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Good Idea Alert: Foodshed Alliance

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Alright – is everyone listening? This is a good idea alert! I was reading the Roxbury Register online the other day and they had an editorial sent in from a Ms. Tamara Scully. Ms. Scully is a member of the Foodshed Alliance. According to their website, the Foodshed Alliance:

a grassroots, non-profit devoted to promoting profitable, sustainable farming and locally-grown, fresh, healthy food in northwestern New Jersey. We believe that the future of our health, our land, and our communities depends, to great extent, on the existence of local farms-that farmers are the keystone to our connection with our food, the land and our sense of place.

Anyone who is interested in this “going green” movement and the idea of making our bodies and lives healthier by eating sustainable foods should check out the Foodshed Alliance at www.foodshedalliance.org. It sounds interesting to me and is definitely something that I’ll be sure to look into the next time I’m up in the Northwest New Jersey area. When I was a little bit younger I had the chance to eat some home grown fruits and vegetables from Northwest New Jersey and they were good!

Anyway, check it out.

Following Up with the Dueling Reports in Mt. Arlington

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Here’s a quick follow-up op-ed that appeared in today’s Daily Record newspaper with respect to finding some way to lower property taxes in Mount Arlington. For those of you that are not up to curve on this issue, here is a previous entry that talks about what the proposal was in Mount Arlington (to eliminate their police force and share services with a neighboring squad). The op-ed as it appears in the Daily Record:

Mount Arlington officials have regrettably caved to pressure and tabled a reasonable idea to seek a cost savings by contracting with a larger town for police services. The plan would have eliminated the borough’s 13-member police force.

Opposition to the idea, which was intense, largely was based on misconceptions, the biggest being a belief that police service in the borough would have been reduced. Officials had no intention of doing that.

Of course, some criticism was legitimate. The report, which was done by former Washington Township Police Chief Ted Ehrenburg, seemed a little light for its cost of $43,500. Also, the council at times irritated opponents by not being more forthcoming with information about the plan.

Notwithstanding those problems, Mayor Art Ondish and the council were right to raise the issue. The mayor says he thinks he was ahead of the curve, and we agree with him.

If property taxes are ever going to be reduced, officials and residents have got to accept the fact that it can not be business as usual. The majority of residents who came out on this issue lacked vision, opting to remain trapped in traditional thinking. And politics being what it is, they got their way.

Over time, however, pressure to consolidate services, or even towns, is bound to increase. We may even see a day when such consolidations are ordered by the state.

“It’s going to happen in the future, It’s just not going to happen with this council in Mount Arlington,” Ondish said. That’s a shame.

Sorry, I had to post the entire thing because these Gannett newspapers are not making their online archives available any more. Rats!

Dueling Reports: What to Do About the MAPD…

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Last week the Mount Arlington, New Jersey, Township Council released a report from an independent consulting firm called Blue Shield Consulting Services. The purpose of commissioning the report was to ascertain whether or not the Mount Arlington Police Department should be merged with one of the surrounding localities. Since I grew up in Mount Arlington and my family still lives there (and I visit there quite often and have even thought about moving back at some point), I have some comments on this issue. But first, the rest of the story….

The report suggested that it would save Mount Arlington multiple millions of dollars to consolidate their police force with an adjoining municipality. There is a grassroots organization based out of Roxbury that disagrees, though (I think it’s Roxbury – the founder lives in Roxbury, but is a former Mount Arlington resident – not sure what the deal is here). On their website (saveMAPD.com), they show that they’ve got around 1140 signatures on an online petition. The problem with this, though, is that some of these petition signers are not Mount Arlington residents, but instead they are former residents like I am.

The folks behind saveMAPD.com commissioned a counter report that (obviously) disagreed with the Blue Shield Consulting Services report. As a side note, this just goes to show you that in the academic and consulting worlds you can get anyone to write you a report using facts that support your case! I think that’s obviously what happened with the saveMAPD.com folks, but I wonder if that’s how the Township Council prefaced their conversation with Blue Shield Consulting Services. Who knows this information besides those who are actually behind closed doors, right?

Anyway, that’s not my gripe with this situation. In fact, I don’t think I have a gripe with the situation as much as I have two comments to make about it all. First, the fact that consolidation of a police department that covers a few square miles is a debated issue has got to have our friends out in the Midwest and South rolling over with laughter. To those folks I say, “Welcome, friends, to New Jersey! This is a state that is made up of 566 fiefdoms that each fight, scratch, and claw for their territory! This is the state of the political bosses and good old boy system. This is – New Jersey!”

My second point is that you have to wonder about the legitimacy of the Township Council’s position on the consolidation. They’ve taken the stance that consolidating will save the township money. Okay, fine. As a student of public policy the very first thing you learn about taxes and local municipalities (and state governments for that matter) is that once they raise a tax rate, they NEVER lower it! Sure, you may have a few extreme examples from around the nation, but the chances of this “saved money” from the consolidation equating to a lower tax rate is slim at best.

