Just a few days before Middletown is set to introduce its budget, the phone lines are buzzing.

Who’s calling? That’s the mystery.

The callers identify themselves members of the Concerned Citizens of Middletown and slam the township committee for “excessive spending” and “engaging in an elaborate shell game” with tax dollars.

The robocalls have residents and township officials questioning the source — and legitimacy — of the messages. At least two rounds of calls have been reported.

“It appears to be just another desperate attempt by the Middletown Democrats to spread misinformation to the taxpayers,” Mayor Tony Fiore said.

Although there once was a formal group called the Concerned Citizens of Middletown, back when the fractious Town Center project was still still alive, Deputy Mayor Pamela Brightbill said the group hasn’t had much activity recently. She and Fiore say they’re told this isn’t the same group making the calls.

The first round of calls was made last week, in which a man claiming to be a township resident pans the committee for its move to reassess property values, a move, the caller says, that won’t reduce property taxes. Here’s the full message:

Hello, I am a concerned Middletown resident.

Have you heard that the township committee is engaging in an elaborate shell game with our tax dollars?

After spending millions on a re-evaluation and now a reassessment to fix faulty property values, our taxes will not be going down.

As a matter of fact they will be going up.

Regardless of how our homes are valued the township needs to collect $45 million to balance its budget.

Pay close attention to your next tax bill, then check with your neighbors. Were their taxes affected?

Paid for by the Concerned Citizens of Middletown.

The second wave of calls went out Tuesday morning, Fiore said. This time, the message, left by a woman, goes after the township’s spending, and that 20 percent of every tax dollar goes towards Middletown’s debt. The full message (which can be heard here):

Hello, I am a Middletown resident.

Have you heard that borrowing funds does not fall under the state’s new two-percent budget cap?

Middletown continually borrows to pay for excessive spending, and now the township is currently $73 million in debt from borrowing.

And the taxpayers must make principal and interest payments on this money.

Right now 20 percent of every tax dollar goes to pay off this debt.

Paid for by Concerned Citizens of Middletown.

Fiore says the calls, traced back to a number in Dunellen, in Middlesex County, are nothing more than a stirring of controversy, and when the township committee unveils its budget next week, “the real truth will come out.”

“The information they’re pointing out is just not accurate,” Fiore said.

Teicia Gaupp of Red Bank has a wreck of a story to tell. And in the manner of confessional bloggers, she’s going to tell it.

For almost two years, Gaupp, her husband, Rob, and two young sons had to endure the indignity of walking away from a home-remodeling project gone sour, sticking their Tower Hill Avenue neighbors with the unsightly vision of an unfinished, plywood-sheathed hulk.

The Gaupps had bought the house, then a two-family, in 2001, a year before they were married. She worked in the Manhattan media swirl, he in environmental engineering. The effort to turn the place into their single-family dream home began in August, 2008.

But almost immediately, things started going wrong.

…and as it appeared last week, with new siding going up. (Click to enlarge)

The brick foundation, which the couple thought simply needed painting, turned out to be in bad shape. So bad, in fact, that the whole thing had to be replaced.

“We had to basically prop up the house, because the foundation was just crumbling,” she says. “There was no integrity to it at all.”

Then, “lots of things happened at once,” Gaupp says. Elevating the century-old structure caused plaster walls to crack. Doors became jammed, window frames twisted. “There are closets that won’t open now,” she said, when she first spoke to redbankgreen over the summer.

Things got worse. At the end of 2009, Gaupp was downsized out of her job. Her husband’s business, which he’d started in 2004, took a hard hit from the economic downturn. He was able to sell it and stay on as an employee of the acquiring company. But by then, the Gaupps were tapped out.

“We did everything we could do,” she says. “We just ran out of money.”

At that point, the Gaupps moved into an investment property they owned across town, on Newman Springs Road. But Teicia made a point of going back to talk to her old neighbors — and at least one who’d moved in after the project stalled — to reassure them that the house wasn’t being abandoned.

“I told them, ‘We’re doing all we can,’” she says, and found people were uniformly understanding.

