Four candidates are seeking two threeyear terms available on the Sayreville Borough Council in the Nov. 4 election.
For the Republican Party, incumbent Lisa Eicher, a teacher at Samsel Upper Elementary School, is running alongside Pat Lembo, a business owner and former Board of Education member.
The Democratic ticket consists of incumbent Mary Novak and Victoria Kilpatrick, a teacher at Sayreville Middle School.
Novak, the current council president, said she is running to ensure the council avoids deadlock on important issues that she believes need to be addressed.
“I really try to move things forward, even against controversy,” Novak said. “I’d rather do something than absolutely nothing.”
According to Novak, a major accomplishment during her tenure on the council has been maintaining investment in infrastructure without increasing debt or taxes.
“We’ve allocated more in road repair and we’ve kept the taxes under the 2 percent [tax levy increase],” she said. “And we’ve made a conscious effort to retire more debt than we’ve taken on.”
Moving forward, Novak said traffic in town is becoming a big problem, and she would seek to mitigate the issue by investing in and encouraging the use of mass transit.
Eicher, formerly a Democrat who has been on the council for six years, said she is seeking re-election because of unfinished business she wants to see completed. This includes bringing a community center to Sayreville.
According to Eicher, the No. 1 issue facing the borough is overdevelopment, and she would seek to slow the pace of building by thinking twice about granting paymentin lieu-of-taxes (PILOTs) agreements to developers.
“We just keep building and building,” Eicher said. “PILOT [agreements] are bringing students into our schools without the money to compensate for it.
“First and foremost, I think we should never give a residential PILOT again,” she said.
In addition, Eicher said using existing money in the borough’s open space fund to expand holdings of deed-restricted land would help to slow overdevelopment in town.
According to Kilpatrick, Sayreville is known for its deep sense of community, and she would like to make that evident by redeveloping Main Street into a central hub.
She would also seek to establish a community center where residents could congregate for special events or in case of emergencies.
“I really want to be a part of solutions and development projects that are going to offer more to the residents than we’ve ever had before,” she said.
By redeveloping Main Street, Kilpatrick said Sayreville residents would have a greater opportunity to keep their money in town, and ratables lost from superstorm Sandy could be replaced.
“Sayreville really has deep family roots,” Kilpatrick, a third-generation resident, said. “I have this vision of what Sayreville was, what it is now and what it could be.”
Lembo, who has served two terms on the school board, said he is hoping to bring his experience in cutting costs without cutting services to the Borough Council.
“When I was on the Board of Education, the school district had always purchased computers,” Lembo said. “We voted to stop purchasing and went to a leasing program, and for the same amount of money we brought in twice the computers.”
According to Lembo, by leasing equipment and expanding shared-services agreements with neighboring towns, the municipality would be able to maintain or even add programs and services without increasing spending.
“You have to make responsible decisions from the beginning,” Lembo said. “You have to be fiscally responsible … and think outside the box.”