Wayne Smith

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.

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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.

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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."

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Democratic mayors in Irvington and Plainfield have endorsed Frank Lautenberg for re-election to the U.S. Senate.

“Frank Lautenberg is a champion on the issues that matter most to us. Issues like health care, education, homeland security, transportation and the environment. I am proud to stand by his side in a primary,” said Wayne Smith, the Mayor of Irvington.

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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.

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At the first class of Politics 107 this morning at Essex County College, some of the students chuckled when they read the list politician guest lecturers slated to speak to the municipal government class over the course of the semester.

“One of these dudes is going to jail,” said Klon Julu, a 27-year-old Political Science major from Newark, after taking a look at the syllabus.

Indeed, one of the several mayors slated to speak at the experimental class this semester was Mims Hackett, the recently arrested Orange mayor and, as of this afternoon, former Assemblyman.

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