Still, frustrated by the experience, and needing something into which she could channel creative energy that used to go into her job, Gaupp started blogging. She created a blog called A Big Fat Renovation, which she kept largely to herself as a means of venting about the house. But that led to blogging in other forums, which in turn led to her role in helping found the Jersey Moms Blog with two other Red Bank women, Brenda Milouchev and Cristie Ritz-King. The trio hope to turn the blog into a moneymaking business.

In recent months, Gaupp has gone public with updates on the house remodeling, much to the chagrin of her husband, who she says is a far more private person than she is. But she says she’s found airing it out to be “like therapy and mind-share.”

“Not the contractors fault.  Or the husband’s.  Economy.  Old House.  Poor Timing. Not enough foresight on all that could happen,” she wrote in August, to commemorate the second anniversary of a project that was supposed to take eight months. “So here we are, hoping for something to give. We just want back in. We know it’ll happen.”

In recent weeks, Gaupp’s posts have taken on a more optimistic tone, now that she and her husband have sold their investment property. Despite getting far less from the sale than they’d hoped, the proceeds will be enough to fund the completion of their remodeling job, Teicia says.

Just last week, new siding went up on the house, covering over the rain-darkened plywood, a sign that the Gaupps’ “renovation odyssey” is nearing it’s end, she wrote in a recent post.

“The contractor says he wants to have us back in there by Christmas,” she tells redbankgreen. “But I know how things go.”

It’s as Jersey as the Sopranos: the Star-Ledger’s Munchmobile, a van with a giant polyurethane wiener on the roof that tours the state every summer in search of the best eats — ice cream, burgers, Italian, seafood, whatever.

Well, yesterday was a special ‘blunch’ edition of the weekly tour to which a half-dozen of the state’s independent bloggers were invited. And even though redbankgreen rankles at the ‘blog’ label, we set aside our semantic tic and climbed aboard, not wanting to miss out on what some people consider the ride of a lifetime.

Also on board? Two other hyperlocal news sites — Hoboken411 and Baristanet, which serves Montclair, Glen Ridge and Bloomfield — and two foodie sites — Off the Broiler and Go Out Jersey.

On the menu? Pizza.

First stop? Brothers Pizza on West Front Street right here in Red Bank, followed by a handful of other places scattered around north Jersey.

We could write a whole story about the giddiness that follows the Munchmobile. A Turnpike toll taker asked driver and Ledger reporter Pete Genovese, “Is that the big weenie?” A plumber’s truck nearly veered into us at 70 mph while a guy leaned out the passenger window to yell, “Hey, you know you got a hot dog on your roof?”

There’s this strange magic associated with the Big Dog. “My dad was more proud that I got to go on the Munchmobile than that I graduated from college,” said Ali Hanford, a co-founder of Go Out Jersey.

We could also go on about the obsessiveness of some food bloggers. Jason Perlow of Off the Broiler will not let his dining companions put a fork to a dish until he’s had several minutes to take pictures.

“OK, the first pie has arrived here at Brothers,” he said into a tape recorder as the first pie arrived at Brothers, “and it is definitely of the bar pie variety.”

Which brings us to the real thrust of our story: Brothers.

The reviews from this crowd were mixed tending toward generally positive. Which is a lot more than could be said about some other stops on what turned out to be an overall disappointing day, everyone in the autowiener agreed.

To redbankgreen’s admittedly biased taste, the Brothers thin-crust pie (half plain, half sausage mushroom) bested the rest, a somewhat sorry lot, and needs no defending. “After a couple of beers, this would probably be one of the best pizzas ever,” Hanford told us.

Liz George of Baristanet was far less impressed. You can read each of the blogger’s assessments on their sites by clicking the links above.

There’s also a Ledger story about the tour today. (The Munchmobile feature usually runs on Friday, but this one was being treated as a news story for reasons not exactly clear to us.) It’s on page A2 of the print edition.

Finally, check out the Munchmobile Blog, written by Genovese, one of the state’s foremost authorities on roadside eats in New Jersey. It’s in three parts, under the heading, “Big, Fat Live Munch Blog.”

Email this story

We’ve solved the mystery about the date: it’s tomorrow, March 13. The start time is in fact 7p, and the location is still the firehouse in Little Silver.

But the event may not be quite as public as suggested by the Asbury Park Press.

