Friday Morning News Roundup

By • Dec 11th, 2009 • Category: Blog

- Former City Council candidate Lori Serrano was indicted yesterday and charged with accepting $10,000 from an informant posing as a developer in exchange for her help with moving projects along once she was to be elected. The indictment charges Serrano with conspiring with then-Jersey City Housing Authority official Edward Cheatam (who has pleaded guilty), consultant Jack Shaw (who died a week after his arrest in July) and others to extort money from Solomon Dwek. Serrano’s attorney says she “was just a pawn in all of this.”

- Officials now say that robbery may have been the motive in this week’s stabbing that killed a Jersey City mother and wounded her infant. No one has been arrested as of yet, and the baby remains in critical but stable condition at University Hospital in Newark.

- Former Ward B councilwoman and Jersey City Parking Authority director Mary Spinello has quietly set up a campaign account for the 2011 state senate Democratic primary in District 31.

- The Hudson County Sheriff’s Office has arrested 118 people on outstanding warrants and charged a county employee with interfering with the investigation.

- Teachers at the Liberty Academy Charter School have a meeting scheduled with the school’s board of trustees tonight after holding a sit-in at the school last week to protest changes to their health care plans that require employee contributions.

- Looks like New York mayor Michael Bloomberg
will be coming to a Jersey City charter school next month; that’s just one of the items to come out of Bloomberg’s first meeting with Gov.-elect Chris Christie.

- Remember that Port Authority budget we told you about earlier this week? Yesterday the agency’s board passed it; no PATH fare increases or toll increases, but there will be 150 layoffs.

- Police in Manchester Township have arrested a 16-year-old Brick Township boy in connection with a bias crime at the home of a Jersey City firefighter.

- Look out for lane closures coming up soon at the Holland and Lincoln Tunnels.

In statewide news:

- Assembly speaker Joseph Roberts says he has not set a hearing date for the same-sex marriage bill. Meanwhile, advocates of the bill say it’s not only the right thing to do, but it would make economic sense as well.

- Lots of action in Trenton yesterday: The Senate approved a bill that would require restaurant owners with 20 or more locations nationally to post calorie information for food and beverages on all indoor and drive-through menu boards; a bill providing better reimbursement for the 60 family planning clinics operating in New Jersey that serve low-income and uninsured women; and a bill that would change the way the state’s paid family leave insurance payments would be calculated.

- Immigrant rights advocates are calling on lawmakers to pass a bill to allow all New Jerseyans to pay in-state college tuition, regardless of immigration status.

- Among the New York Times staffers taking the paper’s buyout this week is Tina Kelley, who helped launch and oversaw the Times‘ hyperlocal sites in New Jersey.

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is the founding editor of the Jersey City Independent; he now works for a public-policy nonprofit in Trenton.
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