John McCormac

South Amboy

Four candidates have emerged as likely contenders for an empty seat in the 19th Legislative District a week in front of a special Democratic Party convention to choose a successor to South Amboy Mayor Jack O'Leary.

O'Leary aborted his candidacy a week ago after failing to get in front of rolling headlines about his insurance business. He was the second candidate fielded by the Democrats this year, coming on the heels of Assemblyman Joe Vas (D-Perth Amboy), who nixed his reelection bid to focus on a slew of federal and state corruption charges leveled against him.

Now, seven days before the special convention on Sept. 2nd, it's a contest among former Superior Court Judge Mathias Rodriguez, Vas partisan Arlene Acosta of Perth Amboy, healthcare advocate Jean Pierce of Woodbridge, and Woodbridge Councilman Charles Kenny.

Mayor Wilda Diaz, center, with her sisters, Lourdes O'Donnell, left, and Nancy Diaz.

PERTH AMBOY - There were days over the course of her first year in office in which Mayor Wilda Diaz wondered whether she could run Perth Amboy for a full four years.

She began to get a deepening sense that the problems were too entrenched, the solutions too troublesome and, in some cases, too hurtful to the people.  

Her 2008 grassroots take-down of City Hall fixture Mayor/Assemblyman Joe Vas proved to be but the beginning of an ongoing and intensifying drama in which Diaz and her administration uncovered an inherited $10.6 million budget shortfall and helped state and federal authorities pull together a corruption case against Vas.

"On this stage last July I could never have envisioned that we would discover a financial crisis so deep, or a web of tangled deals so wide," Diaz said tonight in her first state of the city address at Perth Amboy High School, where she attended school and graduated.

Once running and now continuing to insist on honest and open government, the new mayor in this first year enacted unpoplar measures to reverse course on a local miasma made doubly injurious on residents here by a national recession. Her policies have included a 26% tax increase, water rate increases, wage freezes and layoffs of municipal employees.

Ask yourself what the CWA and the NJEA would say if a Republican Governor in his or her re-election year proposed a State Budget that reduced the annual payment to the Teachers Pension and Annuity Fund by more than $500 million, from almost $700 million the previous year, to only $120 million?  

How long would it take for an NJEA Rally to be organized at the Statehouse to protest this policy?

The unions' silence and acquiescence in Governor Corzine's plan to do just this, and their assent to legislation permitting towns to defer local pension payments, are strong evidence that Governor Corzine's senior staff and political team have not rolled over and played dead in the face of severe public backlash over his budget and recent devastating independent polls.

That the union leadership has either agreed or been cowed into silence in the face of these proposals demonstrates a surprising degree of skill and tact from the Governor's senior advisors, which some observers say had been lacking in the front office for several years.

The question is - Is this new group of advisors, while perhaps short on "flash," long enough on smarts to help the Governor recover from his current image problems?

Assemblyman John Wisniewski (D-Sayreville) prepares for Gov. Jon Corzine's budget speech at the Statehouse on Tuesday.

On hearing the news today of Assemblyman Joe Vas’s (D-Perth Amboy) arrest on bid-rigging charges, Democratic Party players surrounding what was an apparent contest for Vas’s 19th District Assembly seat reacted with little shock - and a mixture of grief and celebration.

"This is a sad day for Assemblyman Vas and his family, and an equally sad day for the people in 19th Legislative District," said Vas's running mate, Assemblyman John Wisniewski (D-Sayreville). "Any time that a public official is involved in even an allegation of official misconduct, it puts a strain on the public trust. I hope the process undertaken today by the Attorney General’s Office moves forward as fairly and efficiently as possible." 

Woodbridge Mayor John McCormac, whose town concentrates the largest number of voters in the 19th, said Vas can write off trying to reclaim his 19th District Assembly seat.

Jersey City Mayor Jerramiah Healy

TRENTON - Street people help in an election year, and Gov. Jon Corzine may have a few more of them in the form of those in the political establishment arguably most naturally resistant to the Wall Street outsider who leapfrogged over all of them to become governor: mayors.

Ticked last year when Gov. Jon Corzine made substantial cuts to state aid for municipalities, big city and suburban Democratic Party execs warmed to the governor’s plan this year to cut municipal aid by less than 2%, even as he slashed 850 line items to repair a long-term budget gap of $7 billion.

Assemblyman Joe Vas (D-Perth Amboy)

In any political weather, the name “Vas” on a campaign sign would inspire a particular dynamism, as in “you go” in the Spanish familiar form - and so the name went for 18 years as the formidable Joe Vas, Perth Amboy’s first Puerto Rican mayor, ran the waterfront town.

And yet now, nearly a year after he lost reelection locally, the danger for Assemblyman Joe Vas – same man, different title at stake - may be the inclination among a majority of committee people in this scrunch of blue collar and maritime Middlesex towns called the 19th District, to simply say “scram.”

Battered, Vas nevertheless doesn’t think it’s going to happen, and even appeared indomitable today, moments before heading into a caucus meeting of the Assembly Democrats, where he serves as deputy majority leader.

“Ask any committee member about me – not someone on the outside looking in and trying to rattle the cage – ask them about me and my district office,” he said.

Convinced the committee will see it his way at a party convention on March 25th at the Forge, Vas intends to stare down a cross-river challenge from South Amboy Mayor John T. O’Leary. Assemblyman John Wisniewski (D-Sayreville) will also screen for one of two seats, but by all accounts, the powerful chair of the Assembly Transportation Committee should have little problem securing party support.

The same can’t be said of Vas – who’s had his fights, Barry Adler two years ago and Arlene Friscia before that, not to mention his first run for mayor when he came in as the underdog – who may yet be in his toughest.

If I had a world of my own, everything would be nonsense. Nothing would be what it is, because everything would be what it isn't.
-- Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, by Lewis Carroll

EDISON - Diners anchor what’s left of the train-track and warehouseEdison Mayor Jun Choi: Politicker file photo girded countryside in this sprawling town, fifth biggest in New Jersey, where Mayor Jun Choi drinks his coffee on a summer morning in one of the more recognizable roadside haunts called the Plaza Diner.

The suit and tie and modest demeanor belie a man restlessly at work, for if Choi was an enigmatic upstart when he hit the scene three years ago, he has built himself into a surging political force, three-fourths of the way into his first term.

"And I’m running again," he says with a smile.

The Edison-raised kid who came from the inner sanctum of Bill Bradley’s machine-bucking 2000 presidential campaign, former state Department of Education wonk, Choi remains the Democratic Party outsider in a party that still does not know quite what to do with him.

U.S. Senate candidate Rob Andrews added to his Middlesex County support today with endorsements from State Sen. Joseph Vitale, Assemblyman John Wisniewski, Woodbridge Mayor John McCormac, Carteret Mayor Dan Reiman, and East Brunswick Democratic Chairman Shawn Taylor.   State Sens. Barbara Buono and Robert Smith announced their support of Andrews yesterday.

VOTERS REJECT HIGHER TAXES
SCHOOL BUDGET FAILURES RISE STATEWIDE

Senator Robert Littell, (R-24), the senior member of the Senate and the Republican Budget Officer issued the following statement regarding the school budget failure rate across the state.