Mayor reflects on his first 100 days in office
Whirlwind, hands-on schedule keeps full-time, young mayor on the run
BY JOHN DUNPHY
Staff Writer

Mayor Jun Choi, pictured here with Dora Ramos, a member of the mayor's Task Force on Education, visited Herbert Hoover Middle School.

On a dreary, rainy morning last week, Edison Mayor Jun Choi pulled into the Herbert Hoover Middle School parking lot, where he was scheduled to speak to the eighth-grade students at 9 o'clock.

It was 8:58 a.m.

David Donnelly, Choi's special assistant, volunteered to park the Mayor's 2003 Ford Crown Victoria. Choi stepped from the driver's seat, collected his papers and stepped inside.

Almost immediately, the 34-year-old son of South Korean immigrant parents, was shaking hands and making nice with several teachers and parents. One, bedecked in the school's blue and white, asked for a photo.

A cluster of young students ran up to him, perhaps not entirely sure who Choi was, but given the amount of attention being received by him, knew he was probably someone important.

"Are you rich?" asked one particularly eager youth.

Little did the child know that Choi, an M.I.T. and Columbia University graduate and the first Asian-American to hold the office of mayor of Edison Township, once earned $123,000 during his tenure with the state Department of Education.

PHOTOSBY JOHN DUNPHY Early Friday morning, Edison Mayor Jun Choi was already checking out the local papers to see if the administration had made the news.

He currently makes $49,000 working full time, the same amount as his part-time predecessor, George A. Spadoro.

The fact Choi is also the first Korean-American to hold the office might be something not everyone realizes in a community where one-third of its population is of Asian descent.

"Whether I am Korean-American or not is not even one of the top 20 issues of me being a good mayor," he said. "We live in a state where we seem to be very racially and ethnically conscious. That's not a major thing for me. I didn't wake up one morning and say, 'Gee, I'd like to be the first Asian-American mayor of Edison Township.'

"I thought I could be a good mayor, an American mayor, of Edison Township," Choi added.

Mayor Jun Choi spoke with the assembled eighth-graders of Herbert Hoover Middle School about racial and ethnic diversity.

Choi was already organizing his morning at 6:53 a.m. last Friday, 97 days into his four-year term as mayor. His morning would include meetings, a radio interview with WCTC-AM personality Jack Ellery and the speech at Herbert Hoover Middle School.

Between sips of coffee from his paper cup, Choi pulled out several notecards, bursting with chicken scratch.

"I keep these each day," he said. "It's basically my to-do list of high priority things."

Choi puts daily tasks on the cards, rather than in his PDA, because he said life moves too quickly to constantly enter things in the device.

He acknowledges not every call gets returned, and not every "to-do" gets done.

"Not everything is always checked off because it's just, you know, physically impossible to get back to everybody in the time that we have to do everything," he said. "Politics is very challenging; there's always more than you can do."

Later, as Ellery grilled the freshman mayor on several issues, including the discontinuation of several township cars for members of the police, callers began lining up to perhaps sound off their own complaints.

Though the radio host was unable to field calls due to time, the mayor called them the "vocal minority," only a small part of a greater picture.

"Not everyone wants to call in," he said. "There's a huge silent majority in our community."

"Democracy, that is, participation in democracy, not only in Edison but in New Jersey and the country is disappointing," Choi said. "There's a lot of apathy out there. So, it's challenging to represent everybody when only a small minority will only vocalize what their concerns are. People give politicians a harder time because they think we're all being bought, that we're using money as a way of influencing the system for the few and not the many."

Even during last year's election, when the highest number of registered voters ever showed up to the polls, many people still opted to stay home, he said.

"We had approximately 26,000 that voted in this last election, out of a community of over 100,000," he said. "The idea of democracy doesn't work unless there's participation."

Choi drives a township vehicle, which he said was because he's still the mayor, even when he's not in the office or at a meeting.

"This is not a luxury item," he said. "I canceled the order for upgraded cars. The chief of police, myself and others were expected new cars this year."

Choi said Spadoro had a personal driver on staff who earned about $35,000 annually for the same vehicle. He terminated the position in an ongoing effort to cut costs.

So far, 18 township employees have been removed from the payroll, either through attrition or termination. One of those terminations, of former Spadoro aide Alexandra Vignola, has resulted in a lawsuit. She claims she was fired for political reasons. That lawsuit is still pending.

Choi said more cost-saving measures are examined every day, including the continued downsizing of township government.

Donnelly, his special assistant since he left a similar role in Jersey City in December, occupies an adjacent office at $80,000 a year. He said it was once Spadoro's driver's office.

"I've worked for eight different elected officials," Donnelly said. "Mayor Choi is the most hands-on mayor. He does a lot of his own research, he does a lot of his own writing. If he's not the first one in here, he's very close. And he's usually the last one to leave."

"A couple times, I suspected he had slept over," he added.

Choi said he enjoys his work. But it has taken a toll in other areas of his life. It's difficult to find time away from the office, from the meetings and from the title of mayor of the fifth largest municipality of New Jersey.

"To get anonymity, to not have people always coming up to you, if I'm looking for private time, it's at someone's private home or outside of Edison, outside of Middlesex County for that matter," Choi said. "You don't have much time for yourself. It's hard."

His expectations after 100 days in office have more or less been met, he said.

"Except the fiscal problems are worse than I anticipated and the challenges for true government reform are going to take longer than I anticipated," Choi said.

To convince the public he's still up to the task will take a lot more than words and a lot more days. With 100 down, he's got 1,000 or so to go.

"This is a lot of hard work," he said. "We have already saved almost $1.8 million. I think we have worked very hard and that we have put a lot of effort toward instituting real, positive changes. To some degree, we've already implemented the changes. But this is the first step in a marathon in getting the work done. You're never fully content because you always think you can do more."

"This is not lip service, this is real reform," Choi added.