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Glassboro, Mantua
await BOE ballot counts
By Denise Jewell, Gloucester County Times
djewell@sjnewsco.com
Thursday, April 22, 2004
In a school board election drama that has dragged on for more than a day, candidates in Glassboro continued to wait Wednesday for the names of the district's three winners.
Gloucester County Board of Election workers spent Wednesday hand-counting write-in candidates after Glassboro voters wrote in 1,617 names - or about 49 percent of the total votes for candidates - Tuesday night
Election officials are also planning to review additional ballots Friday that could affect the outcome of a Mantua Township Board of Education race that ended in a tie.
The unusually high number of write-in candidates clogged Glassboro election stations Tuesday night, with some residents waiting as long as 45 minutes to vote.
Three board of education seats are open in Glassboro and three incumbent school board members ran unopposed on the ballot. Three other residents staged a last-minute write-in campaign in response to a board decision to reduce arts programs at the district's Dorothy L. Bullock School.
The arts funding - which appeared on the ballot as a second question along with funding for a consumer science post - appeared to ignite local voters.
According to the county's unofficial election results, about 1,340 Glassboro residents voted Tuesday. Last year, 704 people voted and 43 candidates were written in, while 874 people voted in 2002 and 105 names were written in.
"It is the most efficient write-in campaign that I've seen," Hogan said.
The last time a write-in candidate was elected to the Glassboro Board of Education was 1990, when David Kalapos won with 624 votes, according to district records. Kalapos was defeated in 1999 after winning three elections.
Hogan said unofficial tallies Wednesday led officials to believe that there had been one write-in winner in Glassboro. However, Mark Harris, director of election operations, said results in the Glassboro race would not be available until Thursday.
Harris said election workers reviewed the write-in ballots by hand on Wednesday to determine whether the write-in votes were a "reasonable facsimile" of a resident's name.
Write-in votes will be counted in every district, regardless of whether they could swing the results, Harris said.
"We concentrated on Glassboro today, obviously, because of the size of the write-in campaigning that was taking place," Harris said. "Then we'll tabulate the rest."
Joy Lundahl - a six-year school board member who received 554 votes, the lowest number of the three incumbent candidates whose names appeared on the ballot - said she was glad to see that both the school district's budget and the second question had passed.
"It's kind of agonizing when you have to wait a long time, but the good news is that our budget passed," Lundahl said. "I'm happy about that, and I'm willing to wait."
Peter Calvo, the current school board president, received 565 votes, while Hector Cabezas received 569. There were 1,617 write-in votes, according to unofficial election results.
Elizabeth Volz, one of the three write-in candidates who stood outside of the polling areas Wednesday night, said she was glad that a high number of voters responded Tuesday.
"Obviously, the fact that that many people were interested and involved in Glassboro was a good thing," Volz said.
In Mantua Township, two school board members tied for one open seat Tuesday. John H. Anderson and Scott R. Hellerman each received 734 votes - or about 24 percent - according to unofficial county results.
Harris said Mantua had several provisional ballots that could affect the tie. Provisional ballots are issued to registered voters whose names do not appear in the poll book. Officials plan to verify provisional ballots on Friday.
If there is still a tie after the provisional ballots are counted, Hogan said, the candidates could ask for a recount and a second election to determine a winner.
Until then, Hogan said, the seat would remain open.
Hogan expected to certify most election results early next week. |
Glouco districts try to regroup after budget defeats
By Steve Levine and Gene Vernacchio
Courier-Post Staff, WOODBURY
Thursday, April 22, 2004
A day after residents here rejected a $10 million bond referendum, the annual school budget and three sitting school board members, officials and residents took stock of Tuesday's election and its effect on the district's future.
The main issue in the race, the one that led to the ouster of board President William H. Fleming Jr., Anthony Chiesa and Jeffrey Foster, was the bond referendum. The 20-year note would have levied taxes of $218 a year for owners of a $100,000 home.
That was in addition to a levy of $94 per year more in the proposed 2004-05 budget.
The budget fell by a scant 58 votes and the referendum by 110 out of more than 1,800 ballots cast, according to unofficial tallies.
