Brick Township's Democratic council members will have to go back to the drawing board on ways to come up with cost savings for residents after an unsuccessful bid to overturn the vetoes of two ordinances. Council President John Ducey says the ordinances that called for the reorganization of municipal departments, eliminating eight positions and the creation of another took months of work and they don't have a Plan-B waiting in the wings.

Ducey says their plan called for the elimination of eight positions created by Mayor Steve Acropolis in 2008 that had salaries that capped out at $100K. He says all those jobs came up to a little over $1 Million. He says their plan called for reinstating two of those positions and creating a third where total salaries were only going to be under $300-thousand.

However, Acropolis says when asked, neither Ducey nor the other council members could produce a spread sheet of the savings. Acropolis claims the entire plan wasn't about cost savings. He alleges it was politically motivated. "You know, it was about creating a $90 thousand dollar a year job for a political appointee." In fact Acropolis says this is the third time council members tried to instill politics into ordinances or resolutions. "and this is the third time that they've been rebuffed and you'd think that they would now work with the administration."

Ducey refutes the Mayors claims that the proposed ordinances were politically motivated. "Every time we try to save money, he just turns around and says it's politics.... where no it's not true. We're just trying to save taxpayers money.

Ducey says "the council as a whole will begin to investigation additional ways to save taxpayers money because unfortunately we were unable to override the Mayor's veto in this attempt to save taxpayers money."

Acropolis says "we're going to continue what we've done over the past five years. Which is reduce the size of government through attrition and or a reduction of force if that is needed. We are down about 90 people from when I took the Mayor's leadership position. That's the way you make government smaller. not by saying we're going to eliminate eight positions of which six are already vacant.


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