By Susan C. Moeller / Senior Reporter

(Oct. 29, 2009) — Democrats currently dominate the Bergen County Board of Chosen Freeholders. Party members, including Julie O’Brien and Vernon Walton, who are up for re-election this year, hold all seven seats. Two Republican challengers, Robert Hermansen and John Driscoll, are hoping to change that. Freeholders are elected for three-year terms. Responses were edited for design purposes.

JOHN DRISCOLL, 45, is running as a Republican for his first time on the board of chosen freeholders. Married with three kids, Driscoll is an autism advocate. He is employed by Lorillard, a tobacco company, as a field sales representative and lives in Paramus.

What is your highest priority in running for the board of chosen freeholders?

Start making this county more affordable. It seems as if in the past six years, the spending has gone out of control. …It just seems like spend, spend, spend and the 7-0 vote every single time. It’s like there doesn’t seem to be anybody up there willing to say, ‘Hey, can we stop for a minute and explain what we are doing?’ That’s kind of important.

I think we need to have a two-party system again. That’s what this country was founded on, and it’s important to have that person who will say, ‘Hold on a minute, let’s discuss this.’ My grandmother lived in Hackensack, and she moved out of town when she was 90 years old. She lives in South Jersey. She was 10 minutes away from her great-grandchildren. Now she’s two hours. I don’t like that. I know a lot of other families are going through that type of a story.

With county taxes increasing, what is your spending plan if you are elected?

We are proposing a 25-percent pay reduction for freeholders, right out of the chute. Our opposition this year proposed a three-day furlough. A three-day furlough for the seven members of the board of freeholders combined saves about $5,000. That’s copy paper in accounting. Our proposal saves almost $45,000 to $47,000. Our proposal saves someone’s job. That’s important. Then, after that, go to the department heads, and tell them the same thing: 25-percent pay reduction. Those department heads total out to about almost $300,000. That’s a big chunk of change now we’re talking. You haven’t cut one service. You haven’t furloughed anybody. You have not laid anyone off. All you’ve done was basically cut the salaries of the elected officials and appointed officials that are there from the county executive, which, to be honest, is not a bad thing, I don’t think. And then you come from there because I’m from the belief that you cannot ask the county workers to do something you’re not willing to do yourself.

Do you support layoffs (or temporary furloughs) as a way to balance the budget?

No. My father was a traffic manager for a warehouse in Moonachie. They moved up to Mahwah eventually, and he was laid off at 54 years old, and that was after giving close to 25 years of his life there. I know what it was like to look at my father in the eye and have him turn around and tell me, ‘Well, John, your sister’s going to Seton Hall. You’re not. You’ve got to go to work.’ And you know what? You accept those things, but I don’t want to have other parents have to go through that conversation with their kids. That’s not fair. And living through that, I would never want to put someone else through that. Layoffs are the ultimate last option, if it even is an option. That, to me, it’s just not even thought about. But, we also have to look at the employment of the county. The no-show jobs, political patronage, have to be examined. There is a lot of waste.

What services or infrastructure projects would you like to add to what the county is already doing, and what services or infrastructure projects would you like the county to stop doing?

I am supportive of the college going down in South Bergen. I’ve said that. …My argument was, I don’t know if it needs to be the extravagant price tag. But, I am 100 percent in support of a South Bergen campus. I grew up in Little Ferry. I know what it’s like to drive up to Paramus at 5 o’clock to get to school. It was tough. It was tough. I would have liked to have come down this way. …I am all for a South Bergen campus. It needs to be done for the sake of the kids. And it also should be marketed properly.

Regards to the road system, Route 17, we’ve got to do something. I mean we have to get our people in here to examine that road to see what can be done.

What is your vision for the Meadowlands campus of Bergen Community College?

I want it to be the best campus it can be. I want it to be something that we can say, ‘This is our college,’ just like Bergen Community is right now. I graduated Bergen Community, and I’m very proud to say I did. I went at night… working during the day.

