Meaning of Hackensack school board election results disputedSaturday, April 20, 2013
BY HANNAN ADELY
STAFF WRITER
The Record
HACKENSACK — In school board races where winners are often decided by dozens or even handfuls of votes, three candidates in the city’s Board of Education election won by hundreds.
The sweep by one election team on Tuesday highlights voter frustration over division and disagreement on the board, say the winners and their supporters.
The opposition said their loss was a product of a large effort by the dominant "political machine" to keep control on the board and because of poor minority voter turnout.
"I think because of all the turmoil we had last year, especially last spring, that a lot of residents were upset and they wanted the turmoil and gridlock to end," said incumbent Francis Albolino, who was elected along with newcomers Lara Rodriguez and Timothy Hoffman.
The team said their pledge to build consensus on the board struck a chord with voters and that they campaigned hard, knocking on doors weekends and evenings.
The other candidates in the race, Rhonda Williams Bembry, Lawrence Eisen and Judith Carter, had promised to improve reading performance and parent participation, but they lost to their rivals by ratios as wide as nearly 2-to-1. Albolino had 1,091 votes in the unofficial tally; Bembry had 662.
In a city where every personal, familial and work connection is scrutinized for links to power brokers, there were accusations about the role of machine politics.
"Issues had nothing to do with the turnout or the election," Eisen said. "It was simply that the machine decided they’d get out the troops and put down an insurgency that threatened them to some degree."
Eisen said the machine, a network of political players led by Democratic strategist Lynne Hurwitz, backed up his opponents with support and funding. The same power block has pulled strings in Hackensack municipal politics for years, propping up the long-dominant Zisa family, observers say.
Hurwitz said she did not work on the campaign, and that the slate won because they were great candidates.
"They worked very hard against people who the community repudiated because Rhonda did not do her job and because the other candidates were not strong enough to win," said Hurwitz, adding that she voted for the winning team.
Daniel Carola, campaign manager for Albolino’s slate, also dismissed allegations of a machine-orchestrated win.
"There’s no machine serving special interests," he said. "The folks who came out to vote didn’t come out because anyone told them to; they came out because of the issues at hand."
He said Hurwitz was a supporter, but did not work on the campaign. Donald Lenner, a lawyer and the longtime treasurer for several political fundraising committees that have benefited Bergen County Democrats, is the treasurer for the Albolino team, according to paperwork filed with the state.
Eisen said he believed his team was far outspent. No spending reports have been filed with the state by either campaign. School board candidates aren’t required to file reports on spending that totals less than $4,500. The next report, which covers spending from April 3 to May 3, is due May 6.
City resident and former school board member Jonathan Gilmore said he supported the Bembry slate because of its diversity. He also believes some decisions on the board have been influenced by outside politics. "I thought the Bembry slate represented some independence," he said.
Gilmore said he was concerned the current board leadership "wasn’t taking into consideration the interests of the district as a whole." The winning candidates said they reached out to voters across the city. "We walked the absolute entire town and people were just happy to see you and to feel somebody was interested," said Rodriguez, whose daughter will begin elementary school in September.
Bembry, who has served on the board twice since 2006, said she believes the local political machine has had a heavy hand in every school election in Hackensack. The problem for her team, she said, was that it couldn’t get its own constituency to the polls.
"Black people did not come out to vote," said Bembry, who is black and an officer in the Bergen chapter of the NAACP. She said it was an "age-old problem" in the city.
"They have to come out and step up their interest," she said. "I don’t know what it’s going to take for the black community to come out and support people who support them."
Carola said the lopsided win was largely because people were still upset that Bembry and a faction of board members tried to oust three popular administrators last year when it was time to renew their contracts. The board members said they had concerns about the hiring process, cronyism and the administrators’ answers to questions.
Parents and students protested at meetings and Hoffman, who at the time was a high school senior and liaison to the board, led a student walkout to support administrators. A citizen group, led by Carola, targeted Bembry and two other board members in a recall campaign over the matter.
Several voters interviewed by The Record said they were upset by that incident and by frequent squabbling on the board. "It just seemed there wasn’t a cooperative spirit going on," said city resident Susan Avallone. "It seemed like the same group was being more obstructionist than collaborative."
Andree Post, who has a child in the high school, said she also was dismayed by the lack of compromise, but that no one party could be blamed. She supported the Albolino ticket, she said, because Rodriguez was a parent with a personal investment in the schools, and because she knew of Hoffman’s leadership from his high school days.
Email: adely@northjersey.com