Keith Rella, a spokesman for Assemblyman Mike Pantner, said the event is being held by the Democratic clubs of Fair Haven, Little Silver and Shrewsbury, and is not, as one might infer from the Press article, a town-hall style meeting.

This is not to blame the Press reporter, Keith Brown. Some miscommunication between Pantner and Brown apparently occurred, Rella acknowledges, and a Panter e-mail quoted by the Press certainly creates the impression that the event is nonpartisan. “We’ve invited many residents of Fair Haven, Little Silver and Shrewsbury to share their concerns as we look ahead to this fall’s elections,” Panter is quoted as saying.

The conundrum for Panter’s office now: local residents who have gripes or solutions to suggest regarding local-government responsiveness shouldn’t feel precluded from attending if they’re not Democrats, Rella says. But Rella also doesn’t want anyone to feel “offended or tricked” when an event they thought was nonpartisan turns out to be a Democratic party function.

As for Panter’s own web-based outreach to constituents, Rella tells us, “We have had some issues with our blog, but should begin updating regularly soon.”

Email this story

Assemblyman Mike Panter thinks local government isn’t as responsive as it should be. So he’s holding a public forum for area residents to tee up the topic.

Want more details? Well, you won’t find them on Panter’s blog, which hasn’t been updated in two months.

We saw a notice of the meeting posted this afternoon on the Asbury Park Press website, which says it will be held at 7p at the Little Silver firehouse at 408 Prospect Avenue.

The Press doesn’t give a date, though, which is why we turned to Pantner’s blog and found only virtual cobwebs.

We’ve got an e-mail into Panter’s communications guy and will update this post once we get the 411.

Meantime, from the Press:

Residents of Shrewsbury, Fair Haven and Little Silver are invited, according to a flier distributed by Panter’s office.

“As you know all too well, there have been several local issues that have caused
frustration among residents and led them to question the responsiveness of local government,” Panter said in an e-mail message inviting residents to attend. “We’ve invited many residents of Fair Haven, Little Silver and Shrewsbury to share their concerns as we look ahead to this fall’s elections.”

The invitation cites residents’ concern over the expansion of the Women’s Club building in Little Silver and a proposed historical preservation ordinance in Shrewsbury as topics that spurred calling Tuesday’s meeting.

Panter, a Shrewsbury resident and head of that borough’s municipal Democratic Party, recently spearheaded a successful drive against a Shrewsbury ordinance that would have created a Historical Preservation Committee that Panter and some 50 residents said would have too much authority over historical properties in the borough. Panter’s Shrewsbury Avenue home would have been affected by the local law.

Following public outcry, the ordinance was rescinded at the request of Shrewsbury Mayor Emilia Sicilano.

Email this story

The event, titled “The Changing World of American Journalism,” will bring together an academic and four working journalists, each of whom will give a short presentation on newsgathering and publishing in the digital age. (See shameless plug, below.)

The event is free and open to the public. The audience will be encouraged to ask questions and raise concerns.

Particular emphasis, says event organizer Art Kamin, will be on what web-based journalism might mean to society, and yea, even democracy.

“Newspapers help make democracy work, but digital-age changes in newspapers are here and more are coming,” says Kamin. “This program will examine what the future may hold for journalism and how it will affect our lives—especially in New Jersey and in Monmouth County, where newspapers play a critical role serving as a government watchdog.”

Scheduled to participate are: John V. Pavlik, chairman of the Department of Journalism and Media Studies at Rutgers University; Bill Zapcic, online editor and columnist at the Home News Tribune, based in East Brunswick, and Roya Rafei, assistant metro editor at the Asbury Park Press.

Shameless plug: the couple who bring you redbankgreen—journalist John T. Ward and graphic artist Trish Russoniello—will also be on the panel, representing the hyperlocal, web-only perspective.

redbankgreen is an independent publication launched June 1. Both the Home News Tribune and the Press are owned by Gannett Co., a major national chain that’s gearing up to make the Internet its primary delivery channel.

Kamin, of Fair Haven, will guide the discussion. A frequent contributor of op-ed pieces to New Jersey newspapers, he was the president and editor of the Red Bank Register, and later the Daily and Sunday Register, based in Shrewsbury, all now defunct.

