January 31, 2008 Issue                                       

©2007 The Chestnut Hill Local

Democratic majority riles Republicans in Whitemarsh
by Kristin Pazulski

Whitemarsh Township’s Board of Supervisors started off the new year contentiously — with charges of  “secret” meetings, partisan division, suspected pay-to-play and resident frustration — but at the regular board meeting on Jan. 24, emotions appeared to have calmed, with the exception of one comment from a board member and a resident’s public statement that revisited frustration felt earlier this month.

At the township’s organizational meeting on Jan. 7, board members clashed on two issues — a revision of the board’s ethics code and the appointment of Sean Kilkenny, a municipal lawyer based in Elkins Park, as the township’s solicitor.

The conflict arose not as much from the selection of Kilkenny but from the process by which he was selected.

At a meeting in November, three new board members — David Brooke, Leslie Richards and Sara Erlbaum, all Democrats — interviewed three candidates for solicitor: Neil Stein of Kaplin Stewart (who had been solicitor for the past four years), Kilkenny and Matt Bradford and Ed Rudolph of Rudolph, Pizzo and Clarke

Bradford, a Republican, has since been appointed by the board as conflict counsel for the township.

Also present at that meeting was David Nasatir, a Philadelphia municipal lawyer, who conducted the interviews so the supervisors could concentrate on the candidates’ answers and prepare follow-up questions, said Richards, the board’s current chair.

Not present were two board members, Jean McLenigan and Kelly Wall, both incumbents and Republicans. They had not been invited to the meeting. The meeting occurred unannounced on Thanksgiving weekend, after the new supervisors were elected but before they were sworn in.

Richards and Erlbaum, when interviewed by the Local, said they chose not to invite McLenigan and Wall so they could properly establish a “team” they felt comfortable coming into office with.

“We were trying to get ourselves together before talking to them,” Erlbaum explained in a phone interview last week. “It’s not politics. It’s getting the right people in the right positions to get the job done.”

They informed the two incumbents of the decision to appoint Kilkenny as solicitor at a meeting in mid-December, though the decision was unofficial until the public vote on Jan. 7, at which McLenigan and Wall voted against the appointment.

Kilkenny, the approving board members said, was chosen for his expertise and experience.

Kilkenny has practiced municipal law for five years with Hamburg-Rubin in Lansdale and then Friedman Schuman, his current firm. In 2006 the Montgomery Bar Association appointed him as chair of the county’s municipal law committee.

“The firm has a depth of experience in municipal law,” Richards said.

“And it’s so comforting he’s not alone,” she added, referring to the team of lawyers at the firm, some of which serve as solicitors for other municipalities.

Currently, Kilkenny and his firm represent nine municipalities, boroughs or townships, among them Lansdale, Hatfield, Springfield, Conshohocken, Norristown and Whitemarsh in Montgomery County, and three others in Bucks County.

Kilkenny personally serves as the solicitor for Lansdale and Whitemarsh, to both of which positions he just received appointments.

Kilkenny, also on Jenkintown’s civic council, said advising this many municipalities will not be too much to handle, and that some townships are fine with having a busy lawyer as their solicitor.

In Norristown, where Kilkenny has served as solicitor since 2004, Township Manager David Forrest said he’s not concerned with the number of municipalities Kilkenny has taken on because “there are multiple attorneys at his firm.”

But some townships are wary. Springfield Township will be considering not appointing the firm at its February board meeting, after delaying the decision at its organizational meeting, according to Mike Taylor, Springfield’s assistant township manager. Kilkenny was formerly the main solicitor at the township until he committed to Hatfield, which holds meetings on the same days at Springfield Township.

Whitemarsh’s Richards said Kilkenny does appear to be “spread really thin,” but she is not concerned about an over-commitment.

“Even though he’s named as solicitor, he has people working under him,” she said, who can come to Whitemarsh’s meetings in Kilkenny’s stead if necessary.

But McLenigan and Wall said it was not his experience that they voted against. Although his commitment to so many communities has them concerned and they suspect partisan favoritism, they are most disappointed by not having been part of the process.

“It was already a done deal, decided behind closed doors,” said Wall last week, regarding the Kilkenny selection.

Wall and McLenigan were informed of the selection at a meeting of the board members in mid-December.

Richards said this gave the two incumbents plenty of time for the two to respond to the appointment of Kilkenny if they chose.

“I think they did that [read statements at the Jan. 7 meeting] with a purpose — a political play,” she said.

“They could have said something,” she said, pointing out that the two supervisors had almost a month to bring up concerns before the Jan. 7 meeting.

The statements Richards referred to were read by McLenigan and Wall at the Jan. 7 meeting.  Wall outlined her concern over not being involved in the selection process for solicitor. She and McLenigan were told that Nasatir was invited to conduct the interviews because of his experience in the field as a lawyer.

Richards said they brought Nasatir to the meeting because “we were all new and we wanted to make sure we had an idea of what we were doing …… and were asking the right questions.”

But Wall, a lawyer with two years as supervisor under her belt, asked why not her?

“Why throw out our two years of experience?” Wall asked.

Richards and Erlbaum had little to say when they were asked why the two incumbents were not considered experienced enough despite their two years on the township board, except to reiterate that they were establishing a strong team.

