Governor Chris Christie might be a very lame duck at this point, with only a little more than a month to go, but as he heads toward the door, he has taken a parting shot at Edward Lloyd, the environmental lawyer who is one of the longest serving members of the Pinelands Commission.
Continue reading CHRISTIE TARGETS ENVIRONMENTAL ADVOCATE COMMISSION SEAT
Earlier this year the Trump administration jettisoned environmental rules that would have halted the use of a pesticide that has been shown to damage children’s brains. Pending state legislation that would at least do so in New Jersey hit a road block last week.
Continue reading SENATE COMMITTEE DELAYS VOTE ON BANNING DANGEROUS PESTICIDE IN NJ
If you are like me and the folks at New Jersey Appleseed and have an interest in keeping tabs on corporate crimes and other misdeeds, I have just the website for you.
The Violation Tracker database has about 300,000 entries that reflect more than $394 billion in fines and settlements. It was compiled by the Corporate Research Project of Good Jobs First—a national group based in Washington, D.C. that describes itself as “a national policy resource center for grassroots groups and public officials, promoting corporate and government accountability in economic development and smart growth for working families.”
I voted today as I hope most of you did.
Pressing those buttons didn’t take much time but it was the culmination of a long process that began last year, with learning about the candidates, reading up on the issues and giving serious thought to the choices presented.
I fulfilled my civic duty. How I wish the state would do its part.
A last ditch effort by the current Orange school board to block a public referendum on whether board members should be chosen by voters rather than the Mayor fell short on Tuesday, when the Appellate Division denied the board’s emergent motion to enjoin the vote and reverse an Oct. 20 trial court decision allowing it.
Presiding Appellate Division Judge Jack Sabatino, along with Judge Mary Whipple, agreed with the reasoning in the Oct. 20 opinion by the lower court judge, Thomas Vena, of Essex County Superior Court.
As a result, voters will get to vote on Nov. 7 whether to change from a Type I school district, with an appointed board, to a Type II school district, with an elected one. It will be the second time they get to do so. Last year, they overwhelmingly approved it, with about 77 per cent voting in favor. In April, however, Vena declared the vote null and void, finding that the wording of the ballot question and accompanying interpretive statement did not provide sufficient information about the ramifications of the change.
The school board sought to rely on statutes that require a five year wait before a referendum can be resubmitted to the voters. NJ Appleseed Executive Director Renée Steinhagen, attorney for the Committee for an Elected School Board, who sought the referendum, argued in response that the restriction did not apply in this instance, where the referendum succeeded but was subsequently nullified.
The appeals court agreed, stating “We agree with the trial court that the public policies of N.J.S.A. 18A:9-4 and 9-5 against repetitive unsuccessful referenda do not pertain to this distinctive situation.”
See my prior post for more information about the case, City of Orange Township Board of Education v. City of Orange, ESX-L-6652-17.
Photo at top from Wikipedia.
With less than two weeks until voters go to the polls on Nov. 7, whether City of Orange voters will get to choose an elected school board as opposed to an appointed one is once again in the hands of the courts.
Last November, voters in a public referendum overwhelmingly favored being able to choose their own school board members rather than having them picked by the Mayor, which is the current system. But a state court judge set aside the result, finding they were not provided with sufficient information to understand the ramifications of the change.
Continue reading EMERGENT APPEAL TO DECIDE IF ORANGE SCHOOL BOARD QUESTION GOES TO VOTERS
Photo by John D. & Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation/CC BY
PLANewark salutes the selection of Damon Rich, as one of 24 MacArthur Foundation fellows for 2017. Rich is a designer and planner who shares the PLANewark vision of building a vibrant and reinvigorated Newark through equitable and sustainable environment and land-use practices.
He and the other honorees will each receive a $625,000 “genius” grant, bestowed annually on creative people, working in any field, who have shown “extraordinary originality and dedication in their creative pursuits and a marked capacity for self-direction.”
Rich was chosen for “creating vivid and witty strategies to design and build places that are more democratic and accountable to their residents.”
When 40,000 Verizon workers—including about 4,600 in New Jersey—went on strike last year, I read a lot of news stories about it and on my trips to New York City, I saw people walking the picket line. The strike ended after almost two months, with both sides claiming victory and it appeared the workers had come out ahead—winning pension increases, ratification bonuses, new call center jobs and other concessions.
Many New Jersey commuters are experiencing a “summer of hell” marked by cancelled and delayed train service due to the deteriorating rail link to New York City. They might want to know why the state has not been able to get its act together to build a badly needed new train tunnel, even while it has been pushing relentlessly to build a mall in the Meadowlands.
Continue reading GETTING A SWAMP MALL INSTEAD OF A COMMUTER TUNNEL
A unanimous decision by the New Jersey Supreme Court has overturned a lower court holding that would have allowed the government to deny access to vast swathes of information kept on its computers. Click here to read the decision.
The lower court had interpreted the state Open Public Records Act, aka OPRA, as mandating public access only to discrete records and not to information per se.
NJ Appleseed 