For the Rutgers Student Democrats one question is being heard loud and clear, R U 4 Cahill?
At the Hidden Grounds Coffee House at 4C Easton Ave on Tuesday night a campaign awareness event was held to lend support to the reelection efforts of Mayor James Cahill.
With music playing and the guest enjoying coffee books of changes, both past and future, were distributed to highlight just how much the city has changed.
“When you look at New Brunswick in 1991, when Mayor Cahill was elected, and you look now you can see he is the epitome of change,” said Michael Zhadanovsky, the VP of College Democrats of NJ.
Zhadanovsky attributed the dramatic landscape change, from the Yard to the development of the Hub, as proof of Mayor Cahills success.
“Mayor Cahill, his council team, and his administration just secured a $100,000 grant from Governor Murphy’s innovation program that’s going straight to the hub,” he said.
New Brunswick is a great place to live for students and graduates thanks to the opportunities that have arisen due to the Mayor, Zhadanovsky said.
“New Brunswick has been the home to Rutgers for 250 years and that means New Brunswick has been the home of students for 250 years,” said Mayor Cahill.
Mayor Cahill joked that he hasn’t been around for the whole time, but the City and the University have grown together.
“We saw there was a need to make the City collaborate with the University and vice versa,” he said.
The Mayor then went on to highlight some of the major changes that have resulted from the cooperation between the two entities, ranging from the new book store, the Gateway Center, The Yard, and the academic building on seminary place.
“There were abandoned buildings, underutilized buildings, owned by the seminary,” Cahill said. “To put the Seminary in a room with Rutgers University, get them to swap lands … and to put together an academic building, the first academic building built in ten years.”
Tilak Bhatnagar, an Honors College student and Edison Young Democrats President, was impressed and thankful for the work the city put into helping that develop.
“As an Honors College student, the Honors College is a great example of the development work for Rutgers that Mayor Cahill has been involved with,” Bhatnagar said. “Mayor Cahill’s history of collaborating with Rutgers on a variety of initiatives speaks for itself.”
Rutgers University Democrats Treasurer, Sam Beson, said that supporting Mayor Cahill is supporting New Brunswick and Rutgers University.
“What really stuck out to me was all the changes he has over seen that I took for granted because I was here afterwards,” Beson said. “I was never here when The Yard was a parking lot and the academic buildings were seminary buildings.”
First year student Ameena Qobrtay said that meeting the mayor and hearing what he did was a huge benefit to her from attending the event.
“He did a really good job of explaining what he did for the school, which is what I was interested in,” Qobrtay said.
