Spout Off Investigation Results Reveal One Wrong, Another Right

STONE HARBOR – Two recent Spout Offs made accusations about Stone Harbor Borough Council members. The nature of the statements and the explicit ties the Spouts made to the June 7 primary election led the Herald to look into the facts cited.
Judith Davies-Dunhour
In the first Spout, Council member Judith Davies Dunhour, a candidate for mayor in the primary, was said to have filed a discrimination suit against the borough when she was an officer of the Stone Harbor Police Department.
An Open Public Records Act request by the Herald showed that no lawsuit was ever filed by Davies-Dunhour.
As Davies-Dunhour explained, in 2005 she felt wrongly passed over for a promotion in the department and used the standard procedures available in the department to express her feeling that she had failed to gain the promotion because of gender discrimination.
That action by Davies-Dunhour led to the borough contracting with dispute resolution professionals in a resolution approved in January 2006. The services were billed at $300/hour and were not to exceed $10,000. 
The Herald has not received the actual billing statements related to the discrimination action and any reimbursement of legal expenses the borough may have paid as part of a settlement. We cannot report on total paid.
According to Davies-Dunhour, she did not end up getting the promotion and continued to serve in the department for four more years, leaving in 2009.
She then ran for council and assumed her seat in January 2010.
The Herald takes no position on Davies-Dunhour’s discrimination action. It was an avenue available to her as an officer in the department.
Davies-Dunhour had contacted the Herald stating that the Spout’s assertion that she had sued the borough was false. The Herald took the step of removing the Spout but felt an obligation to follow up.
Joan Kramar
In another Spout, Council member Joan Kramar was said to have attended a meeting with Atlantic City Electric in February 2013. That meeting was cited as one in which the utility first informed the borough of its plans to upgrade the electrical power infrastructure on the island including the use of the large steel poles.
The Spout claimed that Kramar’s denials that she was at any such meeting were untrue and were just further proof that those at the meeting should be “voted out.”
The evidence that Kramar was at the meeting is an undated signup sheet for the meeting with her signature. The sheet was accessed through an OPRA request and thus is presented by the Borough Clerk’s office as authentic for the meeting in question. Kramar is correct when she states that it had no date on it.
Kramar claims that she has no recollection of being at the meeting and thus maintains that perhaps the signup sheet was from another meeting she did attend.
What the Herald can report is that there is a signup sheet, believed by the clerk’s office to reference the February meeting and that it has Kramar’s signature on it.
As the Herald looked into the Spout, an alternative explanation presented itself. The importance of the February 2013 meeting stems from the assertion that it was the first meeting in which the electric company announced its power upgrade plans.
The assumption is that that meeting would have presented sufficient information on the upgrade that it should have alerted council officials about the use of the large steel poles so opposed by many residents.
The Herald has searched in vain for any notes or minutes that would indicate that the poles were discussed at that meeting.
We did find a write-up of a subsequent meeting of the Avalon Home and Land Owners Association, held in the late summer and reported on in October 2013 AHLOA News, the association’s newsletter, showed a discussion of the ACE project.
That newsletter mentions “transmission lines on the causeways will have steel poles which are completely straight, narrow and uniform.” The use of steel poles for the causeways was apparently known by late summer.
There is an ambiguous reference to Ocean Drive in the newsletter which may or may not mean that the utility had announced at the AHLOA meeting that steel poles would be used on the island.
The Herald has information that Kramar was not at the summer AHLOA meeting.
Kramar argued that she has no recollection of being at the February 2013 meeting, which is pointed to by some as the meeting at which the poles were discussed. The summer AHLOA meeting had some level of discussion of the poles, but she did not attend.