The annual spectacular Red Bank fireworks will not happen this July, according to a report in the Red Bank-Shrewsbury Patch.
“Following a several month-long process of examination and discussion, the KaBoom executive committee has concluded that KaBoom as we know it is not sustainable in the current economy, taking into account escalating costs to maintain public safety coupled with the increasing costs of products and services related to the event,” KaBoom Committee Chairman Tim Hogan said in a release. “KaBoom is a victim of its own success. Each year brought increasing numbers of visitors to Red Bank, especially as towns throughout New Jersey cancelled their own Fourth of July fireworks displays. Our security costs doubled in the last three years, and although we raised more money in 2011 than ever before, we continued to incur a deficit with each succeeding year.”
If you want to understand what rule by liberal judges looks like on the state level, you need only look at New Jersey, which is teetering on bankruptcy though it remains one of America’s wealthiest states. ~ Steven Malanga, writing in City Journal
If you want to understand how, despite being one of the wealthiest states in the country, New Jersey is teetering on the brink of fiscal disaster, read Steven Malanga’s The Court That Broke New Jersey.
If you want to know why no governor or state legislature can reduce New Jersey’s oppressive property taxes, read Steven Malanga’s The Court That Broke New Jersey.
Malanga traces the roots of New Jersey’s tyranical Supreme Court all the way back to Arthur Vanderbilt, the first Chief Justice under the 1947 state constitution. In his opinion in Winberry v. Salisbury, Vanderbilt layed the foundation for judicial tyrnany by ruling that the court, not the legislature, has the power to make rules for the state judiciary.
That ruling set New Jersey’s judiciary apart from the court systems in most other states—as well as from the federal judiciary, which ultimately derives its authority from Congress. Some critics have even argued that Winberry violates the U.S. Constitution’s guarantee that every state must have a republican form of government. “Under the doctrine of Winberry v. Salisbury,” wrote New Jersey lawyer Anthony Kearns in a 1955 ABA Journal article, “we can only conclude that laws of practice and procedure are exclusively in the hands of men who are not elected.”
Malanga clearly lays out how New Jersey’s Supreme Court has taken over the state’s education policy and funding with no improvement in urban education to show for the $40 billion that has been wasted as a result of the Abbott decisions. He lays out the history of how the court usurped local zoning power with the Mt. Laurel decisions and COAH. He connects the dots in explaining how those two extra-constitutional power grabs have resulted in massive wealth redistribution, with no societal benefit, and an oppressive system of goverments.
Malanga stressed the importance of Christie’s promise to reshape the court with judges who will interpret the constitution rather than relating to it as a “living document.” However, he is not optimistic because of “…a Democrat-controlled legislature that’s often happy to dodge responsibility for heavy spending by letting the court mandate it.”
Hat tip to InTheLobby for bring this important article to our attention.
With the Presidential primary season well under way, we are now being treated to candidates going from state to state almost every week in an effort or convince voters that they are the right person to lead the country. If you are wondering when the candidate train stops in New Jersey, well I have some bad news. Last September, the Lieutenant Governor signed a bill approved by the Legislature, which moved the New Jersey 2012 Presidential Primary from February (when it had been held in 2008 on the 5th of February aka “Super Tuesday” ) to June 5, 2012. In 2005, the Legislature had voted to move the 2008 primary which had normally been held in June, to February in an effort to try to give New Jersey voters more influence in picking their party’s Presidential candidates. In 2008, despite the fact that New Jersey’s primary was held on the same day as those in over 20 other states, several candidates did campaign in New Jersey despite it not getting as much of a national focus as had been hoped for. Over 1.1 million residents voted in the 2008 New Jersey Democratic Primary which was won by Hilary Clinton over Barack Obama. In the Republican contest, over 500,000 people went to the polls in an election that saw the party’s eventual nominee John McCain almost doubling the amount of votes received by the 2nd place finisher Mitt Romney. It was estimated that the cost of moving the primary from June to February was $12 million.
