Worried About Health Care Repeal, Advocates Hold Vigil Outside LoBiondo HQ

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On Wednesday night, a couple of dozen people gathered outside Rep. Frank LoBiondo’s office in Mays Landing. They were there to protest the repeal of the Affordable Care Act without any replacement plan. “Prior to the Affordable Care Act, we couldn’t afford insurance,” Jenna Alcantara, a small-business owner from Mullica Township told one of the staff at LoBiondo’s office. “To have this be where it is, is very scary to somebody like me.” (You can see an interview with Alcantara in the video below).

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How Would You Spend $1.56 mln on Atlantic City?

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New Jersey’s Department of Community Affairs (DCA) paid the accounting firm Ernst & Young $1.56 million through September last year to “analyze” Atlantic City’s finances, according to some sleuthing by The Press of Atlantic City’s Christian Hetrick. We are sure that a lot of people in and around Atlantic City have better ideas for how they could use that money. Tell us what you would do with it! We will compile thoughtful suggestions into a post and send it to the DCA. Loading…

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Takeover Tango

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New Jersey’s sinister Department of Community Affairs (if that is, in fact, its real name) has hired Jason Holt to assist in its work of taking over and fixing the grave mess that is the Atlantic City municipal government. This is a curious hiring decision, since, up until a few days ago, Holt had been business administrator for–wait for it–the municipal government of Atlantic City itself, which raises a question or two. Was the Atlantic City government really incompetent, as Governor Christie has repeatedly asserted? And if so, why is the State Department of Community of Affairs hiring the city’s allegedly incompetent personnel to staff its takeover team? By sheer luck, the Philadelphia Inquirer’s Amy Rosenberg seems to have wondered the same thing and reports that a spokesman for Christie, “declined to answer a question about whether Holt’s hire undercut repeated assertions by Christie that Atlantic City’s government was incompetent.”

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Original Spartans

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Dr. John Baker and Dr. Fred Dalzell worked the sidelines of Holy Spirit High School football games for parts of five decades. The prominent South Jersey orthopedic surgeon John Baker likes to talk about the time he met the eminent South Jersey high school football coach Ed Byrnes to talk about becoming the team doctor for the Holy Spirit Spartans. In New Jersey, state law requires high school football teams to have medical staff on-hand in case of injury. At most schools, this is a paid position, but Holy Spirit in the late 1970s was running its program on a shoestring, and Coach Byrnes was looking for volunteers. Baker was a young doctor, recently transplanted to South Jersey from St.

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Socktober Surprise

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Students at Frog Pond Elementary School in Little Egg Harbor donated 821 pairs of socks to Covenant House, a homeless shelter for homeless youth, in Atlantic City earlier this month. The idea to collect the socks came fromKerry Gunn, who teaches fifth grade at the school and showed her students a facebook video by Kid President Robby Novak, who pointed out that socks (according to some metrics) are among the most-needed and least-donated clothing items. Gunn said she presented the idea to her fellow fifth-grade teachers who supported it. “We called this service project, ‘Socktober–Kids Helping Kids,’” she said, in a statement. In response to a series of questions (“Who donated the most socks? Why’d that person have so many socks?

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Emma

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Two weeks ago we went to the “executive sleep out” at Covenant House, where they like to say that the least interesting thing about their kids is the fact that they’re homeless. This is Emma. She ran away from an abusive situation at home and ended up living in her car. That’s the dark place she mentions. She lived in her car for about two and a half months, then came to the shelter, where she’s been going to school and to her (two) jobs in Atlantic City.

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Kellie

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Kellie is a mother, homeowner and casino worker. She’s also lost two young family members to gun violence. One of them was her 13-year-old son, who was murdered in 2012. Her nephew, 17, was killed this year. She has another child, 9, that she worries about.

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