Commissioner Mary J. Amoroso first began her career in public service when she was elected to the Mahwah Town Council in 2015. Before her election to the Mahwah Council, Mary had a long career as a reporter and editor for the Bergen Record, where she covered local, county, state and federal government and politics.

She won a number of awards for a series in The Record about a domestic abuse survivor utilizing county, state and federal resources to make an independent life for herself and her children. Her long-running talk show on the Comcast Cable network CN8 won both a CableACE Award and an Emmy.

Mary Amoroso grew up in Bergenfield, was married at St. John the Evangelist R.C. Church there, and has lived in the Cragmere section of Mahwah since 1993. Mary’s husband Jim McQueeny is a former Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and political talk show host who was press secretary for the late U.S. Senator Frank Lautenberg.

In her 5 years as County Commissioner, Mary has taken part in the county Prosecutor’s School Safety Task Force, which has developed protocols to prevent incidents of violence in our schools and religious institutions. She has worked to connect the Lenni Lenape tribe with county, state and federal resources and to preserve and promote the tribe’s history and legacy in the Mahwah, Ringwood and Hillburn, NY area.

As liaison to the County’s African-American Advisory Committee, Mary is helping to develop a multi-media presentation of Bergen County’s Black history, starting with the time in the late 1700s when enslaved African-American people comprised 20 percent of Bergen’s population and 40 percent of its labor force.

And, along with the Commissioners’ Office of Communications, Mary has created a “County Commissioners’ podcast,” to explore and celebrate the services, trends and people of Bergen County.