Democrats Roger Martindell and Joseph O'Neill easily won the Borough Council election yesterday, beating out Republican challenger Michael Carnevale II and independent candidate Steven Abt '04.
O'Neill led the count with 1,496 votes, followed by Martindell with 1,364, Carnevale with 955 and Abt with 248.
Although Abt lost the general election, he received more votes than all the other candidates combined in District 1, which encompasses most of the University. District board member Cheryl Cavanaugh, who worked at the Mercer polling place where most University students voted, said that at least three quarters of voters who had come to the polling place were University students.
The district also had the smallest turnout of the Borough's 10 districts, with 194 voters, or 19 percent of registered voters, voting.
Twelve people — most of them students — were turned away from the polls, election analyst Joshua Leinsdorf said. He attributed the problem to "ineptitude in the voter registration drive."
After the polls closed, O'Neill, Martindell and Abt watched the election results trickle in at the Democratic victory party at Conte's Pizza on Witherspoon Street. As party representatives tallied up votes by district, it became clear that both Democratic candidates had won.
Abt, who was accompanied by his parents, took his defeat in stride. "I was glad to have run and raised some issues," he said. "It was fun. I'm disappointed more students didn't come out though."
Abt said he has no plans to run for future political office.
O'Neill, a retired researcher, seemed enthused but not surprised by his victory. He said that his first and largest priority on Borough Council would be to talk to the University about the nature of its contributions to the Borough and Township.
"It's not so much the amount of money, but that the University and people in town understand the basis of those contributions," he said.
The Borough is obliged to provide affordable housing based on the level of employment in the area, O'Neill said, although the University — the area's largest employer — is mostly tax-exempt. The University thus needs to help support the Borough's effort to provide affordable housing, he said.
"What I'd like to do is hold a kind of seminar where we'd pull it together [with University officials] and then make a more formal presentation to the University," he said.
O'Neill also expressed a desire to maintain communication with University students who became more involved with this election because of Abt's candidacy. "I'd like to set up some sort of line of communication between the Borough Council and University students," he said.
Martindell, a 12-year veteran of the Council, was nonchalant about the victory. "We're going to continue to express fiscal conservatism and social liberalism in areas of tax policy, civil rights, affordable housing and downtown redevelopment," he said.
Martindell said he agreed with O'Neill on the issue of University contributions to the Borough. "Any contribution we have from the University is a relief for taxpayers," he said. "We have ongoing negotiations with the University and we'll be pursuing those negotiations aggressively," he said.
Both Martindell and O'Neill said that they would not support the proposed alcohol ordinance, an issue that has recently stirred the interests of University students. "I think it's a dead issue as presented," Martindell said.
If some form of the ordinance were to reemerge, Martindell said that he would involve the University community. "If the University community is against it, it's not a good idea," he said.
Meanwhile, the atmosphere at the Republican post-election party at the Nassau Inn was noticeably more subdued than its Democratic counterpart. Republican representatives did not even bother to total up the votes.
Still, Carnevale remained optimistic. "We're disappointed, but we take some satisfaction and hope for the future in that the local Republicans ran much better than the state Republicans," he said.
Although less than 10 percent of voters in the district are registered Republicans, Carnevale managed to pull in just under 20 percent of the vote. "Someone is listening to what we say," he said.
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