Stockton
Claire Lowe at the Press has fun details on Stockton’s expansion plans in Atlantic City, which include demolishing the old Eldridge building to build dorms that would create a true university feel.
I live in the neighborhood and it doesn’t feel too university-ish now, for what it’s worth. I mean I’ve yet to see a professor in a bow-tie, or a flying Model T go warbling and gurgling overhead, which is what I’d been trained to expect university life to look like from the movies. But it’s early days.
In related news, Mel Taylor has a radio clip of Dennis Levinson the other day and the county exec says there will be 10,000 kids in Atlantic City, “before too long” and it hasn’t cost the taxpayers a “red cent.”
Setting aside the curious idea that it’s “liberal progressive professors” or something who are profiteering off the Stockton project, the Atlantic County Improvement Authority issued $125 million in debt to build the Atlantic City campus. Given that the school operated at a $100 million loss last year and was warned by Moody’s and Fitch over its own debt load back in 2016, it’s more like you were a co-signer on the absent-minded professor’s mortgage application.
Speed Limit
Elsewhere in cities, Nanette LoBiondo reports that Ventnor is planning to introduce an ordinance to reduce the speed limit to 25 mph on Atlantic Avenue and paint a bike lane. Right now they’re the lone holdouts at 35 mph.
“A change in the city’s traffic ordinance will ensure the entire stretch of Atlantic Avenue, which spans all of Absecon Island and travels past the new Stockton University Boardwalk campus, will have the same speed limit,” NanLo reports.
SpaceTeam
For reasons I still don’t understand everyone jumped yesterday on a story about a bill introduced by Chris Brown, Vin Gopal and Jim Beach back in January to create a nine-member Atlantic City International Airport Spaceport Feasibility Study Commission to look into turning the airport into a space facility capable of launching very affluent persons into low-altitude orbit, which when you put it that was is not such a bad idea after all.
Check that, I see it’s only “sub-orbital” flights, per this NJ.com story. So I guess I’m a no.
[Edit’s note: Route 40 will not be publishing Thursday or Friday of this week.]
For more feats of journalism…
Gilmore a ‘spendthrift,’ but not a tax cheat, lawyer says–TRENTON — Ocean County Republican Chairman George Gilmore is terrible with money, was always in debt and developed a “way of life” of paying his taxes late, his lawyer said Tuesday. www.politico.com
More condoms, fewer cigarettes found in annual N.J. beach cleanup–SANDY HOOK — Volunteers cleaning up New Jersey beaches last year found everything but the kitchen sink. Oh wait, they found one of those, too. www.pressofatlanticcity.com
94%–In the decade between 2007 and 2017, New Jersey made considerable progress in reducing the number of children in foster care who were placed in group homes; the number went from 1,739 (19 percent) to 332 (6 percent). www.njspotlight.com
Husband-and-wife contractors pocketed $700K in repair money–A Manahawkin couple was arrested for pocketing nearly $700,000 they got from homeowners and subcontractors that they were supposed to use to make Hurricane Sandy-related repairs on houses, the Ocean County Prosecutor’s Office. www.nj.com