Bergen County Executive
Open-knowledge reference entry
The Bergen County Executive is county executive of Bergen County, New Jersey, United States who, as the chief officer of the county's executive branch, oversees the administration of county government. The office was inaugurated in 1986 at the same time the Board of Chosen Freeholders, which plays a legislative role, was reconfigured. The New Jersey Superior Court had subsumed and replaced county courts in 1983. The executive offices are located in the county seat, Hackensack.
The executive is directly elected at-large to a four-year term on a partisan basis. Since the first county executive took office, five individuals have served in the position. In 2014, incumbent James J. "Jim" Tedesco III was elected to his first term, being re-elected in 2018. As of Election Day 2017 there were 593,454 registered voters in the county, which in 2016 had estimated an estimated population of 939,151.
History
In 1972, the State of New Jersey passed the Optional County Charter Law, which provides for four different manners in which a county could be governed: by an executive, an administrator, a board president or a county supervisor.
A referendum to change the Bergen County form of government was held in 1974 and was rejected by a margin of 132,168 to 123,106, making Bergen one of four counties to reject proposals modifying the structure of county government, while four other counties passed changes.
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This entry incorporates text from “Bergen County Executive” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.