The incumbent CPA talks about how his accounting and business background makes him a good candidate for city council.
Giving back to the community is in town council candidate Brad Denn’s blood. His family has a penchant for public sector jobs aimed at bettering the community.
“Almost everybody in my family is a teacher — like out of 21 adults, 17 or 18 are teachers,” he told The Sun in the conference room of his CPA firm’s offices. “I’ve always wanted to give back to society.”
Denn obtained his degree in accounting from Trenton State College, which is now called The College of New Jersey, and like his fellow incumbent Medford council candidate Mayor Chuck Watson, he’s an Eagle Scout.
He feels his background in accounting and business allows him to think about things differently, which can lead to more money in taxpayers’ wallets. One of his proudest accomplishments is passing a balanced budget.
“I’m a tax guy,” he said.
However, he’s not afraid of spending money when it needs to be spent. He and the council are working on “getting the infrastructure started back up again,” he said, mostly referring to repaving roads and fixing old sewer lines.
“Some of these sewer lines are 65, 70 years old, and they’re starting to fracture. Instead of waiting for them to break and using emergency funds to fix them, which has happened, we start systematically saying, all right let’s do this street then that street and pave afterward,” he said noting there’s no sense in repaving a road if you’re going to have to rip it apart to fix the sewer lines anyway.
Denn talked about how council hired an engineer to tell council which of the town’s roads needed to be paved the most. Denn and the rest of the town council had the engineer come up with a map of Medford featuring color coded roads — green, yellow and red — symbolizing which roads were fine, the ones that needed some work but could wait, and ones that needed major work as soon as possible.
“[The engineer] did that analysis for us, and looking at the red roads, we needed to spend $10 million roughly to get the red roads done, and we were only spending $1 million a year. So we upped it to $2.5 million. But we still got a ways to go to catch up,” he said. “There was so much neglect when the budget crisis happened that things weren’t being done systematically. So we’re working on getting that systematically done in the most efficient way possible.”
While Denn loves serving Medford Township, he’s not particularly enthusiastic about running for any higher office. Why not?
“The reason is twofold,” he began. “You become more and more beholden to the people who can get you money to run for re-election. [Running in a] municipal government is very low costing … but when you get into the state Senate and the state Assembly, you gotta raise tens, fifteens, 50, 100, $250,000, and then you have to do massive amounts of campaigning. Knocking on doors or whatever. I got four kids, I’m doing so much for the town, I don’t have time for that.”
