Politics can be a brutally tough game. In order to get anything done, an elected official has to work with a team of peers. It’s even tougher when, in his or her heart of hearts, a politician veers away from the group on a particular topic and acts upon insights that some colleagues may not possess or do not have the will to act upon.
That is why I think that it would have been easy for Jack Ciattarelli, one of five people on the Somerset County Board of Chosen Freeholders, to have voted with the rest of the freeholders in maintaining 15 paid holidays for county employees in 2010.
Instead, he was the sole dissenter claiming, as reported by Martin C. Bricketto in the Courier News on Monday, that, “…our holiday schedule is excessive,” two more than even State of New Jersey gets.
It’s not the first time that Freeholder Jack Ciattarelli has been in the minority: He was one of the most vocal voices in the struggle to disband the Somerset County Park Commission and to bring all of its operations under the direct oversight of the Freeholders. That effort nearly paid off until one freeholder, reported to have been previously in favor of disbanding the Commission, changed his mind in the homestretch.
Such positions may seem to cast Ciattarelli somewhat in the role of a rebel. But that’s not my view. I see Jack Ciattarelli as a political visionary, a person who knows the value of a buck and who is ready to go to the mat for county taxpayers if that’s what it takes.
It can be personally troubling for an elected official to go against the grain, especially if he knows that his vote will be a losing one, but that’s what a politician does who is not getting his ticket punched on the way to another favor or political deal.
Until I ran across him again at the recent forum of the Somerset County Business Partnership at the Raritan Valley Community College, I had not seen nor spoken to Jack Ciattarelli for a long time. But our brief discussion at the end of the program, together with his recent vote, only solidifies my opinion of this man as a visionary worthy of the public’s trust.
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