What makes the participation numbers interesting is when you weigh them against the number of voters taking part in the first two caucuses or primaries this year. Roughly 122,000 people voted in the Iowa Republican caucuses with approximately 250,000 people voting in the New Hampshire GOP Primary. Although there was a Democratic caucus in Iowa and a primary in New Hampshire, they were not competitive races with President Obama virtually unopposed for his party’s nomination. With several Republicans dropping out of their party’s contest just before, during or right after these races, the amount of influence these states have in choosing a party’s nominee is hugely out of proportion to the numbers of voters who take part. Contrast these participation numbers with those of the 2008 general election where close to 130 million voters went to the polls.
So the questions that beg for answers are 1) How can New Jersey residents become more influential in the process of picking their party’s candidate (besides moving to Iowa or New Hampshire for a few months every four years)? 2) What can be done to make the choice of each party’s nominee less dependent on voters in one or two states where they clearly have to much power and contain voters whose views are not always representative of the majority of voters in other states. Note that major issues in Iowa where farm subsidies, ethanol, religion/faith and social issues. One thing is for sure, none of those three would be the top issues for the majority of New Jersey voters. There are no easy answers to question #1. The major party’s threatened loss of convention delegates to States which were going to hold their primaries too early in the 2012 process. One idea for 2016 would be for the state to revert to the 2008 model and possibly schedule its primary in mid/late February or early March of 2016 (This also depends on party scheduling rules that can change.) As mentioned above, this change does come with additional cost ($12 million) and there is no guarantee that the nomination for one or both parties would not have been secured by that date.
The other idea which has been debated for several years, is holding a series (4-6) of regional primaries in the early March to early June time-frame. The order of these would rotate every four years. This would give more states greater influence in picking the eventual nominees. Even if Iowa and New Hampshire kept their traditional places at the starting gate, they would not have the same importance or as great a focus on by candidates.
Since 1976, only 3 of the 18 nominating contests were so close that almost every delegate mattered to the eventual nominee. A couple of interesting historical facts about New Jersey Presidential Primaries are:
In 1972, Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm won the states Democratic Primary. Rep. Chisholm was the first woman to run for the Democratic Presidential nomination and the first major party African American Presidential candidate.
In 1976, in an unsuccessful effort to stop Jimmy Carter from obtaining the Democratic nomination, a slate of uncommitted delegates backing Senator Hubert Humphrey and then (and current) California Governor Jerry Brown, defeated Carter by a wide margin. Carter’s primary win in Ohio the same day however, cinched the nomination for him. I attended a campaign rally for Governor Brown the day before the election at Airport Plaza in Hazlet on June 7, 1976. The story was the lead in the next days Red Bank Register and can be viewed here:
New Jersey’s recently enacted “Anti-Bullying Bill of Rights” has been struck down by the Council on Local Mandates.
The state has until the end of March to amend the law or to provide funding for its implementation, according to Gannett’s Statehouse Bureau.
The Council on Local Mandates was created in 1995 by a constitutional amendment approved by the voters. Its members are appointed by the governor and both parties leaders in the legislature and the chief justice of the supreme court. The council is empowered to “expire” laws, rules and regulations that compel boards of educations, municipalities and counties to take action without providing resources to pay for the mandate.
Assemblywoman Valerie Vainieri Huttle (D-Bergen), the anti bullying bill’s lead sponsor, called the council a “rarely used, shadowy fourth branch of government.”
Why is it rarely used? MMM often hears local municipal officials and school board members complaining about money the state is making them spend.
The newspaper industry is fighting to keep its outdated government subsidy, costing taxpayers tens of millions of dollars a year.
By John Bendel
All across New Jersey, governments and school districts are slashing costs to meet the enormous financial challenges they face. Police officers and firefighters are being laid off, road and highway improvements delayed, and funding for snowstorms and other emergencies curtailed. Nearly everyone has been caught up in the statewide budgetary storm of reduced services and higher taxes.
