In tiny Walpack, nobody won either primary for township committee

Walpack is New Jersey’s least-populated municipality: the 2020 U.S. Census puts the local population at seven, and voter registration records show there are eleven Republicans and one Democrat.

Math gets fairly simple in Walpack: one out of four voters serve on the three-member township committee, and elections there are fairly relaxed.   Turnout in the Republican primary on June 2 was 18% after two voters showed up; the lone Democrat did not vote.  Because of the small number, Walpack’s election results are suppressed to protect

Mayor Victor Maglio, a Republican, is up for re-election this year. Nobody filed for his seat, and no write-in votes were cast, which means Maglio needs to run a write-in campaign if he wants to get re-elected.  He also has a Plan B: if nobody wins the seat, the other two township committee members – one of them is the mayor’s daughter — can appoint him to fill the vacancy.  Either way, if he wages no campaign, he doesn’t have to file with the New Jersey Election Law Enforcement Commission.

This isn’t unusual since Maglio hasn’t filed since 2017.  And no one has ever voted against Maglio in a general election.

Maglio, a 73-year-old pastor, became a township committeeman in 2007 after the death of his father, Mayor Joseph Maglio, who had served on the governing body for 56 years.  He became mayor following the death of Raymond Fuller in 2011.   When there was a roof leak at the municipal building in 2023, Maglio went to Home Depot, bought some shingles and nails, climbed up on the roof, and repaired the leak himself.

Walpack has become a ghost town over the last six decades after the federal government’s 1955 plan to ease flooding on the Delaware River included the construction of the Tocks Island Dam and a man-made lake, 40 miles long and 1 mile wide, that would have engulfed the small Sussex County town.

Using eminent domain, the U.S. government claimed over 70,000 acres in the area, including all of Walpack.  The population went from 384 to 150 between 1970 and 1980, dropping to 67 in 1990, 41 in 2000, and 16 in 2010.

Despite taking the homes of Walpack residents, the controversial dam project was abandoned in 1975.   Many of the houses in Walpack, now owned by the U.S. government, are uninhabitable.

But there are some advantages to living in Walpack: average property taxes are just $450 annually – perhaps the lowest in the state.  There is no municipal property tax — just for students who attend Sandyston public schools — and for Sussex County.  About $39,000 in state aid covers the entire municipal budget.

And Walpack appears to be a model of shared services agreements.

Still, it’s unclear what the municipality’s future will be.  The much-smaller Pahaquarry Township, also a casualty of the Tocks Island Dam project, dissolved in 1997 after its population dropped to six.

Walpack had a Democratic township committeewoman as recently as 2023, when  Janina Wycalek died at age 76.  Maglio’s daughter, Kelly Happe, a Republican, took her seat.

The third member of the township committee is James Heigis, 85, the owner of the fabled Walpack Inn.

Local politics in Walpack is not especially partisan, which is how Wycalek, a liberal Democrat – when she lived in Montclair in the early 1970s, she was one of the leaders of a grassroots group seeking a nuclear freeze – came to spend ten years on the local governing body in a hugely conservative part of the state.

Wycalek was first elected to local office in 2013 after Russell Pagano, the executive chef at the Walpack Inn, moved to North Carolina.  In 2019, Republican Ken Salazar challenged Wycalek; she defeated him with 71% of the vote, 5-2.