There is still one full year to go before the big election in 2016, and in the interim Hopewell Valley residents will have to exercise their franchise in a mostly low energy 2015 municipal election.
In Pennington Borough, three municipal incumbents are running for reelection unopposed. Mayor Anthony Persichilli and Council members Deborah Gnatt and Joseph Lawver are the candidates. Joanna “Jenny” Long is running unopposed to represent the boro on the Hopewell Valley School Board, and she will replace outgoing board member Jon Butler.
Similarly in Hopewell Borough, incumbent mayor Paul Anzano and Council members Debra Lehman and Roxanne Klett are running for reelection unopposed.
School board president Lisa Wolff and board vice president Leigh Ann Peterson are running unopposed for reelection in Hopewell Township.
The sole competitive race this year is between mayor and committee member Harvey Lester, and challenger Julie Blake. The Hopewell Express requested a short bio from each candidate and they responded to questions on various township issues.
Julie Blake:
1.) I have lived in Hopewell Township for 16 years and, with my husband, David, have raised our two college-aged children here. As a professional counselor, I’m trained to listen. I help people find common sense solutions to points of disagreement. Much of my position at Hunterdon Central Regional High School involves advocating for young people and their families in an often times bewildering bureaucracy. I am new to politics but not new to advocating for others. I like to get things done and would much rather make things work for people than be combative or score political points. As a working parent, I know how to prioritize and move things forward. I think these qualities would be of enormous help on the Township Committee.
2.) Citizen advocacy. The Township Committee responds well to citizens who organize themselves and express their opinions. This is a highly educated community of people who keep close watch on what happens around them. The government is as strong as the people it represents. In this way, our local government is strong.
But I think the committee loses sight of the fact that it is there to serve the citizens. There’s a lot of grandstanding, a lot of silencing opponents, a lot of political axes to grind. I am amazed by how much time is wasted at committee meetings and how disrespectful they can be in regard to people’s busy lives. I have been to several meetings where nothing of substance is discussed in public and then the committee and Planning Board go behind closed doors. They appear to be making consequential decisions in private and fail to share these decisions with the community. These are the kinds of perspectives that a newcomer can bring to municipal government.
3.) Overdevelopment is a serious threat. It stresses our schools, roads, and services, not to mention our environment and open space. As a Hopewell Township Committee member, I would propose that we have a serious public discussion about whether we should require all commercial construction to be certifiably green. We as a community are smart enough, and creative enough, to make good plans for the next generation. Unlike my opponent, I have pledged not to accept any monetary contributions from developers or big corporations who seek to exploit the township for financial gain.
4.) Hopewell is a rural community that has limited sewers and has conscientiously dedicated significant parts of its budget to preserving open space. We need to be relentless in reminding the State of those facts, pressing our representatives in Trenton from the governor’s office down about the nature of this community. At the same time, we need to be creative in thinking of ways to not overdevelop the Route 31 corridor and other parcels in the southern tier. Why has the Township planned extensive housing developments that will clog the area between I-95 and the Pennington Circle? That stretch of road is one of the most dangerous corridors in Mercer County. Why would we feed more traffic into it? In short, we do not want to create an “Affordable Housing District” in Hopewell Township nor do we want to develop tracts of land that require expensive construction and sewers.
We have to be mindful of our affordable housing responsibilities and, to be frank, to help educate residents about what those responsibilities are. This can be difficult because the situation is so murky. Mayor Lester touts that he has saved the Township some $640,000 in affordable housing credits, but no one knows what that means. Our attorney has pointed out that we should not expect a payout from the state, so after all is said and done, that apparent victory may be just an illusion.
5.) I am a lifelong environmentalist, and I remember attending community meetings with my dad and family friends about regulating and shutting down the nuclear industry in our hometown. The proposed PennEast pipeline represents the gravest threat to the Hopewell Valley in a generation or more. The pipeline promises to disturb our wildlife and forests, damage our water, and put our health at significant risk. Slated to cut across the township from west of the Ted Stiles Preserve to Mercer Meadows, the pipeline flagrantly violates our decades long commitment to preserving the environment and open space. We need to mobilize all forces to stop this pipeline in the way that previous generations blocked the interstate highway from cutting through our community.
We are fortunate to have so many excellent environmental groups in Hopewell Valley: Stony Brook-Millstone Watershed, the Friends of Hopewell Valley Open Space, and the D & R Greenway Land Trust, the New Jersey Conservation League, among them.
