Gulls
The Seagull Classic is this weekend. Who remembers those old ads on Channel 2 with Tom Williams doing the voice work? Mike McGarry at the Press has a cool story about Milt Wagner who put up 52 for Camden in the basketball tourney in 1980.
Clerks
A group of City of Atlantic City clerks is seeking a pay raise after the city hired three new clerks at a higher starting salary, Amanda Auble at the Press reports.
The new, highfalutin clerks get paid $25,535 per year. I don’t know what the old clerks get except it’s less than that so, for perspective, Bob Mulcahy gets $13,000-a-month for whatever he did before he joined the board of the CRDA, so you could hire six clerks out of his pension.
Overlords
Elsewhere in City of Atlantic governance, Nanette LoBiondo has a story on the new CFO, Toro Aboderin, who was hired from Ventnor to replace Michael Stinson, at the recommendation of Cynthia Lindsay of the state’s DCA (our benevolent overlords).
There were some interesting questions at the city council meeting from Mo Delgado and Jesse Kurtz about what it meant that Aboderin was being hired as CFO rather than as a Director of Revenue and Finance, and how she would be paid.
Mo in particular said something about the change from a “traditional municipal” format to a “corporate” framework where the city is being run “like a corporation.” If I’m not mistaken, this was the context for Marty Small’s comments that the state was exerting its full takeover powers, which caused so much hullaballoo on the Twitter yesterday.
Any con-law scholars out there who want to weigh in should hit us up via email or Twitter.
As a side note, we’ve been adding up the bond fees the city pays to lawyers and investment bankers every time it issues debt and this is actually an incredibly sexy-looking spreadsheet.
Somebody put out a paper a few years back saying the average issuance cost was about 1.02% of the bonds’ principal. I wonder what Atlantic City pays.
I don’t know what a CFO does but presumably she won’t be issuing new shares.
Vigil honors Atlantic City man killed on New Year’s–Friends and family gathered Thursday at the spot where Lamir Jack King. The vigil at Lincoln and Ohio avenues began at 6:30 p.m., the moment the 21-year-old was pronounced dead New Year’s Day. breakingac.com
N.J. city is fighting a ‘wave of gentrification’ with these free lawyers–Newark has laid the groundwork to ensure low-income tenants facing evictions have free legal representation in court as of the summer -- an ambitious move by the city as long-term residents worry they’ll be displaced by new development. www.nj.com
William Paterson forms Cannabis Institute–William Paterson University has formed a new institute to provide scientific and economic information on topics related to cannabis as well as opioids and other drug substances, it announced Thursday. www.roi-nj.com
Legalizing weed and raising N.J. minimum wage to be hashed out again in meeting between Murphy and top Dems–New Jersey’s top three elected state officials are planning to resume negotiations next week on long-delayed proposals to increase the minimum wage and legalize marijuana in the state, NJ Advance Media has learned. www.nj.com
This $4M chunk of N.J. will never be developed. It’s for the birds.–About 2,000 acres of bird habitat along the southern New Jersey coast will never hear the rumble of a dump truck, feel the weight of a strip mall, or experience any sort of development, thanks to nonprofit organizations. www.nj.com
WHO STANDS TO GAIN FROM NEWLY-CREATED OPPORTUNITY ZONES IN NJ?–New Jersey tops the nation for potential developments in so-called Opportunity Zones. Of the 8,000 such locations across the country, created under the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017, the state has 169. The program offers tax breaks to those who invest, build, and create jobs in low-income and economically distressed areas. www.njspotlight.com