Republican Grant Van Eck resigned his seat on the Oakland Borough Council on Friday, eight months short of the expiration of his current term.
The 37-year-old Van Eck is moving to Bridgewater. He was not a candidate for re-election this year.
This could mean a quick return to public office for John McCann, a former congressional candidate who is running for Van Eck’s open seat. It will be up to the Oakland Republican County Committee to submit three names to the all-Republican council.
McCann, a former Cresskill councilman, is running on the Bergen County GOP organization line with incumbent Kevin Slasinski. They face a Carol Ann Rose and Kerri Sirinides, who are running in the June 7 Republican primary under the “Republicans for Oakland Families” banner.
The winners of the primary will face Democrats Andrea Levy and Jo-Ann Ashkenazi.
Oakland is a reliably Republican municipality that backed Donald Trump for president in 2020 and gubernatorial candidate Jack Ciattarelli in 2021. But the three-term mayor, Linda Schwager, is a Democrat.
Van Eck was elected in 2019 by a 129-vote margin against Democrat Thomas Connolly. Slasinski won an unexpired term in November 2019, defeating Connolly by 579 votes.
McCann defeated former Bogota Mayor Steve Lonegan in the 2018 Republican primary for Congress in New Jersey’s 5th district by a 53%-47% margin, but he lost the general election to freshman Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D-Wyckoff) by fourteen percentage point. McCann ought a rematch with Gottheimer in 2020 but lost the GOP primary by 19 points to investment banker Frank Pallotta.