Hopewell Township Citizens Against the PennEast Pipeline and StopPennEast have done a great job partnering with our State and Federal Democratic leadership in spearheading the resistance to this threat. If elected, I will work to strengthen these crucial partnerships.
As for resources, the HTCAPP website and the StopPennEast group on Facebook are good places to begin.
6.) Taxes. We are paying way too much in debt service year after year, and rather than making headway in bringing spending under control we are spending and spending and spending. I’ve talked to hundreds of residents and they repeatedly tell me that Hopewell is getting too expensive for them. We need to take care of our young people, and we need to look out for young families that want to raise their children here.
My 80-year old father still lives in Colorado, and he talks a lot about the concept of aging in place. We need to stop increasing taxes so that our seniors can stay in Hopewell Township and remain part of the community they’ve lived in for many years. We need to preserve our seniors’ ability to age in place.
Taxes and spending, of course, are a question of numbers, and my friend Kevin Kuchinski has a terrific plan for bringing our spending into control. (For inexplicable reasons to me, the Committee seems to have rejected his plan out of hand.)
But reining in spending is also a question of values, of making deliberate, smart, and careful choices about what we as a community care about the most. I have been blessed to raise my children in the Hopewell Valley, and I want to pass that blessing on to other families as well.
Harvey Lester
1.) I am the mayor of Hopewell Township for 2015. As mayor, I am also Chair of the Hopewell Township Board of Health. In 2012, I was elected to the Hopewell Township Committee and have served residents for the past three years. For all three years, I have been liaison to the Hopewell Township Planning Board, Finance Committee and Senior Advisory Board. I volunteer as a member of the Hopewell Valley Municipal Alliance Executive Committee for the past four years.
I am an attorney with degrees from New York Law School and Muhlenberg College, where I graduated with honors while majoring in English and American Studies. I am admitted to practice law in New Jersey, Pennsylvania and the Federal District Court of New Jersey.
My law career was spent in public service in the Essex, Mercer and Hunterdon County Prosecutor’s Offices. As an assistant prosecutor, I became a trial lawyer and conducted well-over 100 criminal jury trials. As a trial lawyer, it is my nature to thoroughly analyze issues, anticipate problems and find the best available solution.
After 31 years, I retired as a career prosecutor and became involved in local issues. I led a grass-roots movement as vice-chair of the environmental group known as Citizens for Tax Choice.
I am a 28-year resident of the township, where I live with my wife and two children, both of whom were educated in the Hopewell Valley Regional School District. My son is a sophomore at college, while my daughter is a senior at Hopewell Valley Central High School.
2.) Hopewell Township municipal government strives to serve our residents well. I have been leading that effort by example. For five years, the State of New Jersey owed Hopewell Township reimbursement of $639,000. Within five minutes of announcing my goals as mayor in January, I set a priority to take action to pursue reimbursement. Where previous mayors were content with the status quo of waiting, I led the charge. By February, our lawsuit was filed. In August, a judge ruled in our favor. The judge found that we were entitled to compensation in the form of affordable housing credit. We claimed that the credit amounted to 70 affordable housing units that the township should not have to build. If built by a developer, the credit could amount to 420 units of less development. The judge will ultimately decide our affordable housing requirement.
The fact is, if not for my leadership, Hopewell Township would still be waiting for the State to stop ignoring us, and we would have a larger affordable housing obligation.
I also made government more transparent and accessible by reinstating Mayor’s Walk-in Hours at the Municipal Building. That was another idea that I announced as one of my goals. I am able to keep municipal office hours because serving on the Hopewell Township Committee is my full-time job.
Our employees are often complimented by residents for their dedication. In fact, in 2013, the Center for Governmental Research found “the township to be a well-run, efficient operation providing responsive services with sensitivity to optimizing public resources.”
We can be a more effective and efficient operation by being open to new ideas, such as the ones that I instituted, and new technology. By avoiding the “we’ve always done it this way” trap, we can serve our residents even better.
3.) I believe in limiting development. Always have, always will. In the past, Democrats have represented that view, but following their massive Kooltronic-Pennytown scheme and more massive Scotch Road Town Center proposal, I see that local Republicans are currently the party holding the line on development.