I really think we need to market the school better, to entice people from Essex, from Hudson, even Passaic County, to get them to come in and go to the school here. And also showing parents that it’s a great option. It’s a great school, and I’ve heard so many parents say in this economic time, it’s a great alternative and especially if kids aren’t sure what they want to major in.

ROBERT HERMANSEN is running as a Republican for his first term on the board. A Mahwah resident, Hermansen, 40, has lived in New Jersey for 26 years. He is married with four children and serves as a councilman in Mahwah. Hermansen is a financial advisor for Wells Fargo Advisors.

Highest priority?

First one is taxes. Second one is the spending, basically the wasteful spending that we have had. The third one is oversight, and the fourth one is the budget, going through the budget line item by line item. Those four things all tie in together. …If you put those four together and do them well, in the end, you are going to be able to save the taxpayers money. And you’re not going to see a continual budget where we’re seeing a 9-percent increase since the year 2000, on average, to the Bergen County resident. We have to do a better job here. Otherwise, we are going to continue to lose residents from Bergen County. The next residents who might be leaving are, you know, people you know very closely or your family members, people who’ve grown up here, people who’ve established Bergen County and created Bergen County for what it is. We can’t afford to lose those people right now, and, unfortunately, that’s where we are going, the route that we are taking right now.

What is your spending plan if you are elected?

Let’s go through and find the areas of waste. Let’s go through and let’s figure out first where we can save money. …Until you get your hands on the budget completely, you don’t know what you are looking at. I OPRA’ed the budget this year. … When I did it, they didn’t even give me the whole thing. I OPRA’ed it. They still have not given me full debt service. In order for me to effectively tell you what I’m going to do, or what I’m not going to do, you have to get your hands around it. …That’s first.

Second, what you also have to accomplish is, you have to say to yourself, ‘There’s a cap right now.’ It’s supposed to be a cap at the county level, just like in your councils and in each town. Right now, the way they are getting outside that cap is by going in and putting things with debt, and just creating more debt and more debt and more debt. The debt is currently outside the cap. I think it should be a hard cap. I think we have to make a hard cap.

If the cap is 4 and they raised the taxes by 7.8 percent this year, that’s almost 95 percent higher than what the cap is supposed to be. It’s ridiculous. That should not be your out every time. It should be your last resort and not your first one and unfortunately, right now, it’s a first resort for them all the time. We’re the fourth-highest taxed county in the entire United States of America. What we should be thinking about doing is trying to get that number down, where we’re not the highest taxed, and we’ve figured out ways to be more efficient with how we do things.

Do you support layoffs (or temporary furloughs) as a way to balance the budget?

We’ve never furloughed an employee in Mahwah, ever. We’ve never had to. We believe that when you create a budget on Jan. 1, the budget that you create should be conservative enough that by the time Dec. 31 comes through that you have enough money there to pay your bills, do what you have to do and move forward. We should not be thinking that in the middle of the budget somehow that we’re going to furlough. You don’t furlough a person in a department unless you can furlough the entire department. …There was a bill passed in August that stated the same thing. The furloughs and the layoffs…they should be last resorts, not first resorts. Instead of layoffs, what we should be looking at are the people who are in no-show jobs. Let’s find the people who are in there, who are not doing anything and are being paid. That’s where we should be looking. It’s all about oversight.

Services or infrastructure projects?

They are talking about the schools right now, the school down here that’s been opened down in the southern district for southern Bergen County. It’s positive. There’s no doubt that that’s a positive. It helps the county. It also helps the students and helps people try to get there. It keeps cars off the road. …Hopefully, by doing the right thing, this campus will prosper and it will grow and it will be as populous as the one is up in Paramus.

We have a tremendous amount of repair to do to the taxpayer. We have a tremendous amount of repair on how a meeting should be done, how it should be run, what should happen, how each resolution should be discussed and understood before you vote on it. There’s a lot of frustration right now as a candidate running and watching what goes on there right now. I’m mortified of what goes on on that board right now. You won’t know (if there are services that could be cut) until you really put your finger on the pulse and see what it is. I think they are trying to get their big-ticket items in now. There are some things, when you go through them, you may lessen. You may not need as much money in there. There’s other things you may look in and say, ‘You know, we may want to do more.’ We’re going to spend $26 million on a juvenile detention center. How about if we had spent $15 million on a renovation of a building, and took the other $10 million and put it toward children — educating them and putting more money towards the DARE program and the municipal alliances?

