Adrian O. Mapp, an alumnus of the Barbados Seventh-day Adventist Secondary School, will lead the Metro-New York area community of 50,000, 50 per cent of whom are black and 40 per cent Hispanic.
Mapp won the November 5th election with 70 percent of the votes by beating Mustapha Muhammad, who received 14 percent of the votes, Scott Belin with 5 percent and Sandy Spector with 10 percent.
The former president of the Plainfield City Council for seven years, he recently tapped former Gov. James McGreevey to be an honorary member of the transition team that will help his administration take power next month.
“I have to use the experiences of people who walk the walk, and he has been a mayor and governor. Who better than him to be a sounding board?” asked Mapp, who will be taking over a municipal budge of US$74 million.
He noted that technology will play a key role in his transition and hopefully help him to more effectively manage the city.
“I want to use technology as a way to manage services, to reduce cost, and to make for a more efficiently run operation,” Mapp, a certified accountant, said. “I think technology has a big role to play in how we serve the public, how we deal with public safety, and how we communicate with the public.”
Mapp moved to the U.S. in 1977 at the age of 21, he was formerly the council’s liaison to the Plainfield Municipal Utilities Authority and served as chairman of the Finance Committee and liaison to the Board of Education. He also served on the Cable Advisory Committee, the Plainfield Redevelopment Authority and the board of directors of the Plainfield Health Center.
Mapp was the president of the Plainfield New Democrats, a trustee on the Raritan Valley Coalition and the finance-committee chair of the Green Brook Flood Control Commission and a member of the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants and the Frontiers International Plainfield Area Club.
He is a member of St. Mark’s Episcopal Church and the president of the Combined Islands Cricket Club.
