New leaders look to revive Monroe’s dormant party.
By: Leon Tovey
MONROE Sidna and George Mitchell have their work cut out for them.
The Mitchells, lifelong Republicans who head Monroe’s Republican Municipal Committee, are hoping to use this year’s ward elections to rejuvenate the Grand Old Party in a township where:
The mayor’s office and all five seats on the Township Council have been in Democratic hands for the better part of the past two decades;
Registered Democrats outnumber registered Republicans by a more than 2-to-1 margin;
The biggest issues facing voters are development, open-space preservation and the construction of a new high school;
And Republican candidates can’t easily take opposing positions on those issues, because the Democratic incumbents have encouraged development (of a limited sort), kept municipal tax increases to a minimum and helped develop a plan for a new high school that would save taxpayers more than $30 million.
"It’s tough being a Republican in this town," Ms. Mitchell said in a February interview. A charming, well-dressed woman in her early 60s with just the faintest hint of her native Tennessee in her speech, Ms. Mitchell and her husband moved from heavily Republican Bernardsville in Somerset County to Rossmoor in 1999.
"It was a political shock to move here," she said. "(Republicans) are really outnumbered. There are so many of these old New York, Yellow Dog Democrats in a lot of the retirement communities it’s a very difficult thing for a Republican to overcome."
And Ms. Mitchell has tried. In 2003, the retired deputy director of the state Council on Affordable Housing ran for a 14th District seat in the General Assembly with Republican Bill Baroni against Democratic incumbents Linda Greenstein and Gary Guear.
The incumbents easily carried Monroe, with 6,784 votes for Ms. Greenstein, 5,980 votes for Mr. Guear, 4,270 votes for Mr. Baroni and 4,215 votes for Ms. Mitchell. The districtwide picture was slightly different, however; Mr. Baroni won one seat and Ms. Greenstein defeated Ms. Mitchell by fewer than 1,000 votes.
Currently, the Mitchells head three township Republican organizations. Ms. Mitchell took over as chairwoman of the township’s Republican Municipal Committee last fall after Audrey Cornish resigned, and her husband is the committee’s vice chairman.
Ms. Mitchell also is the president of the Rossmoor Republican Club, which meets on the 15th of each month and has about 130 members, and together with her husband and Ben Roth, president of the Clearbrook Republican Club and a former council candidate, she founded the Monroe Township Republican Club in 2004.
"We needed a little pride in the Republican Party here," Mr. Mitchell said of the club, which meets the fourth Wednesday of each month at the high school. "We wanted to build up our numbers outside of Rossmoor we’re getting there."
Mr. Mitchell, a quiet man with a gruff demeanor, a prickly sense of humor ("We’re gonna throw the bums out," was his response to a question about the party’s plan for the upcoming Township Council election) and a warm smile, said 65 people attended the Township Republican Club’s first meeting last year. He didn’t say how many had attended its last meeting.
"We’re getting there," he repeated.
Democrats’ rise
Democrats have not always dominated the township’s political scene. During the 12-year administration of former Republican Mayor Peter R. Garibaldi, Republicans held four of the council’s five seats.
During most of Mr. Garibaldi’s 12 years in office, Ward 2 Councilman Michael DiPierro was the sole Democrat on the council. All that changed in 1987, when current Mayor Richard Pucci was elected to his first, four-year term.
Mayor Pucci came into office with two fellow Democrats, Irwin Nalitt and Ronald Appleby, who were elected to the two at-large council seats (Mr. Nalitt is still on the council, but Mr. Appleby resigned in 1989 and was replaced by John Riggs, who is still on the council). When the council was reorganized in January of 1988, it went from a 4-1 Republican majority with a Republican mayor to a 3-2 Democratic majority with a Democratic mayor.
In 1989, the election of Henry Miller as the Ward 1 councilman, Mr. DiPierro’s re-election in Ward 2 and Ward 3 Republican Councilman Robert Tucker’s decision to change party affiliations and run as a Democrat completed the council’s transformation.
Township Clerk Sharon Doerfler (who has seen many a politician come and go) recalled recently that there was nothing dramatic in the council’s transition from Republican to Democratic hands.
"It was just one of those things that happens," she said. "Things just changed."
The Mitchells and other Republicans in the township believe that if things can change once, they can change again and that it’s about time they did.
New directions
Carlos Lopez, a financial analyst for T.D. Waterhouse who has lived in the northeast section of the township since 1993, plans to run as a Republican this year for the Ward 3 council seat currently held by Democrat Joanne Connolly, the council president, who was elected in 1993.
"We don’t want to point a finger," Mr. Lopez said during an interview in early March. "But we do want to ask some questions that need to be asked."
Mr. Lopez said higher taxes are his number one concern, followed immediately by development. He said that while opposition to development might seem like an unusual position for a Republican to take, it makes sense if one considers that increased development drives up taxes.
"There has been an explosion of new homes in the township the last few years," he said. "It’s placed a huge burden on the schools and infrastructure, and that’s driving up taxes."
The mayor and the council have not done enough to slow the pace of development, Mr. Lopez said. For proof he pointed to the plight of the township’s proposed new high school.
In November 2002, voters rejected a $113 million referendum to build a new high school; officials returned a year later with a smaller proposal. In December 2003, voters approved the $82.9 million referendum to build a 365,000-square-foot building that would house 1,800 students and would be constructed to accommodate additions to bring total capacity to 2,700.
But the second referendum depended on the township’s acquiring a 35-acre piece of Thompson Park through a land exchange with the state Green Acres Program (which funded the purchase of the land). The application is under review by Green Acres.
