Ugly fight next door

This is a story of local politics gone off the rails. It doesn’t involve Middlesex Borough directly and thank God for that. A train wreck has occurred in a neighboring town.

Small-town government can get nasty, particularly at election time. Tensions are amped up when the longtime status quo feels threatened. That has been the situation in nearby Warren Township for a couple of years.

Four candidates ran in the recent Republican primary for a pair of Warren Township Committee seats. Two candidates endorsed by the municipal GOP organization – Dan Croson and Lance Blick – were the winners. Neither is a current committeeman. They defeated Greg Przybylski and Jolanta Maziarz, a former committeewoman.

Although not serving currently, Croson and Blick were backed by some of Warren’s longtime Republican leaders.

The voting ended on June 4. The bad blood hasn’t. It boiled over at the Township Committee’s Thursday, June 13 session.

None of the four recent candidates attended or spoke over Zoom. Still, it’s clear Warren’s political waters are poisoned. Joining the fray now are citizens who have not been engaged in politics previously.

Two audience members spoke out at the meeting, ripping Mayor Victor Sordillo for comments made after the votes were counted. Sordillo supported Croson and Blick.

Sordillo not only spiked the football after his candidates won, he danced in both end zones and beat up the other team’s mascot. 

One audience member questioned Sordillo for terming the Croson-Blick win “not just a landslide, but a major embarrassment” for Przybylski and Maziarz. The margin was roughly 1,100 votes for both Croson and Blick versus about 950 for their opponents.

The first speaker, a 37-year-long Warren resident, said the mud-slinging in the recent campaign was “beyond belief.”

Sordillo’s boasting, she asserted, showed a “lack of humanity.” She added: “What pomposity and arrogance… you should be ashamed of yourself for resorting to the antics that you did.”

Sordillo didn’t flinch. His trash-talking was justified, he claimed, because backers of Maziarz and Przybylski had dragged his adult children into a social media rumble. Sordillo’s daughter was on the ballot, narrowly winning a Republican Municipal Committee seat in the district where she resides.

Family members had always been off-limits in past campaigns, Sordillo asserted. Currently wrapping up his eighth, three-year term, he is not seeking re-election to the Township Committee this year.

The Warren mayor also threw in a Trump-like boast. Sordillo noted that he’d won a GOP committee district seat in the primary, besting Przybylski “by a 4-to-1 margin.” He added he’d done “incredibly well” and been asked to run because “people love (me) in this town.” 

The mayor concluded by asking his critic, “You’ve been here 37 years? What have YOU done for this community?”

A second woman spoke, blasting Sordillo for his treatment of his first critic. “I’ve never been to a public meeting and seen such behavior,” she told him.

“It’s like a dictatorship,” the second woman said. “People have grievances, they should be allowed to air them.”

“This is my second meeting,” she added. “I’m embarrassed that this is my town.”

Sordillo cautioned the second woman that he’d have her removed unless she yielded the floor. When that did not happen immediately, a Warren police officer took a few steps toward her before she retreated.

Yeesh – anyone who thought Middlesex Borough’s 2018 and 2019 elections got too contentious, think again. This Warren stuff is making Rich Rut’s “Reasons not to vote for Ron DiMura” Facebook posts look tame in comparison.

If Sordillo’s family got dragged in by constituents – whose beef was really with the mayor – that was outrageous. It doesn’t justify the Warren mayor’s harsh treatment of two residents who objected to his brash post-election commentary.

In Middlesex, we’ve had a mayoral indictment and various scrapes at Borough Council meetings in recent years. Occasionally, there’s a joke cracked about jail time. Yet, our local politics have not veered off the road and into the ditch where our Warren neighbors landed recently.

Hopefully, we’ll continue to voice our differences in a relatively civil manner. Or, in what seems like a civil manner, compared to what’s going on next door.

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