BORDENTOWN TOWNSHIP: Bordentown Tea Party forms

By Amber Cox
   BORDENTOWN TOWNSHIP — There is a new political group in town.
   It’s the fledgling Bordentown Tea Party, headed by Neil Sander, 35, of the Sylvan Glen development, and it aims to make local government accountable to its citizenry.
   Mr. Sander began his efforts in Tea Party groups after Congressman Chris Smith voted for the Cap and Trade bill in 2009.
   The bill allows the government to set a cap on pollution, limiting the amount of carbon dioxide and other harmful emissions that companies and businesses can release. The government issues credits to the companies about the amount that can be released. Since some companies can emit fewer than others, the companies can trade credits allowing them to release more.
   Mr. Sander, a forensic civil engineer at Fleisher Forensics in Fort Washington, Pa. , said he is against the bill for three reasons.
   ” (It) . . . would regulate every carbon-positive industry to its economic detriment,” he said. “An industry such as mine, real estate construction, which relies on concrete, asphalt, timber and other carbon-positive goods and services, and already has an unemployment rate north of 20 percent, would probably take a generation to recover.”
   ”(It) would have created a bubble to dwarf the real estate bubble, without the tangible asset of land to back it up.”
   He also questioned whether it is genuinely a threat and whether the costs of addressing it are worth it.
   ”I believe the answer is no,” he said. “I’d always liked him before that and seeing him vote for it made me look into him a little closer, and I didn’t like what I saw, especially on the spending side,” he said.
   Mr. Sander began to work for Mr. Smith’s opponent in the Republican primary, Alan Bateman who received about 30 percent of the vote.
   ”We have a larger Tea Party organization in New Jersey and when I was out campaigning and getting signatures it gave me the opportunity to talk to a lot of my neighbors,” he said. “I found out that a lot of them weren’t happy with the way things were going either.”
   Mr. Sander said he always had a concept of a “Tea Party 2.0,” which wouldn’t involve rallies or dressing up as Colonial soldiers but “actually taking the material apart in local politics.”
   ”You’re not going to fix the world over night, but there are plenty of things that need to be done that can help,” he said. “So I spoke to some neighbors about getting a group together to try and take on local issues.”
   Mr. Sander said there are many things that need to be done as evidenced in the past two weeks with the release of the drunken driving arrest video of Township Committeewoman Anita DiMattia.
   ”I think the immediate thing we need to work with is the DiMattia issue,” he said. “I think it’s time for her to step down. It was bad enough that it happened and we all make mistakes. The Republican Party says it stands for personal responsibility. It’s time for her to be a big girl and accept responsibility.”
   Mr. Sander also said he thinks it’s shameful what the Republican Party did to Bordentown Tea Party member and former Township Committeeman Bill Morelli, “just kicking him off the ticket like that because he wasn’t playing ball.” Mr. Morelli is also involved in the group.
   Mr. Sander lived in Pennsylvania for about 10 years and said when he moved to Bordentown, with his wife, and started to learn about New Jersey politics he was horrified.
   ”When I read the ‘Soprano State,’ it really opened my eyes as to what was going on around me,” he said.
   The “Soprano State” is a book about New Jersey’s culture of corruption.
   Mr. Sander said he would love to see some of the Tea Party’s members on the election ticket.
   ”I’d love to have candidates with our ideals,” he said. “The idea of limited government, responsivness to the citizenry and the township living within its means. But I think there’s a broader need to just break the machines.”
   Mr. Sander said he doesn’t think any primary election candidate, Republican or Democratic, should go uncontested.
   ”Elected officials need to come back and answer to their own voters and earn the right to go back on the ticket again,” he said. “When I was working for the Bateman campaign, Chris Smith hadn’t had a primary opponent in 30 years. How does that happen? People get to this position where they just have so much power they clear everybody else out and maintain it.”
   The Bordentown Tea Party group has only been in existence for about six weeks and has five active members. Mr. Sander said the other members are friends and neighbors from his development that he met during the 2010 campaign.
   ”We’re certainly interested in people joining who are interested in either the political philosophy of the Tea Party or just in the practical philosophy of the Tea Party.
   ”I’d love to have a group of people who can go to every municipal meeting and basically hold the elected officials’ noses to the grindstone. I don’t want to call them rabble rousers, but in a sense that’s what they would be,” he said
   Mr. Sander does not feel some of the issues other Tea Party organizations bring up are as important as they make them seem.
   ”The first Tea Party event I went to was actually tax day in 2009,” he said. “I’ve been to enough rallies in life to know that about two hours in is when some of the real nuts start to show up, the guys with the sandwich boards saying President Obama was born in Kenya, wearing the tinfoil hats. I don’t have much patience for that. It’s like OK, that’s it. We have real elections and real problems.”
   Mr. Sander said he doesn’t expect the group to make much of a difference this year.
   ”We have to start one town at a time, one year at a time and just persevere,” he said.
Information on joining the Bordentown Tea Party is available by contacting [email protected].