IS THAT all there is? For more than two years now, Bergen County Executive Dennis McNerney has been blathering about how he is going to enact tough pay-to-play reforms and clean up county government. Yet this week, in his state of the county address, Mr. McNerney dished up another serving of the same old slop.
The ingredients may be slightly different, but they have the same flavor: They are so vague and vapid as to be worthless. Until Mr. McNerney actually produces reforms of substance, why would anyone pay attention to his so-called proposals? It's common knowledge that county Democratic boss Joseph Ferriero calls the shots in this administration, and he's not about to do anything that could derail his gravy train of political donations.
For example, rather than banning vendors who donate to county or local political organizations from getting county work - similar to what the Legislature did on the state level this week - Mr. McNerney only wants to create a committee to examine whether a vendor is qualified.
Given the pathetically partisan work done by Mr. McNerney's other concocted committees, why would anyone think this one would be any different? Think of it as the Boss Joe seal-of-approval committee, rubber-stamping contracts for big donors.
Mr. McNerney also called for vendors to name which candidates and political organizations they've contributed to - not a bad idea for a first step, if the reporting included donations to local candidates and committees and it was done as part of a competitive bidding process. Too bad that won't happen.
If the county executive were genuinely interested in reform, he would actively push for a tough pay-to-play ban at the county and municipal levels and he would go to Trenton to lobby vigorously for the reforms to be made statewide.
But he's not, and he won't. It took more than a year to come up with these scant ideas, and it has been four months since he asked an attorney to look into an executive order that would ban pay-to-play at the county level.
