By Nick Sodano, Editor
It wasn’t even close. The official vote tally will take a little time to be established by the County, but the voters of Mount Holly rejected many of the Carty-affiliated candidates by a 2-1 margin. A victory gathering was held at Dunleavy’s with Lumberton candidates who also swept into office and officially ended Carty’s grip on power in that town. Now comes the real work: governing.
It seemed that everyone at the gathering from the Mount Holly contingent had a set of projects that would benefit the town. So many in fact that they will have to be categorized and prioritized by the new leaders in terms of importance to taxpayers versus ease of implementation.
Some of the priorities were already documented by the Astor/Burkus/Ford team on the Astor Burkus website. See https://astorandburkus.com/f/astor-burkus-ford---policy-platform
My suggestions to the campaign are legion, but the easiest one to implement would probably be the “Call For Service app” which was removed from the township website about a year ago. This change doesn’t save tax dollars so much as it documents service requests [pot holes, dead trees, etc.] and gives residents a dated “deli number” to establish a time stamp on their complaint. When I asked about the disappearance of the app, the Township Clerk would not explain why it vanished but said “just send an email”. My theory as to why the app vanished is that it produced a list of ALL complaints. That complete list could be demanded by an Open Public Records Act request, as opposed to a more difficult task of requesting each separate email. Having such a list could be inconvenient for administrators who might have to explain how many requests were left unfulfilled.
If readers have suggestions for the new leadership and wish to send them to the Reporter, I promise to document them and produce a list at the end of the year. The new leaders will be sworn in early January of 2027. Send suggestions to nick.sodano@verizon.net Use subject line “Suggestions”