Teaneck’s voters sent 1400-signed petitions that, when supported by the entire electorate on November 2, 2021, moved the Town’s Council elections from May to November. Teaneck had been one of the very few municipalities that has not moved governing board elections to the November general election date.
But the incumbent 7 members of Council had apparently preferred the lower turnout. So during November’s election season they began devising a series of arguments about why a Council election held in November would transform the election into a partisan one which they claimed would inevitably mean that “party bosses” (unnamed) would control all appointments for important Town officials.
One of the most hypocritical diatribes on this allegation came from the oddest source – Michael Pagan, the Councilman whose full-time job is Information Director for Bergen County — a senior County job for the new Democratic administration which in 2013 was specifically said to disqualify him from holding municipal elective office elsewhere in the County. Pagan received his County appointment as a patronage job for having been the campaign director for Bergen’s County Executive when Jim Tedesco first ran and won in 2013.
Pagan seems to have forgotten that a County employee reporting directly to him and his County office recently received a higher-paying appointment as executive assistant to Teaneck’s Manager.
Within two hours of his own swearing in on July 1, 2020, Pagan supported giving a contract to a planning organization whose only known prior relationship to the Town or its officials was its $900 contribution to the Pagan slate’s campaign two months earlier. The slate’s campaign had also received similar $900 gifts from 3 Partisan PAC’s in the State – though the slate never reported those gifts until 8+ months AFTER the election.
The sheer irony of virtually everything that Pagan claimed about what would happen if the Council elections were moved to November was captured in a video (see below) from the July 13, 2020 Council meeting.
Mr. Pagan, were you describing what you had just help make happen when Council elections were still held in May?
