Rogers Believes Reducing Taxes 'Number One Issue'

On Tuesday, Nov. 8, two candidates will be seeking to represent District 5 -- which comprises Belleville, Bloomfield, Nutley, Montclair and Glen Ridge -- on the nine-member Essex County Board of Chosen Freeholders. Those candidates are Republican Steven Rogers and Democrat Brendan Gill. Today we profile Rogers; Gill was profiled yesterday.

Steven Rogers believes the people of District 5 get comparatively little in services for the $86 million in county taxes the residents of the district pay. If elected he vows to push for forensic audits of every county department to root out waste and unnecessary spending. 

“We read about the county running restaurants and county parks outside the district and other services, when what we really need is tax relief,” the 59-year-old Nutley resident explained. “If you have spending cuts it forces you to prioritize.”

Married and the father of three adult children, Rogers was a member of the Nutley Police Department for nearly 40 years before retiring this summer at the rank of detective lieutenant. Rogers, who was elected to the Nutley Board of Education in 2009,  graduated from William Paterson University and also studied at the US Naval War College in Rhode Island, after serving in the US Air Force in the early 1970s. He later served in the US Naval Reserve, rising to the rank of Lieutenant Commander, and with the Office of Naval Intelligence.

For two years after the Sept. 11 attacks, Rogers traveled the world as an officer with Naval Intelligence, and also worked with the National Joint Terrorism Task Force in Washington.

Rogers, who refers to the leadership of Essex County as a political “machine” that has “controlled your pocketbook,” said reducing county taxes are “the number one priority.”

“I’ve found by walking and meeting thousands of people this summer that the most important issue they want addressed is the tax issue,” said Rogers. “At this point people are losing their homes and something needs to be done.”

One way Rogers would achieve tax relief is through a “moratorium on spending increases” and  mandatory cuts in spending. This would partly be achieved through transferring money from what Rogers described as “niceties” to “necessities.” 

“Why spend a million dollars to improve a golf course when you can give $150,000 to each of the five towns to hire a police officer?” Rogers said, noting that investments in law enforcement not only would improve a community’s safety but also its property values. Rogers believes law enforcement, including the Prosecutor’s Office and Sheriff’s Office, is among the “necessities” county government should concentrate on.

Among the “niceties” are various discretionary spending and projects undertaken by the county, including partnering with a restaurant owner to open an eatery at the South Mountain Reservation in West Orange, a speculative venture that Rogers believes represents government overreach into the private sector.


“That’s a $4 million restaurant.....We’re going into competition with mom-and-pop businesses,” Rogers said. 


Indeed, Rogers would like to see more public money flow towards the private sector, but in the form of direct assistance for private business.

“Instead of spending all this money on recreation you can give it back to small businesses. You can give a credit to businesses that hire the unemployed, for example,” Rogers said. “But the county seems more concerned about recreation than the survival of the people in this district.”

Rogers also said he would focus on luring employers to Essex County to replace industries that have left or reduced their workforces in recent years. He specifically cited pharmaceutical giant Roche, whose workforce at its Nutley/Clifton facility may be scaled back dramatically in the years to come, many fear.

“We should be looking at large companies, green companies, like solar panel makers,” Rogers said. “Getting companies to come to a town like Nutley is what county government should be doing.”

Rogers supports other green initiatives as well, including gradually changing over the county’s vehicle fleet to electric cars and trucks, as well as installing recharging stations. Doing so would be good for the environment and would eventually save “millions a year.”

Rogers is running for an office that even he admits is not familiar to a lot of his potential constituents -- many of the people he has met while campaigning “don’t even know who their freeholder representative is,” Rogers noted. [Editor’s note: Democrat Ralph Caputo presently represents District 5, although he is not seeking re-election.]

To bring freeholder government closer to the people, Rogers said he would set up offices in all of the district’s communities. “I plan to have a representative in every town,” he said.   

If he wins, Rogers also said he would seek to work with both political parties for the betterment of the district. Rogers said he has no personal animus towards his opponent, Brendan Gill, simply a different approach to running county government.

“This is an election for survival more than anything else. I want to bring Democrats and Republicans together because we all love our county. We all want to maintain a good quality of life and leave a good quality of life for our children.”