In 2008, under a Democratic administration, the township bought Pennytown for $6.5 million to construct 70 affordable housing units. By 2009, still under a Democratic administration, the project expanded to 365 housing units and a proposed partnership with Kooltronic Corporation. Under Republican administrations of 2010, 2011 and 2012, the project did not move forward. When the Democrats regained control of the township committee in 2013, the project was resurrected and was wildly unpopular. I chose to stand with the people and against my former party.
By 2014, history had repeated itself. When the current owner of the former Merrill Lynch property at Scotch Road, asked the Planning Board to recommend to the township committee re-zoning 200 acres on the west side of Scotch Road, the Democratic administration proposed a 1,000-acre Scotch Road Town Center project. Once again, the project was wildly unpopular. Once again, I stood with the people and against my former party.
In best representing residents’ interests, committee members should actually represent their constituents as I did.
4.) Residents need to know that affordable housing is a New Jersey Constitutional obligation, which is the law of our land. Beginning in 1975, the New Jersey Supreme Court found that municipalities cannot exclude low and moderate income families from the municipality by means of zoning. In 1983, the Court created an enforcement mechanism to insure municipal compliance by allowing builders to sue non-compliant municipalities with a so-called “builders’ remedy” lawsuit. In 1985, the New Jersey Legislature passed a law called the Fair Housing Act and created an administrative agency, the Council on Affordable Housing, to determine each municipal obligation.
After COAH issued several rounds of rules over the decades, COAH became mired in court challenges and eventually became non-functioning. On March 10, 2015, the courts took over the obligation to determine municipal compliance.
Enforcement of a municipal affordable housing obligation is much more expensive through the courts than by way of an administrative agency. That is why I recently introduced, and the Hopewell Township Committee passed, a resolution “imploring” the Governor and legislature to get off the sidelines and get into the game of changing 30 year old rules, which make it challenging to protect Hopewell Township from builders. I also did my own “imploring” by personally lobbying State legislators.
5.) I have been fighting the PennEast pipeline every step of the way. In October, 2014, I voted to oppose the pipeline in a township resolution that authorized our township attorney to intervene on behalf of the township, if, and when, PennEast filed a formal application with the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. In November, 2014, I attended the so-called PennEast Open House at South Hunterdon High School to see their tactics for myself.
Besides attending numerous public meetings as well as strategy sessions, in February 2015, at the Scoping meeting, I publicly urged FERC to vote for the “No Build” option.
In July, when the County granted PennEast survey approval at the Ted Stiles Preserve at Baldpate Mountain, I authored a press release, which was published, announcing that I would introduce a resolution at our upcoming township committee meeting to demand that the county rescind their permission. Within 24 hours of publication, the county withdrew their grant of survey approval. At that meeting, I introduced and passed a resolution banning PennEast from surveying township property, including Baldpate Mountain.
Also in July, as Chair of the Hopewell Township Board of Health, I conducted a novel hearing with scientific testimony as to health and safety aspects of the PennEast pipeline. After hearing the testimony, I introduced and passed a resolution declaring that the pipeline was “a significant and unreasonable risk to township residents.”
Recently, I became an intervenor in my own right.
The township website is an excellent source of information on the history and status of the PennEast pipeline as well as the websites of various private non-profit groups fighting the pipeline.
6.) Although Hopewell Township has the lowest municipal tax rate in Mercer County, debt proved to be a drag on our budget this year. Creating a comprehensive plan to address our debt should be a priority. For years, previous township committees kicked the debt can down the road by spending money that we did not have, and failing to responsibly plan for our future.
By 2014, we had put $49 million in bonds to be paid off by future committees. For example, when the 2008 township committee bought Pennytown for $6.5 million and our affordable housing trust fund ran out of money, that obligation became part of general debt for future township committees to be stuck with. When we had a fire this year that destroyed every public works vehicle, those obligations combined to cause our spending to spike.
During this year’s budget cycle, under my leadership, the township committee conducted 14 public budget meetings. That represents more than twice as many budget meetings than were conducted during the previous year as well as more budget meetings than 2013 and 2014 combined. Like Zero Based Budgeting, every dollar was subject to scrutiny.
In 2015, Wall Street gave Hopewell Township a testament to our money management skills when the bond rating agency, Standard and Poor’s, gave Hopewell Township its highest rating of AAA. That highest bond rating put Hopewell Township in an exclusive club of only 18 New Jersey municipalities with a AAA bond rating.
