And then the Blue Wave came crashing. In the 2018 mid-term elections both of the county’s congressional districts – New Jersey’s 7^th and 11^th – elected Democrats for the first time since the early 1980s. This followed a trend found in many American suburban districts, where a new crop of candidates energized by their opposition to President Donald Trump sent longtime Republican incumbents packing.

Len Resto was one of the Blue Wave’s casualties. A Republican member of the Chatham Borough Council, he and his running mate, Peter Hoffman, narrowly lost re-election to the Democratic ticket in 2018. He eventually found his way back to the Council when he was appointed to fill a vacant seat – only this time, he decided to serve as a Democrat.

“I’ve always been a very middle of the road person, a moderate. And the Republican Party to me was just lurching so far to the right that it was falling off a cliff,” Resto told me over the phone about his switch in party. He’s running for election again this year, his first time doing so as a Democrat, and is optimistic that his “boringly in the middle” will help he and his running mate, Frank Truilo, defeat Republican candidate Bob Weber. “People in Chatham, I think, are very moderate, they’re middle of the road, they want to see things getting done. They want to see harmony. And, you know, I’ve kind of been someone that offers that. I try to work with everybody.”

This isn’t the first time Resto has switched parties. He’d been a lifelong Democrat until the early 2000s, when he became the campaign treasurer for Andy Copp, a Republican candidate for Borough Council. He also supported former Republican New Jersey governors Tom Kean and Christine Todd Whitman (who gave a brief statement endorsing former Vice President Joe Biden at the Democratic National Convention in August), two figures who Resto argues represent a version of Republicanism that’s been abandoned by the modern party. “The moderate Republicans believed in old fashioned conservative values. They believed in fiscal conservatism, or fiscal sanity, and we have got a deficit that is in the trillions that your grandchildren will still be paying off,” said Resto. “Under Trump, it’s gone just totally off a cliff, and we keep cutting taxes. But the relief doesn’t seem to filter down to the middle class and those at the bottom rung of the ladder.”

Traditionally, the prospect of lower taxes helped persuade voters in affluent suburban districts to vote for Republicans. But the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act – which was passed by a Republican controlled Congress and signed into law by President Trump — placed a $10,000 cap on state and local tax (abbreviated as SALT) deductions. This effectively raised taxes on residents in wealthy communities in states like New Jersey, New York, and California, which have high state and property taxes. Democrats in these regions ran in opposition to the SALT cap in the 2018 midterms, helping them win seats in wealthy areas like New Jersey’s 11^th Congressional District, where Chatham Borough and the majority of Morris County is located.

Two years ago, Congresswoman Mikie Sherrill, a former federal prosecutor and Navy helicopter pilot, became the first Democrat to win the 11^th district since 1984. “I think I was able to flip the district because what people want here in New Jersey is efficient government,” she told me over the phone. “People here are overtaxed. So, they want to make sure that if they’re paying money to the US government that the money is being wisely spent. And I think they also want to see a return on that investment.”

During her first term in Congress, Sherrill introduced bipartisan legislation that would raise the SALT cap and pursued funding for local infrastructure projects like the Gateway Tunnel project, which would improve rail access in New Jersey. She’s confident that her advocacy for her constituents’ interests, as well as her moderate policy positions, will help her stay employed through at least 2023. “I think the district was ready for someone who was going to really push hard to put the interests of the district before any partisan politics and really focus on the needs of the district,” Sherrill said. “And I think the reason I’ll be able to hold the district is because I’ve done just that in Congress. I haven’t focused on partisan political issues, but rather I focused on what was going to best serve North Jersey and the country.”

Another reason why Sherrill may hold the district? Rosemary Becchi, her Republican opponent, lobbied on behalf of the National Alliance of Forest Owners for the very same tax bill that lowered the SALT cap. While Becchi has pointed out that she only lobbied for the portion of the bill that lowered taxes for her client and not the SALT cap, such a distinction may not make a difference come Election Day. Election forecasters like FiveThirtyEight and Real Clear Politics currently have the 11^th District race pegged as a likely Democratic win.

Tax policy, bipartisanship, and advocacy for local issues are all fine reasons to vote for a candidate, and they certainly may have played a role in sending Sherrill and other Democratic freshmen to Capitol Hill. But aren’t we ignoring the awkwardly coiffed elephant in the room?

“Donald Trump has been one of the biggest gifts and he just keeps on giving,” said Rupande Mehta, the Democratic candidate for the state senate in New Jersey’s 25^th Legislative District, which also covers Morris County and shares territory with the 11^th Congressional District. “I mean, he’s in the news every day for all the wrong reasons, right? People are craving normalcy at this point.”

