WEST WILDWOOD – An Office of Administrative Law judge slashed former West Wildwood Mayor Christopher Fox’s ethics fines to less than half of the $24,900 for which he was on the hook.
Fox will now pay $11,000 to the state Local Finance Board, which brought the ethics charges in 2019. At the time, the ethics fines were the largest ever issued by the Local Finance Board. Fox will not pursue the issue further, his attorney said.
“Fox has the right to but will not challenge the judge’s decision because he believes that she exercised her judicial function in good faith,” Michelle Douglass, Fox’s lawyer, said in an email.
The initial decision will be reviewed by the Local Finance Board’s Division of Local Government Services, which has 45 days from the time the decision was issued March 14 to adopt, modify or reject Judge Susan Olgiati’s order.
“Unfortunately, public officials who try to do the right thing, such as Mr. Fox, may be deterred from public service in the wake of this decision,” Douglass added.
Fox’s ethics charges stem from actions he took while he was sharing a house in a rent-free living arrangement with Jacquelyn Ferentz. Ferentz was a police officer who was fired under Mayor Chuck Frederick, who led the borough from 2008 to 2012. After Ferentz’s firing, she brought two lawsuits against the borough.
After Fox won the 2012 election and became mayor, Ferentz was reinstated, promoted to chief, and settled one lawsuit for wrongful termination. She took the second lawsuit, a whistleblower claim, to a jury trial, also using Douglass as her lawyer, and won a verdict for a judgment worth nearly $2 million.
The borough’s insurer, the Municipal Excess Liability Joint Insurance Fund (MELJIF), informed the borough that it would not defend or indemnify the whistleblower claim. West Wildwood filed suit against the insurer but lost.
The borough was on the hook for a judgment for almost as much as its annual budget.
Fox later voted for a resolution “providing for an emergency appropriation” for $1.99 million to fund Ferentz’s judgment when she went to the bank and froze the borough’s assets.
The judgment shook the tiny island community, causing taxes to skyrocket and scrutiny to grow to the point where public government meetings would regularly turn into shouting matches between elected officials and taxpayers (who videotaped every minute).
Fox lost his job as Wildwood’s administrator when the ethics violations became public, but he refused to resign in West Wildwood, turning up the temperature on the public scrutiny.
Fox retained Douglass and vowed to fight the violations, which he called “ridiculous,” and filed an appeal, which eventually led to hearings in February and March 2021, held virtually due to the Coronavirus pandemic. It was no surprise that several members of the public were present on Zoom for each hearing, including when Fox testified.
In the first charge, the state accused Fox of violating ethics rules by serving as director of public safety while living with the chief of police and the judge agrees Fox had a “direct financial and personal involvement that might reasonably be expected to impair his objectivity or independence of judgment.”
However, the judge found that Fox did not have the intent to use the position to secure unwarranted privileges and advantages, so it was only a partial victory for the state on this charge, with fines reduced from $7,500 to $3,500.
In the second charge, the board alleges Fox violated the law by reading police activity reports at public meetings, voting on personnel moves involving the police department, discussing the police department in response to public comments, and voting on capital appropriations, including a police vehicle for Ferentz.
The judge found that reading police activity reports and responding to comments did not rise to the level of a violation; however, voting on personnel decisions and capital appropriations did, though, she found the state again failed to prove intent. The fines were reduced from $10,400 to $3,300.
The third charge accuses Fox of securing an unfair advantage for his daughter by appointing her to a volunteer position of deputy office of emergency management coordinator. Olgiati found that the state proved Fox violated the statute with the appointment and upheld the original fine of $1,000
The fourth charge alleged Fox took various unethical actions related to the funding of Ferentz’s jury award.
“Indeed, he was voting on measures designed to ensure his housemate received a judgment nearing $2 million,” Olgiati wrote in her decision. However, the judge again ruled that the state failed to prove intent and only that the action created the public appearance of a conflict. The fines were reduced from $3,800 to $1,300.
In the fifth charge, the state accuses Fox of violating ethics rules by voting to increase the police chief’s salary while living with the police chief. Olgiati ruled that Fox violated the statute and affirmed the $500 fine.
For the sixth charge, the judge ruled that the state proved Fox violated ethics rules by signing a shared service agreement for law enforcement support with Wildwood during the Roar to the Shore motorcycle rally while simultaneously serving as that city’s administrator. Though Fox testified he signed the agreement inadvertently, the judge upheld the $400 fine.
In the seventh and final charge, the state accused Fox of failing to disclose pension income on required disclosure forms. Fox agreed he didn’t disclose the income and testified it was an honest mistake.
The judge agreed Fox violated the statute by failing to disclose it but called the $1,300 fine “unwarranted” and reduced it to $1,000, or $100 for each year he failed to disclose the pension income.
The judge did not buy the advice of counsel defense brought by Fox, who argued that Borough Solicitor Mary D’Arcy Bittner should have advised him against taking the official actions that resulted in the charges.
Olgiati wrote in her decision that “silence by counsel” is not a sufficient defense and that Fox must have explicitly sought the solicitor’s advice and been steered wrong to raise that defense.
“We are glad that the judge dismissed many of the ethics charges and recognized that, in a small community, mistakes get made by governing officials, as well as publicly employed solicitors, which resulted in her finding technical, not substantive, violations of some of the ethics charges,” said Douglass.
Olgiati did not preside over the hearings but was assigned to the case after Judge John S. Kennedy, who had been assigned the case, was promoted to the Superior Court.
Steven Gleeson, the deputy attorney general who argued the case for the state, did not respond to a request for comment on the judge’s decision.
To contact Shay Roddy, email sroddy@cmcherald.com.
