Restrictions limited scope of debate in Manalapan
BY KATHY BARATTA Staff Writer

MANALAPAN - Stephen McEnery and Gerard Ward, chairmen of the Manalapan Republican Party and the Manalapan Democratic Party, respectively, have been known to agree on little, but this week they were of the same mind when it came to their assessment of what had been billed as a debate to be held under the auspices of the League of Women Voters (LWV).

Both men were unhappy with the end result of how the event at town hall was produced and directed.

Starting with a restriction on the number of audience members, notice of which was posted on the township's Internet Web site days before the Oct. 24 event was held, to the last minute restrictions they said were imposed upon the candidates by the township volunteer coordinating the event, McEnery and Ward agreed that the volunteer who is also a township employee with the Department of Public Works had been allowed to exercise authority over the entire process that had not been his to wield.

However, Dorothy Porcaro, who is the campaign manager for the independent candidate who is running for a seat on the Township Committee, said although she had not attended the live event she did watch it on the township's municipal access cable television channel and had no complaints regarding its content and execution.

The five people running for two seats on the Township Committee in the Nov. 6 election are Republicans Andrew Lucas and Susan Cohen; Democrats Drew Shapiro and Herb Barrack; and independent candidate Joseph DePasquale.

Jan Zachary is one of several volunteers who comprise Manalapan's Cable Television Committee (CTC) and is the individual who ran the show on the night of the Oct. 24 debate. A tape of the debate was later broadcast on channel 77, which is only available to residents who are cable television customers of Cablevision.

CTC Chairman Marc Levy said Zachary had pretty much taken over putting the debate production together and said he would defer any explanation to him.

Zachary said he had envisioned the Oct. 24 event "as a meet the candidates (event) rather than a debate," and said that was why he set the constraints tighter than the ones requested by the League of Women Voters, which moderated the event.

Zachary said he had sought to restrict the number of persons attending the event in the main meeting room at town hall in order to be able to guarantee the room he would need for the camera angles he wanted to use.

Shirley Steinhorn served as the LWV moderator at the Manalapan debate. She said although the LWV supplies suggested guidelines for the event, it is left to the venue coordinators to decide the final parameters of the debate.

Steinhorn said that in her contacts with Manalapan up to and including the night of the event, she had been instructed to deal with Zachary.

Township Administrator Tara Lovrich said she handed oversight of the event to the Cable Television Committee because she considered it their area of expertise given the technical aspects of the event that they, not she, would have to address.

However, Lovrich said she had not been aware that Zachary was going to arbitrarily establish guidelines for what she believed was to be a traditional debate held under LWV guidelines, up to and including his posting on the township Web site that only the first 50 people to arrive would be allowed to attend the debate.

According to Lovrich, Zachary exceeded his authority in attempting to limit the size of the audience. Lovrich said she had not given more than a cursory glance at the slide Zachary submitted that was placed on the Web site regarding the rules of the debate.

She said by the time she was made aware of the Web site posting that stated there would be limited audience participation it was the afternoon of the Oct. 24 event and too late to amend the Web site nor account for how many times the information had been viewed.

Two days before the debate took place a flier was developed and distributed which also stated that there would be limited audience participation.

McEnery and Ward both said they believed residents who visited the township Web site to obtain information about the debate or had seen the flier may have become discouraged by the audience restriction and decided not to bother to attend due to the possibility of being turned away.

Other restrictions put into effect by Zachary included narrowing the scope of what the candidates could discuss, including instructing the candidates that they were not to personally engage each other directly nor mention any individual by name.

Those wishing to submit questions upon their arrival that evening were told questions from the floor were not going to be entertained as Zachary had gathered 19 questions sent by e-mail that were then pared down to a random selection of five questions.

When asked if he had imposed these restraints on the debate process, Zachary said he "asked that they not individually engage each other, I didn't demand it."

In the aftermath, McEnery and Ward agreed the event had suffered from what they both termed as Zachary's intrusion into the process.

"Who is he that he gets to decide what is or isn't appropriate for any candidate to talk about?" asked an angry Ward.

McEnery echoed Ward's comments, with both men saying they came to the debate expecting to watch their candidates engage in a back and forth give and take and instead were forced to watch the candidates try and respond under restrictive terms no one had been aware would be enforced until the minutes leading up to the event.

McEnery and Ward also said it was their belief that Zachary had not only exceeded any minor authority afforded him due to his role on the CTC, but in the end he had kept the debate from being as informative as it could have been because he (Zachary) made the decision to eliminate not only direct engagement between the candidates, but also the time and space for rebuttals in order for there to be more time for as many questions to be asked as possible in 90 minutes, which was the length of the event.

McEnery and Ward said they had learned from their mistake this year and said that in the future they would make certain that mutually agreed upon parameters would be established well ahead of an event.

The two men said they could not believe their ears when Zachary was instructing the audience members minutes before the start of the debate on what behavior he expected from them, even stating at one point that he did not want an audience but was forced to allow one.

"He thinks he calls the shots and maybe this year he got away with it, but it will be the last time. That thing (the debate) was a mess because of him," McEnery said.

Zachary said he tried to limit audience participation in order to have the range for a wider camera angle of all five candidates and asked for the questions to be emailed ahead of time so they could be parsed and a selection made of which questions to ask.

Ward said he favored questions from the audience, but said that in the future he would defer to debate guidelines established by the LWV.

According to Porcaro, car trouble caused her to arrive late to the event and due to the sign on the meeting room door that said no one would be allowed to enter once the event was under way, she said she returned home.

Porcaro said she watched a subsequent broadcast of the event and said she had no complaints with how Zachary had done things.

"He (Zachary) may not be savvy, but I give him kudos for volunteering his time," she said.

Porcaro said unlike McEnery and Ward, she was glad the candidates were not allowed to directly engage each other.

"I was happy to see it was civil with no muckraking," she said