Norco executive candidates Giovanni, Zrinski offer different approaches to running county
The Northampton County executive candidates – Republican Tom Giovanni and Democrat Tara Zrinski – are vying to succeed the current county executive.
While Lamont McClure, the Democratic executive who did not run for a third four-year term, is not on Tuesday’s ballot, his record from the last eight years is.
Giovanni says it’s time for a change in county leadership to bring more transparency and accountability to the office.
Zrinski, who is endorsed by McClure and acknowledged his successes with the county, said her administration would be different from his. “I’m a different person. I have a different focus,” she said on the Sept. 22 broadcast of WFMZ-TV’s “Business Matters.”
The county executive next year will earn $105,000, up from the current $85,000. The executive oversees 2,000 county employees and a budget of $502 million. In his eight years, McClure did not raise the real estate tax and reduced it once. (He is a 7th Congressional District candidate in 2026.)
Although Giovanni and Zrinski serve in elected county offices, they had different experiences before politics. Giovanni, a commissioner, owned an information technology business. Zrinski, a former commissioner and the current controller, worked in several jobs, including time spent as a writer, college philosophy instructor and environmental activist.
Tom Giovanni
Giovanni, 72, of Plainfield Township, is a lifelong resident of the Slate Belt. He graduated from Pius X High School in Roseto and attended Northampton Community College and Lincoln Technical Institute with degrees in business administration and specialized electronics.
After finishing at Lincoln Tech, he landed what he called a “dream job” with Western Electric in Allentown, famous for manufacturing the first transistors in 1951. He worked there until the mid-1980s when the company laid off a number of workers.
“I thought I would never get laid off,” he said in an interview with Armchair Lehigh Valley. After working at a computer tech job that required being away from home each week, he switched to Bell and Howell, servicing mail-inserting machines.
In 1990, he decided to start his own business, Hi-Tech Laser Systems, to service laser printers. From being the only employee, he expanded the company’s focus to a range of information technology services, including establishing networks and servers for businesses and other groups. He had about 14 employees by the time he sold the business in 2012 to East Coast Network Services.
He served on the board of directors of the Nazareth YMCA for a number of years and worked on the effort to consolidate the area YMCAs into the Greater Valley YMCA. He has been chairman of the board of Nazareth Mutual Insurance Co. since 1999.
When incumbent District 4 county council member Matt Dietz decided not to seek reelection in 2019, Giovanni campaigned for the office that represents the Slate Belt and Nazareth area. He won the election with 60% of the vote. He was unopposed for reelection in 2023.
He points to his business experience that qualifies him to run the county.
“I have a lot of experience in managing people,” he said. “I’m well versed in managing employees and handling their concerns and to weigh their concerns … I make the final decision but it’s a team effort of everybody together in the county moving in the right direction. I’ll try my darndest not to raise taxes. I’ll see what programs work and what programs don’t work, see what we need to do to help people in this county.”
He voted for McClure’s 8.5% tax cut for 2022, but said that in hindsight, “Maybe we shouldn’t have done that,” noting the county would have had more revenue to work with since then.
Tara Zrinski
Zrinski, 50, of Bethlehem, is a granddaughter of a Bethlehem Steel worker, graduated from Freedom High School in 1993, studied philosophy and English at Drew University in Madison, New Jersey, and later enrolled in Moravian Theological Seminary.
At that time, she was raising her two sons as a single mother. She worked for the Unitarian Universalist Church of the Lehigh Valley as director of lifespan faith development. She was an adjunct professor of philosophy at Northampton Community College and other area colleges. She wrote for several publications, was a local coordinator for Food and Water Watch and worked for solar energy companies.
Much of her work involved social issues, which led to her getting involved in politics and being elected county commissioner in 2017.
“I think a lot of it had to do with my growing up in the church, my education, at the seminary. I really am service oriented. … So public service was a natural flow from the activism I was doing, because I really like to engage in the community as well. I want to make a difference, I want to help people.”
She was reelected in 2021 and in 2023 was elected county controller. She has also run other offices, including state senator in 2022, and said she is committed to serve the people.
She wasn’t planning to run for county executive but decided to campaign for the office after McClure said he wouldn’t seek reelection.
“I don’t think I ever thought that when I ran for county council that I would get the opportunity to run for county executive. ... I find myself very grateful for the opportunity to be able to do this work and to be able to do it with the potential to have so much influence on things that are really important to me – not just the environment, but social issues and employee issues,” she said.
As county controller, she oversees a team of auditors and gained more knowledge about the inner workings of county finances.
“I know what the auditors are looking for. So I know what transparency in budgets looks like firsthand, because the process that would go about auditing financial statements or procedures or the performance of a specific department is a very logical framework of questions that reveal the segregation of duties, the transparency of transactions, tracking the money.” The recent audit of Gracedale finances was an example of that, she said.
If elected, Zrinski would become the first woman to serve as Northampton County executive. (Lehigh County has had two female executives – Jane Baker and Jane Ervin.)
“I’m really excited to potentially be the first woman who is [Northampton’s] county executive,” she said “because it does break some sort of glass ceiling for individuals.”
