Help Needed To Rebuild Atlantic City Memorial Park

By |

Councilman Kaleem Shabazz, of Atlantic City’s third ward, stoops to pick up a piece of litter and brush away a weed that’s obscuring a memorial plaque. No one else in the park – and there are about two dozen people hanging out under the large shady trees – seems to notice the councilman’s effort. Atlantic City’s government has secured the bulk of the funding it needs to transform the park from a stopping-place for drug users and homeless people into a recreation area for the hundreds of kids living on the neighboring blocks. But the city is seeking about $100,000 from Atlantic County’s open spaces fund for so-called ‘gap’ funding, to allow the city to officially start the project and release the funding from the non-profits and other organizations that are contributing most of the cash. The problem is that Atlantic County has not approved any open-spaces funding requests in the last two years.

More about: Atlantic City, Homepage Featured

You’re a sucker if you’re paying more than $1 for year-round AC parking

By |

A law firm is paying the Casino Reinvestment Development Authority (CRDA) just $1 a year for 10 sweet parking spaces in the Authority’s swanky gated lot in Atlantic City, according to a document released to Route 40 as part of a freedom-of-information request. The lot abuts Gordon’s Alley, an historic Atlantic City retail lane, where businesses and workers said they’ve been adversely affected by the lack of convenient parking. The agreement between CRDA and the law firm is ridiculous for a few reasons:

The other weekend, I rode the jitney and met people who live and work in Atlantic City (and pay their taxes) and who can’t afford to drive to work because the parking costs* in this crazy city are too high. Apparently, they’re just not working for the right companies. CRDA’s main source of revenue is from parking fees.

More about: Atlantic City, Watchdog Journalism, Atlantic City, casino reinvestment development authority, casinos, CRDA, dla piper, john palmieri

Jitney downbeach: an experiment in public transport

By |

UPDATED: This story was updated August 25, 2016 to include comments from Ventnor Commissioner Lance Landgraf. To read the original piece, a roundup of live tweeting from a downbeach jitney trip, scroll down. A test-run to expand the Atlantic City jitney service downbeach to Ventnor and Margate earlier this summer was shut down after jitney drivers said there were too few passengers to make the route viable. It is possible, however, that the effort could be revived next year and Ventnor Commissioner Lance Landgraf said he would like to work with the Jitney Association to find ways to help it succeed for residents. “We would welcome it back and we would certainly sit down with them and try and make it better if we could,” Landgraf said in a phone interview.

More about: Atlantic City, Atlantic City, bus, jitney, margate, public transit, public transport, rebuilding atlantic city

A Surreality Tour of Atlantic County

By |

Living around here can be a surreal experience at times, so we decided to photograph a few of our favorite surreal places in the county. Do you live or visit this area? Do you drive by or live near a bizarre building or abandoned lot? Do you want to know more about it? We’d love to hear from you by email, on Twitter or Instagram – we’d be surprised if we couldn’t add more to this list and we’re up for some local research. We’re pretty sure there are some crazy stories behind these crazy places.

More about: Atlantic City, opinion, Watchdog Journalism, accc, atlantic cape community college, Atlantic City, atlantic county, casino reinvestment development authority

Ratings agency warns Stockton over debt for AC development

By |

Stockton University will have a “weakened financial position” after issuing new debt to build a parking garage and residence hall in Atlantic City, and it may look to raise tuition fees, according to debt ratings agency Fitch Ratings. Stockton, which gained university status last year, is borrowing $70 million to pay for the Atlantic City development and $211 million to refund outstanding debt and finance $25 million in projects at its main Galloway campus. Since the University’s operating results were in the red last year in spite of healthy enrollment growth, Stockton needs to trim expenses and raise revenue – likely by making tuition “adjustments,” the ratings agency said in a statement on Wednesday. Without those changes, Stockton would not be able to borrow for any further expansion projects without risking a ratings downgrade, which would increase the cost of its borrowing and further worsen its financial position. “Stockton’s operating results have been negative since fiscal 2014,” said Fitch.

More about: Atlantic City, Business, Atlantic City, debt, galloway, gateway development, south jersey industries, Stockton

Camp Revel

By |

Sometime around lunch on Monday of this week, Bill Terrigino of 227 Metropolitan Avenue stood outside gardening in one of the two yards on either side of his home in the South Inlet neighborhood of Atlantic City. Close readers of this space may remember Bill as the oft-chronicled inhabitant of a charming, cedar-sided Victorian house, nearly 110 years old, that has the interesting fate of being located directly across the street from the Revel casino hotel resort, the second-tallest building in the state of New Jersey and the most notorious casino flop in the history of Atlantic City and probably of the world, which sat about 50 feet to the west of Bill’s geraniums,* humming like a spaceship that was running out of electricity. Revel’s owner, an eccentric millionaire named Glenn Straub, had set that coming Wednesday–about 48 hours in the future–as the deadline for what’s been described as a grand reopening, a “soft” opening, a “real soft” opening and a “flaccid” flop (the local press corps has some bros in it). Which made Bill’s neighborhood once again a subject of some media interest. Bill, who’d worked as a banquet waiter at the Golden Nugget back in the 80s, had lived with his family in the Inlet since the early 1990s, and had been in his house well over a decade when work began on the gargantuan Revel, and the South Inlet was turned into the biggest construction site New Jersey.

More about: Atlantic City, casino, Glenn Straub, rebuilding atlantic city, redevelopment, Revel, sewerage, South Inlet

In Atlantic City, Kick a Lifeguard, Win a Prize

By |

Socialism for billionaires, free-enterprise for the average Joe

My old friend the fat-cat retired Atlantic City lifeguard pension profiteer is in the news again in this season of “shared sacrifice” here in our fabled Queen of Resorts, this time in the pages of the New York Times, where he’s presented as a symbol, I perceive, of the outrageous greed and excess at the heart of our dilapidated republic. Novice economists might suppose this greed and excess was  concentrated within our citadels of high finance, or among the titans of industry—in this case the casino gambling industry—who so enriched themselves while leaving a string of empty eyesores atop our most important natural resource (the beach and boardwalk). This would be incorrect. Our problems here in Atlantic City—generations in the making—are not the result of a concentration of political power in the hands of financiers or gambling moguls, but rather to the unrestrained avarice of our municipal working class. John Steinbeck, that great chronicler of the American everyman, once wrote that socialism never took root in our native soils because the American proletariat does not identify as an exploited working class.

More about: Atlantic City, Homepage Featured, opinion, Atlantic City, Bernie Sanders, billionaires, Donald Trump, lifeguard