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Essex County Politics · February 26, 2021 2:14 AM
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JOHN REITMEYER, BUDGET/FINANCE WRITER | FEBRUARY 26, 2021
NJ Spotlight News

They warned “winter is coming” and said then-President Donald Trump’s administration deserved “shame” for not sending New Jersey more robust federal aid.
Democrats who control both houses of the state Legislature last year said they needed an emergency borrowing issue — bypassing the constitutional mandate for voter approval — as a “last resort” to deal with the COVID-19 pandemic. Their goal: address what Gov. Phil Murphy’s administration was calling a “historic fiscal crisis.”
But now the state’s fortunes are nowhere near as dire as predicted. A revenue collapse that at one point was being forecast by Murphy to be on par with the Great Depression has not fully materialized.
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Posted by
Essex County Politics · February 25, 2021 2:15 AM
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By Nikita Biryukov, February 24 2021
New Jersey Globe

Gov. Phil Murphy.
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Gov. Phil Murphy is sticking by an early voting bill moving its way through the legislature despite it providing for significantly fewer days for residents to cast their ballots ahead of an election than he would prefer.
“Without getting into the specifics of early voting, and I mean this not facetiously — I’ll take anything,” Murphy said at Wednesday’s virus briefing. “I think anything early is what the doctor ordered.”
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Posted by
Essex County Politics · February 23, 2021 2:31 AM
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Posted Feb 22, 2021
A map shows 8 proposed skyscrapers in the Manhattan neighborhood surrounding Penn Station that would fund redevelopment and an addition to the underground station.
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A grand plan to build an annex south of New York’s Penn Station to create more track and platform space for NJ Transit commuters could be reality by 2028, draft plans said. But it will come at the price of building skyscrapers, some up to 400 feet high, in the neighborhood surrounding the station.
The draft plans for redeveloping the much-maligned subterranean station, building an addition to it and redeveloping the midtown Manhattan neighborhood around it were announced by the Empire State Development Corporation and Gov. Andrew Cuomo Friday.
A proposed addition south of Penn Station would have nine additional tracks and five new platforms to accommodate NJ Transit trains, and be in operation in 2028, the same time it predicts new Gateway Hudson River tunnels would be completed, the report said.
But some experts reiterated their original criticisms that the addition would park NJ Transit trains in a dead end station that’s not as flexible as the current Penn Station track layout.
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