Freeholders gave raises to 50 insiders... stiffed regular workers

If you want to know why the county workers who plow the snow and fix the roads are so up in arms, consider this:  What were Freeholders Rose and Lazzaro thinking to be in the middle of contract negotiations with the county's blue-collar union workers, telling them you need to hold-the-line on spending, while handing out big raises to 50 of your white-collar cronies?   

Are these guys stupid, clueless, arrogant, or all three?

Actually, it is much simpler than that.  They do as Freeholder Boss George Graham tells them, and he is in the middle of doing some serious Empire Building.  Like taking over the Sheriff's Department, so he can turn it into the kind of patronage den they have back in Hudson County, where Graham, a former Democrat Party political consultant, ran campaigns for the Mayor of Bayonne and the like.

A recent letter from a reader explains it:

SOURCE: Freeholder Minutes, May 9, 2018

Now there is a justifiable anger from those county employees who have not been on the receiving end of the largesse of Freeholders Graham, Rose, and Lazzaro. For the first time in memory, the CWA employees union made an endorsement and endorsed their opponents. Such is the anger out there. 

It is clear that the three Freeholders have lost the moral high ground by handing out raises to their friends.  They cannot be agents for fiscal responsibility while they behave in such an irresponsible manner.  Perhaps two new freeholders, without the baggage of having taken care of their cronies, can argue on behalf of the taxpayers, for fiscal restraint, that we are all taxpayers and in this together?

Perhaps they can.  Because the incumbents certainly cannot.