Route 40 (https://rtforty.com/category/watchdog/)
Asking questions and holding South Jersey’s elected officials and government bodies to account.
Atlantic City’s proposed design for a microgrid to generate power in the event of a blackout is three times more costly than other designs for microgrids proposed across the state. And unlike other towns’ proposals, the only critical building Atlantic City’s microgrid would power is the hospital.
Atlantic City’s syringe exchange program has operated for more than a decade from a downtown office building just a few blocks from the city’s casinos. Back when the South Jersey Aids Alliance started offering clean needles from the Oasis Drop-in Center in 2007, the site was in the Central Business District. We requested property records from the city and the Casino Reinvestment Development Authority, which oversees planning in the district. The city’s most recent document for the property (posted below) shows it as having the present use “office building”. Neither CRDA or the city had any certificate of land use compliance on file for the property, at 32 S Tennessee Ave.
A New Jersey audit of the Casino Reinvestment Development Authority that begun almost two years ago is finally nearing completion. The office of the state auditor will send its report to CRDA on May 21 and it will be made public around June 11, after the Authority has had time to make an official response. CRDA, based in Atlantic City, controls more than $300 million in assets and is one of New Jersey’s most important entities.
DCO Energy, a company controlled by the Jingoli family, won a six-month contract to report on the feasibility of establishing a “microgrid” to support Atlantic City facilities in the event of a regional electrical grid failure.
New Jersey’s State Auditor’s office is close to publishing its long-awaited report on the Casino Reinvestment Development Authority.
The Casino Reinvestment Development Authority board will discuss issues related to public safety in the Atlantic City Tourism District in a closed session following its public meeting on Tuesday afternoon.
The Casino Reinvestment Development Authority is preparing to sell off some of its Atlantic City real estate holdings, according to documents filed on its website.
“The CRDA seeks an experienced professional firm to market and auction surplus real property owned by the Authority and no longer necessary for its operations,” says the request for proposal. The real estate to be auctioned off ranges from a half-block package in the Inlet with a valuation of $6 million, to a $300 non-buildable alley on North Massachusetts Ave.
Outside interests with deep pockets want a say in Atlantic City’s mayoral election – why? We dug deep into the campaign filings made by Democratic Mayoral Candidate Frank Gilliam during his primary run and found some clues.
New Jersey’s Division of Law has spent $6.3 million with six consulting and law firms hired for projects related to Atlantic City’s oversight since March 2015, according to invoices released in response to a public records request. The invoices are heavily redacted so it is hard to glean details of the lucrative advisory work, but they show that many more thousands of dollars have been spent on unspecified consulting and takeover-related litigation than on monetizing Atlantic City’s few remaining assets. Just over half of that money was spent with Ernst & Young, which was hired in 2015 to analyze the city’s finances. The West Orange law firm Chiesa, Shahinian & Giantomasi, which was appointed by the state in November to run Atlantic City has charged $2.4 million for six months of work on everything from city council agendas to waste management and litigation, the documents show. You can download a copy of the database compiled by Route 40, with links to each invoice, here.
New Jersey’s Casino Reinvestment Development Authority has awarded pay increases to close to one third of its employees, in some cases raising salaries by tens of thousands of dollars, even as it cut jobs earlier this year citing budget constraints.
The State Auditor’s office is in the final stages of a probe of finances and performance at Atlantic City’s Casino Reinvestment Development Authority, after a longer-than-expected investigation. Auditors from the office began looking into CRDA’s books and records last year for the first time in the Authority’s history. “It’s taking a little bit more time than we initially thought,” said John Termyna, assistant state auditor, in an interview last month. “It became more comprehensive,” he said, adding the extended investigation was “because of some of the things that we got into.” Termyna said he would not go into details about the findings of the audit before it is published.
