Former Councilor Malcolm Dunn passes away on New Year's Day (Updated with obituary)

Malcolm Dunn and group from Plainfield that visited
Vineland UEZ in 2002. (l to r) employees Pat Ballard Fox
and Wayne Awald, City Council members Adrian Mapp,
Liz Urquhart and Malcolm R. Dunn, and UEZ coordinator
Jacques Howard. Photo by Dan Damon, then the city's
Public Information Officer.

UPDATE Mon, Jan. 7: Obituary here; visitation will be Friday at PHS, funeral Saturday at Fountain Baptist Church.

(CORRECTED: House was on 8th at Spooner, not vice versa. Thank you, JP.) I learned through Facebook on Sunday afternoon that former Ward 3 Councilman (and Council President) Malcom R. Dunn passed away on New Year's Day.

I have known Malcolm since shortly after moving to Plainfield when he inquired if my partner Nat was from Queens. (Answer: Yes.)

It turns out that Nat's father, who was a fixture in Queens politics, was instrumental in getting Malcolm's Dunn & Sons business the maintenance  contract for the Twin Towers, which turned out to be the basis of Dunn's financial well-being. (To this day, Malcolm's brother Danny reminds me of his gratitude for that fact whenever I bump into him.)

When we moved here, Malcolm and Flora and family lived in a home on Spooner Avenue near West 8th Street.

When Mayor Al McWilliams launched his community-based strategic planning effort in the late 1990s (more than 500 residents participated in intensive meetings in over a period of many months), Malcolm played a leading role.

He and I served on the coordinating committee which also included Pastor LaVerne Lattimore Ball (of Rose of Sharon Church) and Fred Hipp (of Muhlenberg Hospital, then Solaris Health System).

For months, we toiled to coordinate the discussion groups and then the preparation of the final report -- one of the first to be published on the city's earliest website (now long gone).

When the report was finally finished, I was able to land a feature story about it in the monthly magazine of the NJ League of Municipalities -- and Malcolm and Mayor McWilliams made the front cover in a photo of them standing on the NJ Transit overpass on Watchung Avenue, with the North Avenue business block in the background, discussing the plan -- with a rolled-up blueprint as a prop.

In 2002, Malcolm and I were part of a team sent by Mayor McWilliams to investigate the Urban Enterprise Zone (UEZ) in Vineland, then one of New Jersey's leading such programs (see my 2010 retrospective on that trip here).

It was fascinating to watch Malcolm work -- he was quick to grasp the essence of a situation or presentation and had little time for fluff or small talk. He summarized the points that interested him succinctly and could present his conclusions from memory -- and forcefully.

All of these things made him a formidable presence -- never more so than in his two terms as Council President.

As I observed in writing up a special Council meeting during the tenure of the hapless Mayor Sharon Robinson-Briggs and referring back to Malcolm's days (see that post here) --

As Council President, Malcolm terrorized City Administrators and department heads, scathingly chewing them up and spitting them out when they came before the Council ill-prepared.


Though I do not miss the meetings [Dunn chaired] that often dragged on toward -- and sometimes past -- the midnight hour, I do think that we could do with a firmer approach by the Council President toward the Robinson-Briggs administration, at least by demanding that [then-City Administrator Mark] Dashield come prepared and then by taking on the list-making role of Ko-Ko, the Mikado's Lord High Executioner.

Malcolm was also able to be quite unashamedly controversial -- as when, as PMUA Commissioner along with his sidekick Cecil Sanders, he engineered the scandalous $1 million payout to PMUA Executive Director Eric Watson and his deputy David Ervin on their way out of the agency.

Though the settlement caused a firestorm of negative publicity, Malcolm never retreated and never apologized for his decision.

Malcolm was a master of what is called in New Jersey parlance "transactional politics". It hard to think of a deal in which he was a participant that he did not come out on the good end.

He was endlessly lobbying for "local contractors" whenever there was a Plainfield project involving construction. Whenever that plea was heeded, one could usually find a connection to Malcolm in whoever got the contract as a "local" businessperson.

All told, Malcolm R. Dunn was a dominant figure in Plainfield politics at the turn of the 21st century, and one of its pivotal figures -- along with Mayor Al McWilliams and Assemblyman Jerry Green.

His passing, along with that of Assemblyman Green, marks the end of an era.

Rest in peace, Malcolm.

---

 -- Dan Damon [ follow ]

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