During the 2003 mayoral and council elections, the Republican platform was based largely on opposition to the swap.
Mr. Lopez said that, while he doesn’t oppose the idea of the land swap, as some of his fellow Republicans do (Ms. Cornish, the former municipal chair and council candidate, was ejected from a Township Council meeting last fall after a heated argument with the council about the issue), he feels the situation that led to the swap is untenable.
"It’s the best deal we can get," he said. "But it’s only the best deal we can get because a big chunk of the residents in this town killed us on (the 2002 referendum) because of money and traffic. There are a lot of people in this town who will never vote to spend more money on schools and that’s Pucci’s fault."
According to township estimates, 42 percent of the township’s population is over the age of 55. Township officials have said they want to encourage an influx of retired people to the community because seniors expand the tax base without adding to the school-age population.
To facilitate that influx, township officials have encouraged the construction of more planned retirement communities. Four of the seven PRCs The Ponds, Greenbriar at Whittingham, Encore and Regency at Monroe have been built during Mayor Pucci’s tenure and three more are planned for the coming years.
The drawback to that plan, Mr. Lopez said, is that seniors tend to vote against things like building a new high school because they have no school-age children and don’t want to see their taxes increase. (An analysis conducted by The Cranbury Press in the late 1990s found that a majority of residents of the PRCs had voted consistently against school budgets, whether taxes increased or not.)
Ms. Mitchell agreed that seniors tend to vote against expanding the school budget though she bristled at the assertion that seniors were anti-education.
"People generally are interested in a good education system," Ms. Mitchell said. "But when you get older, you start to wonder whether your money is being well spent. You start to think about coordinating services between the town and the schools. You start wondering how much duplication is there and how can it be avoided?"
"We have to maintain our schools," Mr. Lopez said. "And we’re not. So why does the council keep rubber-stamping these PRCs? I don’t buy the tax-ratable standpoint. I think they’re doing it because the people who live in those places vote Democratic."
While some would disagree with Mr. Lopez’s assertion about the mayor’s and the council’s motives for encouraging development of PRCs, he seems to be correct about the voting tendencies of the PRCs.
There was no municipal election in 2004, but in the general election, voters in Wards 1 and 2 (where the majority of the PRCs are located) strongly supported Democratic candidates, while voters in Ward 3 split their votes. Ward 3 was the only one where a majority voted to re-elect President George W. Bush.
What’s more, as of November, registered Democrats made up 37.2 percent of the electorate in Ward 1, where Clearbrook, Rossmoor, the Ponds and Encore are located. Registered Republicans made up 17.3 percent of the electorate.
In Ward 2, home to Greenbriar at Whittingham and Concordia, registered Democrats made up 36.3 percent of the electorate and registered Republicans 10.6 percent.
In Ward 3, where the new Regency at Monroe is located, Democrats still make up the majority, but the numbers are much closer, with 15.6 percent Democrats and 12.7 percent Republicans.
In all, just two of the township’s 34 voting districts have more registered Republicans than registered Democrats.
Voters not affiliated with either major party represent about 55 percent of the township’s electorate and are the majority in all three wards. Mr. Lopez, who plans to make his "development increases taxes" argument a cornerstone of his campaign, said tapping into the unaffiliated voters would be the key in the election.
In addition to Ms. Connolly, incumbent Democrats Gerald Tamburro (Ward 2) and Mr. Miller (Ward 1) are facing re-election this year.
Steve Williams, who ran an unsuccessful campaign for an at-large council seat in 2003, will run against Mr. Tamburro in Ward 2, but Ms. Mitchell said this week that the party hadn’t found anyone to run against Councilman Miller in Ward 1.
Ms. Mitchell, who as a resident of Rossmoor is eligible to run for the Ward 1 seat, said this week that neither she nor or her husband had any intention of doing so.
Mr. Williams said he’s aware that it will be difficult to defeat Mr. Tamburro, who beat Republican Ken Chiarella by an almost 3-to-1 margin when he was elected to his first term in 2001.
"It’s going to be a tough sell," Mr. Williams said Wednesday. "I’m going to have to go to people in places like Concordia which are hard to just to get into but my approach is going to be to get to as many doors as possible. I don’t consider myself a politician, I consider myself a neighbor."
Mr. Williams, a resident of the township for the past five-and-a-half years, received 3,425 votes in 2003, while Councilman John Riggs, who received the least votes of the two Democratic incumbents, received 7,046. Ward 2, where Mr. Williams is running this year, is the most heavily Democratic in the township.
Ward 3 is more evenly matched and, as a newcomer to township politics, Mr. Lopez said he thinks he can appeal to undecided voters in the area, though he admitted it won’t be easy. In 2001, Ms. Connolly staved off a challenge from Ms. Cornish and was elected to her third term on the council by a vote of 1,380 to 654.
"We have to let people know that the council is not a rubber stamp for developers," Mr. Lopez said. "And to do that, we need an opposing voice on the council."
Mr. Williams who, like Mr. Lopez, said he intends to focus on the link between development and increased taxes in his campaign said he believes a Republican can win in Monroe.
He added that given the length of time the council has been in Democratic hands, a Republican who was elected would be in a strong position by sheer dint of the attention such a win would elicit. And that would be a good thing, he said.
Ms. Mitchell agreed.
"We’re just trying to get people to understand that a little diversity is good here," she said in February, expropriating a word generally embraced by Democrats. "When you get any one party in power for too long, it’s easy to keep doing things the same old way even if it’s wrong."