Gotham City: Rick Rovegno, Cumberland County Commissioner

Gotham City:
Telling Tales of Our Capital Region's Politics

by Frank Pizzoli

Rick Rovegno,
Cumberland County Commissioner

When is the last time you heard an elected official limit his own term of office?

Normally, we see a Capital City full of professional pols who honk on about our Founding Fathers’ ideals, leaving out the “citizens’ assembly” part. We’re not supposed to stay forever at the party.

“If the citizens chose so, I would probably run one more time. But that’s it,” explains recently elected Cumberland County Commissioner Rick Rovegno. He’s a Democrat in a staunchly Republican county. Otherwise, he intends to stick to his limit. “I pledged no more than two terms during my campaign,” he says. He’d be nearly 50 at the end of two four-year terms and wants to devote time to his wife, keeping promises they made to each other a long time ago.

Sound refreshing?

Rovegno is a fascinating mixture of know-how business acumen blended with a strong sense of community. Self-employed since the age of 19, he runs a combination real estate development and contracting firm with an eye toward adaptive re-use (like an old school building or factory made into apartments or office space). It’s been 20 years since Cumberland County had a “self-employed” commissioner. The one was Nelson Punt, popular Carlisle restaurateur and food wholesaler, who was killed in an automobile accident.

“Even though I’m a developer myself, I think the environment, land use planning, transportation planning, and farmland preservation are critical issues facing all of us,” he explains. Off and on, regional planning efforts have occupied local headlines for the past 18 months with agreements on “who goes first” difficult to reach.

Three weeks into the job at the time of this interview, Rovegno shared that “county government is an incredibly large and complicated apparatus”. In recent years as our national government “defederalizes” programs, counties are called upon to administer more and more programs. I asked Rovegno if the often-expressed criticism that the feds “mandate” programs but don’t adequately fund them is true? “Money has followed mandates in most programs” but the amount received may not be enough to do the job or keep abreast of changes.

Rovegno’s style is simple — manage by walking around. “Just watch what happens, who does what, how they do it. I’ve learned that from running my own business. I hope to both learn and apply as an elected official,” he concluded.
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