City Living, Pinelands Parties and the Atlantic Club’s Future – Friday’s Roundup

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City Living
Would you like to live blocks from the ocean, with bay or Atlantic views, in an affordable but beautifully-renovated apartment? What if it were in Atlantic City? The Iron Room’s Mark Callazzo is betting that some people who work in the city – but live offshore or downbeach – might be enticed back to the city, if there were a decent housing choice for them. We took an exclusive tour around his new apartment building at 1 N. Boston Ave and interviewed him about his outlook on Atlantic City. You can watch the video and read the piece here.

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Wawa In Florida: It’s Like an Eagles’ Tailgate and Possible Mortgage Relief For Sandy Victims – Thursday’s Roundup

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A Wawa Opens In A Florida Town, People Get Excited
It’s not exactly news from South Jersey, but it is news about about one of our area’s institutions: Wawa. The chain of goose has opened its first store in Winter Garden, Florida (just outside Orlando) and locals – well, really they’re South Jersey transplants – got a little over excited, according to the West Orange Times & Observer. “It was like tailgating at a Philadelphia Eagles game,” said a guy named Andrew Murray, who attended the opening four years ago of the first Wawa ever in Florida. “It was a really big deal,” Murray said. You can take the guy out of South Jersey, apparently, but you can’t take him out of a Wawa.

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Taj Mahal Up For Sale, Ridesharing Regulation and Sonic Booms – Wednesday’s Roundup

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Icahn In Talks To Sell Taj Mahal
According to the New York Post, one of Atlantic City’s least-favorite billionaire investors Carl Icahn is in talks to sell one of his three casinos in the resort town. The Taj Mahal, which Icahn closed in October after a bitter contract dispute with UniteHere local 54 ended in a summer-long strike, is on the block – apparently. Other casino operators might be interested, according to the report. Route 40 reported back in November that the mere act of closing the property almost halved its value. You can read that story here.

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Legislature Says No To Icahn Reopening Taj, Christie’s AC Overlord Pick Says A Lot – Tuesday’s Roundup

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Legislature Moves To Stop Taj Reopening Under Icahn

New Jersey’s state legislators on Monday voted to punish billionaire investor Carl Icahn for closing the Taj Mahal casino, by preventing him from reopening it for five years. The bill would apply to any casino owner who closed a casino after Jan. 2016 but right now that’s just Icahn. It’s not clear, however, whether Gov. Christie – who has the say on the plan – will approve it. Read the AP story here.

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Income Gap Widening, New Sober Living House Opens – Friday’s Roundup

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New Jersey’s income gap is getting wider – and it’s one of the widest in the country. Recently released data show that the average income, exclusive of capital gains, was more than $400,000 for the top 5 percent of New Jersey households. The poorest 20 percent had an average income of $25,600. NJSpotlight has an interactive map and a detailed story here – so you can see poverty rates by county. The Egg Harbor Township-based group Stop the Heroin have opened their first sober living home in Pleasantville.

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Rehab Battles, Dunes Go To Court and Atlantic County Taxpayers Get Squeezed – Wednesday’s Roundup

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Route 40 yesterday wrote about Atlantic County’s spending on drug and alcohol rehab services – half-way houses will get more money next year, but there will be less spent on counseling for outpatients. Read the story here. On a similar topic but over in Cherry Hill, NJPen’s Matt Skoufalos takes at what happened when a private company wanted to build a rehab center in local residents’ backyards. You can read that story here and check out NJPen for the rest of Skoufalos’ reporting on all sides of the Cherry Hill rehab center debate. The Inquirer’s Amy Rosenberg is following the battle over the Margate dunes from a court in Camden, where yesterday a civil engineer testified about the potential unsightly and dangerous side effects that dunes would bring to the beach.

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School Voucher Money, Fighter Jets and Tax Breaks – Tuesday’s Roundup

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School Vouchers

New Jersey’s teachers’ union spent tens of thousands of dollars – multiple times some of its members’ salaries – campaigning against the introduction of school vouchers in Atlantic City, but the issue has not gone away and interest seems to be spreading to other nearby communities. You can read the Route 40 exclusive here. Fighter Jets

The Press of Atlantic City has the news that Atlantic City International Airport will not house the new F-35 Fighter Jets that Sen. Cory Booker and local Rep. Frank LoBiondo had hoped to lure to the New Jersey Air National Guard’s 177th Fighter Wing, which is based at the airport. Booker and LoBiondo got some pretty sweet lobbying money from the aerospace sector (more on that on Route 40 later) to try and do the deal and LoBiondo described the Air Force’s decision as a setback. The Press doesn’t go into detail, but presumably expansion of the base is now less likely.

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The Gas Pipeline and CRDA Reshuffle – Monday’s Roundup

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Further Scrutiny For PennEast Pipeline

The Pinelands Commission – a state authority that oversees an area of South Jersey bigger than Rhode Island – has decided to put off any decision on a $1 billion pipeline proposal presented by a consortium that includes South Jersey Gas. The commission – which isn’t really known for leadership or transparency – failed to give details on exactly what it will do, but there will be some kind of public comment period, NJ Spotlight reports. The PennEast Pipeline, which is supposed to stretch from Luzerne County, PA to Mercer County, NJ, and bring the area cheaper gas, has already been held up by federal authorities after late route changes. It’s not clear whether the Pinelands Commission’s review could further hold up the pipeline project, along with another one that was proposed by New Jersey Natural Gas. CRDA Reshuffle

It’s old news that the outgoing director of our other local state authority, the Casino Reinvestment Development Authority, will get a golden parachute of a quarter of a million dollars, or one year’s salary.

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Atlantic City’s Debt, The Opioid Crisis and Award-Winning South Jersey Vodka – Thursday’s Eclectic Roundup

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There’s a long look at Atlantic City’s finances on Bloomberg today that basically concludes that the future is likely to be a double whammy of tax hikes and spending cuts, which I guess everyone already knew is the way to dig yourself out of a debt hole, but there’s something about the graphics on the page – they depict the drop in tax take – that is so stark it’s hard not to feel sympathy pains for the taxpayers in the city. The blink-and-you’d-miss-it takeaway from the Bloomberg piece is that the city workers’ union is considering legal action to thwart any move by the city’s overseer to change workers’ contract. If anyone wants to be cheered up, they can take a look at our take on how the city’s crisis is actually a problem for the whole county, although that gets less attention. In even more depressing local news (it’s one of those days, apparently), there was another shooting in Hamilton Township last night – Lynda Cohen at Breaking AC has the details here. In wider New Jersey news, there have been some developments around tackling the opioid crisis that are worth paying attention to. A group of hospitals a long way north of Atlantic County, but connected to networks down here, have agreed to provide Union County police with free Narcan, the drug used to counteract opioid overdoses.

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