Mehta, who is currently working as a manager of strategic sourcing at Prudential Financial, is running to flip a seat that’s been held by Republicans since 1998 and thinks disgust for Trump and changing demographics are her key to victory. “We have working families coming into the district and changing the entire demographic. And that’s where this momentum for my race is coming from.”

In 2018, Mehta narrowly lost a race for the Morris County Board of Chosen Freeholders, a five-person governing body that’s only had one Democratic member in the last 40 years. Her loss highlights a concurrent, almost paradoxical trend in New Jersey’s Blue Wave. While Morris County Democrats have made gains at the federal level and in municipal governments, they’ve yet to break through at the state and county level.

Resto thinks that inertia is simply the result of ignorance. “I think a lot of people don’t even understand what a freeholder does,” Resto said. “So, they’ll vote for a name that they just happen to recognize.” (Freeholders, for the record, act as New Jersey’s version of county legislators; they’re largely responsible for managing a county’s budget). He also said the groundswell of newly engaged Democrats at the local level could quickly change things, however. “I think that the Democratic Party hasn’t put up as good candidates as they possibly could have. But I think what’s happening is as local races like those in Chatham Borough, Chatham Township, and other places start to turn more and more Democratic, you’re going to have a pool of candidates that will make races more competitive.”

Mehta, who also lost a race for a seat on the Denville Township Council in 2017, certainly doesn’t have name recognition on her side. Her opponent, incumbent state Senator Anthony M. Bucco, was appointed to office in 2019 to replace his late father, Anthony R. Bucco. Before Anthony R.’s death, the two Buccos served concurrently – father in the Senate, son in the General Assembly – for nine years. At least one Anthony Bucco has represented the 25^th Legislative District in the New Jersey Legislature since 1995, when Anthony R. was first sworn in as an assemblyman.

Still, Mehta is hopeful that the wave of female support that swept candidates like Sherrill into office two years ago will help her overcome the inherent disadvantages that come with running against a decades-long political dynasty. “My biggest support is coming from women who were energized in ’18,” Mehta said. “Women are more economically independent; more and more women are taking positions of power in society. We don’t want to be told by men what we can and cannot do, especially with our own bodies. So, I think that is sort of all fueling the fire.”

I asked Mehta why Republican attempts to tie moderate North Jersey Democrats like herself and Sherrill to left-wing Democrats like Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders and New York Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez haven’t been effective. “Because people are not stupid,” she said. She also said that Republicans’ reliance on such scare tactics shows how little ground they’ve already lost on issues like abortion, the environment, and the coronavirus pandemic.

“They have no record to stand on. So, the only thing they can do is caricature the whole AOC thing, and they use that against me. I mean, you look at the ads on TV, I don’t even have to see who the Democrat is that they’re running against. These are literally the same textbook ads against Democrats everywhere. People don’t fall for it.”

The post North Jersey Democrats Hope to Make Recent Gains Stick appeared first on Pavement Pieces.

On September 9^th, a day after the Noe Pond Club closed for the fall and winter, members received a sudden email from the Bartons informing them that their days of enjoying an afternoon of tennis and swimming at the three and a half acre property may soon be numbered.

“We are writing to inform membership of continued unprecedented circumstances,” the email read. “We have received an unsolicited purchase offer for the Noe land from a very reputable developer. After painstaking thought, careful consideration, and considerable angst, we have accepted the offer. If the developer is satisfied with the review of the property this fall, closing is expected to occur in December or January. If the developer decides not to purchase the land, club operations are expected to continue.”

Lauren Petersen, a Chatham Township resident who’s been a member of the Noe Pond Club since 2018, said that the email left her feeling “sick.” “It was a total shock and out of the blue because there had been no rumors or any kind of rumblings going on all summer. We just thought things were, you know, going normally. And when we got it, we were just, like, shocked.”

Petersen said that it was the impersonal tone of the email as much as the possibility of the club closing that upset her.

“It’s been such a family centered place. We didn’t expect to receive such news in such a kind of cold way. So yeah, we were all taken aback. Even friends of mine and other members, we all just would text each other like, oh my god, can you believe this? So yeah, it was a dark day.”

The Noe Pond Club holds a special place in Petersen’s heart. When she and her husband, Todd, were looking to move out of Easton, Pennsylvania in 2017, the prospect of becoming a Noe member helped push them towards relocating to Chatham. She said that her family spends “every day there” in the summer, and that her four children learned how to swim through the Noe Summer Kid’s Program. Petersen took her concerns about the sale directly to the Township Committee’s September 10^th Zoom meeting. When she got the chance to speak, she focused less on the disappointment of losing a hub of family fun and more on the environmental impact of developing the property.

