My Process
To be fair and thorough, I’ve given each of these elected officials numerous opportunities to explain their actions or lack of deliberate consideration, but they simply don’t respond. Instead, they pay their lawyer our tax dollars to respond for them, so they can avoid having to answer for themselves. This isn’t a large federal bureaucracy, mind you, so a simple, honest response would have been expected. These are our local representatives, our neighbors. In some cases, people I once considered friends. Their’s is shameful and callous behavior. It’s certainly not the level of responsiveness one would expect from our local elected officials, our neighbors.
Specifically, I directly asked, in writing, the mayor and two of the Borough Council members, all of whom I have known for years, a few questions. Why did they voted against my application? No response from any of them, except the former mayor, who feigned ignorance regarding the reason for the rejection, but assured me that she herself did not vote (against it). More recently, why does the Borough appear — if I am to believe what their outside counsel tells me — to prioritize the interests of law-breaking, itinerant motorists over those of their local constituents and property owning families? No response from any of them. I’ve been waiting for some of those responses for 20 months at this point. Instead, they have paid a lawyer to send me increasingly threatening notices indicating that “the matter is closed.” No accountability. They have insufficient respect for a taxpayer, property owner and member of the community to even respond.
At each step along the way, I’ve given them rope and a shovel. They have repeatedly (and foolishly, in my opinion) used the shovel to dig themselves deeper and deeper into a hole of their own making over time, and have never once used the rope to pull themselves out of the hole they keep digging for themselves. AT this point, they must “be hearing Chinese.” I have been direct with them, but I have been fair. I am simply holding them to account, as is my right.
So, with new grandchildren now in the picture, and having been stonewalled by our Borough government for nearly two year, and counting, I have taken the only steps available to me to protect our property by arraying large stones on my property along the section of road that has been most dangerous to our family over the years. Again the eyesore remains, but at least we have a modicum of enhanced personal safety. I’ve dug in for a very long — and expensive — fight.
So, what was my next step? The Borough refused to reconsider this matter, so I was forced to appear in person and raise this issue in the “public comment” portion of a sparely attended Borough Council meeting, my last chance to do so before migrating back to our home in Florida for 7 months. I used my time to start establishing a basic record of the facts of this matter to date in front of the Borough Council. They never said a word.
As you can likely tell, this has become for me more than just about replacing a fence. I would still like to do that, but this is now, first and foremost, about rectifying what I see as a decrepit local government. I moved to Florida nearly a decade ago, but have chosen to “vacation” in Mendham for 4-5 months a year since. I love our community here. As a long-time active member of the Mendham Borough community, including serving in our local government and as an elected representative of our community, I have been shocked by the level of willful deception and lack of agency or accountability that has come to characterize our elected and appointed local officials since I moved. I don’t vote here any longer, so I just haven’t paid much attention to local government matters here for some time — but I am now.
I, and my family, love Mendham. Our family and four children have benefited enormously from being members of this community for nearly 35 years. My wife’s connections are even deeper, having grown up here in Mendham. And, despite the fact that we no longer have any children in the school system and now reside in Florida, we choose to come back and “vacation” for part of the year in our Mendham home, where we created and nurtured our family. Even though downsizing and selling is the logical step for us now, we choose instead to continue to maintain some link to this wonderful community, paying significant property taxes for the privilege, because we are happy to “pay it back” in support of the community and the public schools that have treated our family so well for so long. We have also taken great pride in preserving, and carefully enhancing, over the past few decades this nearly 300-year old homestead, a homestead that many people in Mendham — including strangers — have gone out of their way to tell us is one of the things they cherish most about our Mendham community. I now find myself hoping that our current Mendham community has not changed too much in recent years from the one we have cherished for decades. I hope that others in our community also care about assuring that we enjoy a responsive local government that supports what is wonderful about our community. Remember, only we can hold our local government to account. So, I look forward to finding out if Mendham “is still Mendham.”
This Website
I created this website to shine a light on what I perceive to be a local government that has become decrepit. A “swamp.” The only way to eliminate the ills created by a swamp is to drain it. Our swamp needs draining, in my humble opinion. I have many other pressing demands on my time. I own and manage multiple small businesses and have many more productive places to invest my time than to have to deal with needless and malign bureaucracy in our local government. But I care about Mendham, at least the Mendham that I have loved for decades. So, this is something that I am doing for Mendham. For me, with our children grown, we can easily just sell this property, in a seller’s market, and maintain some smaller, less expensive local presence, perhaps in nearby Morristown, if we so choose. I really don’t need this headache, to be honest. But, I have a very soft spot in my heart for the Mendham community that I have come to know over my decades here, and I feel a duty to try to help rectify what I see as a cancerous threat to what makes this community truly special. So, in my “spare time,” I’ve tried to create a persistent display of evidence of a decrepit government so that it can be meticulously exposed to the sunlight. I can’t replace these bad actors with deserving public servants, but we, as a community, can.
