How Three People Took Over Bristol Politics

It started with a bill.

On a cool October day last year, the now Bristol Township Council candidates Amber Longhitano, Troy Brennan, and Craig Bowen met at the New Madison's Restaurant in Levittown, with a pen and pad in hand and a fury in their hearts.

The commotion was over a U&O, or use and occupancy, bill from the township's License and Inspections office. Troy Brennan was flabbergasted at the amount of fee's levied on the ledger. Longhitano, Bowen and fellow business-owner Gerard Lykon conferred with the furious Brennan, and shared similar difficulties with U&O.

“They incentivize failure, [the fee's] became more and more ridiculous," Longhitano said.

The U&O fee's was the tip of the iceberg to the group. Homes and storefronts were being abandoned, people were packing up their businesses and moving out, making the divide in taxpayers 80/20 residents to businesses. Taxes were on the rise, while the economy slumped and the state of Bristol, to them, seemingly spiraled lower and lower.

“We talked to some of the strongest business minds in the area, and all of them couldn't understand why Bristol Township is not the golden gateway to Bucks County -- this is Levittown. Bucks County started here, there is no reason why we are in such bad shape," Brennan said.

It was over breakfast that the battle lines were drawn. The plan: Rally together local businesses together to try to effect change.

At the time, none of the three at the table said they expected that they would spend the better part of the following winter campaigning for elected office, much less win.

Not only did they win, they swept the primary on its head.

Craig Bowen, the president of the Bristol Township Business Coalition, started the organization with barely a handful of members. The small group banded together and went before the Township Council the last week of November.

Longhitano went to the council with a presentation of low school ratings in the township, the high millage rate compared to neighboring townships, and the sense of a general state of decline in Bristol Township. She made her case; the bureaucracy in Bristol was killing businesses and the township itself.

"I told them, 'This is not an attack. This is a plea for help,'" Longhitano said.

Longhitano said she left that night feeling that she and her plea, were completely ignored.

The coalition went back to their grassroots. Their first open meeting on February 21 was so full that there was barely even any standing room in meeting hall. All of the attendees, many of whom were members of the local business community, were irate about the state of the township and the lack of cooperation from the township.

A seed was planted in their heads when a woman stood up at the meeting and said to them, “You people are not going to make any changes on the outside.”

Bowen was reluctant to the idea of running. He was an auto-mechanic, not a politician.

“I felt that once [the Bristol Township Council] saw the support the coalition had from businesses and residents that they would adjust and embrace us. Unfortunately, it just wasn't the case,” Bowen said.

Brennan, already having toyed with the idea of an attempt at local politics, was quick to jump on-board. He asked Bowen to "sleep on it."

“I told [Bowen and Longhitano] that they didn't really have a choice. It needed to happen,” Brennan said.

A day later, they were all on board -- the campaign begun.

They would meet in their “war room,” the home office of mutual friend Kevin Glasson. Glasson lost the November 2010 election for state representative to then Bristol Township Council Vice President Tina Davis. From the office, they plotted our their strategy for their campaign. The focus was not on endorsements or advertisements, but instead focused entirely on grass-roots campaigning. The three planned to knock on every single door in the township. They would end up campaigning nearly seven days a week from then to election night, eight weeks later.

For Craig Bowen, the door-to-door campaigning was an overwhelming experience. He recalled one home on Appletree Drive in Bristol being a particularly heart-wrenching experience for him. The home, he says, was dilapidated with paint peeling off the walls, shrubs overgrown and taking over the lawn, the front door dangling like a thread. The homeowner was an elderly woman, a widow, who apologized to Bowen and Brennan about the state of disrepair of her home.

“She told us that she meant to fix it up, but she spends almost all her income just paying for her health insurance and her taxes,” Bowen said.

Longhitano recalled similar stories.

“I've left doors with tears in my eyes,” Longhitano said.

The hardest challenge for the candidates did not come from heart-wrenching stories or arduous campaigning, but from the attacks made by the political parties themselves.

The colalition-endorsed candidates, running as Indepedent Democrats, were running against two incumbent Democratic candidates, Linda Tarlini and Raymond Blalock. The established Democratic Party fired at them with both barrels. They sent out an attack ad blasting the coalition-endorsed candidates as “fake democrats.” Accusing all three of them, and fellow independent Democratic candidate Joe Glasson, as political imposters, claiming they switched from one party to the other just to gain votes.

Likewise, the Bristol Township Republican Party sent out an e-mail to registered voters, warning voters not to vote for the candidates, and that the claims made by the Democrats were false. They disavowed that the BTBC-endorsed candidates were, in anyway, related to the Bristol G.O.P.

The candidates were left unwanted from either party.

“We felt like we were on an island out there on our own, but we didn't care,” a confident Brennan said.

The political attacks did not change the outcome of the vote.

All four candidates, Amber Longhitano, Craig Bowen, Troy Brennan, and Joe Glasson, won the primary election. Longhitano, Brennan and Glasson narrowly won the three contested four-year term seats on council, winning by only a few points ahead of the incumbents. Bowen, on the other-hand, took a commanding 55 percent of the vote on the two-year term seat over Raymond Blalock.

But the primary was only one-half of the war. The candidates soon will resume their campaigning within the following weeks, leading all the way to the election this November. Their plan: to continue the same strategy that won them the Primary – grass-roots, door to door campaigning.

If the candidates are successful, they will have made a tremendous sweep in the local government and hold majority vote in the council.

“If I could leave this township better than I came in, it would be a legacy bigger than anything I could ever leave behind in my life,” Longhitano said.

Even if they are unsuccessful for their bid in November, the BTBC-Three proved that, in a time when multi-million dollar campaigns and career politics are the status-quo, grass-roots democracy is still alive and well in Bristol Townhip.