Richard DiLascio

Lyndhurst mayor and newly minted Democrat Richard DiLascio wants to clear the air.

He didn’t leave the Republican Party because Democratic Chairman Joe Ferriero cut a deal with him, he said.  He didn’t leave because he wanted to join the winning team.  To hear DiLascio tell it, the county’s Republican party left him. 

“I’ve been the chairman of this party in Lyndhurst for 20 years, a member for 30 years and in all that time there was always an opportunity to have discussions about different things facing the organization,” said DiLascio.  “But lately the organization lost its focus- there’s nothing there but this totally irrelevant agenda that doesn’t meet its constituency’s needs.”

Bergen County Republican Organization Chairman Rob Ortiz responded today to the Democratic coup in Lyndhurst, where the town’s entire governing board decided to abandon the GOP for the Democrats.

While losing a whole town doesn’t bode well for the county’s beleaguered Republican Party, Ortiz’s response was summed up by the heading of his press release: “Good riddance to bad rubbish.”

Ortiz said that Lyndhurst Mayor Richard Dilascio was already known to be an ally of Bergen County Democratic Chairman Joe Ferriero and of State Sen. Paul Sarlo, and re-hashed the charge that DiLascio was offered county job in exchange for making nice with officials at EnCap, a controversial Bergen County mixed-use development.

In a rare shift in party affiliation, the entire membership of the all-Republican governing body in Lyndhurst will switch from Republican to Democrat tomorrow. Nearly 60% of Lyndhurst’s Republican County Committee will become Democrats too.

The party realignment, first reported in PoliticsNJ.com last summer, is far greater in scope than speculated. It represents, perhaps, the most massive shift in Party affiliation of elected and Party officials in a single community in one day. “It’s safe to say something like this certainly doesn’t happen in politics everyday,” said Lyndhurst Mayor Richard DiLascio.