Dan Crisafulli, who ran a campaign for Summit Common Council based on making government work better for everyone and rising above “poison politics,” has become the city’s first openly LGBTQ councilperson.
Crisafulli was elected Nov. 4 to the at-large council seat for a two-year term. He will take office in early January.
“It feels really good. It was a big campaign. It was a tight campaign. When they went low, we went high, and in the end, people came to us,” said Crisafulli, who is 60 years old and has lived in Summit with his husband and daughter for about nine years.
Crisafulli is a partner with a sustainable investment firm in New York and went to both Dartmouth College and Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government on scholarship. With that background, it’s probably safe to say he can balance a checkbook, so financial acumen will be one of the things he’ll be bringing to his new role.
“So it’s really back to the basic issues of affordability and maintaining the cost of government, government spending, hopefully keeping a lid on taxes while we make government work better,” he said.
In addition to costs, taxes, and government functionality, other issues Crisafulli wants to tackle are sustainable development, fixing the city’s playgrounds, addressing the downtown and small-business owners, “good governance,” schools, and stormwater management.
He outlined his approach to those issues in video posts on his website.
For example, in a post about repairing the playgrounds, Crisafulli said residents have waited too long for the Mabie Playground renovation, noting that the grant money is there, but delays and rising costs have stalled the project. On the east side of the city, he continued, the Jefferson Playground is “out of commission,” leaving kids there with nowhere to play. “When leadership drops the ball, it’s the kids who miss out,” he said in the post.
With regard to the other side of the age spectrum, Crisafulli explained in another post how he believes the city can provide even better care for its senior citizens. This is an issue that impacted him personally quite recently.
His mother, Lorys, who passed away in June at the age of 98, had been living with him and his husband. Crisafulli said, “Our family benefitted from the excellent care and support services available in Summit, but there were gaps.” He said many seniors want to stay in their own homes while they age, but too many are held back by gaps in essential services and by social isolation. Crisafulli said he will work to convene a task force on aging at home.
In addition to those issues, he told Out in Jersey that he wants to change what he says is a lack of long-term planning in Summit and a use of Band-Aids and short-term fixes. He said he also wants to bring a more pragmatic, rather than an oppositional, approach to government.
As an at-large councilperson, Crisafulli will represent the whole city, not just the two wards that make it up. On the Common Council, three members are elected from each of the wards for a three-year term in addition to the seat Crisafulli will fill.
He is upset at what is happening in the country and the “poison politics” he sees both outside and inside Summit. This “poison” motivated him to run for office. He said people were fearful about all the changes under the new presidential administration, and he was told running was a risky thing to do because people were getting in trouble for “standing up.”
“…The local Dems reached out to me in March, I looked around and most people said, ‘Don’t do it. It’s crazy. Why expose yourself to all the ugliness? It’s an unpaid, overworked volunteer position. Why would you do this?’” But Crisafulli was undeterred.
“So with all of that, I just felt it was something I had to do,” he said. “I felt I had to stand up.”
So, with the support of his family, including that of his now late mother, he did. “They saw it in my eyes,” he said. “There’s something that I had to do, and my business partners were supportive, too.”
With that, Crisafulli began his campaign, gaining support from the city’s straight and queer communities alike. And less than a week before the election, the LGBTQ Victory Fund endorsed him. The victory fund is an organization that, as it explains on its website, “supports pro-equality, pro-choice, out LGBTQ candidates at all levels of government who we know can win their elections and fight for our rights.”
Crisafulli wanted to note that Summit’s queer community is included in his aim to make government work for everybody.
“I didn’t specifically shout about those issues, but people,” including neighbors who have a queer child, “have been reaching out to me,” he said, adding that he’s been getting “notes of thank you” from the city’s LGBTQ community and has received help from it, including donations. Since running, he said he has been hearing from the “small but now more engaged gay community in our town.”
Crisafulli has volunteered and held other service positions as well. He says that he served on the Summit Environmental Commission since 2022, he is a mentor and judge to student entrepreneurs at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and served as “finance warden” of his church. He has held leadership positions in various community organizations, including Root Capital, which supports small agricultural producers in Africa, Asia, and Latin America.
Crisafulli grew up in Monongahela, Pennsylvania about 17 miles southeast of Pittsburgh. Before coming to Summit, he and his family had been living in San Francisco.
“We were urban parents, which was great until it wasn’t, going into middle school we wanted to get our daughter into a more kid-friendly environment.” And at the same time, he explained, his father-in-law was diagnosed with cancer, and they felt it was better to move closer to family.
Friends told Crisafulli and his husband that Summit would be a good choice for a place to live because of its schools and easy access to Manhattan via public transit. Also, Crisafulli said, Summit is a “cute town,” it’s walkable, and it’s not just another suburban place with strip malls.
Crisafulli has been married to his husband, Greg Vargas, for 27 years. Their daughter, Caroline, just turned 20 and is a sophomore at American University in Washington, D.C. She graduated from Summit High School. The smallest member of their family is Jumanji — who, according to Crisafulli’s website, “enjoys walks with his canine friends.”
Editor’s note: Any other LGBTQ political firsts out there? We’d love to hear from you. Email us at newseditor@outinjersey.net.
