In this case, majority rules

Mayor Joseph Scarpelli did a good thing when he decided to sign the ordinance that created the position for a Township Council vice president.

While we agree the Township Council has operated successfully without a vice president for many years, there’s nothing wrong with being proactive. We would hope that no governing body would face an unbreakable tie-vote when choosing who should run a meeting when the president is unexpectedly absent. But, as Republican council members pointed out, this could happen.

The Democratic council members, and the mayor, wanted a restriction placed in the ordinance that would have kept an outgoing council president from serving as the vice president the following year. When it became clear that the GOP council members weren’t willing to insert this language into the ordinance, Scarpelli was ready to use his veto power to strike it down.

Republicans alleged the restriction was suggested to keep Stephen Acropolis, the president in 2004 and Scarpelli’s mayoral opponent this year, out of the vice president’s seat.

Perhaps this is true. Or perhaps the Democrats wanted to follow the rule of the president’s position which states a council member can’t serve as president two years in a row.

We’ll probably never know for sure.

Regardless, the mayor’s decision to uphold the council’s vote in favor of the ordinance was correct. Acropolis has said that because he took his name out of contention for the vice president’s seat, the mayor changed his mind on vetoing the ordinance. That may be the case, but Scarpelli did back down and let the Township Council figure out how they want to organize their own governing body.

Well done.

But what we’d like to know is — would there have been such a fuss if the Democrats had the majority on the council and it was a Democrat who was likely to take the vice president’s seat after just serving as president the year before?

We think not.