So you have to competing sides arguing for two inherently awkward positions. New Jersey should be much more regionalized when it comes to service provisions. If done correctly, this would ease costs and (more importantly for those of us who live in the state) put an end to the abuse of power that is prevalent in the local police forces around New Jersey. At the same time, there will always be people who fight against regionalization because it means that some jurisdiction is going to lose some measure of power. Further, some folks will have hurt feelings about losing fiefdom-specific services.

My issue is that no matter what happens the one thing that you can be sure of is that the tax rate will NOT go down – and THAT, folks, is something worth getting mad about.

The Syrian Community in Deal, NJ

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Anyone who has lived in Deal, New Jersey that does not practice the Jewish religion has likely been in awe at one point or another at the local and summer communities. This is a large Jewish community that is – by and large – very devoted to their faith and to the strengthening of their community as a whole. Many of us non-Jewish folks who live in town have become friendly with the locals (to some degree), but we all know that they treat us a little bit differently than they treat those who are members of their own faith – and we’re all pretty cool with that.

A few years ago, one of us non-Jewish folks found a book called Postville that shed a LOT of light on many of the business and religious traditions that we see everyday in Deal. Actually, the retired woman who found this book used to be one of my co-workers in an office that was owned by another Jewish guy who just fascinated by the locals. And, believe it or not, she directed me to a recent New York Times Magazine article about the community!

The folks over at the New York Times Magazine put together a GREAT article on the larger Syrian Jewish community that owns a good portion of town and operates between here and Brooklyn, NY. The article is a great look at some of the big players in the community and how the community views themselves in comparison to the rest of the Jewish religion.

This is really a great, educational article and I encourage everyone to take a read of it when you get a chance.

Monmouth University & Long Branch to Formalize Invasion of Student Rights

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Today’s Atlanticville had an article about “improving relations” between Monmouth University and its surrounding municipalities – namely Long Branch. I love Long Branch and I think some exciting and creative things are going on over there. I’m also a university alumnus who fought vociferously for students’ rights while an undergraduate. I consider myself privileged to continue that fight as I get older and move up and on through the game of life.

But what always gets me is how the students at Monmouth, by and large, don’t care about this fight. Taken from today’s Atlanticville:

Hayes told the council that the city and the university will be taking their partnership one step further this year and will be sharing information on the addresses of students living off campus.

“We have been able to make some significant headway,” Hayes said at the meeting. “It looks like the university will be willing to share some information with us about where students are housed, for the purpose of safety.”

Anyone who knows the story about the people involved here know that this has nothing to do with student safety. Kevin Hayes is the head of the inspection department in Long Branch. He’s been sued time and time again by local landlords for not granting Certificates of Occupancy for completely well-groomed and maintained houses. And not that it should matter in this particular case, but Hayes’ son was a Long Branch police officer who was one of the major causes of problems between the off-campus students and Long Branch. Hayes, Jr. and another young police officer in Long Branch were shaking down minority students in their off-campus homes and raiding their drug caches…so THEY could sell it on their own!

Of course they got no prison time because they’re politically-connected and this is New Jersey, but it makes me sick to read that the students “get a little better every year” when there are deep, troubling problems on both sides of the argument.

But when you have a student body that doesn’t give a hoot, what are you to do to stop these injustices? Re-read that selection from the article above – that’s illegal, folks. Going to school at a college does not permit that college to share your information with the local police force – especially when that police force has been sued in the past for being overzealous in their enforcement against college students and when they’ve even had to remove officers for shaking students down!

The university surely won’t tell the students anything about this – they relish the fact that 99% of the university community are lemmings who do what they’re told and (even worse) believe what they’re told. This is a tragic reality not just at Monmouth, but many of today’s private colleges and universities. You want to read something even more disgusting?

“If a student is involved in an issue of misconduct off campus, the police will send a copy of the report to us and I will review it,” Nagy said. “We will charge the student under the code of conduct. The student will go through the city’s court and through the Monmouth University court.

“The student is charged twice,” Nagy said. “Just because you do not physically live on campus does not mean you can do whatever you want. A student’s actions affect our reputation.”

That’s right folks – forget about your 5th amendment rights against double jeopardy! You get charged TWICE for the same “crime” in this circus! And having been through that rodeo once or twice, I can tell you that the school’s judicial officers know that this is illegal. Students are often cited by the local police on a Thursday night and expected to go through the university judicial process within a week or two when their actual court date is a month or more away. In essence, the school attempts to find you guilty before the United States legal system!

When you bring this up to the university, they cite their student code of conduct. Most students (with a head on their shoulders) then cite their Constitutional rights. The university ALWAYS comes back with the fact that they are a private university and do not need to respect those rights…which is a lie thanks to President Clinton. President Clinton signed something called the Higher Education Amendments of 1998 which snuck in the provision that if a private university receives ANY federal funding, they MUST respect the Constitutional rights of the students.

That’s generally when you get the university to sit down and start tapping their foot.

But what does it matter? Civil rights have gotten so bad in the Long Branch/Ocean Township area that an article like this can actually be published, describing how the entities intend on destroying students’ rights, and no one will do anything about it. Watch – we’ll get another edition of the Atlanticville next week and there will be no student response…

There’s just no passion any more in undergraduates.