Route 40 (https://rtforty.com/2017/10/)
The school district in Pitman, Gloucester County, has a problem. It’s a familiar one to many school districts in South Jersey: enrollment is down and it has high fixed costs. In Pitman, officials are looking at loans and also staff cuts and closing buildings.
Kara Quigley Keane usually starts putting the Halloween decorations up outside the house—a little Cape Cod bungalow on Fulton Avenue in Margate—the day after Labor Day.
As part of Voting Block, a collaborative reporting project on the governor’s race involving 25 news organizations and dozens of neighbors, we want to know what your priorities are for the next governor. We’re creating a “people’s agenda” to send whoever wins the election on Nov. 7. And we need your help to build it. Tell us what you want the next governor to focus on during the first 100 days in office.
Atlantic County mayors are creeping closer to figuring out how to establish a county-wide tax assessment system that they believe could cut down on tax appeals. A bipartisan committee of mayors has been looking at how other tax assessment systems work elsewhere (as far afield as Florida and Arizona) and how the county’s patchwork of municipalities could be brought under one property tax regime.
Route 40 gathered together a group of residents from Atlantic City’s Bungalow Park neighborhood at the Back Bay Ale House on Tuesday, Oct. 17 to talk about the New Jersey gubernatorial race and the issues their community would like to see addressed by the next governor. The conversation was recorded as part of the collaborative reporting project Voting Block.
The first thing the next governor of New Jersey should do is get out of Atlantic City, a group of city residents agreed at a recent dinner in Bungalow Park. The almost one-year-old takeover of the city, which came after years of state oversight failed to avert a fiscal crisis in the gambling resort, is deeply unpopular with residents. Not one of the 13 guests at our Voting Block gathering at the Back Bay Ale House thought the state should continue its oversight. Neighbors from Bungalow Park, a bayfront enclave of homeowners that has withstood Superstorm Sandy and AtlanticheCity’s many cycles of urban renewal and urban neglect, fear rising property taxes are threatening their community. And with the state in charge of the city government, they have even less of a platform from which to raise that issue – and others – than ever before.
Billions of dollars in grants and insurance payments have been spent on Sandy recovery efforts, but some people are still homeless and living out of their cars, according to a piece by The Inquirer’s Amy Rosenberg and Frank Kummer. Many people’s recovery projects were derailed by contractor fraud, others are still waiting on FEMA flood insurance payouts, or revised payouts after original low-ball offers.
Glenn Straub is suing the state to reduce the tax bill he pays for the still-shuttered Revel. Straub has not been able to get a casino license to reopen Revel as a casino. He says it should not be taxed as a casino under the Atlantic City PILOT (payment in lieu of taxes) program because it was closed when the legislation went into effect last year.
Route 40’s Business Bootcamps give you the chance to hear first hand from local entrepreneurs about their experience starting businesses in South Jersey. These are live, ticketed events that are free to Route 40 Members. After Route 40’s reporters interview the guest business owner, attendees get a chance to join in the conversation over drinks and food. The events are made possible by Jake Perskie of Fox Rothschild. We are now launching a recording of the first episode as a podcast, available to the public here and across podcast platforms. The first episode, recorded on Sept.
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What is it about Ocean City pizza joints? With Manco & Manco’s Charles Bangle finally sentenced to jail for evading almost $92,000 in taxes, another Ocean City Boardwalk pizza-store owner on Monday pleaded guilty to cheating the government out of $85,000 in taxes.