Jerry's page on the Alman Group website (click to enlarge).
Plainfield Assemblyman Jerry Green has never come clean with the voters about his clients when he was with The Alman Group, what payments he received, and what he did for the money.
Rumors have circulated for years that Green was on a $60,000 a year retainer to lobby on behalf of Muhlenberg Hospital, even before the hospital's corporate parent, Solaris Health System hired the Alman Group in 1999(citation).
Green resigned abruptly as the group's Vice President for Local Affairs after a Gannett series on influence-peddling broke the story of his previously undisclosed relationship with the firm (citations one, two, three).
Interestingly, in the story(citation) where Jerry defends his 'consulting' work, he is compared with Sharpe James, Wayne Bryant and Joe Coniglio -- three senators who all have since been convicted on corruption charges (they were all sitting at the time of the 2007 story).
While Jerry took pains to say he was only 'consulting' and not 'lobbying'(citations one, two, three), reasonable people might find that a distinction without a difference.
Especially when you look back at the Courier's 2007 story on Jerry as 'King of the Queen City'(citation) --
"...Albio Sires couldn't help but laugh at the irony. The New Jersey congressman and former Assembly speaker had given Green the opportunity to be a deputy speaker in 2002. And Green gives Sires credit for "opening doors" for him.In 2003, Jerry proposed a $150 million plan to build a new elementary school on the Muhlenberg campus and retire the hospital's (then) $24 million debt. The proposal would have involved building a multi-level parking deck to free up enough land for the new school. At the time Green said, 'If I can't put this proposal together, Muhlenberg is heading toward getting closed' (citation).
But Green would still bust down his doors in his persistent effort to get state aid for the Muhlenberg Regional Medical Center in Plainfield.
"He was in my office every single day trying to save that hospital," Sires recalled...
In addition to getting charity-care funding for Muhlenberg, Green also saw to it that the hospital was able to conduct emergency angioplasties, even without cardiac surgery on site, after their application to do [so] was denied in 1997.
"Jerry was very helpful in petitioning the Commissioner of Health ..." said John P. McGee, chief executive officer and president of Muhlenberg...
The plan, which would have sidestepped the state's monitoring process and put the awarding of contracts in local hands (a recipe for corruption if ever there was one), eventually came to naught.
As the voters approach whether to give Jerry the nod for another two years in the Assembly, it would be nice if he came clean with who his Alman Group clients were, what 'projects' (his word) he performed for them, and how and how much he was paid.
Oh, and why he resigned from the Alman Group so abruptly after he was caught out failing to disclose the financial relationship.
-- Dan Damon
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