Dear Editor:
The Town Council Meeting held on November 12th provided Parsippany residents with yet another opportunity to take the measure of Mayor Barberio’s commitment to Parsippany residents and his ability to do his job. And, true to form, the Mayor’s inability to demonstrate that commitment and his inability to do his job were never more apparent.
To take just two examples from the meeting:
(1) When asked by several Fox Chase Drive residents why he had not bothered to respond to their past requests for his assistance, Mayor Barberio sheepishly said that he would only now belatedly contact Denville Mayor Andes to see if an agreement could be reached whereby trees would be planted to provide a sight and noise barrier between their properties and the factory that had replaced their back yard “enchanted forest.”
Is it possible that Mayor Barberio’s very belated response to the residents of Fox Chase Drive was due to a suddenly developed personal interest in planting trees? Or, did the Mayor’s knee-jerk response have anything to do with his upcoming re-election campaign and/or the praise Councilman Justin Musella received from Fox Chase Drive residents for the assistance the Councilman had already rendered them?
(2) When asked, at the Council meeting about the status of his recent self-serving and panicked demand that the Board of Education’s finances be “audited”, the Mayor, unable to complete a coherent thought could not provide an intelligible answer. What the Mayor seemed to be saying was that though he had just talked to the external auditor, the Mayor did not know the status of the “audit” and he seemed somewhat unclear as to what the current purpose of the audit was. He also said that the cost of the “audit” might very well be much less than the $17,500 his Council rubber stamps (Carifi, Neglia, and McGrath) had authorized. And, in the most bizarre statement of all, the Mayor tried to justify his vindictive action by indicating that the Board of Education should be pleased if the taxpayer-funded “audit” proved that the Board of Education had been doing exactly what it said it was doing all along.
With that in mind, is it possible that Mayor Barberio has finally realized that his obsequious kowtowing to John Inglesino and out-of-town developers was bad for Parsippany residents? And were his accusations against the Board of Education an attempt to awkwardly and foolishly distract attention from himself by intimating that the Board of Education had engaged in financial malfeasance?
His “too little, too late” response to Fox Chase Drive residents and his inability to justify his wildly inappropriate and misleading accusations against the Board of Education only serve to reinforce the growing consensus in Parsippany that the Mayor’s office is not the place Mr. Barberio should be.
Bob Crawford
