Over twenty years ago, Nancy Merse was the first woman elected to the Edgewater Municipal Council. In 2004, she became the first woman elected mayor.

She has come a long way, without leaving home. Along that way, Mayor Merse was instrumental in developing the borough from a factory town on the verge of bankruptcy to one of Bergen County’s most desirable communities.

Recently inducted into the New Jersey Municipal Hall of Fame, the mayor is a retired Assistant Vice President of United Jersey Bank – now Fleet Bank. She was raised here, went to school here, sent her children to school here – and they sent their children to school here. This is her town and nobody knows it better.

“Edgewater is a dynamic community where residents and businesses work together,” she said. “The spirit of the old coast energizes our new Gold Coast and the future has never looked better.”

But she remembers a time when it couldn’t look worse. In fact, it was on the verge of bankruptcy in the mid ‘80s, when an industrial exodus left a three and a half mile strip of abandoned factories behind. Their once bountiful ratables shifted the tax burden to the backs of the people who lived here. Merse and her colleagues in Mayor Brian Christiansen’s dynamic Democratic administrations rode the storm and salvaged the borough. Mixed use complexes of residences and commercial establishments have transformed Edgewater into the fastest growing municipality in Bergen County.