Yet one industry is fighting to remain immune from the hard financial decisions being made by each and every town and school district in the state. Using their editorial pages and considerable clout, New Jersey’s newspapers have put their own financial interests ahead of the taxpayers, including their own readers, by opposing legislation that would save money and make government more open and accountable. This legislation would give governments the option to publish legal notices online rather than in newspapers, as they’ve been mandated to do by law for decades. The change being fought so aggressively by the newspapers not only would save taxpayer dollars, but give hundreds of thousands more citizens access to the information - and in a more easily accessible way.
Using the public’s “right to know” as cover, the newspaper industry in New Jersey is fighting to preserve its own monopoly - a monopoly that’s being subsidized by upwards of $30 million a year in taxpayers’ money. The New Jersey Press Association and its member news organizations across the state are trying to hold onto the kind of no-bid contract they routinely condemn.
Last year, we saw New Jersey’s newspaper industry elbowing for space on Trenton’s Lobby Row to save their slice of the government pie. They lined the halls of the Statehouse - lobbying legislators in a bid to influence the process not for the public good, but for their own economic gain. They became just another special interest. And while they were busy arm-twisting legislators who will vote on the issue, they were using their editorial pages to intimidate those same legislators.
The bill was to be posted again for a vote last week, but Assembly Speaker Sheila Oliver apparently succumbed to newspaper pressure and pulled it at the last minute.
A core principle of newspapers is never to confuse their editorial opinions and news content with their companies’ economic interests. In this case, that line has been crossed. And the newspaper publishers and editors crossed that divide in the interest of propping up a practice that is an anachronism in the modern world of the Internet. The law granting newspapers this particular monopoly was passed during the age of typewriters. It makes no sense whatsoever to preserve that law in the Internet era.
It’s especially disingenuous for the newspaper lobby to be stubbornly fighting the posting of legal ads online at the very time those newspapers are admonishing governments to post more information - everything from salaries to contracts to marriage licenses - on the Internet, on government websites already up and running. Recently the Bergen Record, Courier-Post and The Press of Atlantic City all ran editorials calling on governments to offer more documents and records online to benefit the public. Could it be that the newspaper industry is interested in transparency only when it doesn’t affect its own financial interests? You be the judge.
The benefits of allowing the posting of legal notices online are indisputable.
First, it greatly expands a notice’s exposure to the public, giving citizens greater, cheaper and more convenient access to legal notices. And the information would be available 24-7, in Spanish as well as English, in more easily readable form.
Second, the cost savings are clear. The state, county and local governments would post the legal ads on their existing websites, a simple process requiring no added expense; in fact, the scanning procedure is so easy it’s familiar to grammar-school students. Newspaper executives argue that the costs to taxpayers for running the legals in their publications have been overestimated since the private sector pays for some of the ads -liquor license applications, sheriff sales, and certain land-use matters for example. Why should the private sector fork over millions to newspapers when they could run the ads at no cost on government web sites?
Finally, while individual citizens must pay 75 cents to $1 to buy a newspaper - and much more on Sundays - they could access the same information online, at little or no cost. The fact is, online posting would save governments, individuals and businesses the millions of dollars they spend each year to pay whatever publishers charge for placing a legal ad in their newspapers.
Earlier this year in the Borough of Island Heights where I live, mandated legal ads cost the borough approximately $4,000. This is no small amount of money for a town struggling to make ends meet.
The newspaper lobby would have you believe that the proposed change would be harmful to those who do not use the Internet, especially seniors. Give me a break. The number of people using the Internet has exploded over the last decade - to the point where those who go online to learn the latest news, weather, sports scores and other information far outnumber those who buy newspapers. Going online has become second nature to a vast majority of Americans - including my fellow seniors.