McLenigan’s statement at the meeting focused more on the amending of the township’s ethics code, which had just been revised and adopted in October by the former board, including McLenigan, Wall and Democrats Joe Corcoran, Steve Brown and John Weiss. (Corcoran and Brown decided not to run for re-election for personal reasons, and Weiss had moved out of the township toward the end of his four-year term).

The code had been worked on for months with then-solicitor Neil Stein, said Wall and McLenigan, and it was approved unanimously.

But Richards said she was uncomfortable with the newly updated code, suspecting it would not hold up if its legality were challenged.

“I felt uncomfortable moving ahead with an ethics policy that we did not think was solid,” Richards said. “We’ve been told by multiple legal opinions that it might not [hold up legally].”

And so she asked Kilkenny, before the Jan. 7 meeting at which he was officially appointed, to review the code and provide an opinion on its legality.

That opinion, presented at the Jan. 7 meeting, questioned the code’s legality on three points:

 • that the requirement of a super-majority (four of the five supervisors voting yes) to change the code was illegal;

 • that allowing the board to remove supervisors for a violation under the code was illegal, since they can only be removed on the state level;

 • and that restricting political contributions of officials and employees — contracted or otherwise — was illegal and an infringement on freedom of speech.

“It was illegal based on the Pennsylvania State Constitution, the U.S. Constitution and … it contradicted Whitemarsh’s Home Rule Charter,” Kilkenny said in an interview.

Wall agreed that the super-majority might be arguable, but the other arguments just seemed to encourage political partisan play.

“[The former code had addressed] issues that really smack of partisan politics,” McLenigan said. “We wanted the Whitemarsh code to be stronger.”

Plus, the amended code that the new board members proposed at the Jan. 7 meeting, based on the state’s ethics code, included a clause that would not allow former staff and officials to represent anyone in front of the board of supervisors for any reason for one year — a move Wall, McLenigan and Stein saw as a direct attack on the recently-replaced solicitor.

But what bothered the two Republicans most was that they were not informed of the review or the opinion until the Friday before the Jan. 7 meeting, at which time changes to the code would be voted on.

“I would not have been as upset if we had been able to discuss it,” Wall said.

The two excluded supervisors also were suspicious of the removal of the code’s stricter regulations on township employee political contributions, especially since Kilkenny has contributed to local candidates.

Kilkenny has contributed $8,500 to state and federal candidates since 2003 and more than $24,000 to candidates on the county level since 2005, according to a Jan. 16, 2008, story in the Conshohocken Recorder.

Last year Kilkenny estimated that he donated $5,000 to $7,000, including about $1,000 to the Colonial Area Democratic Committee, which supports Democrats running in Conshohocken, Plymouth and Whitemarsh at all levels of office, including boards of supervisors. (Jason Salus of the Colonial Area Democratic Committee estimated that Kilkenny gave about $1,500 last year.)

Richards insisted that Kilkenny’s donations and political affiliation (he is also a Democrat and sits on the Montgomery County Democratic Committee as its finance chair) had nothing to do with his appointment as solicitor. Salus said the local committee Kilkenny contributed to did not give money to any of the Whitemarsh candidates because they did not have campaigns to contribute to (though the Recorder reported that Kilkenny said he did contribute to Hatfield and Lansdale candidates, both of which appointed Kilkenny as solicitor too this year).

Killkenny was ultimately appointed Whitemarsh’s solicitor with a 3-2 vote at the Jan. 7 meeting, with Democrats Brooke, Erlbaum and Richards voting for Kilkenny’s appointment and McLenigan and Wall against it.

Residents at the Jan. 7 meeting were disappointed to see such partisan contention with the new board. But Richards and others have said that a bit of contention is par for the course in organizational meetings, and she sees the rest of the year going smoother.

“I don’t envision us always agreeing, but I think we’ll be respectful and will listen to what each other have to say,” Richards said.

And the Jan. 24 meeting seemed to hint that Richards was correct.

Before that meeting, Bob Sague, a Whitemarsh township resident, said, “I don’t particularly like what went on,” referring to the Jan. 7 meeting.

“That’s what they were elected to do,” he continued. “Once you’re in office that [politics] should disappear. More than 50 percent of the people present at that meeting left here angry. It was a slap in the face to the two incumbents.”

He later repeated a similar statement to the board during public comment.

But beside Sague’s comments and a brief encounter at the beginning of the meeting — when Richards referred to a decision by the “entire board” and McLenigan asked if she had been included in that discussion (it appeared she had been) — the meeting seemed to move smoothly.

Kilkenny offered his legal advice throughout the meeting, and, on a few occasions, was called upon by the board to offer advice, such as when Richards had to excuse herself from discussion on the restoration of a park bridge because her firm was involved in some of the research.

Residents, like Mark Helm who expressed concern publicly at the Jan. 7 meeting, hope the apparent cooperation will last.

”I think, basically, people like me get their gripes out in public, but I doubt we’ll ever get the truth,” he said last week, after the Jan. 24 meeting. “We can hold on to our complaints for only so long. We have to let it go. That stuff is just political life in the fast lane.”

Contact staff writer Kristin Pazulski at 215-248-8819 or kristin@chestnuthilllocal.com.