The county commissioners have awarded a contract for air-side services at Cape May Airport, to take effect when the current arrangement with the Delaware River and Bay Authority ends.
The contract award to FlightLevel Cape May LLC means the commissioners have committed county taxpayers to repaying the DRBA more than $32 million in capital investments made by the authority over the 25-plus years in which it oversaw the airport complex.
The benefit, according to the members of the commission who voted for the change, is county control over a 1,000-acre complex, land that Commission Director Len Desiderio has called a vital county asset. The commissioners have been silent on details of their plans for the site.
Terms of the contract award were not disclosed.
The commissioners on July 8 also passed a resolution authorizing a competitive contracting process for engineering and planning services for the airport property.
Controversy surrounded the matter in the last two weeks as Commissioner Will Morey sought to speak out on the decision, which he opposed, but he ultimately chose not to do so due to legal opinions from county Counsel Jeffrey Lindsay and an outside ethics attorney that said Morey was constrained by a conflict of interest due to a financial arrangement that Morey, a lifelong aviator, has at the airport’s industrial park.
Morey’s attorney had been dueling with Lindsay since mid-June over whether what Morey characterizes as a minor financial interest in the industrial park space, which contains a hangar, constitutes a disqualifying conflict.
In the end Morey announced at the July 8 meeting that he was abiding by Lindsay’s determination, would not speak out on airport issues and would abstain from the vote to award the air-side services contract. Even if he had voted against the contract it would have passed; the final tally was four in favor and one abstention.
Morey is concerned about the lack of public discussion about a decision that obligates taxpayers to such a large repayment.
The vote to award the contract for air-side services put the final seal on the county’s reclaiming of oversight over the airport complex from the DRBA. The vote for the engineering and planning services starts the process of determining what the county’s master plan will be for the acreage.
Some members of the public who spoke at the meeting thought they should have heard about the plan for the airport before any vote that made an award and committed them to a more than $32 million expense.
The vote was over quickly, with one motion to close public comment and adopt multiple resolutions on the airport all together. Morey himself did not realize the motion included the contract, voted yes for it, and then had to go back to register his abstention.
After some public criticism for initially placing the contract award resolution on the consent agenda, the agenda was altered prior to the meeting to place all resolutions related to the airport on the regular agenda. In New Jersey, generally, a governing body votes separately on each resolution when that resolution is not part of a consent agenda. That did not happen in this case.
There was no discussion of the airport resolutions by the commissioners and, as is the practice at the county commission, the actual resolutions were not available to the public prior to the vote. Only a one-sentence summary of each was provided in the agenda.
As a commissioner, Morey could have asked for a discussion, but he had already agreed to remain silent under the conflict determination made by Lindsay.
In an ironic twist, Fredric L. Shenkman, the Cooper Levenson attorney whom the county had used as an outside ethics counsel for an opinion on the conflict of interest issue involving Morey, wrote to Morey’s attorney admitting that he should not have issued the opinion, due to a conflict of interest with his own firm, which represents Morey and his family in matters unrelated to the airport.
Shenkman’s opinion on conflict and the exchange of emails between Lindsay and Morey’s attorney all came within 24 hours of the commission meeting, leaving no time to resolve issues related to the question of a conflict, a point Morey made at the July 8 meeting. The letter from Shenkman admitting he should not have been involved in the opinion came too late to be meaningful at the meeting.
Commissioner Bobby Barr did say that he would welcome a discussion with the public about the airport “at the appropriate time.” He said he looks forward to sharing the commissioners’ vision for the site when a master plan is completed and “we know what we don’t know.”
In several of Morey’s statements in email exchanges with Lindsay prior to the July 8 meeting, it was clear that Morey believed that the sharing of a vision should have preceded and not followed any vote to alter oversight at the airport, especially given that the DRBA contract had years yet to run.
Contact the reporter, Vince Conti, at vconti@cmcherald.com.
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