By way of review, New Jersey laws mandate that individuals, businesses and government entities pay to publish legal notices in officially-designated newspapers. The New Jersey Legislature is considering amending the law to allow for publication of those legal notices on official state, county and municipal web sites in addition to, or instead of, traditional newspaper advertising. Technological advances and the growing abundance of government information online demonstrate the benefits of broad dissemination of legal notices on the Internet as an alternative to traditional newspaper publication. Amending the law to allow the option of posting legal notices on a web site enables residents throughout the state to view any kind of legal notice from any part of the state. Far more New Jersey residents have access to information available on the web than to any one newspaper designated to publish legal notices. While traditional newspapers were the only logical means of ensuring public access to information in the past, today any resident can gain Internet access either at home, through their jobs, at any public library, in most public schools, and at community centers and Internet cafes.
Newspaper publication imposes time constraints on the availability of legal notices that web site posting would not. For example, the law requiring publication of a legal notice of a proposed toll hike might only mandate that the notice appear for a certain number of days in one or more designated official newspaper. Because web sites have far greater capacities than a single print edition of a newspaper, the same legal notice could remain posted on official state, county and municipal websites for several months or more, allowing residents greater opportunity to find and view the information. Instead of being subjected to the painstaking process of going through individual back copies of a newspaper, a resident could go to a single web site to find the legal notice they are looking for.
Official web sites can be designed to allow flexibility in sorting and searching for legal notices. Those web sites could be required to provide users the ability to search for legal notices by date posted, the appropriate county or other geographic category, or the subject of the posting. A person who prefers searching for postings by scanning pages of newspapers would retain that option, while someone searching for a fairly specific posting - such as applications for liquor licenses in December, 2003 only - could search for and view only the relevant notices.
Amending the law to expand the available avenues for publishing legal notices affords governments, businesses and individuals a virtually free method of publishing notices that they have to pay for under the current system. Such a proposal will not limit access to newspapers or restrict anyone from continuing to publish legal notices in newspapers. Instead, it offers far greater flexibility in posting legal notices and increases the public’s access — at a vastly reduced cost for everyone.
John Bendel is an Island Heights, N.J. councilman, president of Bendel & Bendel Inc., and former editorial page editor of the North Jersey Herald News.
Assembly Minority Leader Alex DeCroce died last night shortly after the final voting session of the 214th legislature. He was 75 years old.
DeCroce collapsed after 11PM in the legislative wing of the statehouse.
Governor Chris Christie said, “Tonight I lost a dear friend, colleague and mentor -– Assembly Republican Leader Alex De Croce.
“I have known Alex for nearly 20 years,” the governor said. “He helped to give me my start in elective politics in Morris County in 1993. He was one of the most kind, considerate and trustworthy people I have ever had the pleasure to know. He was an enormously accomplished legislator and a tremendous servant to the people of New Jersey.
“Mary Pat and I offer our heartfelt condolences to his wife, Department of Community Affairs Deputy Commissioner Betty Lou De Croce, and to Alex’s entire family,” Christie said. “This is an enormous loss for our state and for me personally.”
The ceremonial swearing in of the 215th legislature and the Governor’s State of the State address scheduled for today have been canceled. There will be an informal swearing in and the Governor will briefly address both houses of the legislature in order to fulfill the constitution requirement that he address them today.
Legislation that ends the requirement of “Legal Ads” being published in newspapers, in favor of the ads being posted on government websites, is on the calendar in both the Senate and Assembly on Monday, the last day of the current legislative session.
Call or email your legislators right now and ask them to vote YES on S-2072 in the Senate and A-2082 in the Assembly. You can find your legislators contact information here.
Classified ads in newspapers have gone the way of the horse and buggy. The Internet has made them obsolete. On most days Legals Ads make up the vast majority of the once thick classified section. The private sector has already voted. Taxpayers and those with proceedings before a court or board should not have to subsidize an antiquated practice.
Posting Legal Notices on municipal, county and state websites will lead to more people seeing them and will save the public between $12 and $70 million per year, depending upon who you believe. The newspaper industry says they ads cost only $12 million per year. Proponents of the bill says they cost $70 million.
Assembly Minority Leader Alex DeCroce died last night shortly after the final voting session of the 214th legislature. He was 75 years old.