Gracedale
At the Gracedale nursing home, Giovanni cited the lack of transparency and accountability after council in 2022 allocated $5 million in federal covid relief funds to give workers bonuses to keep them on staff. Council learned this year that the bonuses ended and asked the Zrinski’s office to perform an audit.
“Our audit revealed that about half of that money went directly to employee bonuses while the rest supported ongoing operating costs like overtime and staffing shortages up until the end of 2023. Retention bonuses continued to be paid employees under union contracts and to career service employees, with bonuses ending at various times,” Zrinski wrote on the controller’s website.
She said the audit showed the need for improvements in tracking how the county’s money is spent under which categories.
During the interview, she said, “Transparency is key because if you don’t have transparency, you don’t have trust.” She believed that the administration could have informed council details of the transfer but said council had an opportunity to question the status but didn’t.
Giovanni, when interviewed on the “Business Matters” program on WFMZ-TV, said he was satisfied with the audit. “It kind of validated what happened,” he said.
In his interview with Armchair Lehigh Valley, he said McClure “should have told council in executive session [about the bonus money]. … We could have staved off a lot of issues if the administration would have been transparent.”
He added, “When something is wrong, someone should admit the problem. I don’t have a problem with saying, ‘I screwed up.’ People are only human.”
As county executive he would first “do a total assessment of problem areas,” including Gracedale and its reliance on higher-cost agency nurses to fill shifts, county finances and employees.
“I don’t think there is a good relationship between the executive and county employees. What are we missing? We need to get our morale back up so it’s a decent place to work.”
Giovanni said there’s turnover of employees at Gracedale and elsewhere in the county. “How can you hire people if you can’t retain the ones you have?” he asked.
Zrinski, if elected, wouldn’t change the management at Gracedale, giving the new administrator Michelle Morton time to make an impact. “She’s willing to stay, and I’m willing to help make an effort to support her to make Gracedale stronger,” Zrinski said.
She suggested Gracedale could hire a development director to work with the Friends of Gracedale Foundation to raise larger sums of money for Gracedale operations.
She said Gracedale needs to hire more of its own employees, rather than rely on an agency to provide nursing help.
“The county used to be a place where it was like a family to work,” Zrinski said. “And that is the kind of environment that I want to get back to. The idea that we can be a community of caring people that care for each other is really important to me, and I think in order to be able to do that, you have to compensate people fairly.”
Immigration
McClure has been criticized for not allowing Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents inside the county prison or courthouse to apprehend noncitizens wanted on federal charges.
McClure said the law requires a judge’s order. Without that, the county notifies ICE when an inmate will be released from prison, and agents can apprehend the person outside the courthouse or prison, which happened twice this year without incident. McClure issued an executive order in 2020 after a federal officer, without a warrant, apprehended a noncitizen in the courthouse. ICE disputes the need for a judge’s order, saying federal law allows ICE agents to make arrests inside a courthouse or prison.
Giovanni said, “If they have the proper paperwork, they should go into the prison. The county let two violent immigrants into the street. They shouldn’t have let that happen.”
Zrinski countered, “We’re handling it right when we say that we require a bench warrant and we need to uphold due process. I don’t see a problem with the ordinance that Lamont put into effect and in fact, I would keep that.”
Elections
The county’s voting machines improperly tallied votes in a few contests in the elections of 2019 and 2023, which required a review of the backup paper summaries to determine the actual vote count.
“We have to really be secure and train good people to know what’s going on. … They do have good people,” Giovanni said.
“The problem with the machines, that’s an issue. They need to be programmed correctly, and they need to be tested on every machine. … Humans make mistakes and you need to test it and make sure it works.”
He said the county should reallocate the number of machines at polling places to eliminate long lines at some polling places.
He said during the “Business Matters” forum that the county couldn’t use paper ballots as an alternative, but said in an interview that was incorrect. He said he would have to research whether switching to all paper ballots – as Lehigh County does – is a better option.
Zrinski said the county should explore using paper ballots. The ballots are read by a scanner to tabulate the results, which is what Northampton County uses for its mail-in ballots.
“I would like to also expand the opportunity for people to get ballots on demand,” she said. “That would just enfranchise more voters, and I never think that is a bad thing. I like that we have drop boxes in different places that make voting accessible for individuals to drop off their ballot instead of going all the way to Easton.”
Farmland/open space
Giovanni supports efforts to save agricultural and undeveloped land from being used for new homes or business. His son is a dairy farmer whose land has been preserved. Giovanni cautioned, “If too much is preserved, however, that hurts the tax base.”
Zrinski supports continuing the county’s program to preserve farmland and open space. “I don’t think it is just a means by which we mitigate warehouse proliferation. I think it has value in itself in terms of having agricultural security now and in the future to be able to potentially farmland,” which provides locally sourced food.
Affordable housing
Giovanni envisions a cooperative approach to creating affordable housing. “There are some good ways to attack that. I’ve talked to developers about it.” He would work with municipalities on zoning suggestions that could lead to more residences people can afford.
Zrinski said the county must develop affordable plans with community groups. “I’ve been talking to individuals who are really engaged and invested in affordable housing, entry level homeownership housing, people who are interested in helping with the problem,” she said.