March 25, 2010
By SETH AUGENSTEIN
SPARTA — The local council race could be a wide-open, wild one this spring.
Eight newcomers will vie for three seats, after the three incumbents making up the
majority voting bloc all bowed out of the running last week.
The candidates run the gamut of public involvement; but all are newcomers to running for municipal office. Donald Ploetner, Jesse Wolosky, Molly Whilesmith, Gilbert Gibbs, John Schon, Jonathan Rush, Jim Nye and Robert Spetz are all seeking one of the three seats vacated by the one-term incumbents who were the deciders for many of the split council votes.
Mike Spekhardt, Manny Goldberg and Brian Brady — the three-member majority on the council for the last four years — decided against running again. Goldberg has said he was set to move out of state to live closer to his family, and Spekhardt spoke briefly last week about wanting more time with his family. Brady could not be reached for comment.
The new candidates who could be reached spoke about change on the council — and also about avoiding the nebulous “hidden agendas” they say have plagued township decision making in recent years. There is youth, in the form of Ploetner, a 28-year-old who’s lived in town for most of the last decade and who worked in the auto industry until recently; the activist in Wolosky, who spearheaded several township-wide petition drives; and Rush, a former school board member who made a significant showing in the 2008 council race as a write-in candidate.
The newcomers to local politics include professionals and small business owners. Nye is married to school board member Ilse Wolfe. Both work in educational consulting and publishing. Gibbs is a marine mechanical engineer who co-owns a small firm in Randolph. Spetz owns an auto repair shop right in town.
Whilesmith and Schon could not be reached for comment.
All who could be reached for comment say they will avoid the “hidden agendas” — and will work for the betterment of the township. Wolosky already has fired an opening shot in the race, by refusing to answer the township’s standard petition questionnaire asking for personal information, saying it was eliminated by state statute several years ago.
The last four years have had a remarkable number of controversies that sprung up every six months or so. The purchase of the Limecrest Quarry in 2007 for $2.45 million brought accusations of improper use of public funds. A little more than a year later the quarry became the site for the proposed $2 billion Riverbank underground hydroelectric plant, which galvanized opposition from neighboring Andover Township. (Drill testing eventually bore out the rock as unsuitable for the massive construction there.)
The March 2008 referendum on the garbage utility also divided the township, though the service was approved by a significant margin — and ultimately proved popular among residents. Three abortive recall petitions even sought to throw Spekhardt, Goldberg and Brady out of office. More recently, public petitions successfully negated the council’s creation of a liquor license — along with the accompanying revenue for the township, last year. Other occasional controversies included bonding for turf at Station Park, which bitterly split the council last year, as well as the very-recent firing of two volunteer chairs of the town’s cultural affairs committee, which caused some backstage furor in town.
The 2008 council election was a dramatic one. A runoff election turnaround reversed the results of the initial May election. Two newcomers ran against incumbents Scott Seelagy and Jerry Murphy, and one, Chris Curry, was in the lead after the first May date at the polls; but no one got the 50-percent-plus-one vote total needed to win a seat. In the ensuing month before the legally-required runoff, a massive and expensive campaign by the two newcomers boomeranged, catapulting Murphy and Seelagy to double the vote totals of the newcomers; campaign collecting and spending records were shattered along the way.
All this year’s candidates acknowledge that the race will be tough, and will probably drag out to a June runoff.
“It’s going to be tough with eight people,” Gibbs said.
However, all acknowledged that whoever gets in office could have the most difficult road of all — four years of budgets in a tightening government financial framework.
“It’s not going to be a cakewalk,” Rush said. “You’ve got to be ready for a fight.”