The rest of this website provides a very detailed timeline of the events to date, copies of all written communications, the history of the property in question, pictures of the other stone structures along just Talmage Road and some personal observations on how local government should behave. I will periodically update this website with my first hand experiences with the existing local government for as long as it takes to replace those “bad apples,” who have now proven themselves undeserving of the responsibility to govern our Borough, with responsible elected representatives and appointed administrators to our Borough.
I believe that the replacement of two of the Borough Council members this year will start that process. New blood is needed and we will get it. That’s a good start. Then, two more next year, and two more — and the mayor — the year after that. There are at least a couple of administrators that likely need replacing, as well. It’s our government. It’s our responsibility to fix it. Unfortunately, while I remain a taxpayer here in Mendham, I do not vote here because I reside in Florida. So, I can only raise the issue and hope that our community cares enough to fix the problems that plague it. It is a wonderful community, after all. It deserves good government.
About the Author/Complainant
So, for those of you that don’t already know me, what kind of a “trouble-maker” is this guy Brian Cavanaugh, the author of this website? Well, quite a trouble-maker when I see something that seems bad for our community. Some of you may recall that I spent 4 years about a decade or so ago, before moving to Florida, trying to lead an effort to restructure our regional high school district — a move that would have reduced our property taxes and enhanced our high school’s resources by rectifying a “taxation without representation” problem that continues to plague our community — via our regional high school district — to this day. I even represented our community for 2 1/2 years on the regional high school board of education, in an effort to try to fix the problem from within, at the request of leaders and community members in the Borough. Ultimately, the effort remained inexplicably stymied by those representing other communities that send students to our high school, even though the interests of their constituents was well-aligned with those of our community. I must admit that the frustration of having state rules that made it so difficult to rectify a “taxation without representation” issue was one factor in my decision to move to Florida. But, back to the point. I will “call out $#@% when I see it” and try to help our community do something about it.
I am otherwise content, however, to mind my own business, pay my taxes and support our community. To that end:
- I coached hundreds of our Mendham youngsters over a decade in our local rec-league basketball program,
- I have periodically volunteered at nearby “soup kitchens,”
- I have served as a eucharistic minister at St Joe’s, I have for 14 year — and counting — chaperoned about 50 of our local teens on St Joe’s annual weeklong mission trip to Appalachia,
- I have enjoyed, as a longtime Pastime Club member, “manning the games” for the past 20+ years at the Labor Day Carnival,
- I served, at the request of the then-Mayor, on the Mendham Borough Planning Board for a few years,
- I served as Mendham Borough’s elected representative to the West Morris Regional High School District Board of Education.
- And, of course, I have always enjoyed helping my neighbors when they can use it — clearing downed trees, digging them out when it snows heavily and the plows are slow to get there, even burying a friend’s deceased, beloved dog. I, and my family, have always enjoyed being a part of this community. Where we reside in Florida is wonderful, but it doesn’t seem to offer quite as tight knit of a sense of a community as we have — or at least used have — here in Mendham.
So, yes, I am quite a trouble maker. :>). But, good trouble, I like to believe.
And, as you can see, I’m clearly “graphically challenged” at building a web site. :>). My apologies for that and for my meticulous, but long-winded, method of written communication. Again, I just want to be thorough (and fair). Please forgive me for any inadvertent typos.
Thank you for reading this.
So, why, and what about, this Web Site?
I have created this web site to shed sunshine on the behavior of our local Mendham Borough government. They say that sunshine is the best antiseptic. I believe that “the swamp” needs a complete draining at this point. I can’t “sue” this government into better shape. Only voters can demand better and hold their elected and, indirectly, appointed officials to account. So, I put this information before you, so that you can make educated decisions about what’s best for you and our shared community.
On that note, this is not a political issue, in my mind. This is a good local governance issue. I have been a Republican my entire adult life and I supported two new republican candidates in last year’s Mendham Borough election. Unfortunately, they have been unable to bring about the kind of change that I feel that we need to see here. When it became clear to me, after relating the details of my experience to the Chair of the Mendham Republican Committee, that he was uninterested in the fact that an entirely Republican local government had doled out this experience to me, so uninterested that he shortly thereafter proposed that one of those same Borough Council members that voted against my application without any information or discussion be considered by the Borough Council to be appointed interim mayor, I realized that the entire local “system” was rotted beyond repair. So, despite the fact that I support Republican candidates last year, I am supporting the Democratic candidates in this 2025 election. Not because they are Democrats, but largely because they are NOT part of this broken local Republican machine. We need to drain the swamp and I see no other way to do that but to send a clear message to our Republican friends that they better fundamentally restructure the way they do business here in Mendham Borough.
I can imagine some of you, including local realtors, wondering about how long this website will “stay up.” It will stay up until I feel that there is no reason to continue to pay for it to remain in place. That will be only once the voters of the Borough of Mendham have voted to remove all of those involved in this nefarious behavior and demands that its government “right the wrong” that has been done in our collective name by these irresponsible elected and appointed officials. At least some of them are good people, but they have simply proven themselves unfit to serve us any longer. That’s a fact.
Until the Swamp is dry, the sun will continue to shine.