By David Wildstein, April 26 2022
New Jersey Appellate Court Judge Hany Mawla.
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In a mystifying punt of two ballot access lawsuits, a New Jersey appellate court judge will allow primary elections to be held on June 7 with the intention of deciding the eligibility of candidates after Election Day.
Appellate Judge Hany A. Mawla today vacated his own stay of nominating petition challenges in the Democratic primary for Union County Commissioner and the Republican primary for Howell Township Council.
Mawla denied a request for emergent relief, which means there will not be an immediate ruling.
“The stay entered in this court’s order dated April 22, 2022 is hereby vacated,” Mawla said in his order. “The appeal shall proceed in the normal course.”
Instead, Mawla ordered a briefing schedule that begins on June 10 – three days after the primary – and ends on July 21.
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There was no change in the outcome of last week’s Newark school election after ballots from missing districts were counted on Monday, according to results posted by the Essex County Clerk’s Office. Officials still haven’t said why ballots were missing for six days.
A “Moving Newark Schools Forward” slate backed by Mayor Ras Baraka retained its lopsided margin of victory for the three open seats on the nine-member Newark Board of Education, according tallies updated on Monday afternoon.
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Low-income New Jerseyans will be getting another $12.8 million to help them pay their heating and cooling bills, the final tranche of a record allocation to the state.
President Joe Biden’s $1.9 trillion coronavirus stimulus law, the $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure law and the regular spending bills will deliver $302.4 million to the state through Sept. 30, more than double the $112.7 million the state ordinarily would receive under the Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program, or LIHEAP.
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Community outreach, musical talent and mentorship continues to shape the narrative that a recent The Ellen DeGeneres Show guest prides himself on.
However, for the Newark teacher, who appeared on the show on Friday, securing a better future for the young men in his community is the holy grail.
Known as JaRich to most, Jaleel Ritchwood-Jordan, 30, of Newark, is a special needs educator at Marion P. Thomas Charter High School, as well as co-founder of the school’s Boys to Men Mentoring Club.
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New Jersey state Sen. Holly Schepisi was lying in bed when she first read the sample lessons one school district was considering incorporating into its sex education curriculum.
The Republican lawmaker said she began clicking on links included in the sample lesson plans — “digging deeper,” she said — and soon found herself down a YouTube rabbit hole watching recommended videos from a sex ed advocacy organization geared toward kids of various ages. The videos described how many times a day is OK to masturbate, how to properly put on a condom and how watching pornography is “normal” but that it does not reflect reality. Schepisi posted a link to the proposed lesson plans on Facebook, writing, “I truly think New Jersey has lost its damn mind.”
That single post set off a national firestorm of conservative media coverage promoting Republican lawmakers who said revisions to New Jersey’s comprehensive health and physical education learning standards, which were adopted in 2020, were “unnecessarily sexualizing children” and “indoctrinating” students with “extreme views on gender identity and sexual orientation.”
That narrative is not true. The sample lesson plans Schepisi spread were not mandated by the state, and the school system in question — more than 40 miles away from Schepisi’s legislative district in northern New Jersey — did not adopt them as written. Another district did adopt some of the broader curricula the lesson plans came from, but it has been using those lessons for four years with little community pushback.
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The customers began lining up before dawn at Rise Paterson, a marijuana dispensary in New Jersey that was welcoming customers with free doughnuts and reggaeton blaring from loudspeakers.
As New Jersey kicked off legalized sales of recreational marijuana on Thursday, Rise, along with roughly a dozen other medical marijuana dispensaries across the state, opened its doors for its first customers, ages 21 and older.
“I’m just excited that everything is opening up legally,” said Daniel Garcia, 23, of Union City, N.J., who was first in line at 3:30 a.m.
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Officials are seeking a judge’s order granting access to voting machines for 30 election districts in Newark after poll workers failed to turn in ballots from those districts in Tuesday’s school board race.
Essex County Clerk Christopher Durkin said Thursday that county lawyers were seeking an order in state Superior Court in Newark. A hearing was likely to be scheduled for Friday.
Durkin said he hoped a judge would issue an order allowing county officials to open the locked voting machines and remove the paper ballots and digital cartridges containing corresponding data and tabulate them. He said voting machines are legally impounded following an election and cannot be opened by anyone other than the supervisory board of elections worker designated to do so, except by a judge’s order.
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A new report on air quality in the U.S. ranked the New York metropolitan area, including parts of New Jersey, as one of the worst in the country for ozone pollution, despite improvements over previous years.
The report, by the American Lung Association, investigated both ground-level ozone air pollution and particle pollution — soot — from 2018 through 2020.
The “State of the Air” analysis classified the New York-Newark metro area the 14th worst for ozone air pollution. The Philadelphia-Reading-Camden corridor ranked the 29th worst in ozone air quality and 18th worst in average particle pollution level.
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An attempt by the state to slow the rapid erosion of East Point Lighthouse’s shoreline with a sand-filled "geotube" quickly proved to be inadequate against the rising water.
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The Garden State’s history is starting to wash away.
New Jersey as it exists today was built up over hundreds of years from the arrival of Europeans, and thousands of years of Lenape settlement before that. Reminders of the past are scattered everywhere — the state has more than 100,000 historic properties, one in nearly every city and town.
“This is part of our cultural consciousness,” said Barton Ross, a past president of the advocacy group Preservation New Jersey. “To experience the historic neighborhoods and what they bring.”
But as climate change pushes water up along New Jersey’s coast, the risks of flooding and destruction during storms are rising for the state’s waterfront heritage.
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New Jersey’s second largest city plans to ignore the state attorney general’s guidance that police officers are allowed to use cannabis while off duty.
Jersey City Mayor Steve Fulop tweeted Wednesday that police leadership will issue a directive informing the city’s roughly 1,000 officers that they cannot use cannabis, whether on or off duty.
“NJ’s policies allowing law enforcement to smoke is an outlier nationally and one that will put our officers + community at risk with impaired judgment,” Fulop wrote. “Unlike alcohol where there are tests + timelines that can create clear protection between consumption + duty, w/marijuana that doesn’t exist.”
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