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NJ town will vote in 'vitriolic' election on whether to make its government nonpartisan
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Mike Hayes
Published Jun 15, 2026
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By
Mike Hayes
Published Jun 15, 2026
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Voters in the affluent North Jersey township of Millburn will head to the polls Tuesday to vote on changing the town’s form of government for the first time since it was incorporated 169 years ago.
The measure would nullify the terms of local township committee members and the entire body would be re-elected under new rules in November. Most notably, municipal elections would become nonpartisan and candidates would be allowed to run without declaring their party affiliations next to their names on the ballot.
Local Democrats say the move is an attempt by the Republican majority to shun an increasingly toxic and unpopular party label.
“I believe it's a way for the Republican candidates to run in November without identifying their party affiliation, or in future elections, at a time when being associated with this party, the national party, is not very popular,” said Cheryl Desmaris, the chair of the Millburn-Short Hills Democratic Committee.
Republican members of the township committee deny the accusation, saying they're solely interested in improving representation in the wealthy suburb.
The local township committee in Millburn is perhaps best-known in New Jersey for members’ high-profile fight against affordable housing mandates handed down by the state. In 2024, Gothamist chronicled Millburn officials’ attempt to block a 75-unit affordable apartment complex from being built on Main Street. In 2023, Two current Republicans on the township committee, Frank Saccomandi and Ben Stoller, ran for office on a platform of blocking the project.
Saccomandi and Stoller pushed back on the claim by Democrats that they were looking the change to nonpartisan elections in order to shield their party affiliation.
“ That absolutely could not be further from the truth,” Stoller told Gothamist.
Township Councilmember Jamie Serruto, a Republican, told Gothamist that he was in favor of residents voting yes on the initiative. He declined to answer further questions about the proposal on the record.
After Donald Trump's better-than-expected performance in the Garden State in the 2024 election, political experts started to entertain the idea that New Jersey was shifting closer to becoming a battleground state. But since then, the president’s approval ratings have plummeted from around 50% to 32% in New Jersey.
The GOP has not fared well in recent major New Jersey races. Democrat Mikie Sherrill trounced Trump-endorsed Republican Jack Ciattarelli by more than 14 points in the state's 2025 gubernatorial race. Far-left Democrat Analilia Mejia knocked out establishment Democrats in the special primary to fill Sherrill’s old congressional seat, then went on to beat centrist Republican nominee Joe Hathaway by more than 20 points in the general special election.
The initiative would also expand the township committee from five members to seven. It would also extend township committee members’ terms from three years to four. Stoller said he favored this change because most newly elected officials need considerable time just to learn the mechanics of municipal government.
“ It takes you a year, literally, to get a feel of what's going on in local government,” he said.
Both Stoller and Saccomandi said that by switching to a nonpartisan form of government, some of the divisiveness of today’s party politics would go away. Township committee member Michael Cohen, a Democrat, said the fractious debate over whether to become “nonpartisan” demonstrates the flaws in that theory.
“This referendum is essentially a nonpartisan election,” he said. “There's no party on the ballot for this, and this is the most vitriolic election I have ever seen in all the time that I've been here.”
Cohen, who is Jewish, said he’s received antisemitic comments on videos he’s posted on social media advocating against the government change. He said someone called the police on people handing out literature at the local train station that advocated against the change.
The initiative would also significantly shorten some members’ terms. Both Cohen and Serruto were just elected in November. If the town votes yes on changing the government, their three-year terms would be cut to just one year. Another councilmember, David Cosgrove, a Democrat, would lose a year of his three-year term.
“ I think there were like 5,000 people in town who voted for me for a three-year term — and this does violence to that,” he said.
The town’s Democrats also said Saccomandi is misleading residents about the need for nonpartisan elections in Millburn. According to Saccomandi, when he initially ran for township committee in 2022, he was “required” to change his party affiliation from Democrat to Republican in order to get on the ballot.
“When I got into local politics, I was a Democrat. I’d been a Democrat for over a decade. Now, because I had started going to meetings, and I was speaking out against the all-Democrat [township committee], there was no way that they would let me run as a Democrat. So I had to change parties just to run,” Saccomandi said in a February interview with the local charter commission, which prepared a report recommending the government changes.
Campaign mailers advocating for residents to vote yes on Thursday shared with Gothamist include a quote from Saccomandi saying he was “forced to change parties to run.”
Annette Romano, the former Democratic mayor of Millburn who was the chair of the Millburn Democratic Committee at the time, said Saccomandi never inquired about running on the Democratic ticket in town.
“ Frank Saccomandi never, ever asked to run as a Democratic candidate for township committee, ever,” she said.
She also suggested political cowardice on the part of Republicans.
“ When I ran for office 20 years ago, I ran for township committee when it was not popular to be a Democrat in Millburn,” Romano said. “I had the word ‘Democrat’ on my lawn signs. I never walked, I never ran away from it. It's just who I am. So it's kind of obvious what they're doing.”
Asked about the Democrats’ argument that he is misleading the public by claiming he was required to run as a Republican in 2022, Saccomandi told Gothamist: “ I think you're getting mired in the wrong details.”
“Bottom line, they would not let me run as a Democrat, and so I ran as a Republican, and that's the end of that,” he said.
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Mike Hayes
Mike Hayes covers equity and access to opportunity in New Jersey. He joined WNYC and Gothamist in 2023. Before that, he worked as a freelance journalist writing about policing and criminal justice. He has written for ProPublica, CNN, HuffPost, BuzzFeed News and The Appeal. He is also the author of the book, “The Secret Files: Bill De Blasio, The NYPD, and the Broken Promises of Police Reform.” In 2019, he was a finalist for the Livingston Award for Young Journalists.
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