The Jersey City Independent "

The Board of Trustees of the Jersey City Economic Development Corporation (JCEDC) last night approved the agency’s Fiscal Year 2012 budget, increasing CEO Steve Lipski’s yearly salary to $65,000 from $1. The JCEDC budget, which came in at $1,135,711, also preserves four jobs that were at one point on the chopping block, thanks to extra money from the Urban Enterprise Zone (UEZ) program.

An earlier version of the proposed budget, which JCEDC CFO Cliff Adams says was a “worst case” document drawn up in March as a “precautionary measure,” had drawn the ire of Ward E councilman Steven Fulop, who is pushing to eliminate the JCEDC entirely. Fulop included the previous budget document in a press release sent out Monday that pointed to the large salary increase Lipski was receiving, and the jobs that were being eliminated, as evidence of the agency’s corruption.

The salary increase approved for Lipski last night is less than the one in the previous budget document; it had proposed giving the former councilman a salary of $95,000. He says he says he was “taken aback” when he found out the new salary “last Thursday,” once the full extent of “deobligated” funds was known.

“After the heavy outcry from Fulop and the community-at-large,” Lipski says the salary was reconsidered.

“I didn’t come into this for the money,” he says. “I have a long history of serving the community. I was born in Jersey City, it’s what I know. Even though the salary is less than any everyone else at the corporation, I am humbled and grateful to be chosen by the mayor [for this position].”

Lipski served as the councilman representing Ward C until 2009, after the public disgrace that followed the well-publicized incident in 2008 when he allegedly urinated off a balcony at a Grateful Dead cover band concert in D.C. He also founded the CREATE Charter School in 2000; the state shut the school down last year. The JCEDC position is his first public job since, and he says that he is not looking to get rich by re-entering the public sector.

“If I was in it for the money, I would have taken a job elsewhere,” he tells JCI.

Adams says the initial budget that caused the stir was an “internal working” document that reflected the agency’s belief that “all new UEZ funding would disappear as of July 1, 2011.”

“As the facts changed, particularly the amount of residual UEZ dollars available, the budget changed,” he adds. “Approximately a week prior to the JCEDC board meeting, we determined that unspent UEZ funds from completed UEZ projects would be sufficient to keep the staff intact through June 30, 2012.”

Fulop, however, says he remains highly suspicious of the process.

“Look at who is on that board,” he says, referring to the Board of Trustees. “Would you expect anything else?”

The JCEDC’s Board of Trustees include Healy chief of staff Rosemary McFadden and Council President Peter Brennan as officers, and the mayor serves as a member.

“By lowering the salary they think it becomes acceptable, and they are missing the point entirely,” Fulop says. “Taxpayer dollars are not supposed to be used to hook up friends that are having a rough time finding a job. In this case, there was no public advertisement of a job opening, there was no solicitation of professionals.”

He adds that the “political” nature of the Lipski appointment shows that the agency can clearly be eliminated and merged with its corresponding county-level agency.

“If the agency is so crucial and can’t be replicated, then how can they have purely political, unqualified leadership?,” he says. “It shows the hypocrisy of the Healy administration at its core.”

Lipski notes that only three of the 15 members of the board are officially associated with the Healy administration, with the remainder of the board made up of business and community leaders. And the mayor points out that the board “has always included representatives of the City Council, of the mayor’s office, and the Hudson County Chamber of Commerce, in addition to direct appointees by the Board of the EDC.”

“Perhaps councilman Fulop should refer to the Merriam-Webster dictionary, as the definition of corruption has a specific and legal meaning and his usage is completely wrong,” Healy adds. “Bandying about the use of this word only serves to cast a false and libelous light on those individuals, something councilman Fulop continues to do anytime someone disagrees with him.”

The close scrutiny of JCEDC funding was first initiated by Fulop, who is proposing a resolution that would inform Mayor Healy of the City Council’s intention to eliminate the organization in the hopes that it can be combined with Hudson County’s EDC, thus saving the city from funding an organization that he said performs “duplicative services.”

Whether or not Fulop’s resolution passes, Adams says the JCEDC is adapting itself to be less reliant on Jersey City, and to this end, they are going to “transition the corporation into developing alternative sources of funding totally separate from the Jersey City municipal budget.”

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