This guest editorial was Published in today’s editions of The Record and Herald News.
Being a candidate for local office can be thankless position to have
Your Turn
Paul Vagianos Guest columnist
The Record and northjersey.com recently reported that Ridgewood Mayor Ramon Hache was being investigated by the New Jersey Election Law Enforcement Commission (ELEC) for failure to correctly report several hundred dollars of campaign contributions (“Ridgewood mayor hit with money complaint,” Page 1L, Oct. 8).
It is important to put this matter into perspective. Mayor Hache was a first-time candidate running for local office as a councilman. ELEC regulations, while critically important to our free and fair electoral process, are a maze of laws and filing requirements that can be confusing to a seasoned veteran of multiple elections. In this instance, the mayor’s campaign treasurer was his wife.
The vast majority of local elections are waged by residents who want to contribute their time and efforts to their town. If you’ve ever attended a local council meeting, you’ve seen that it is perhaps the most thankless job in the world. Most meetings have little or no attendance unless an issue has upset some of the local residents – in which case, watch out.
Those are the meetings that go on for hours, well into the wee hours of the morning with residents criticizing and often attacking local council people. For their efforts, members of the council in Ridgewood are paid $2,500 – the mayor gets $5,000. For the hours they put in, that amount doesn’t even begin to approach the minimum wage. Most people are unwilling to serve their community under these circumstances.
If this isn’t enough to discourage good people from running for local office, ELEC has filed a complaint against a local official because his wife didn’t keep good records of his campaign contributions. To make matters worse, The Record portrayed the matter as something far more serious than what it actually is: a local resident running for office in a small town who didn’t file all the forms correctly.
We’re not talking about someone running for governor or U.S. Senate who can afford to hire a paid professional to ensure that these forms are filed correctly. We’re talking about a local guy who just wanted to give back to his community.
It’s difficult enough to get good people to run for local office. This just makes it that much harder.
Paul Vagianos lives in Ridgewood.