NBC Nightly News anchor (and Brookdale graduate alum) Brian Williams will also weigh in, via a pre-recorded message to the gathering.

The two-hour event begins at 7p in the Warner Student Life Center, Navesink 1. Here’s a campus map; look for “SLC” (Student Life Center) in the upper left corner. For parking, it looks like lot 7 is the best bet, followed by lot 6.

For more information, call (732) 224-2967.

Email this story

Remember that house in Rumson we told you about earlier this month, the one for which the asking price had been slashed from $940,000 to $699,000 over the course of a year?

‘Little Silvered,’ author of The Jersey Shore Real Estate Bubble blog and source of our report, says that the house is now for rent as well as for sale. He’s been monitoring the house for the past year, and thinks the addition of this one and others to the for-rent rolls “is a clear indication how slow the real estate market currently is.”

Elsewhere, though, Little Silvered (who keeps his true identity a secret) says he believes asking prices in this region are down about 10 percent from the peak, which is a far cry from the 25-percent haircut the owners of the Rumson house in question have endured.

Any brokers, agents or sellers out there want to weigh in on Little Silvered’s take on the market?

Tom Labetti is a big fan of Verizon’s new FiOS service. Couldn’t be a stronger advocate for the technology. Thinks it’s so good, in fact, that it’s going to all but annihilate the competition for both high-speed Internet access and cable, once it catches on.

And that scares the pixels out of him.

By day, Labetti is a software consultant in Manhattan. At home, on Elm Place in Red Bank, he watches video blogs and surfs the web on a giant-screen TV. Between his home and office, he’s always on, thanks to a wireless laptop and Internet service provided along the rail lines. He’s an early adopter, the kind of guy who lists all the gadgets he’s using on a blog.

In his own word, a geek.

But what scares Labetti is probably worth at least a couple of minutes attention from even non-geeks. Anybody who uses the Internet or subscribes to cable, that is.

Until recently, Labetti never even thought of inserting himself into a public policy debate. “Come on,” he says, “I’m a Jersey Italian.” (We had to mull that one over for a few seconds, because we’ve known a few Italian-American politicos in our day. But his point, of course, is that he’s a political agnostic.) Still, something stirred the 33-year-old Labetti to activism recently, and that something has a lot to do with Verizon’s current push to become a provider of cable television programming over its FiOS lines right here in Red Bank, which it can’t yet do.

For those who haven’t yet gotten the promos in their newspaper inserts (or the overnight mail sent to some homes), FiOS is a fiber-optic system that can carry Internet and phone service, as well as movies and other entertainment programming. It’s a big fat pipe—metaphorically speaking, that is; it’s actually hair-thin—and stuff moves through it incredibly quickly.

Red Bank is one of only 50 or so communities in seven states that Verizon has so far wired for FiOS, but a total of 147 New Jersey towns are now targeted for roll-out. To smooth the process, Verizon is trying at both the state and federal levels to eliminate the requirement that it go town-by-town for franchise rights to provide the service, as cable companies had to do a generation ago. So far, their efforts appear to be paying off. In the meantime, though, the company is also going through the existing regulatory process. Naturally, the cable companies are doing everything they can to slow the technology’s advance.

Over the years, Labetti has had dial-up, ISDN, cable, and DSL service. But when he got FiOS, he knew it was a new day. “It blows away anything else you can get here,” he says. Labetti is convinced that the service is so damned good that customers are likely to flock to it, making Verizon “the de-facto Internet provider” wherever its fiber runs, he says.

And that troubles him, because just as the FiOS was being readied, Labetti noticed that executives at Verizon and other telcos were floating trial balloons about the possibility of changing the egalitarian nature of the Internet, where anybody with a connection can put something up or visit any site that wants to be visited. And soon, it became clear that Verizon other telcos (AT&T, BellSouth) as well as some media giants including the cable systems (Comcast among them) want to create a second, faster lane for the Internet, one for which they can charge content providers access fees.

