Though I don’t live in New Brunswick, and can’t vote in its municipal elections, I commute through the city ten times a week, and spend time there just about every week. I also have a strong interest, as do all of us in this area, in the workings of New Brunswick’s major institutions: Rutgers University, Johnson & Johnson, RWJ Barnabas Health, DEVCO, the Middlesex County Commission, and now HELIX. These institutions are among the main power brokers behind Jersey politics as such. The people who call the shots within them end up calling the shots for all of us.

New Brunswick has had the same mayor, James Cahill, since 1991, and even the most cursory dealings with the city’s power brokers suggest a highly ossified form of machine politics masquerading as government and leadership. It doesn’t take much political aptitude or detective work to see that New Brunswick is run by an insider network governed by the amoral imperatives of stability, opacity, and revenue-maximization. The handling of HELIX by itself testifies to that, but if you want further documentation, go through the archives of New Brunswick Today, and you’ll find it.  The people of New Brunswick, and of central Jersey generally, deserve better.

I’m happy to say that they have a choice: Charlie Kratovil, activist and editor of New Brunswick Today, is running for mayor. For whatever it’s worth, I wholeheartedly endorse and support him. I know Charlie only glancingly, from occasional interactions at Middlesex County Council, and know his work primarily from his superb reporting at New Brunswick Today. But that’s just a fraction of what he does. I won’t try to summarize his accomplishments; click the preceding link, and you can read about them at his website. What I will say is that he’s an indefatigable activist for justice, that he knows the issues affecting New Brunswick (and the state) inside-out and upside-down, and that he has a rare integrity and dedication to the common good that you don’t see that often in Jersey politics.

It’s obviously time for a change in New Brunswick, and Charlie is that change. If you’re a Democratic voter in New Brunswick, vote for Kratovil in the June 2 primary.  That said, whatever the fate of his mayoral campaign, you’ll be hearing more about him here at Policy of Truth.