Meet Joe Fitzgerald, Running For Re-Election To Middletown School Board

MIDDLETOWN, NJ — Nov. 4 will be an election for Middletown Township Committee and school board.

There are seven candidates running for three seats on the Middletown school board, and they are: James Dobis, Chris Aveta, James Cody, Sara Weinstein, Erin Torres and current Board members Leonora Lacqua-Caminiti and Joe Fitzgerald.

Patch asked them all the same series of questions, and all seven got back to us. We will be publishing their candidate profiles. Here are Fitzgerald's answers:

What is your name, age and office you are running for. Do you currently hold this office and if so, for how long? Both years and terms. Have you ever run for elected office before? Please list all races and their outcomes.

I am a current BOE member and currently on the last year of my first term.

What is your occupation?

Entrepreneur

What part of Middletown do you live in? How long have you lived in town?

Navesink, 12 years.

Do you have children in the district or did your children attend Middletown schools in the past

Three in the district. Two in Navesink Elementary and one in Bayshore Middle school.

What specific skills or accomplishments can you cite that would compel voters to elect you to the Board of Education?

I am a Marine veteran with eight years of service and two deployments under my belt. My military experience has instilled in me essential values such as leadership, strategic thinking, discipline and resilience. In 2016, I ventured into the technology sector by founding an Internet and tech company. This journey has sharpened my entrepreneurial mindset, enhancing my vision, creativity and adaptability in addressing challenges.

Please list the 3 biggest issues the Middletown school district is currently facing.

Funding, infrastructure, transparency, and I’d add a four … Overcrowding in some schools in the district vs. others.

Joe and Leonora, only: You voted earlier this year to increase the Middletown schools property tax by 10.1 percent. Many residents, notably seniors but also others, pleaded with the board not to increase the tax, and also the district warned it would not prevent the future closure or consolidation of some schools. Why did you vote this way?

Ultimately the original plan was to raise taxes 5.88 percent, shut down Navesink Elementary, Leonardo Elementary, and turn Bayshore Middle school into an elementary school in four months. This also included giving the property off of Kings Hwy. to the township that they’ve been trying to get for almost a decade with a 1-year shared Class III cost with the township, which is currently a shared service without the sharing part.

The financial flaw in this plan is that we would have gotten zero funding for shutting down Navesink since it’s owned by the Navesink Library. Leonardo is worth 800K at best and it’s somewhat attached to Bayshore; the Class III service should already be shared 50/50 with the township, and the Kings Highway property should go out for bid. The property is zoned for single-family homes so the fear of condos and apartments is out.

At the end of the day, this plan still would have left us with a $12M deficit year over year. The plan to claw back with the closure was said to be $4M year over year. This means it would have taken us another four years to get whole. Now what happens in the next four years? What happens if an issue arises? A roof replacement? AC unit goes out? They had no plans for that. To make things even worse if something else did come up, we wouldn’t have enough funds in our capital reserve to fund it. No creditor would touch us in our current state of having less than $50k in our reserve. A district of our size is required to keep at least $1.6M in our reserve. At the end of the day, this would lead to an ultimate collapse of our district. Today it was Navesink and Leonardo; tomorrow it’s River Plaza and Bayview and so on. You can’t fix our infrastructure or build better schools with no capital reserves. It's that simple.

Now before I say this last part I must preface by saying, I am politically a conservative who believes we should be governed by laws set forth by our country’s Constitution. This being said, at our Board meeting to vote on the above we were told by Dr. Alfone and Amy Dougherty that our proposed budget was just rejected by the state. This means that if we approved the budget with this plan, the fear of the state coming in to take over our district had become a reality. The state's first move would be to leverage the taxpayers at a 10.1-percent levy anyway. The most devastating part of this is that the state would have implemented a state-assigned moderator and our taxpayers would have had to fund this. We would lose all control and the state would be doing the dictating. So you ask me why I voted the way I did? I had no choice.

(Obviously I don’t speak for the entire board; this is just me saying this as an individual member.)

To the others not currently on the board: Would you have voted for the 10.1 percent tax increase or not? Please explain why or why not.

N/A

For all: In the past year, what mistakes has the Middletown BOE made? Or, asked another way: Where could the Board have done better?

It takes some time to truly understand the position. By the time you think you have it, your term is up. So, reflecting back, I should have taken more of an interest in committees that I wasn’t on and speaking to those board members about their meetings. I think you only get half of the story when you hear the committee rundown. Sometimes it’s the back and forth in the room that can give you a more insight of the issues at hand.

What's your favorite thing about living in Middletown?

I love that we are all so different but somehow make it work. We have financial brokers to fishermen. You couldn’t be so different, but that’s what makes Middletown so great!

Editor's note: Fitzgerald was arrested June 30 and charged with six illegal gun crimes, including unlawful possession of a weapon for unlawful purpose. He is currently fighting the criminal charges in court.

The election will be Nov. 4, but early in-person voting starts Oct. 25.

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