It’s the final play of the game for Evesham Mayor Randy Brown.
Brown used this week’s Evesham Township Council meeting to announce he had withdrawn his name as the Republican candidate in the township’s upcoming mayoral election in November.
Brown, who serves as the kicking coach for the Baltimore Ravens and also works in the title insurance business, cited unspecified professional opportunities that had become available to him in 2019 as the driving force behind his decision.
“I’m not going to give you the line that ‘I need to spend more time with my family,’ because I spend plenty of time with my family … this is purely a professional, business decision,” Brown said.
With the position of mayor in Evesham Township paying a yearly salary ranging from $7,000 to $10,000, and given the hours Brown said he puts into the job, in the past Brown has often lamented he might someday be forced to relinquish his role as mayor in exchange for a more secure financial future for his family.
Regardless, Brown said his wife, Trisha, and his school-aged daughters, Ryan and Mackenzie, were disappointed his mayoral tenure would be coming to an end.
“In 2019, I’ll be presented with a few, once-in-a-lifetime professional options — I’ve got a few college tuitions and a few weddings to start planning for now that my girls are in fifth grade and seventh grade,” Brown said.
Brown has previously described himself as Republican for most of his adult life, although he was originally a registered Democrat when he won his first mayoral race against former Mayor Gus Tamburro in the spring of 2007 when the township’s municipal elections were nonpartisan.
At the time, Tamburro was backed the Burlington County Republican Committee, and Brown himself had actually managed Tamburro’s 2003 campaign for mayor four years earlier.
Brown won his 2007 election with 51 percent of the vote to Tamburro’s 48 percent — or by just 277 of the 7,466 votes cast.
Brown officially switched back to the Republican Party for his re-election efforts in 2010 after voters had approved a referendum the year prior that moved the township’s elections to November and thereby officially made municipal elections in Evesham Township partisan affairs.
Brown’s margin of victory also increased in his subsequent re-election efforts, with his run against Democrat Mike Schmidt in 2010 netting Brown 54 percent of the vote to Schmidt’s 45 percent, and Brown’s 2014 run against Democrat Fred Ritter netting Brown 61 percent of the vote to Ritter’s 38 percent — a difference of nearly 2,900 votes of the slightly more than 12,000 votes cast that year.
At times, Brown has also considered running for a higher office, with his name floated as a possible candidate for Congress in 2014 or a possible candidate for governor or lieutenant governor last year.
Ultimately, however, Brown stayed in his role as Evesham’s mayor.
Looking back at his career on council, Brown said his priorities have focused on putting Evesham’s community first, lowering property taxes, increasing ratables and improving recreational facilities.
With that, Brown recalled the period after his first election in 2007, when he and fellow council members faced a $6 million deficit and the township-owned Indian Spring Country Club that Brown described as “hemorrhaging money.”
Now, more than a decade later, Brown said Evesham Township has millions of dollars in surplus, increased ratables, new recreation facilities, several years of flat or decreased municipal property taxes, a financially stable golf course utility and one of the highest bond ratings in the state.
“In the past 12 years, Evesham has become a destination for families, retirees and businesses,” Brown said.
However, Brown’s time on council has not been without controversy, with opponents often using phrases such as “arrogant” or “bully.”
Brown has been known for engaging in heated back-forth debates with residents, especially during the public comment portion of township council meetings.
Voices in these debates became so impassioned toward the end of 2014 and into early 2015 that Brown put a policy in place where residents speaking at council meetings were asked to direct any questions toward the township’s professionals (township manager, township solicitor, etc.) while councilmembers themselves would, for the most part, refrain from responding to residents directly, instead waiting until the council comments portion at the end of meetings to choose whether to respond.
Brown has also used his pulpit as mayor to harshly criticize the actions of members of the Evesham Township School District Board of Education and district Superintendent John Scavelli Jr., especially related to the district’s rising tax rates and the decision to close of Evans Elementary School at the end of the 2016–2017 school year, over which the municipality and local planning board filed a lawsuit.
In 2017, the ETSD’s director of personnel also named Brown in a defamation lawsuit after Brown held a news conference calling for a third-party investigator to examine alleged claims that female employees of the district had accused the director of personnel of sexual harassment.
An investigation by the Evesham Township Police Department resulted in no charges filed regarding the sexual harassment allegations, and a federal judge eventually tossed the defamation suit against Brown earlier this year.
With Brown’s announcement at this week’s council meeting falling on Sept. 11, that date also happened to be the last day in this year’s general election schedule where a primary nominee could withdraw their name from the ballot and still have the county committee of the party choose a replacement.
With that in mind, Brown said he did not wish to commit his name to another potential four-year term for Evesham’s residents, knowing that he would not be able to complete it.
“For the town to be able to have a chance to determine who they want to have in the majority and lead the town for the next four years — it’s the direction I wanted to see it go in,” Brown said.
Democratic mayoral candidate Jaclyn Veasy, a senior claims adjuster in the insurance industry and the opponent who Brown would have faced in November, said she and her two fellow Democrats running for seats on council this year would continue running on their same platform of making Evesham “a government by and for the people” regardless of who their opponents are.
“No matter who is on the ballot, voters in Evesham deserve new leadership and vision based on listening and responding to the residents,” Veasy said. “That hasn’t changed for our team and we will keep up our message and platform.”
Moving forward, Brown said he plans to complete his current term, which runs through the remainder of 2018.
“Somebody asked me ‘was it the hardest decision I’ve ever made’ and considering all the decisions I’ve made in 12 years, this was just another decision,” Brown said. “If you ask yourself what’s the best for the team, whether that team is the township, the employees or the family, I believe it was best to do it now.”
