From The Sidelines: Some Answers on Montville Township Land Deal

When the Montville Township Committee passed the final ordinance to allow the purchase of 35 acres of floodway, wet lands and uplands a few weeks ago, several residents rose to question the purchase.

One of the questions was who exactly the seller was. It seems like a proper question for the expenditure of $1.3 million in county open space dollars. The answer that was given by the township attorney was that "he didn't remember" and when asked for a final time, Committeewoman Nielson replied that she didn't care who owned the property, in fact she said she didn't care if Dan Grant owned the property. It didn't matter.

Why she used my name is unclear but I can assure everyone I have no such interest, but now I do know who the owners were when the application was submitted and approved. It is now clear the Township Committee lied by omission. You can't tell me they didn't know who owned this land when the application was submitted. Thanks to the magic of the Open Public Records Act, the owners of the approved purchase under the name of Market Place at Montville were Fred Soussa, 51 percent, Ronald Soussa at 24 percent, Robert Gannon at 12.5 percent, and a Fairfield Resident at 12.5 percent. The fact that the Township Committee refused to reveal the owners at a public meeting is a disgrace as is the attorney’s memory lapse. They are not names they are apt to forget.

Given who they are it is understandable that the Committee did not want to reveal their names at that meeting a few weeks ago but it was certainly wrong. The property was transferred to a new LLC recently but the value was established by the County Open Space Committee when it approved a $1.3 million grant in 2009. It has been carried forward with extensions to this point. These were the owners of record at that time.

They are both political heavy weights in the local Republican organization. Bob Gannon was Jim Sandham's campaign manager in the last election. Ron Soussa has been an officer in the Republican Club but the Soussa name has done exceptionally well with this group of Republican elected officials. Ron Soussa just got a $700,000 settlement from the township for an eight-year-old case against the Township which he had lost once and appealed. He got a zoning change for his building on Changebridge Road. He is the landlord of State Senator Pennachio who split up the decade’s long tradition of combining the offices of our two Assemblymen and our Senator to move to Soussa's building alone at a greater cost to the tax payers and bringing $3,000 per month in lease income with him. Now this $1.3 million gift compliments of our Township Committee.    

Soussa has a long history of attacking elected officials that wouldn't bend to his will. Myself, John Rosellini and Marie Cetrulo were all victims of his scurrilous politics. The people on the Township Committee currently owe him and his never ending attacks on previous elected officials which are what helped this wing of the Republican party get elected. He has manufactured websites like dumpjohn.com, montvillefacts.com and used a previous version of mymontville.com as attack weapons until My Online Neighborhoods took the site away from him. He hired one member of the Township Committee while this open space application was being approved.

I talked to one member of the County Open Space Committee who said that this property was not worth buying in his opinion. He is no longer a member, but he was then and actually came to the site. The county does no due diligence. They leave it to the municipalities.    

In full disclosure and ironically Soussa has been stalking me over the Internet for almost 10 years over what he calls the Harbeson-Grant property. No Grant ever owned the property and this Grant never participated in the discussions about the township buying it. It was a small parcel of four acres purchased as part of 130 or so acres of open space in the Aquifer Protection Zone. I excluded myself from any discussion of the purchase and never received any benefit from it. Soussa's contention is that four Republicans conspired with this Democrat to purchase this land. That land was appraised for $240,000.00 and sold to the Township for $145,000 or a little over $.60 on the dollar. There is more to come on this I am sure and Mayor Braden, Sandham, Gallopo and Nielson should be ashamed.