Opponents call it the end of “net neutrality.” Here’s what a group called SaveTheInternet says about a two-tiered web:

These companies have a new vision for the Internet. Instead of an even playing field, they want to reserve express lanes for their own content and services—or those from big corporations that can afford the steep tolls—and leave the rest of us on a winding dirt road.

On the Internet, consumers are in ultimate control—deciding between content, applications and services available anywhere, no matter who owns the network. There’s no middleman. But without Net Neutrality, the Internet will look more like cable TV. Network owners will decide which channels, content and applications are available; consumers will have to choose from their menu.

So if iTunes, for example, doesn’t do a deal with Verizon for express-lane access, and Napster does, Verizon customers might be stuck with Napster or nothing. A home-based filmmaker or musician might be priced off the web. The impacts could be widespread.

At the moment, net neutrality is a hot topic in Congress. You may have seen full-page ads in the New York Times and elsewhere, featuring strange-bedfellows pairings of groups like MoveOn.Org and the Christian Coalition calling for the preservation of net neutrality.

Labetti’s in the fray, too, but has taken a solo approach. A couple of months ago, he set up a blog, RedBankTV, that calls attention to the net neutrality issue and others he thinks should be tied to it.

The way he sees it, one of the big questions is why should Verizon, or whichever company happens to provide the so-called ‘last mile’ link from the Internet to your home or office, be the one to decide what you can and cannot get from the Internet? And as long as those companies need public franchises, shouldn’t we use our leverage to make sure that the consumer’s interests get a fair shake, too?

One thing you might notice about RedBankTV is that Labetti is anything but a hothead. He thinks it’s unfortunate that the net neutrality issue seems to be splitting along right v. left lines, or free market v. government regulation. In fact, his reasonableness makes the lobbyists and executives at the telcos look unhinged by comparison; they’re doing their best to tar the net-neutrality backers as part of a “radical” movement that will drive up prices and limit consumer choice.

Web giants like Microsoft, Google and Yahoo are backing the net neutrality push. But with big lobbying money and members of the DC revolving-door crowd on the telcos’ side, Labetti says fighting them in Washington is a lost cause. Instead, he thinks that local influence is the way to go. If Verizon wants a cable-like franchise in Red Bank, local officials should demand specific concessions from the company. Those concessions, he says, should include:

A commitment to net neutrality.

A commitment to a la carte cable service, so that consumers aren’t stuck with the kind of take-it-or-leave-it bundles of channels they now get from cable providers.

A commitment not to oppose any effort to build a municipality-wide wireless Internet access system, or Muni WiFi.

That last one may be the most blue-sky for Labetti, because there hasn’t been much call for Muni WiFi here yet. But Labetti believes it’s a good way to address some social equity and Internet-access issues by making the web more affordable for lower-income earners, and thinks it should be on the table.

To get his ideas across, Labetti’s been posting frequently for the past month or so. He’s also been writing letters to borough officials, to local newspapers, to Gov. Jon Corzine. But as Labetti, ever earnest and forthright, says on his own site, “so far there has been little reaction to my method.”

In fact, a cynic would say the tide is clearly running against him. The state Assembly recently voted to allow the telcos to bypass municipalities and get statewide franchises. A week ago, the House passed a new telecommunications bill without any net neutrality provisions in it.

Then there’s this: Labetti informed us last night that he just learned that FCC regs prohibit towns from trying to negotiate into cable franchise agreements exactly the kinds of provisions he’s been pushing for.

Still, all isn’t lost, from his perspective. He thinks the Red Bank Borough Council should “publicly question” Verizon about the issues if and when it’s franchise application is approved by the state Board of Public Utilities (a move that then sends the deal back to the borough for negotiation of terms). But with rather tepid responses from mayoral candidates John Curley and Pat Menna to his urgings, Labetti says he’s holding off on “giving myself a passing grade.”

Doc Searls, senior editor of the Linnux Journal and longtime writer on technology issues, has become a reader and admirer of RedBankTV. In an e-mail to redbankgreen from his home in Santa Barbara, CA., Searls says that says Labetti “is a warrior and a hero in a true David vs. Goliath fight.”

At the moment, the odds don’t look good for this David. Then again, that’s what it means to be a David, right? And the big issue that he’s been calling attention to—net neutrality—appears to be energizing more opponents every day.