Hilary Clinton, the United Kingdom’s Labor Party and Sandra Fluke — the young woman who’s congressional testimony prompted Rush Limbaugh to call her a slut — all of them have Veracity Media in common. The campaign firm was co-founded by Alex Torpey, who at the age of 23 and fresh out of college was elected South Orange’s youngest mayor ever. He’s stepping down but talked with NJTV News Anchor Mary Alice Williams about his time in office and what the future holds for him and other young people getting involved with government.
When Torpey began his four-year term as South Orange mayor, he wanted to see more young people getting involved in local government. At the end of his term, he says he’s absolutely seen an increase.
“What’s so exciting about working around politics and government right now is that if you look really closely across the country, you might not see it as much at the federal level, but certainly young mayors, young council people, young state legislators. They’re starting to pop up more and more. What’s really interesting is that a lot of them seem to be sort of less partisan, party identified and just really more interested in trying to find ways to make government actually work for people to accomplish some sort of social change that I think a lot of young people especially really want to see the government do,” he said.
He says the benefit of young people running for office — as opposed to becoming a legislative aid — is that young people are less party identified which helps against the stagnation in legislation that’s primarily seen in major political parties where people aren’t seeing a lot getting done, especially at the federal level.
“If you look at the typical legislature, district or legislative office, you’re going to see someone who holds the office position who’s maybe a little bit older and most of their staff is a lot younger. One of the things that I’ve been more interested in thinking more about is what if you flip that and what if you have a younger elected official and actually an older staff?” he asked. “Some of the benefits definitely include that and they don’t really see politics and holding an elected office as a career. They see social good as their career or social change as their career, or policy as their career and that could take them in the public sector, in the private sector, in office, out of office, it doesn’t really matter, whichever way is most helpful to getting something done.”
In 2011, Torpey called property taxes the most important issue to address during his time as mayor. At the end of his term, he says that goal went well.
“We had four years of the lowest tax increases since the 1990s and three years in a row we’ve actually paid down our debt instead of adding to it,” Torpey said. “We’re doing a pretty good job controlling costs right now in South Orange.”
At first colleagues had mixed reactions about his age and experience level, but he says that those reactions changed over the years as they realized that he wasn’t out to turn everything upside down and had good ideas to contribute.
“In the beginning people were kind of hesitant and skeptical. There was actually some animosity from a few people in particular about having someone, I don’t know if age was the primary factor but I would assume it contributed to it, and that certainly changed as I think people saw that it’s not really like the young person in the room is the bull in the china shop,” he said. “They’re not trying to come in and turn everything upside down. They do have some new ideas, they do have a new way of looking at things and I think a lot of young people, certainly myself included, are really interested in the expertise and knowledge and skills of people that are already there and have been doing it longer. I actually think that in combination with the younger generation that’s really the best formula.”
During his time in office, he had to deal with the aftermath of Hurricanes Irene and Sandy, as well as the Halloween snowstorm of 2011. He says it all went toward learning how to make the system more efficient and was an unbelievable test.
“My master’s degree was in emergency management and I’ve been a volunteer EMT with our rescue squad and our OEM coordinator so I’ve been very involved in the emergency preparedness and management and response side of things. Those storms pushed everybody to their limit. A lot of people all around the state and this region were horrible affected by those,” he said. “I think that a couple of things that I certainly learned from those experiences is firstly that the community really came together. You saw people opening up their houses for people to stay if they didn’t have power at their house. From the village’s standpoint we did a really great job with what we could do from our emergency response side. Our police department and fire department and rescue squad and public works, I mean it was incredible watching them spring into action but it certainly taught me. We did a pretty good job communicating to people about what was going on and we’ve implemented some new emergency communication practices before those storms and after. But what really opened my eyes in those experiences was the lack of preparedness on behalf of our utility companies. That was one of the biggest learning experiences for me was seeing how poorly prepared some of these organizations are for these storms and that was certainly a good learning lesson which I would hope that we would have made more progress since then on.”
But the question remains: did the utility companies take anything away from these big storms? Torpey says he’s unconvinced.
“[They haven’t done] as much as they could have and not as much as they need to to be really well prepared. They’re kind of dinosaurs as far as an organization is concerned. They’re taking outage information by hand, faxing things to people that are typing them in and this is in an age where in South Orange we’re trying to eliminate our last fax machine, it’s just not necessary to do. I’ve spent a lot of time talking with the heads of our utility company, PSE&G. Although they’ve certainly expressed a commitment and interest in doing better, I don’t think that many of us have seen that much of an improvement,” he said.
Drawn to community service from a young age, what’s next for the outgoing mayor? He says whatever it is that’s next, he’ll always be involved in public service.
“I think that community service and public service can be defined in so many different ways and really the way that the framers of our Constitution, our founding fathers intended for politics to be was that the people that served in these offices were not doing it and running for reelection every single time,” Torpey said. “They’re not just trying to climb up the ladder for their career. That people were going to do a job for a period of time, commit their full life to it and then go back to trying to do something may be a little bit different. For me, what I’m going to be doing is always going to be public service oriented, whether it’s through my company helping people get elected to office or who we think could get elected or should be elected to office, or whether it’s finding more young people to run for office, or whether it’s the master’s class that I started co-teaching at Seton Hall. There’s always going to be a lot of work trying to find ways to make government work better and trying to find ways to get more people involved, trying to understand how we develop leadership in the country and how the next generation of people who are in charge of our government can maybe do a little bit better job than the people who are there now.”
He weighs in on the people who say the government should have a smaller role.
“I think that there’s actually a huge confluence of people that want the government to provide services, but also people who want the government to interfere too much in their lives. One of the things that we see more and more, especially over the last decade, is the idea of government as a facilitator. For example the government doesn’t necessarily have to provide every single service that you might expect a government to provide, but they might be able to do things like facilitate partnerships with a private company or a non-profit that might be able to do a better job providing that service,” Torpey said. “There’s a lot of opportunity to mesh and meld the political sides that we see in this country and get to a point where the government’s doing things that we want it to do. It’s not overly intrusive and it’s cost efficient because there’s services being provided by private companies or non-profits and the taxes are lower because the money is being spent better than it is right now.”