Woodbridge Native Joseph 'Rudy' Rullo Running for NJ Governor

METUCHEN, NJ - The Metuchen Republicans hosted 2017 Republican Governor Candidate Joseph 'Rudy' Rullo at their quarterly meeting last month at D'Novo restaurant in Metuchen. About 20 people were in attendance where they were able to hear Rullo, a former Port Reading resident and Woodbridge High School student, speak about his ties to the local area and the issues he is running on.

Although Rullo grew up in Woodbridge, he now lives in Ocean County, where he is a volunteer firefighter and an entrepreneur in the solar energy field.

And Rullo has some provocative new ideas for how to run New Jersey:

• Rullo wants to legalize and regulate marijuana sales and use the money to help fund the state's dwindling Transportation Trust Fund.
• He targeted savings by vowing to drastically reduce school superintendents and business administrators. Instead of having one superintendent and one business administrator per school district, he wants to cut the number to one per county. By consolidating superintendents and business administrators, he stated that New Jersey can save $50 million per year by eliminating superintendents alone.

• Rullo said his campaign would focus on repealing the $.23 gas tax, cut billions in political earmarked jobs and contracts, consolidate all highway authorities to eliminate redundant high-level management positions, and eliminate high-cost earmark and specialty contracts tied to contributors.
• Rullo said he also intends to work to eliminate $1.3 billion in pension fees to NYC politically-connected brokerage houses and replace the existing system with licensed brokers employed in the state investors' division and re-allocate the savings towards the yearly pension payment.
• He also targeted to eliminate municipal tax assessors and reduce the position to one per county and will fire hundreds of high-salary patronage jobs, like indicted Port Authority’s David Wildstein, as an example, saving hundreds of millions of dollars to cut taxes.

Rullo also introduced Metuchen’s own Republican Vice-Chairman Joe Furmato as his Middlesex County campaign coordinator. That's Furmato, at left, with Rullo.

"Establishment Republican party candidates Kim Guadagno and Jack Ciattarelli are doing their best not to mention him as a candidate in this year’s gubernatorial primary campaign," said Furmato. "And it's not just the party standard bearers ignoring Rullo. Despite being the first Republican to file in the race, Rullo has often been sidelined in media reports covering the election, sometimes getting an honorable mention in the final paragraphs of election reports."

Rullo said that all registered New Jersey Republicans should be wary of candidates who did not endorse the entire Republican ticket in November. Both Guadagno and Ciattarelli publicly went against the Trump-Pence ticket in the 2016 election. Rullo is a Trump supporter.

Joe is expected to take part in pre-General Primary debates in all 21 of New Jersey’s counties and will be participating in the Middlesex County debate to be held Thursday, March 9th at the forum theatre in Metuchen at 7 p.m. The Middlesex County debate will be held prior to the March 25th Middlesex County Convention at Old Bridge High-school where all registered county Republicans can vote for who they want to be the county nominee.

The primary will be June 6; the governor's election Nov. 9.