Former Glen Ridge Mayor Carl Bergmanson is no stranger to lost causes. A year ago, we wrote about his attempt to reinstate Pluto as a planet.
This time, his cause is not intergalactical. He's filed a petition with the attorney general and set up a website, recallcorzinenow, with the cause of handing walking papers to Governor Jon Corzine.
"I've talked to a lot of people and they're all pretty fed up with the governor," says Bergmanson, citing Corzine's failure to hold a constitutional convention, as promised, and "the whole sell-the-turnpike thing." But the "last straw" was Corzine's merge-or-die campaign against New Jersey's small towns. Glen Ridge, which had 7,271 residents in the 2000 census, has already lost $170,000 in state aid as a result.
"It's a lie," says Bergmanson. "Small towns don't cost more than big towns. They're not less efficient than big towns."
Bergmanson has started by analyzing the budgets of all the towns in Essex County, and discovered that the six towns with less than 10,000 residents cost less per person than the other 16 municipalities.
Corzine's anti-small-town campaign "is just a red herring to distract people from what's actually going on."
Bergmanson, a self-identified Whig who is classified by the state as an independent, says the effort is nonpartisan. His son Andrew, a freshman at Brown, and co-chair of the effort, is a registered Democrat.
Bergmanson says that to recall the governor he will need to gather 1.3 million signatures in the next three months.
Whether that will be harder that getting Pluto reinstated, Bergmanson can't say. "We are making progress on that [Pluto] front," he says. He has recruited NASA administrator Alan Stern on the pro-Pluto team.
I'll support Carl no matter what he does. Pluto a planet? Sure. Recall Corzine? Why not.