Bilal Beasley

North Ward Councilman David Lyons in his campaign headquarters on Monday night. 

IRVINGTON - Gene Etchison approaches a sprawling old house on the corner of Clinton Avenue and tells the resident when he steps outside, "I love your grass. It’s cut real nice. I love to lie down in the grass, that’s why I always notice it when I go by here."

The man shakes the candidate's hand. He knows it’s the day before Election Day.

He confesses he has a problem with the way Mayor Wayne Smith’s administration is running the town, and he tells Etchison he’d like to go to Town Hall and tell them they need to improve the sanitation department - and everything else for that matter, but he just doesn’t have the energy anymore.

Sen. Ron Rice (D-Essex)Sen. Ronald Rice (D-Essex) hopes his written request to Attorney General Anne Milgram for an investigative audit of Irvington, cc’d to voters, will give North Ward Councilman David Lyons a leg up in Tuesday’s municipal elections.

A vocal critic of Mayor Wayne Smith’s management of the Essex County town and often the lone dissenting vote on the council, 12-year incumbent Lyons is in a competitive race with Newark Det. Gene Etchison.

Lyons has questions about his town’s obligation to pay the state back $8 million over a 20-year period, a result of the Smith administration’s bonding without the permission of the state Department of Community Affairs.

Rice has the same questions.

Council President John SowellIRVINGTON - A political pragmatist who insists his insider knowledge of how government works does not diminish his closeness to the community, Council President John Sowell says an aggressive opponent in the West Ward doesn’t know enough about the process to serve.

An executive with the sheet metal workers union, Sowell originally thought he was only going to be running against 21-year old Keith White, political acolyte of North Ward Councilman David Lyons.

Now he’s also trying to stare down an old contemporary.

It’s a three-way race in Irvington’s West Ward with Sowell intending to fend off not just National Guardsman White but one-time ally turned vocal detractor, security guard Cedric Hunter.

Challenger Cedric HunterHunter and Sowell fell out after Hunter, a leader of the Irvington Alliance, failed to spirit the council president away from Team Irvington, a group founded and run by At-Large Councilman (and Freeholder) Bilal Beasley, who was wounded in an unsuccessful challenge last year of Sen. Ronald Rice (D-Essex).

"Bilal Beasley’s run of victories at the county level are over and soon the people who so openly supported him will besiege him to rid themselves of his disgrace," Hunter wrote to Sowell soon after Beasley’s loss. "As one of his most obedient cohorts, your name is closely aligned with his. Hopefully, you will see that the handwriting is on the wall and Bilal Beasley’s career in politics will (not) last for too much longer."

The retirement this year of Johnny Jones from the Essex County Board of Chosen Freeholders left a vacancy, which Newark Mayor Cory Booker wanted to fill with long time South Ward ally Terrance Bankston. 

On Saturday, however, the party selected Rufus Johnson - chief of staff to Sen. Ronald Rice (D-Essex), the man Booker defeated for mayor in 2006.

Johnson will run on the line with incumbent freeholders Ralph Caputo, Linda Cavanaugh, Carol Clark, Blonnie Watson, Bilal Beasley, Patricia Sebold, Samuel Gonzalez and Donald Payne, Jr.

Councilman David LyonsIRVINGTON - North Ward Councilman David Lyons and Gene Etchison started out as friends and political allies, with Etchison drawn to the older man’s fireball activism.

As president of the local tenants association, Lyons didn’t care who he offended in his drive for better housing, and he took that attitude into a run for City Council in 1996.

"We used to go door to door together," recalled Etchison of Lyons’ first campaign. "I was like his little brother."

That didn’t last.

Lyons won. But though he successfully backed Etchison for district leader, Etchison then ran against Lyons with the muscle of South Ward boss D. Bilal Beasley and Team Irvington behind him.Challenger Gene Etchison

The councilman took the challenge as a betrayal.

"When I see him around, we don’t talk, said Lyons. "I lost respect for him after that."

A police officer and Marine Corps veteran who is the godson of Assemblywoman Cleopatra Tucker, Etchison said it was only political inevitability that propelled him into the arena against a man he once admired, but whom he came to see as a chronic naysayer.

State Sen. Ronald Rice (left) and his Democratic primary challenger, Essex County Freeholder Bilal Beasley

Although they come from the same neighborhood, these men tell different stories about their past.

They’re the same age. They graduated from high school in the same era and in their early 60s now they’re old enough to recall another Newark, distant from the one that exists. As African-Americans inspired by King and Malcolm X and the pressures of history on urban America, Ronald Rice and Bilal Beasley started their public careers in local government, Rice in 1978 on the Newark City Council and Beasley in 1984 on the council of neighboring Irvington.

They have their own scars, but their memories diverge most starkly when they reflect on what drove them into politics.

Republican Senate Primary - Distrtict 24

STEVE OROHO
Raised: $ 266,480
Spent: $ 62,812
Cash-on-Hand: $ 213,667

GUY GREGG
Raised: $ 218,336
Spent: $ 83,875
Cash-on-Hand: $ 134,661

Republican Assembly Primary - District 26

ALEX DECROCE
Raised: $ 363,922
Spent: $ 226,536
Cash-on-Hand: $ 137,386

LARRY CASHA
Raised: $ 250,798
Spent: $ 179,873
Cash-on-Hand: $ 70,925

JAY WEBBER
Raised: $ 93,422
Spent: $ 44,494
Cash-on-Hand: $ 48,927

Democratic Senate Primary - District 28

RONALD RICE
Raised: $ 273,252
Spent: $ 281,381
Cash-on-Hand: $ 32,830

BILAL BEASLEY
Raised: $ 99,400
Spent: $ 29,156
Cash-on-Hand: $ 67,243

Democratic Senate Primary - District 31

SANDRA CUNNINGHAM
Raised: $ 69,605
Spent: $ 47,797
Cash-on-Hand: $ 21,807

LOUIS MANZO
Not available

Democratic Senate Primary - District 33

BRIAN STACK
Raised: $ 81,426
Spent: $ 67,825
Cash-on-Hand: $ 13,600

SAL VEGA
Not available

Republican Senate Primary - District 40

KEVIN O'TOOLE
Raised: $ 185,463
Spent: $ 88,649
Cash-on-Hand: $ 96,713

TODD CALIGUIRE
Raised: $ 46,407
Spent: $ 14,255
Cash-on-Hand: $ 31,925

Source: New Jersey Election Law Enforcement Commission