What is your vision for the Meadowlands campus of BCC?

It would be nice to see it be as successful as the one that we have in Paramus. Look, education is so important to our children, and some people are in positions where they are trying to make time to go to school, where they are going back. And not just kids. Some of our adults are going back for courses. …The more convenient that you make these campuses and the campus for them to get to to do that, the better for all of us. It’s better for communities because we have people who are better educated and have a better chance to do well for themselves. And, the way that we are being taxed in this county, they had better be educated, to help them get better jobs, and to help them get higher-paying jobs just to pay the tax increases. It (the Meadowlands campus) is important. It’s extremely important to make that a very successful campus like we have up in Paramus.

JULIE O’BRIEN, 51, a Democrat, is running for her second term as a Bergen County freeholder. O’Brien, from Ramsey, has four children and one grandchild. She is not employed, choosing a full-time focus on freeholder activities instead.

Highest priority?

My highest priority is making sure that I am doing — and this is going to sound hokey — but making sure that I am doing the people’s business. That’s why I do this full-time, because I really want to be able to devote as much time as possible to doing what the people elected me to do, which is keep an eye on their money that they are giving to the county, and make sure that the services that the county provides are doing what they need to be doing — making sure that the roads are maintained. Infrastructure is a big focus of mine because infrastructure was kind of neglected for a long time in Bergen County. So, to make sure that our parks are in great shape, we’re doing a lot more with a lot less now. But our parks director is doing a great job, and our parks employees are doing an awesome job, and our parks look better than I have seen them look in my memory.

What is your spending plan if you are elected?

I want to continue to keep the tax rate steady, which we have kept the tax rate steady. We have less revenue coming in from other sources now, and our treasurer said, this year, this is the worst deficit that he’s seen in 20 or more years. So we have to continue focusing on doing more with less, which we’ve been doing. I mean…our employees have really stepped up to the plate and have worked very hard to do more with less, but the services that we’re providing for people are still exceptional services. People are getting their needs met. But we have to continue to focus on doing more with less.

Do you support layoffs (or temporary furloughs) as a way to balance the budget?

Especially in this environment, I really don’t want to see people losing their jobs. I think that if we’re prudent (as we’ve been), we’ve been able to hold off layoffs this year. We ended up not having to do the furloughs so far. We have to see, as the end of the year comes, what we have left over. But, especially in this environment, I don’t want to see anyone lose their job. We’ve dealt with unemployment in my family and I just, you know, I don’t want to see that happen to anyone else. I think having been in a situation where every dollar counts — and my family was living on my $28,000 freeholder salary for about six months — you know, if I had to take two or three furlough days, that would have really impacted my family. So people — especially at the lower end of the pay scale — we can’t afford to make them take days off without pay. At this point, I’m waiting to see what the end-of-the-year numbers are.

Services or infrastructure projects?

I don’t see that we can really reduce any infrastructure. …You have the Williams Center right down the street. The Williams Center is a perfect example of what happens when you neglect your infrastructure.

The county owned that building — I think it was for 20 years — and nothing was done with it, and it really kind of fell into disrepair. So when you neglect your infrastructure, it ends up just costing you more down the road. So I’m not an advocate of cutting any infrastructure projects.

We’re finally getting our roads to a better place. We have a lot of cars in Bergen County.

There’ve been a lot of intersection improvements that we’ve been working on and getting those things done to keep the flow of traffic going.

But we really inherited a severely neglected infrastructure when this administration came in.

But moving forward, we have a lot more people who are in need of services that have never needed services before, so those are the kinds of things that we are going to need to focus on, at least until we get out of this rough patch with the economy.

We did the Road to Resources and Recovery. … People are coming in, people who don’t, who’ve never had to navigate the system before, don’t know where to go. So, that was why we did the Road to Resources and Recovery, to be able to reach out to the people who really need the help.

