Monday Morning News Roundup
By Jon Whiten • Mar 23rd, 2009 • Category: Blog
- The Journal takes broader look at how the unemployment rate, which is rising in Jersey City, is also rising throughout the rest of Hudson County. A job fair in Union City on Saturday drew 182 locals looking for work, while Jersey City’s Roger Williams talks about the difficulties of being unemployed.
- Many mayoral and council campaigns are aping the Obama presidential campaign in their campaign slogans that will appear on the May ballot. The Journal has the rundown of all the slogans. City clerk Robert Byrne tells the Reporter that he was “underwhelmed by the effort” that some potential candidates put forth in submitting their petitions. Meanwhile, Sean Connors, who for a while was rumored to be running for the Ward D City Council seat, has endorsed Mayor Healy’s slate of candidates. Connors is running for school board this year. And Al Sullivan cites an unidentified poll that has Healy in front with 25 percent, followed by L. Harvey Smith (18), Lou Manzo (10), and Dan Levin (7).
- Jersey City will receive $1.7 million in federal stimulus money from the Department of Housing and Urban Development under the Community Development Block Grant Program.
- The Heights man who is campaigning to have traffic patterns reversed on his street found a handwritten note reading “Stop or else think about your kids!” under the windshield wiper of his vehicle last week.
- One Jersey City family is receiving $25,000 from the Foster Care Rehab Program, which helps foster families fix physical issues in their homes that might prevent them from being eligible to foster a child. As we noted last week, the city is receiving a total of $100,000 from the program, which is run by the state Department of Community Affairs.
- The Jersey City Waterfront Parks Conservancy is set to unveil its master plan to create one park from several parks in the Paulus Hook area tomorrow night. For details, click here.
- John “Jack” Hill, chief of investigations for the Hudson County Prosecutor’s Office, died this weekend.
In statewide news:
- Deportations in New Jersey rose to 4,453 in FY2008, from 3,387 the previous year. Of those, 71 percent — or 3,155 deportations — were for non-criminal offenses.
- Political observers think that Gov. Corzine’s transition from promising to fix the state’s budget problems when he campaigned in 2005 to having to deal with the stark reality of a recession will frame this fall’s election.
- A state anti-smoking initiative known as the Comprehensive Tobacco Control Program will face an $840,000 budget cut for the next fiscal year.
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Jon Whiten is the founding editor of the Jersey City Independent; he now works for a public-policy nonprofit in Trenton.
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