Our Revolution Trenton Mercer Responds to Mandel-Gawas-Stevens

TRENTON —  Recent emails were illegally sent out by the Mandel-Gawas-Stevens council slate against Our Revolution Trenton Mercer and the Weiss-Fox-Finkelstein council slate in West Windsor. Our Revolution Trenton Mercer releases this statement in response:.

The Mandel-Gawas-Stevens (MGS) team recently released a spam email filled with inflammatory language about Our Revolution Trenton Mercer (ORTM) and the Weiss-Fox-Finkelstein (WFF) campaign, claiming that ORTM endorsed WFF because we want to increase affordable housing by 40%. This is an outright verifiable lie, as ORTM never endorsed the campaign for any sort of policy regarding housing. ORTM endorsed WFF explicitly for their environmentally friendly policies and anti- industrialization stance. As a matter of fact, housing isn’t a WFF platform priority. MGS is attempting to bolster support on a lie.

In light of these comments, ORTM questions MGS’s values and ethics. Firstly, on MGS’s underlying sentiment against housing. Although housing is not an issue that ORTM nor WFF are pursuing in West Windsor, ORTM believes that housing is a human right, and an important foundation to community and health. The MGS slate believes that housing is a burden to the township and something to fearmonger over. We find the anti-housing sentiment to be indefensible,anti-community, and anti-working class people. Growing families is a sign of a healthy economy and town, showing us that people have enough confidence to plant their roots in West Windsor. However if there is no housing or accommodations, how can we expect new and aspiring families to have confidence that the community will welcome them to stay?

We also want to ask the MGS slate how they can so proudly boast about protecting 800 acres of land when in the same email, they boast about the prospect of warehouses, ignoring the more than 600 acres of fragile land that will be negatively impacted by these same warehouses. This is not saving the land; this is harming the land and community. The warehouses will also massively contribute to traffic and gridlock throughout the county. The MGS slate is misleading their readers, claiming that Clarksville Road won’t be affected. They conveniently omit Route 1, which will negatively impact West Windsor, Mercer County, and the state by encouraging congestion on a vital state business route, with no plans for mitigation. The MGS slate’s actions are shortsighted and inconsiderate of our community and neighbors.

Most importantly, the MGS candidates seem to believe they are above the law. Residents have come forward in regards to the spam email they received from the campaign. These residents never signed up to receive emails from the campaign, only emails from the township. Even the WFF candidates themselves received MGS spam emails. This leads us to believe that the MGS campaign is breaking the law and ethics rules by using the township email list for campaign purposes. By doing so, they are abusing both the trust of the West Windsor community and their positions as elected officials. Because of this, Our Revolution Trenton Mercer will be submitting a complaint to the Mercer County Prosecutor’s Office.

The Mandel-Gawas-Stevens campaign should be honest with West Windsor residents and tell them where their values lie, instead of deflecting and hiding behind the “nonpartisan” label.