And, I’ve heard some beautiful stories come out of this program. … People who were really at the end of their ropes, and we’ve been able to get them to the resources that they need, so that they didn’t lose their homes. We’re just really trying to focus on making sure that the people who need the services know how to get to them.

I can’t see cutting things. …That’s kind of government’s role, is to make sure that the people are taken care of, especially in the toughest of times. I think that because of the economy, there’s nothing that I can see that we need to add at this point that we’re not doing. We need to kind of maintain, I think, at this point, because we are in a really tough economy. And we have to be very cognizant of the fact that a lot of the people who are paying taxes are in rough situations themselves.

But I believe as long as we keep the tax rate steady, where it’s been for the last four years, our portion of someone’s taxes is not going to be affected the way that they are on a local level.

What is your vision for the Meadowlands campus of BCC?

The Meadowlands campus has been so successful beyond what anyone ever thought that it was going to be. I think that we need to continue to support that campus as well as the Paramus campus and the Hackensack campus. A lot more people are staying at home to go to college because they can’t afford to go away. …It (Bergen Community) opens up the college experience to a lot more people, to have it affordable like that. So, to keep the costs down, to keep it affordable for everyone and to make it acceptable, I think, is really the key. And I think that’s what we are doing.

The college has done a great job with the South Bergen campus and getting it off the ground.

VERNON WALTON, 38, a Democrat from Englewood, was appointed and then elected in 2009 to fill an unexpired term on the freeholder board. He is running for his first full term, to begin in 2010. Walton, who is single, is the pastor of the Mount Calvary Baptist Church in Englewood.

Highest priority?

I’d like to continue the progressive agenda that we have been working on. I think we have an aggressive agenda in terms of meeting the needs of people, stabilizing taxes, insuring that we keep open space a priority and education, the safety of our residents.

We have a wonderful county, and to our credit, we have done a great job in terms of protecting open space, and we want to make sure that that remains a focus of ours.

With county taxes increasing, what is your spending plan if you are elected?

In terms of the budget itself — if you would take a very close look at the budget — all of the areas where the budget has increased have largely been as a result of issues and areas out of our control.

We have maintained a very small work force, and we have gotten more out of the workforce that we have, but the costs have obviously been toward health issues, personnel, contract issues and things of that nature, which binds us contractually. But, we have done a very good job in terms of keeping a very modest budget, particularly when you look at the services we offer.

Do you support layoffs (or temporary furloughs) as a way to balance the budget?

That is always our last option. You know layoffs and furloughs are not necessarily something, certainly, that we subscribe to, but we want to do our very best to maintain efficiency. And if it comes to that, it’s something that we have to review at that particular moment.

Services or infrastructure projects?

We’ve been very intentional about trying to direct people to the appropriate resources that they need in order to survive this particular meltdown. If anything, I’d like to see a greater sense of focus on a department or person in terms of helping people to address those particular needs, helping to focus the message and helping to carry that message out. Just recently we have introduced a public advocate, and so that could be a greater area of responsibility for this particular person, making sure that people have access.

Because there are a lot of resources that we have, but because this is the very first time that people find themselves in this predicament, they don’t know often where to go, where to start, and I think that while we have been proactive, there’s always more room for us to grow in that particular area. I don’t know about taking away. I think we’ve been pretty aggressive with our health and human services facility here to open. That’s going to be a big help to our homeless population in meeting the needs of…people that are…experiencing meltdown in this particular climate. I think we’ve been pretty aggressive. I’d stay the course right now.

What is your vision for the Meadowlands campus of BCC?

We are a funding mechanism. And, obviously it has its own separate board that sets policy and procedure. In terms of the Meadowlands campus, we’d like to see its continued expansion. We’re excited about the fact that residents are taking advantage of it and it’s growing at a fast pace. I believe that they offer first-class education, and I think it just speaks volumes to a need that exists in the county.

This is one of those areas where we heard the need, we met the need and made our commitment through the funding.