Dueling Loyalties, Blurred Ethical Boundaries Plague Pagan’s Bid for Teaneck Council
Michael Pagan served as chair of Jim Tedesco’s 2014 successful campaign for Bergen County Executive. That campaign was waged in major part on a
pledge to reform county ethics policy and practice. Tedesco was working to rid the democratic party of the tarnish of the Ferriero leadership. Tedesco did not wait to treat such issues on a case-by-case basis but announced a principled policy – and implemented it in practice. The principle: No county executive appointee should hold another elected office. Tedesco from the very start of his first term as Executive said that the top people in his County administration could not also hold elected positions in some other unit in government- and he enforced it. (See the Record, 1/5/2014 L-1)
Pagan above all others should have known what ethics would require in a reformed County government – and that conflicts of interest were to be avoided and publicly addressed – and specifically how conflicts of interest between county and municipal levels of government should not only be addressed but anticipated.
Pagan was chosen by Tedesco to be the Public Information Officer for Bergen County before Tedesco was inaugurated. It is a position Pagan still holds to this day. And then more recently Pagan has also become the spokesperson for Tedesco due to the resignation of the prior spokesperson.
The issue is not new But in this his 2nd campaign for Council since taking the County job, Pagan has left completely unaddressed the conflict of interest which his boss Tedesco saw from the very start. When Pagan ran in 2016 the conflict issue was directly raised to Pagan in the press by James Dunleavy (Suburbanite April 14 – letters). Dunleavy said explicitly that he could not vote for Pagan for Council because of the “dueling loyalties”. Pagan’s County job created. In 2016 Dunleavy questioned whether Pagan should even be running for Council because of that conflict: “Should he resign his county position in order to run because of the number of town issues coming before our council that he will have to recuse himself due to conflicts of interest?
But it was never addressed Pagan never answered Dunleavy – he simply ignored the conflict issue in 2016. And he ignores it now – in fact, he now flaunts what he does in his County role as a reason to be elected to Teaneck Council.. So what is he doing and what does he promise to do about this conflict. Let’s step back and clarify the context.
There is no higher profile position in the State’s county governments than that of the County Executive of Bergen, the most populous and wealthiest county in NJ. And for good measure, Bergen far outstrips every other county in the extent that it has been hit by Covid-19’s cases and deaths. And NOTHING automatically makes the interests of Bergen County and that of Teaneck congruent – tomorrow, next week or next year. (Watch closely how many issues related to municipal, county and state property tax policy play out this next week. It is naive to think that the interests of various levels of government will be the same. Much of county revenues flow through municipal fiscal management and county financial support of different municipalities and their residents vary dramatically)
The CONFLICT issues for Pagan flow from there. We get radio silence from Pagan who somehow manages to write press releases daily about other matters.
There are two time frames – and we deserve to know/hear how Pagan handles each one:
- From now until the end of the election period (5/12)
Should Pagan ask to be “on leave” until May 12? Has he asked to be on leave? How does he explain it if he has not?
- Then – if he is elected.
Let’s take the hypothetical: There are unconfirmed reports that Pagan has said privately – but apparently for publication – that if elected he would request that Tedesco give him another job.
Has Pagan asked him about it? In the absence of clear assurance that Tedesco would agree to a transfer or that if elected Pagan would give up County employment and seek it elsewhere, voters have to conclude that Pagan is again simply pushing the problem down the road and failing to resolve it. THE CONFLICT continues.
Literally Now More than Ever Four years ago these were the questions that Pagan dodged. The current complexities of public governance in trying to manage effectively the public’s business through this pandemic and its aftermath only heighten the stakes – for both Teaneck and the County – of having a conflicted Michael Pagan in the middle silently wrestling with what Dunleavy called “dueling agendas” that we would never know about.
So what is it? Mr. Pagan, voters deserve to know! Explain your position on how you view this entire conflict issue – the precise issue your boss so openly and aggressively defined and about which you still remain totally silent. How are you going to handle it – and why should Teaneck voters wait until after an election to find out whether and if so how you will actually resolve the issue? The conflict questions Mr. Dunleavy identified as disqualifying four years ago remain and you have really done nothing to dispose of them.