Superintendent Judith Wilson said Wednesday the problems listed in the referendum still need to be fixed.
"Most of the projects were categorized by the state as for health and safety," she said. "We have the same issues today we had before the vote."
Some projects slated for correction included bringing the high school auditorium up to fire code, addressing heating and ventilation in all four schools and repairing the district's cement football stadium.
Wilson said matching state funds - about $8 million - might now be lost and the district will face rising interest rates when it does decide to borrow. Another referendum could be held, but money in a state school repair fund are running low, Wilson said.
"It's like a loaf of bread. Every time there is an election, chunks are taken. We're hoping there will be some crumbs left for us, but there is no guarantee of that," Wilson said.
Challengers for the board derided the referendum as wasteful. Though they agreed some repairs are necessary, they said others were simply lavish.
Salvatore Ferraino, who won a three-year seat along with William C. Goodrich and Thomas S. Haase, thought a proposal to pour terrazzo flooring in the high school was especially wasteful.
"It's flooring like they have in 30th Street Station," said Ferraino, 37, a union official. "If you need to repair the flooring, I'm sure there's a cheaper way."
Wilson said it wasn't as simple as that. "We were going for a poured terrazzo for its durability and ability to be cleaned," she said. "What we have now is tattered, stained carpet that in some cases exists over wooden floors that in some areas has buckled."
Stephanie Patterson, whose daughter graduated from the district and whose son is a junior at Woodbury High, voted for the financing measures.
"I'm not taking this as a defeat but as a delay," she said. "It seems wrong to me that we as taxpayers pay more into the prison system than we do to educate our youth."
Elsewhere in Gloucester County, a number of school officials also worked through unexpected defeats.
Deptford
Assistant superintendent Marie Louis said officials are coming to grips with a defeated budget that would have raised the school tax rate by 4 cents - $42 a year for the average homeowner.
The defeat followed last year's vote when residents approved a budget with a 21-cent tax hike.
"It's been very inconsistent in Deptford," Louis said. "We had seven years of zero increase (in the 1990s) and in some years it passed, some years it failed, even with the zero percent increase."
Louis said school officials will begin meeting with the mayor and township manager next week to pare down the budget.
Monroe
In Monroe, where voters rejected the proposed budget by a 1,638 to 1,028 vote, Superintendent Robert Terrill said there are no easy areas for cuts. The budget would have raised the tax rate by 27 cents, or $281 for the average homeowner.
In dollars and cents, the increase would have raised school taxes $281 for the owner of a home assessed at $104,000, the township average.
"The problem with Monroe is that we already have the second lowest per pupil expenditure in Gloucester County in our class category," Terrill said.
"It's frustrating. I understand the people who don't want to pay a 27-cent increase. That's a pretty large amount to increase your taxes."
One area township council might cut could be transportation, such as courtesy busing, Terrill said.
"Maybe we're just going to have to tell parents that they're responsible to get their kids to a certain bus stop, and we can reduce the number of buses we have," he said. "Maybe we can extend the area we bus students from a half mile to two miles to save money."
Glassboro
The balloting wasn't all bad news for Gloucester County school officials.
In Glassboro, officials Wednesday celebrated passage of both the school budget and a secondary question to continue art and music classes at the Dorothy L. Bullock School.
The fate of its school board, however, remained unanswered.
Incumbents Hector Cabezas, Peter Calvo and Joy Lundahl were challenged by a trio of write-in candidates - Bryan Appleby-Wineberg, Frank Mitcho and Elizabeth Volz- who launched an aggressive, last-minute write-in campaign.
County elections officials planned to tally the write-in votes today.
Superintendent Michael Gorman said the efforts by community members to attract voters to the polls in support of the secondary ballot question helped the budget pass.
"We had in excess of 1,300 ballots cast and last year we had half of that cast," Gorman said.
" . . . I think the community effort was defining," he said. "I think it was really the process in its purest form."
WHAT'S NEXT
# Defeated school budgets will go to the municipal governing body for consideration. For more information, call (856) 845-1300 in Woodbury, (856) 845-5300 in Deptford and (856) 728-9800 in Monroe. |
