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Who Are They Trying to Kid?
By Sergio Bichao, dahiller.com
During Governor McGreevey's 2001 campaign, one of his key fundraisers, Rajesh Chugh, is alleged to have approached businessmen telling them that he could get them lucrative billboard deals once McGreevey was elected.
"He [Chuch] said he would introduce me to the right people to get the zoning done,'' Subin Varghese tells the Bergen Record.
Deny this as hard as the McGreevey administration may, but so far I believe every word Mr. Varghese is claiming about Chugh and the billboards.
Chugh, for those of you who may not know, is a crook. A crook with friends in high places, but a crook nevertheless. Chugh used his connections with high-power politicians like McGreevey to extort campaign contributions from businesses and now he is in trouble for it. Chugh is, as columnist Micahel Shaprio writes, "but one example of how power corrupts." And power corrupts absolutely in New Jersey, even in Union County and Hillside.
The Hillside Township Council, the Mayor, and the Township Attorney are claiming that the deal that allowed Matrix to erect a billboard on Department of Public Works property was a good one for Hillside. They know this somehow without having requested bids from competing advertising firms. The Route 22 billboard, by the advertising company's own admission, is a very profitable one. Who is to say that the township would not have gotten more if the deal had been made competitively?
Hillside will receive $10,000 each year from the Matrix company for the rights. But I find it very hard to believe that a Union County Democratic Party operative when out of his - or her - way to convince state officials to give the Hillside billboard favored treatment just so that Hillside could get $10,000. Following the modus operandi of the Roger Chughs of New Jersey politics, it doesn't take a political scientist to guess that Township Attorney Dwayne Warren is probably right about one thing: the billboard "deal" was a good one. But it is not the people of Hillside who will be on the receiving end of the bargain.
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