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UNION COUNTY — It looks just like Union County's website.

Same design. Same format. Same colors.

It offers public documents like budgets, meeting minutes and freeholder schedules. There's even a copy of the county check registry, which lists all payments the county made to vendors.

But there are also signs it isn’t a government website at all: The main photo shows a sheriff’s campaign poster, stuck to a utility pole, with words that say it is illegal to post campaign posters on utility poles. The government seal has the county manager’s face on it, and a link to a diatribe about nepotism.

What gives?

The site is actually a spoof, produced by the Union County Watchdog Association, a group that fits somewhere between anti-county-government rhetoric and good-government advocacy. Members bombard the county with public record requests, attend meetings — where they blast the freeholders about perceived wrongdoing — and hold a biweekly online show to talk about county government.

The website replaces the association’s old site and includes largely the same content as before, with some additions to the home page, said Tina Renna, the group’s founder.

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It is, depending on whom you ask, either a well-produced parody or a cheap rip-off that accomplishes little.

"They say imitation is the highest form of flattery, but in this instance, Ms. Renna’s imitation is a pale one to say the least," jabs Sebastian D’Elia, Union County’s spokesman. "This is the equivalent of going into a museum and taking a picture of the Mona Lisa with a digital camera, displaying it on the wall and trying to convince people that it is an original."

But the watchdogs say their site is a chance to convey their outrage that the county spent $136,000 on its site, launched last fall, for design and less than a year of maintenance.

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"If we wanted to design a site, I have this talent around me to blow that site out of the water," said Renna, who’s also the group’s president. "The fact that we did a spoof of their site is the whole point of it. We did what they did for 1 percent of what they paid in our tax dollars."

The parody cost $1,360 and took about four days of work by its designer, Michael Pierone, an open-government advocate who has been working with Renna for years.

D'Elia says about 1,200 man-hours were spent designing and updating the county's site.