A rookie mayor at 93 years young
The new mayor here looked gleefully down at the 6-month-old girl, the daughter of a city councilmember, but opted against the traditional political peck on the baby’s cheek — it was the germs, he said.
Of course, not much is traditional about this firstterm mayor, Vito Perillo. He is a 93-year-old Second World War veteran who had never held elected office. His campaign consisted largely of knocking on every door in town, accompanied by his campaign manager, and wearing out two pairs of shoes in the process. And he defeated a two-term incumbent who had been involved in city government for nearly two decades.
His victory last fall gave him a national profile — even Lester Holt of NBC came for an interview. Tinton Falls, a town of roughly 18,000 people inland from the Jersey Shore, was quickly in the spotlight.
But after several weeks in office, he is running into the kind of traditional problem that plagues mayors across the country: a disagreeable city council.
“There’s been a lot of pushback, but things are getting better now,” Perillo said. He had expected to be able to appoint his choice for borough administrator and borough attorney quickly, but the city council was not moving as fast as he hoped.
It took more than a month, but he finally has his administrator, Michael Skudera, though he is still waiting for the borough attorney to be approved.
“When I ran for mayor, there were two people who ran for council unopposed, and that was a big mistake,” he said. “I mean, I should have had two people run with me — at least I would have had two people on the council that I could count on.”
Tinton Falls has a non-partisan government so the council does not caucus as political parties or proclaim allegiance to Republicans or Democrats. Perillo is a registered Republican, though he said that was because of a single vote long ago, adding that he has always been an independent.
Some council members have described their early dealings with Perillo as “challenging,” attributing it to the mayor’s inexperience.
“He is very new at politics, and the things that go on in the internal side of it,” said councilmember Christopher Pak. “But he’s working hard toward making it work.”
If there is a starting point for Perillo’s decades-long, relatively unplanned drift into politics, it might be sometime in the past year, when he finally reached a breaking point and grew increasingly angry at what he viewed was opaque spending by the town’s administration. “We didn’t really see the point of mailing a flyer out if we could walk them to people’s doors,” said Perillo’s campaign manager, Steve Leech, 60, who has also been Perillo’s next-door neighbour since 1992.
Sometimes they just left flyers, while other times visits led to extended conversations. Perillo was always proud to end an encounter with a handshake, a grip that, even after 93 years — 38 of them as an electrical engineer for the Defense Department, plus a tour in the South Pacific during the Second World War — can still crack a knuckle.