Corzine puts squeeze on mayor
N.J. business with Ridgefield is frozen until its mayor, Anthony Suarez, quits. He was arrested in the recent corruption sweep.
RIDGEFIELD, N.J. - The embattled mayor of this Bergen County city refused to leave office yesterday despite a corruption charge against him and a state-imposed freeze that could bring business dealings here to a halt.
In an executive order signed yesterday, Gov. Corzine ordered state departments to "immediately suspend any approval or application" for a development project in a municipality where an incumbent mayor is charged with a public corruption crime.
That order would directly affect Ridgefield, where Democratic Mayor Anthony Suarez, one of more than two dozen public officials in the state arrested on corruption charges last month, has defied calls to resign.
One of those calls came yesterday from Council President Nicholas Lonzisero, a Republican.
"In essence, he's holding the people of Ridgefield hostage," Lonzisero said. "The mayor and the council are elected with the public trust in mind. The officials who were arrested have broken the public trust and owe it to themselves and the public to step down."
Besides freezing approvals and permits, Corzine, a Democrat, on Sunday said he had ordered the state comptroller to begin a review of Ridgefield's procurement practices, development contracts, and records.
Suarez said yesterday that he welcomed Corzine's ordering of a review of borough records, but that he would remain in office.
"I'm still able to do the things I want to do as the mayor of Ridgefield," he said outside his house.
Suarez and two other New Jersey mayors were among 44 people arrested July 23 in a two-track federal investigation into money laundering and political corruption.
Suarez, a lawyer, is accused of accepting an illegal $10,000 payment from a federal informant for his legal defense fund.
Like fellow Mayors Dennis Elwell, of nearby Secaucus, and Peter Cammarano III, of Hoboken, Suarez has vowed to fight the charges. Last week he endured a nonbinding council resolution asking him to step down.
While Elwell and Cammarano relinquished their offices last week, Suarez has refused to go.
A coalition of environmental advocates yesterday also called on state lawmakers to adopt ethics changes to curb possible corruption in the Department of Environmental Protection.
In the charging complaints last month, federal authorities alleged that public employees and officials accepted bribes in exchange for the promise of help in getting projects approved by the state agency.
The coalition argued that the corruption sweep showed that "environmental decisions are made within a 'culture of corruption' in which developers are overly influential."
Those decisions, the group charged, have the potential to harm the public.
"If we want our state to be green, we need to make politics clean," said Dena Mottola Jaborska, executive director of Environment New Jersey.
The coalition, known as CleanGreenNJ, called for an independent investigation of possible corruption at the Department of Environmental Protection and said it sought campaign-finance reform and whistleblower protections for DEP employees.
Other suggestions included allowing the public access to the calendars of top agency officials and repealing gag orders that forbid agency scientists from speaking to the media without approval from department officials.
In addition to Environment New Jersey, the coalition includes the New Jersey Environmental Federation, New Jersey Environmental Lobby, and New Jersey Sierra Club and Surfrider Foundation.