As Montclair’s Township Council reaches its six-month mark in office, we’re hearing a lot about splits and divisions, both in the council and in the community.

Among them are some scrapes I’ve gotten into with other members of the council, including the mayor, who has claimed she felt intimidated by me during a raucous closed session of the Council before the Christmas break.

It’s true that I yelled “F&*$ you!” in a professional setting, more than once. That’s not okay. But I wholly reject the suggestion that I intimidated anyone. And no one should mistake my quietly taking some lumps for anything other than a willingness to face the music for what I actually did, rather than a license to exaggerate it to score political points, especially if that creates further conflict in the Township.

The situation brings to mind a local fissure that doesn’t get adequate attention, between those who are prone to the dramatic, and those who aren’t. There are more low-drama than high-drama folks, both among residents as a whole, and on the Council. But the dramatists tend to dominate our public conversation, amplified by a media ecosystem that by nature thrives on conflict, especially of the performative variety.

This isn’t to say that the dramatic types—which include me, at least on some days—are always wrong. But when you end up with drama-hungry people from other towns tuning into our council meetings for entertainment while low-drama residents tune out, you get problems. To name just one sobering example, we should already be celebrating the passage of a new Complete Streets ordinance addressing our dire and growing problems of traffic safety. But it has kept being sidetracked, in large part because of unrelated drama.

So everyone can be as dramatic as they want. But going forward in 2025 I’m going to try to avoid the drama and instead just grind out the work, especially in areas that have been overlooked because of previous dramas, and even if our local council TV ratings suffer as a result.

Best,