Weck Bio - Summit Republicans

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When I retired last year as the Summit Chief of Police and sold my house in Madison, there wasn’t a question in my mind as to where I wanted to move. Many of my friends who are retired or getting ready to, are looking to go South, but for me, Summit has become my home for many different reasons and there’s no other place I wanted to be.

I served here for over thirty years, this is my community and I’m not done being a integral part of it.

I’m proud of my record as Chief of Police. I was honored to have received the TransOptions Government Official of the Year, the Boy Scouts of America Good Scout Award, Summit Keeper of the Dream Award and the Summit Star of Excellence. But while most of these are individual awards, the one I’m most proud of is the NJ Attorney General’s Community Policing Award in 2017. This award was due to the dedicated work the men and women of the Summit Police Department did with this community each and every day.

We instituted new programs that kept this community safe and informed, like ones for our Senior Citizens, our Youth, and I created a Community Policing Unit and a Traffic Safety Unit.

I know I have a very unique skill set and background, and I believe, no, I know I can continue to make a positive impact for the City of Summit by serving on the Common Council.

Here are my priorities:

First, As Summit, and more broadly Union County and New Jersey, continue to grow and change, so does our public safety concerns. As your Councilman, I will always have the right read on keeping our community safe. I will always serve as my constituent’s liaison to all emergency services and make sure we are getting the best possible coverage and service.

Second, as I mentioned earlier, too many of our friends and neighbors are moving to more affordable states. I’m choosing to retire here despite the financial hardship of the local tax burden. I want to do my part to keep our local taxes low to make that choice a little bit easier for families who don’t want to move away from their family members. I want Summit to be a community where multiple generations can afford to live, where kids, parents and grandparents are minutes away from each other, not hours or days.

  Third, I will work to improve your quality of life. There are small moments where local government touches your life, and you might not even realize it. The way I see it; everyone who lives in Summit pays a premium to do so and every resident deserves for those small moments to be a positive impact.

We need our recycling pick up to run more smoothly, we need the trash picked up off our streets and downtown, and if you need access to your local elected officials, it should be as convenient as possible. That means better government transparency and continuing a virtual option for Council meeting attendance - the residents deserve to be heard and council should want to have residents’s input and feedback on things that will impact them and their families.

After more than 30 years of dedicated service, I feel more motivated than ever to help Summit grow and continue to come together as a community.

I know that politics can be toxic and dividing at times, but as your Councilman, I want to help Summit work together and put party politics behind us at the local level, after all, we should all be working together for the betterment of Summit.

I can tell you that I’ve answered thousands of calls and led a great police department, As an officer and Chief, I never cared about a person’s color, religion, sexual orientation, immigration status or gender, what I did care about was giving the most professional service I could give them. That is the same mentality I will carry with me on Council.

When it comes down to it, nothings changed with me over the years, then and now - I still want “what’s best for Summit.”