This post is comprised of two distinct sets of documents.

1) The Township has released as public documents (in response to an OPRA request) a summary of the expenses of public funds that have been made by the organizations seeking to implement two monuments on the Town Green.  What follows are: 1) the summary of those expenses as the Town reported them in an Excel sheet followed by 2) a huge (17MB) listing of the financial, transactions that are summarized on that summary sheet.  

Click Below for the expenses summary sheet
82572-Monuments Breakdown EAMC and HMC Revised with Library Expenses Updated on

Click Below for the large listing of all expense transactions –
it’s huge so you will have to wait for it to load: 
12.12.2383048-OPRA Response – Powers – Invoices Garden to Nature Grant – Condensed_Redacted 

2) A diverse series of documents that were initially gathered and distributed by Councilwoman Goldberg near the end of 2/27/2024 Council meeting (see Town video (click here and move the cursor to 3h&05min) The documents we provide below are actually a replica of what the Town Clerk eventually (after much prodding) placed on the Township website but in a place where no resident would look for them.

In fact, these are a diverse mishmash of documents some of which do tell snippets of the story of how the State Grant funds were applied for, used and recorded.
Voices does not know how Councilwoman Goldberg selected these particular documents. We have from Goldberg the application for the 2017 state grant but no similar document for 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021 or 2022. We have the signed “agreement” document for the 2020 state DCA grant, but nothing similar for the other four years. We have a “By-laws” document from April 2019 for the Garden to Nurture Human Understanding organization signed by 5 officers from the three grant recipient organizations, but reportedly this organization never functioned and 4 of the 5 listed officers had reportedly resigned or entirely left the project before Fall 2019. We have an incomplete patchwork of annual IRS submissions from the two monument committees – none of which do anything significant to clarify what each organization was either receiving or how it was spending state money. 
The five years of portions of the Library’s annual audit of its “Miscellany Fund” are of virtually no relevance. By contrast, we learn a great deal about what the state required the grant funds to be used for in the document that is the agreement approved by the state and the library to allow funding for the 2020 portion of the state grant funding:

Interested readers will want to relate the state’s list of who could NOT receive grant funds and compare those requirements to what is found in the list of grant expense transactions described earlier in this post.  The state-library agreement for 2020 clearly states, on p 12 of the grant agreement this provision: 

• D. No person shall be employed or retained as a consultant (under this agreement) by
  the Recipient or any of its sub-recipients while he/she or a member of his/her
  immediate family is a member of the governing Board of the Recipient; exercises
  supervisory authority over his/her position, or serves on a Board or committee which
  – either by rule or practice – regularly nominates, recommends, or screens candidates
  for his/her position. Exceptions to this provision must be requested in writing from the
  Division of Community Resources. For the purpose of this paragraph. a member of
  an immediate family shall include the following persons:
  Husband
  Father
  Mother
  Brother
  Sister
  Son
  Daughter
  Wife
  Father-in-Law
  Mother-in-Law
  Brother-in-Law
  Sister-in-Law
  Son-in-Law
  Daughter-in-Law

It was after Voices did compare this requirement with the list of public fund expenditures that it became convinced that an independent audit was a necessity.