ELIZABETH, NJ — Alexander Mirabella on Thursday night ran the last meeting of his two-year tenure as chairman of the Union County Board of Commissioners.

The 24-year veteran commissioner is finishing his eighth, three-year term and will be sworn into a ninth term in January. Mirabella had started in his role as chairman in January 2020.

“When I first became chair we had initiatives and plans and a robust agenda on behalf of the residents of this county and then March came up with the pandemic, and we pivoted directly and quickly to testing and vaccinations and food drives … basically reinventing how we do government in this county,” Mirabella said.

The county “has come a long way” since the statewide lockdown in 2020 at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, he said.