Few years in Hudson County politics have been so dynamic or changed as fundamentally as 2007.
In this past year, the county saw a new Democratic faction, two new state senators, four new state Assemblypeople, a new county sheriff and county clerk, and a host of municipal changes – especially in Hoboken, where the reform movement found new life after being pronounced dead two years ago, and in Bayonne, which had three different mayors during the year.
The most significant changes occurred at the top, with state Senate Majority Leader Bernard Kenny (D-33rd Dist.) and state Senator Joseph Doria (D-31st Dist.) declining to run for re-election in the Democratic primaries for those offices this past June.
Kenny left reluctantly, forced out by an overpowering challenge by Assemblyman and Union City Mayor Brian Stack, who wanted Kenny’s position. Stack had to hurry because of an impending change in state law that could have derailed his option to run. The law was designed to prohibiting dual office-holding. Stack would have not been able to become state Senator and remain as mayor if he waited too long.
The bill, which eventually was passed in early 2007, actually was part of a plot hatched outside of Hudson County to limit the growing influence of Newark Mayor Cory Booker, but factions inside Hudson County apparently thought it might also be a way to save Kenny’s seat in the Senate. Those factions included Kenny, Doria, and state Sen. and North Bergen Mayor Nicholas Sacco.
If Stack had waited until 2011 to challenge Kenny, he would have been forced to choose between his mayoral seat and the Senate.
A Stack supporter connected with the Doria camp leaked word to Stack about the plot, and Stack moved to unseat Kenny in what proved to be the first serious countywide Democratic civil war since the late 1980s.
Not only did Stack start his own county Democratic faction called Democrats for Hudson County, which fielded state and county candidates in the June Democratic primaries for various offices, Stack also sent troops and money into Hoboken to help favored candidates in the May City Council elections there.
The war split political families and was a significant challenge to the power of the Hudson County Democratic Organization’s (HCDO’s) control over many seats throughout the county.
Doria withdrew from seeking re-election, partly because the newly appointed chairman of the HCDO, Jersey City Mayor Jerramiah Healy (who replaced Kenny in that role), kept tampering with Doria’s ticket, fearing that Assemblyman Louis Manzo would use his Assembly seat as a platform to run against Healy for mayor in 2009.
For months, Healy tinkered with the ticket until Manzo forged an alliance with Stack and ran against the HCDO.
While Healy also apparently tried to deny former Jersey City Council President L. Harvey Smith’s spot on the ticket as an Assembly candidate, he eventual relented when he forged a deal with Sandra Cunningham to head that HCDO ticket as the state Senate candidate in the 31st District. That district includes all of Bayonne and a large portion of Jersey City.
Rather than running for re-election to the Assembly, Manzo agreed to run against Cunningham for state Senate. While Manzo had good runningmates in Nicholas Chiaravalloti and Sheila Newton-Moses in the Assembly races, the HCDO-backed Cunningham ticket had more name recognition, with Cunningham and Smith in Jersey City, as well as Bayonne Councilman Anthony Chiappone.
In the end, overwhelming support from the African-American sections of Jersey City decided in favor of the Cunningham ticket for the 31st state legislative district.
This loss also contributed to the loss of Stack-backed candidates for county seats, which included community activists Naomi Velázquez for county sheriff, incumbent Joe Cassidy for sheriff, and Deputy County Clerk Mary Jane Desmond for county clerk.
The winning HCDO ticket for those county seats included County Executive Tom DeGise, along with Barbara Netchert for county clerk and Juan Perez for county sheriff.
Stack’s legislative ticket in the 32nd District – which covers Secaucus, North Bergen, and a portion of Jersey City – included Sean Connors for state Senate with Tom Troyer and Marisa Suarez for state Assembly. The HCDO-backed ticket of incumbent Sacco in the senate and incumbent assembly members Joan Quigley and Vincent Pietro rolled over the Stack candidates with ease.
If there was one sour note for the HCDO, it was Connors’ strong showing in Jersey City Heights, where he beat Sacco.
Stack did extremely well in the 33rd District, which includes his own city of Union City, as well as West New York, Guttenberg, Hoboken, Weehawken, and part of Jersey City.
In one of the nastiest political campaigns in memory, West New York Mayor Sal Vega challenged Stack for the 33rd District state Senate seat he wanted to badly. But Stack won the seat.
Backed by a massive turnout in Union City as well as significant majorities in the other towns, Stack also managed to carry into Assembly seats his two runningmates, Hoboken Councilman Ruben Ramos Jr., and West New York Commissioner Caridad Rodriguez, over HCDO candidates Carol Marsh and Nicole Harrison Garcia.
While those races were for the Democratic primaries in June, the winners went on to the general election in November and actually faced much less of a fight. The Democratic county and state legislative candidates went on to beat Republican and independent challengers in November easily.
In a special election to fill the vacated freeholder seat for West New York, Stack-backed Jose Munoz of West New York beat Alberto Cabrera of Weehawken. This, of course, was part of one of the sideshows of Hudson County politics during 2007, since West New York Commissioner Jerry Lange was supposed to be the HCDO candidate for freeholder, but was dumped last-minute by Vega in favor of Cabrera. Lange, who served as acting freeholder when Vega vacated the seat in 2006 to become West New York mayor, shifted to the Stack side and promised to work against Vega in a recall election.
By year’s end, Stack and Vega forged a truce, spelling the apparent end of any recall attempt. However, no one was sure how long the truce would last.
Municipal sideshows
The most significant sideshow in this year’s politics involved the ward council elections in Hoboken. Incumbent 1st Ward Councilwoman Theresa Castellano and her cousin, incumbent 3rd Ward Councilman Michael Russo, both won re-election to their seats. Former Planning Board member Elizabeth Mason won the 2nd Ward council seat for her first term, replacing retiring councilman and current Council President Richard Del Boccio. She also bested long-time Hobokenite and former fire chief Richard Tremitiedi for the seat.
But as is typical of Hoboken, three wards wound up in runoffs because the multiple candidates divided the votes so that no one candidate got the needed 50 percent plus one to win outright.
In a runoff in June, Peter Cunningham won the 5th Ward seat and Angelo Giacchi won in the 6th. Dawn Zimmer, who had squeaked into the runoff in the May election, defeated incumbent Chris Campos by six votes in the 4th Ward.
Campos had raised questions about the handling of absentee ballots in the regular election, and he challenged the results of the runoff, receiving the help of former Jersey City Mayor Jerry McCann, who helped get Campos another shot in a special November election – where Zimmer beat Campos more handily, partly on the back of a open space referendum.
McCann also made his own comeback in 2007, managing to get elected to the Jersey City Board of Education despite a challenge against his votes later.
The other very significant shift in political power came in Bayonne in October when Doria resigned as mayor to take up the post of commissioner of the state Department of Community Affairs. Council President Vincent Lo Re became acting mayor for eight days until the city council voted to have the city’s Chief Finance Officer, Terrence Malloy, serve as interim Mayor until a special election can be held in November 2008.