Politics & Government

Mayor Candidate Profile: Donald Flett (I)

Candidates for the Toms River Township Council respond to questions posed by Toms River Patch

Editor's Note: We asked each of the three candidates for Toms River mayor to answer our candidate's profile. Their answers appear here verbatim. We have disabled comments on profile articles to ensure the candidates' statements speak for themselves and readers can decide, without additional, potentially anonymous commentary, their view on those running for office.

Independent candidate for mayor, Donald R. Flett

Campaign slogan: honesty, hard work, humility

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Biography: 63, licensed professional sanitary/hydraulic engineer, local business owner, father of 3, grandfather of 4, area resident for 38 years mostly in Toms River, heritage: German, Irish, Scottish, Jewish; interests: grandchildren, reading, exercising, wind surfing and mixed martial arts (watching), conversation, engineering/science/ecology, politics, history, good food and entertaining friends.

What are your key concerns about Toms River?  What issues do you hope to address?

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Fellow Citizens of Toms River,

According to our Constitution, and common sense, the bedrock source of legitimacy for any government, national or local, resides in the phrase “We the People”.

We the People are organizing and conducting a local campaign of ordinary citizens rededicated to the principle of effective and productive citizens’ control of our government.  We are rebuilding our democracy from the bottom up: citizen by citizen, house by house, block by block, neighborhood by neighborhood, town by town, county by county and state by state.  We are not affiliated with any political party: Republican, Democratic, Progressive, Tea Party, Green Party, Libertarian or any other.

Based on long and bitter experience, we are convinced that the organized political parties are not consistent with the principle of true citizens’ democratic/representative control of government.  These autocratically organized and secretly controlled, extra-constitutional, parasitic entities simply cannot be trusted to represent the people rather than their own selfish interests. 

We are dedicated to changing this situation and taking back our government.

To paraphrase Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address: we are the inheritors of a great nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all people are created equal.  We are now engaged in a great political struggle, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and dedicated, can long endure as a functioning democracy.  We are met on a great battlefield of that political war.  We are resolved that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth. 

We will not squander our inheritance of a great democratic/representative government by laziness, ignorance, inattention, silliness, bickering or defeatism

Campaign Principles

It is recognized that we, as citizens, do not have effective control of our government at any level.  Our government works for special interests not for the population as a whole.  It is now very clear that this situation exists at the local level and is to our collective detriment.

Individually and collectively, we must know and exercise our inherent rights and responsibilities as citizens.  If we ignore our responsibilities, we will lose our rights.

Therefore, we must return to constitutional principles and reassert our right and responsibility to run our own affairs and reestablish firm, day to day, knowledgeable control of our government, starting at the basic local level.

To this end we will conduct our peoples’ campaign on the highest intellectual, practical and moral level.

We will be rigorously practical and concentrate on the policies and practices that actually work for the common and individual good and prosperity.

We will understand and preserve what is good about our community and we will diagnose and change what is unsatisfactory, inefficient and/or corrupt.

We will help people to help themselves – but there will be no free rides.  Everyone has to contribute according to their abilities and situation.  But we will reach out and generously help those who are truly in need.

Mayoral Campaign

I am running not as a Democrat, not a Republican but as an Independent candidate of all the people.

This is a democratic, peoples’ campaign and is a work in progress – please give us your ideas and opinions concerning how our government should be run.

The job of mayor is to meld the desires and needs of all the citizens and to harness government to address these factors in the most efficient way as directed by the people.

I am dedicated to taking back our democratic/representative form of government at the local level.

I will work hard to understand and improve our physical and manmade environments and to improve the workings of our local government in all respects.

I will vigorously investigate and prosecute local fraud and corruption by all appropriate means on behalf of the citizens.

I will strive to understand the mechanisms of local corruption and implement institutional practices to prevent these practices in the future.


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