In one of his last acts before he was indicted last week, New Jersey State Sen. Wayne Bryant attended a Borough Council meeting in his hometown of Lawnside and helped steer a $10,000 "incentive" bonus to a woman who holds three borough jobs.
It was a classic Bryant show of generosity with public money, rewarding a loyalist, Jessie Harris, who earns a total of $93,000 for the jobs of borough administrator, tax collector and chief financial officer.
It may have been his last act.
The 59-year-old state senator has been slapped with corruption charges that have already ended his political career and could earn him a long prison term if he is convicted. He has resigned from the law firm he helped found and has been removed from no-show jobs at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey and at Rutgers University-Camden.
Even in Lawnside, where the senator's family has played key roles in the 1.5-square-mile borough for two centuries, Bryant's influence appears over.
At the recent Borough Council meeting, Bryant - filling the role of borough solicitor - faced angry questions about giving the bonus to Harris, who retires in June.
Some people thought the confused wording of the resolution might entitle Harris to a $270,000 bonus - $10,000 for each of her 27 years working for Lawnside - which unsettled the packed audience. Some called the bonus a payoff to silence Harris for the secrets she must know.
Bryant rewrote the resolution and explained that it was never intended to give Harris more than a single $10,000 payment. Still, some people in the audience questioned why Bryant was speaking for the borough, since he holds no official title.
Though he resigned March 1 from his law firm, which collects $64,000 a year representing the borough, Bryant said, "sometimes I come out of retirement status" to fill in for his former law partner as solicitor at borough meetings.
Residents were unmoved.
Some later launched a petition drive asking Borough Council to forbid Bryant and his relatives from doling out any more public money to their favorites.
"We have the right to ask for what we want in the borough," said Willa Coletrane, a Republican candidate for Borough Council who is part of a new anti-Bryant Republican upsurge. "Part of the problem is we sat back and said nothing for so long."
Words like that have rarely been uttered in Lawnside, a historic town noted as a stop on the Underground Railroad.