“I can’t quite understand how that area could even be developed,” Petersen said.” I think it’s already zoned for some residential, but really the majority of the property I believe is swampland or wetlands. So I just really am concerned about the impact to the animals and the swamps and the stream that feeds behind there. I mean, at my own personal property in Chatham, half of our backyard is protected wetlands. So we can’t even put a fence post in there. All we’re allowed to do is just mow the lawn.”

The Bartons’ plans to sell the Noe Pond Club represents more than just the end of a historic family business founded in 1955 when Kim’s parents, Nancy Tasman Brower and Bailey Brower Jr., converted the onetime dairy farm into a recreational hub with a beachfront, tennis courts, and playgrounds. Instead, the sale has added fuel to a debate about rezoning and affordable housing that has gripped the small New Jersey town for nearly five years.

“I think that the concerns around that property are illustrative of a bigger problem, which is this affordable housing conundrum that we have as a town, as a community,” explained Phil Ankel, an attorney, Chatham resident, and Democratic candidate for the Township Committee.  “And that property and some of the speculation around it really brings some of the risk associated with different affordable housing strategies to the forefront.”

In 1983, the Supreme Court of New Jersey ruled that the state’s municipalities were constitutionally obligated to provide affordable housing options to potential residents. To meet this requirement, municipalities often times exercise eminent domain to seize property and build the required affordable housing units themselves. But local governments can also choose to fight this mandate, a strategy that Ankel calls “delay and litigate.” Chatham Township had pursued the delay and litigate strategy for much of the past five years before it reached a settlement in 2018 with housing rights organization the Fair Share Housing Center in which they agreed to meet their affordable housing obligations. This settlement also made the Township immune to a “builder’s remedy” lawsuit, which Ankel says would take the construction of affordable housing out of the town’s hands and grant control of it to a private developer. “It’s really, let’s say, a strong hammer in New Jersey that allows builders to go to court and essentially say, well, Chatham Township hasn’t been building their affordable housing, we’ll do it for them, we’ll do it here, and you, court, overturn Chatham’s zoning rules in order to allow us to build, let’s say, substantially larger developments than that community might want.”

So, what does that have to do with Noe Pond? Well, officially, nothing. But after the Township Committee voted to acquire the site of defunct steakhouse Charlie Brown’s Fresh Grill for the purposes of constructing affordable housing units, a local real estate developer called The Silverman Group filed a motion claiming that they were already under contract to purchase that land, as well as another, undisclosed property in Chatham. Ankel says that it’s a “commonly held view” that the other property in question is in fact Noe Pond, and that the Silverman Group plans to use a builder’s remedy argument to build more houses on the site than is currently allowed by Chatham’s zoning laws.

I reached out to the Bartons and to The Silverman Group to confirm whether or not the firm had, in fact, purchased the Noe Pond property, but neither party responded to my requests for comment. In fact, the only source I could find that tied The Silverman Group to Noe Pond was an article written about the firm’s challenge to Chatham’s purchase of the Charlie Brown’s by Ed Barmakian of TAPintoChatham, who refers to The Silverman Group’s purchase of the property as “alleged.”

The unconfirmed nature of The Silverman Group’s role in the sale hasn’t stopped Ankel and his running mate, Amee Shah, from making claims that The Silverman Group is trying to “force the Township to accept substantial development of the Noe Pond site” on their campaign’s website and in advertisements. Ankel and Shah’s Republican opponents, Mark Hamilton and Ashley Felice, have also come out against the Noe Pond sale and overdevelopment in a candidate statement in which they claim that the Democrats were ignoring the issue until it “came closer to their homes.” But while both campaigns have made opposition to the sale a key plank in their platforms, Ankel conceded that there is only so much local government can do. “I think it’s important to recognize that this is a private landowner, or owners, that want to sell their private property to somebody else. I think it’s unlikely that the Township would be in a position to stop the sale in that sense, and I don’t think anyone has suggested that’s on the table.” Instead, he said the primary role for the Township committee will be ensuring that the zoning on Noe Pond does not change.

Preventing the development of Noe Pond could very well be an animating issue for Chatham voters. Petersen is a registered Republican, but she did vote for a Democrat in the last Township Committee election, and she told me that “I don’t want to just vote party on this. I want to know who is really going to do something about it.” She said that she plans to meet with Felice to better understand the Republican ticket’s stance on the issue. “I just want to make sure that I’m making the choice for somebody who’s really going to take Noe seriously and not just, like, push it down the line.”

Petersen acknowledged that fretting about the sale of a private club is “a real first world problem,” but she still has a hard time accepting that when the lifeguards blew their whistles to close the pond on September 8^th, they did so for the last time. “It’s just, it’s a very, very bittersweet, sad situation. I would say more bitter than sweet for sure. But hopefully, it’ll be there next summer for us to enjoy. I mean honestly, my hope is that the whole thing falls through.”

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