The race for three seats on the Ridgewood Village Council has heated up in recent weeks amid controversies involving local recreation fields and a fabricated personal attack leveled against one of the candidates.
Four candidates are running, including two incumbents: Mayor Paul Vagianos and Deputy Mayor Pamela Perron are seeking re-election; another councilwoman, Lorraine Reynolds, is not running. Also in the race are Frank Mortimer, Jr. and Hyunju Kwak, a two-term school board member.
Among the controversies in Ridgewood is a turf field project that is now in limbo after soil tests revealed unacceptable levels of carcinogens and mercury. That’s made the village’s fields committee a political hotbed.
At a meeting of that panel discussing a track at the Benjamin Franklin Middle School, Kwak got into a heated discussion with a constituent, Robert Lynch.
Lynch railed against “BS politics.”
“I am done playing nice with this silliness,” he told the committee. “Let’s try to get some shit done, please.”
Then Lynch suggested that Kwak might be connected to misinformation about the status of the track.
“Wow, we’re going off track here. Haha, that’s a pun,” Kwak said. “I’m not looking to lynch … Haha, this is another pun. I’m rich with puns.”
But Lynch didn’t think it was funny.
“Don’t do that. Don’t use my last name as sort of a joke,” he told her. “If somebody did that to you, you’d be very offended.”
Kwak said that “people have done that…absolutely they have.”
Earlier this week, Mortimer – known locally as “Frank the Beeman” because of his work as a beekeeper – accused Kwak’s husband, Steve Kim, of contacting his employer, Cornell University, with claims that he’s misrepresented his job title: adjunct instructor in the Master Beekeeping Program. It turns out Kim was wrong, something backed up in writing by a Cornell administrator who praised Mortimer’s integrity.
“Ridgewood must rise above the unfortunate plague of negative politics and remember that it’s the people who live in Ridgewood that makes our community so special. We are a non-partisan form of government, where we are supposed to collaborate and work together to improve our community,” Mortimer said. “Our goal should be to get everyone involved and engaged – not create division and sides.”
Still, Kwak doubled down on the accusation that Mortimer is doing something wrong, saying her husband “believes that accurate representation of credentials is paramount.”
Ridgewood elects five council members in November non-partisan elections for four year-terms, staggered in even-numbered years.