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The central issue of Tuesday’s council caucus, and what will likely be the big draw to Wednesday’s council meeting, was the redeveloper pay-to-play ordinance introduced last month by Ward E councilman Steven Fulop. This ordinance (begins page 22) would expand the city’s current pay-to-play law to include redevelopers, barring them from making campaign donations to municipal officials while negotiating to be named the designated builder for a redevelopment or rehabilitation project in the city.

The details of the ordinance have proved a bit prickly, with council members raising questions about the proposed law’s on-the-ground implications. Over the last month a series of meetings were held between Fulop, Ward D councilman Bill Gaughan and the city’s Law Department, as well as representatives from advocacy groups such as Civic JC and Citizens’ Campaign, with the goal of revising the ordinance to create a measure that would pass the council. Those meetings seemed at times to be yielding little in the way of substantive changes to the bill, and within the last two weeks there were discussions about whether to table the ordinance to allow time for continued revisions. Fulop, who asserted that tabling the ordinance would be “equivalent to voting no,” came to the caucus intent on pressing for its passage at Wednesday’s meeting.

Fulop appears to have gotten his wish: after a heated exchange that took up over an hour of Tuesday’s caucus, some revisions were agreed upon, and it now appears to have enough support to pass.

Tuesday’s discussion of the topic began when Gaughan noted that there were three specific aspects of the current version of the bill that he and Ward A councilman Michael Sottolano found “a little problematic.”

First, Gaughan charged that the section in the bill regarding “citizens’ private right of action,” which provides that any citizen of Jersey City or an entity representing a group of citizens will have the right to bring suit against those they believe are violating the law, exposes the city to “an immense amount of liability.” Ward F councilwoman Viola Richardson echoed this concern when she remarked that the provision would give political adversaries the opportunity to bog down a candidate with gratuitous lawsuits. “I’m not signing anything that’s gonna give somebody the authority to do me like that,” she quipped. Speaking to JCI by phone on Monday, recent mayoral candidate Dan Levin called the provision “very critical.” But after some discussion between the council members, it was agreed that the provision would be removed from the revised bill. Citizens’ Campaign communications director Heather Taylor, who spoke to the council during the caucus in order to clarify certain issues, told JCI after the meeting that the law upholds the citizen’s private right of action in such cases regardless of whether this ordinance provides for it.

The second concern brought up by Gaughan and Sottolano, and the one most discussed, was the proposed timeframe during which redevelopers would be subject to the ban set forth in the ordinance. Fulop argued that in order to eliminate all perception of conflict of interest, “we should err on the side of the more restrictive,” advocating a ban on campaign contributions from the first time a potential redeveloper expresses interest in a particular property. The ordinance as currently proposed sets the start of the ban at the date of a “memorializing resolution” that authorizes the municipal planning board to determine whether a given site is in need of redevelopment. As Taylor put it during the caucus, “that’s the red flag” that alerts developers to the potential for profit at a particular property. All the council members agreed that this was an unreasonable amount of time; Sottolano suggested setting the start of the ban at three months before the date a potential redeveloper submits an application to the Jersey City Redevelopment Agency to be designated the redeveloper for a given property, a suggestion that everyone agreed was appropriate.

The third concern centered around how large firms would be affected by the ordinance, but the discussion of this concern did not lead to any revisions in the bill.

Speaking after the caucus, Fulop stated he was “happy” with the changes, saying he is “entirely comfortable that it achieves everything we wanted [the ordinance] to achieve.” More to the point, he remarked that he is now “confident” the bill has the votes it needs to pass.

Upon conclusion of the discussion of the ordinance, city clerk Robert Byrne indicated that the city would determine whether the changes to the ordinance were “substantial”: if so, a vote on the ordinance would be delayed until the next council meeting.