approximately $165 million dollars if there were sold. Selling would be a nice way to kick the can down the road for a while but then it would get ugly. Look at the rates of surrounding towns. When other towns have sold their utilities the rates for water and sewer have skyrocketed. We must have our elected officials pledge to never sell our utilities.
Community: We are one community. We need to build bridges within our community. We grew too fast and we lost our rural character. Stopping development will give us a chance to assimilate and build community ties for all of our residents. We have proposed our community commission in order to accomplish this. The mayor will sit on this commission with representatives of all communities. They will meet monthly to discuss issues and come up with solutions, create community events and to find ways to build bridges.
I have made several pledges over the past few months.
- I will not accept pay to be your mayor. I will not accept any benefit other than the personal benefit of being able to fix the issues that plague our town.
- I will not sell our utilities.
- I will not accept PAC donations or donations from professional services…Ever! This choice has limited our reach in this election but we have maintained our integrity.
- I will institute term limits. I was always against term limits until I saw the effects of money on our system. The parties set up a monopoly through patronage and PAC donations. We need to limit the power of individual politicians and guard against a power monopoly unfairly gained by the money in politics.
- I will make our town non-partisan. Good ideas come from people and not from party politics. There are good ideas and good people in both parties but better results, on the local level, come from elected officials who are not bound to party platforms and party politics.
You can view our entire platform and our fiscal plan at http://www.independentsformonroe.com .
We have an opportunity to make real change in Monroe on November 3rd but that will be up to you. If you want real change then please vote Line D!