Assembly candidate Cook applauds Hamilton municipal government
HAMILTON — Tuesday was a celebration of Hamilton doing the right thing, according to candidate for Assembly Steve Cook.
“It is a celebration of Hamilton not only doing the right thing, but going above and beyond by setting the example for governments across the state about how to let residents know that their government is honest and transparent, and letting the taxpayers know that they’re getting the best bang for your buck,” Cook said.
Cook was at Hamilton Township Municipal building yesterday to announce some achievements of the municipal government. He was joined by Mayor Kelly Yaede; Assemblyman Jon Bramnick; Peter Inverso, candidate for State Senate; Connie Silakowski, Democratic Citizen’s Group Campaign Leader; and council members Ed Gore, Dennis Pone, and Ileana Schirmer.
“In Hamilton there has been a real wind of reform and government excellence that has occurred over the last couple of years,” Cook said, “We (Cook and Silakowski) did a review process and saw Hamilton was actually doing a good job here. They just didn’t have it (the best practices) codified in their ordinances to do this permanently. So when we met with them we saw that this municipal government was doing a good job trying to get the best price they could, but that didn’t mean they weren’t receptive. We sat down and made suggestions, and to our surprise they actually came back and said not only are we going to do government insurance, but we are going to do all of our procurement services. They set the protocol for reform for the state of NJ to do it and do it well across the board.”
“In my year as Mayor, it was very important that we listen to the residents of Hamilton and worked in a bipartisan matter with the Citizen’s Campaign. We made our best practices into law, and our future generations will have to follow them. What that means is that our residents have the extra assurance they need to know that the bidding contracts and future contracting practices will be up to standard,” Yaede said.
According to Cook, this was a bipartisan effort started a few years ago by himself and Silakowski.
“We sat down and talked about the need for reform for the procurement of government health insurance and one of the first things we did was take a look at the Citizen’s Campaign platform and called a local meeting at the Hamilton library where we talked to people who joined with us to do what their program calls for,” Cook said.
Cook and Silakowski talked about reform and in some cases reforms about integrity and ethics.
“The byproduct of reform is not only transparency but a very, very important factor for people to realize is that taxpayers’ money is saved when you do government well. Good government is not only ethical, it’s more affordable. We found that after we did our research, we met with the school district and talked about best practices. Through that process we found some resistance in the school level to get this done,” Cook said.
“But Hamilton is a tale of two governments, because the response from the municipal government was great,” Cook said.
“To know that future generations and future governing bodies in Hamilton are now going to have this legislation in place that will protect tax payers and provide more transparency and a more open government is absolutely that best thing for the tax payers,” Silakowski said, “I have to add that being a registered Democrat, to work across the party lines and see this all implemented, speaks volumes for our current elected officials.”
Cook said the biggest difference is that Hamilton school district is saving one million a year on their cost for insurance just for broker fees. According to the assembly candidate, best practices are about bidding out to brokers services first and then the broker advocates for the government entity.
After he helped Hamilton put into ordinance this best practice, Cook wanted to move forward with the initiative as he ran for state assembly.
“I proposed that any government entity who ever sees more than 50 percent state funding and state aid, would have to institute these best practices. The purpose for that is that state tax dollars are going to pay for those services and we want those services to be transparent and free of wasteful spending,” Cook said.
According to Cook, Bramnick wanted to see how it was done in Hamilton and send a clear message that this was something that the assembly Republicans could support going forward into the next session.
“We are going to call this the Cook legislation. Even though he hasn’t come to Trenton yet, this is exactly the type of legislation we’ve been waiting for and if you look at the history here, it comes out of a bipartisan effort with a reform minded mayor and it hopefully will be adopted by Trenton. That’s some of the difficulty we’ve had and that’s why we need people like Cook in Trenton,” Bramnick said.