By Sunayana Prabhu
LITTLE SILVER – What happens when you serve your community for over a decade, through hurricanes, once-in-a-century storms and a worldwide pandemic? Why, you get honored by the state, of course.
Little Silver Mayor Robert Neff Jr. was inducted into the Mayors’ Hall of Fame at the 107th Annual New Jersey League of Municipalities (NJLM) Conference in Atlantic City Nov. 18. Then league president William Pikolycky and officials from throughout New Jersey honored Neff along with other long-serving mayors from across the state.
During a phone interview with The Two River Times – while recovering from COVID – Neff noted running a municipality these days is “a pretty complex thing. There are lots of statutes, lots of regulations.” But, he said, he never looked back once he took on the responsibility of serving as the borough’s mayor 10 years ago.
“I’m fortunate to be the mayor,” he said.
Born in Washington D.C, Neff moved to Shrewsbury with his family at age 5; he has lived in Little Silver since 1994 with his wife Cindy and their three children, Carey, Kate and Laura.
Neff has a Bachelor of Arts from Middlebury College and a law degree from Seton Hall University School of Law. He has practiced law with the same firm since 1994.
He was elected to the Little Silver Borough Council in 2007 and served as head of the council’s personnel committee and as liaison to the Shade Tree Commission and the Environmental Commission. He was selected mayor by the borough council in August 2011 to fill the unexpired term of the late Mayor Suzanne Castleman.
Before she died, “when Susie decided not to run for a final term, she asked if I would run for mayor and I said no, a couple times,” Neff reminisces. Being mayor “is a big time commitment,” he said.
But his family stood by him and encouraged him to take on the responsibility. “If you want to do it right, you’ve got to put the time in like anything else. And I think that’s why I hesitated. But my family was good enough to say, ‘Oh, why don’t you do it? It’s a nice opportunity, it’s OK if you miss dinner or you’re not here on a weekday or weekend,’ ” Neff said, attributing his mayoral success to his family’s support.
Before serving on the council, Neff was a volunteer and committee member with Boy Scout Troop 126, where he continues to serve as a merit badge counselor. He coached a number of recreational sports over the years and is a past member of the Little Silver Planning-Zoning Board. He has worked as a newspaper reporter and served for 20 years under three governors on the state Tidelands Resource Council.
Neff was almost 49 years old when he was elected to a full-term; he was reelected in 2015 and 2019.
Although he has enjoyed serving the community it has not been free from challenges. Neff said one of the first challenges he met when he became mayor was Hurricane Irene. He was welcomed into the mayor’s office of a town facing “significant flooding, some pretty high winds” and that forced him to focus on disaster response. He acknowledged the “excellent” and “extraordinary” team of volunteers, fire department and EMS members who did a “great job with Hurricane Irene.”
“Then, a year later, of course, we had Super Storm Sandy.”
Neff said damages caused by Super Storm Sandy forced the town to sharpen its emergency response which helped when COVID-19 struck years later. “(Sandy) was certainly an extraordinary challenge. But having come through it, I think we’re a better town for it. We’re better prepared for emergencies. And I think that showed when the pandemic came along,” he said.
Little Silver Borough was on the “front line immediately” with the first COVID patient in the area, a Red Bank Regional High School student, Neff said. “The first thing we did was try to clamp down some of the social media comments where people were actually vilifying this young student who had the disease – she didn’t know she had it.”
Neff credited the borough’s responsive EMS and board of health in helping educate and protect the community during the pandemic. “We used Constant Contact,” he said, “Facebook and our website, in our code-red communication mediums in Little Silver to really get a lot of information out to tell them (residents) what the virus was all about, to tell them what we were doing about it.”
Having gone through unprecedented emergency situations in a decade as mayor, Neff maintains he wouldn’t be able to do it without help from volunteers, the community and the borough’s fire, police and EMS. He hopes the honor he received from NJLM with his induction into the Mayors’ Hall of Fame “reflects that fact that Little Silver has got such an incredible employment force, such an incredible volunteer force – everybody in town who really makes Little Silver what it is,” Neff said. As a mayor, he said, “I guess I get the award sometimes when there is an award, but it really belongs to everybody in town because it’s a nice town.”
The Mayors’ Hall of Fame inductees must be serving as mayor and have at least 10 years of mayoral service to be inducted at the silver level, at least 20 years of mayoral service to be inducted at the gold level and 30 years of service for platinum level.
NJLM established the Mayors’ Hall of Fame in 1995 to recognize mayors who have served their municipalities for lengthy terms. “Serving as mayor for decades is a commitment of time and energy over the long haul,” Michael Cerra, NJLM executive director, said, noting that the newly inducted mayors made a long-term commitment as leaders to guide and improve their communities. “They have helped their communities grow and change over the years, and have worked to make a positive impact,” Cerra said. “We congratulate them on their deserved recognition.”
The article originally appeared in the December 15 – 21, 2022 print edition of The Two River Times.
