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Hackensack
Community Relations Specialist
Luis worked directly for County Executive James J. Tedesco III, from the County Executive’s first term into his second, in the government of New Jersey’s most populous county. Luis provided assistance and outreach to the county’s 70 municipalities, connecting local officials and residents with county programs and services. He also coordinated countywide events and supervised the office’s interns and event volunteers.
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Teaneck
Executive Assistant to the Township Manager
Teaneck is the county’s second-largest municipality, and its Township Manager is its chief executive. Luis prepared the Manager’s section of the Mayor and Council’s meeting binder, handled the public records requests that came to the Manager’s office, coordinated the content of the Teaneck Quarterly, worked on the website redesign and the move to a new email system, and supervised the office’s interns. When a question belonged to Bergen County, he knew which county office would answer it.
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Saddle River
Secretary to the Planning Board and other boards, Clerk’s Office
Luis has been secretary to the Planning Board since 2023, and since January 2026 to the Environmental Commission, the Landmarks Commission, and Parks and Recreation. Each month he handles 20 to 30 public records requests for the Municipal Clerk, from acknowledgment through review and redaction, and he drafts the resolutions that memorialize the Planning Board’s decisions. He also works on procurement coordination, election support, the Borough’s employee leave records and community events, and he serves the public in English and Spanish.
About
The work behind public decisions.
From the county seat to the Clerk’s counter: nearly 10 years inside local government in Bergen County, New Jersey.
Luis DePaz has served local government in Bergen County since 2017, at three scales: Bergen County, a county of nearly 1 million; Teaneck, a township of 41,000; and Saddle River, a borough of 3,400, where he is secretary to the Planning Board and three other boards and commissions. Having worked in the County Executive’s office and in two of the county’s municipalities, he knows the handoffs between county and town from both sides.
A clerk’s office is where a town keeps its memory: the minutes, the ordinances, the contracts and the record of every vote. His work there is the groundwork of public decisions, from notices and agendas to minutes, records, procurement coordination and the municipal web pages. None of it can be approximate. It has to be the right document, in the right version, with a clear answer to who is responsible for it.
He also works with frontier AI every day. He builds software with AI coding agents, runs his own AI agent under written rules and staged permissions, and tracks every major model release as it ships. He knows what these models do well, where they fail and how to put them to work on real municipal problems: finding the right version of a public record, drafting minutes a board will approve and answering residents without exposing their data.
Few people who know the models have taken the minutes of a planning board hearing, and few who take minutes have tested a model. Luis has done both.
Three posts in Bergen County.
In order, from the county seat in Hackensack to the Clerk’s Office in Saddle River. A timeline from 2017 to the present shows where each post was based and when.
Areas of work.
What he does in the Clerk’s Office, area by area.
- Meetings
- Legal notices, agendas, roll call and minutes for four boards under the Open Public Meetings Act.
- Records
- Public records requests for the Municipal Clerk: acknowledging each one, coordinating the departments’ responses, reviewing and redacting the records, and consulting the Borough’s counsel on the hard calls.
- Land use
- Planning Board administration: keeping the application files and affidavits, checking each applicant’s 200-foot notice, calculating escrow and drafting the resolutions that memorialize the Board’s decisions.
- Governing body
- Preparing, attesting and keeping the oaths of office, and formatting resolutions and ordinances from the attorney’s drafts for Council action.
- Elections and licensing
- On Election Day, supervising polling place operations, answering poll workers’ questions and delivering the sealed results to the Bergen County Clerk. Handling liquor license renewals under the State’s alcoholic beverage control rules.
- Procurement
- Routing requisitions and vouchers for approval, and keeping the purchase order records under New Jersey’s Local Public Contracts Law.
- Employee leave records
- Keeping the Borough’s employee leave records and giving each employee an annual statement of leave balances.
- Web pages
- More than two dozen of the Borough’s department, board and service pages, rebuilt on one page system.
The boards he serves.
Saddle River’s volunteer boards shape how the town grows, what it protects and where people gather. Luis is secretary to four of them, which together meet about four evenings a month, all year.
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Planning Board
Reviews site plans and subdivisions and keeps the Master Plan current under New Jersey’s Municipal Land Use Law.
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Environmental Commission
Advises on open space, trees, water and other natural resources. Re-established in 2025.
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Landmarks Commission
Looks after historic places, with advisory committees for the Bishop House and the Saddle River Museum.
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Parks and Recreation
Plans parks, recreation programs and community events.
How a meeting becomes the record
- Notice Published ahead of every meeting under the Open Public Meetings Act.
- Agenda Prepared and distributed before the meeting.
- Roll call Luis reads the meeting notice into the record and calls the roll.
- Minutes Drafted after the meeting and brought back to the board for adoption.
- Record Filed and made available to the public.
Let’s talk about the work ahead.
Whether you lead a town, serve on its governing body or run one of its offices, Luis would be glad to hear from you.
He reads every message himself and replies within two business days.