TOWN WATCH
EAST ORANGE / ORANGE – Britnee Timberlake (D-East Orange), who has been assemblywoman in the “Old 34th State Legislative District,” is seeking to become state senator in the “New 34th LD.”
Timberlake, who succeeded Lt. Governor-Elect Sheila Y. Oliver (D-East Orange) in a special 2017 election, has reportedly filed senatorial campaign paperwork with the state Election Law Enforcement Commission Feb. 21.
The former Essex County then-Freeholder / now-Commissioner had been representing East Orange, Orange, Montclair and Passaic County’s Clifton in the “Old 34th” – along with Assemblyman Tom Giblin and State Senator Nia Gill (both D-Montclair).
The 2021-22 state redistricting, however, has returned Glen Ridge, added Bloomfield, Belleville and Nutley and spun off Montclair and Clifton. Former Timberlake colleagues Gill and Giblin are now facing other incumbents in a new 27th LD.
Essex County and State Democratic Committee Chairman LeRoy Jones, also of East Orange, will be talking with party officials in the New 34th’s six towns about finding Timberlake’s General Assembly successor for the 2023 campaign.
All 120 N.J. General Assembly and State Senate seats are up for voters approval this year.
NEWARK – The Essex County Democratic Committee will have to come up with a successor to Rufus Johnson since his Feb. 3 announcement that he is retiring from the County Board of Commissioners.
Johnson (D-Newark), who was first elected to his at-large office in 2008, said he will not campaign with his other eight colleagues this year and will retire when his term expires on Jan. 1, 2024. He had considered retiring in 2020 but ran – and was elected – to one more three-year term.
Johnson, outside of the Hall of Records, worked as a legislative aide. He was an aide to Sen. Ronald L. Rice when he was on the Newark Municipal Council 1998-2006 and in his 27th Legislative District field office here. Rice (D-Newark) retired last year to focus on his health.
Johnson had also been an aide to West Ward Councilman Joseph McCallum. McCallum resigned last year in anticipation of a bribery trial. A New Jersey Superior Court jury found McCallum guilty; he is currently serving his sentence.
The former West Ward Young Democrats president had also served on the local Habitat for Humanity directors board. He had founded and had coached for Newark’s Optimist Club Little League and Pop Warner Football team.
The Newark Public Schools product attended Essex County College and Ohio’s Wilberforce University. He was also an Our Lady of Good Counsel boys’ basketball coach.
The entire slate of commissioners – four at-large and one in each of five wards – are up for voter consideration this year.
IRVINGTON / MAPLEWOOD – New Jersey American Water customers may have already noticed changes in its water appearance and higher water bills since at least Feb. 13.
NJAW has notified its customers who are served by its Canal Road Treatment plant in Raritan and Raritan-Millstone Treatment Plant that they will likely experience discolored and a chlorinated taste with its water from Feb. 20 through April 30.
The Camden-headquartered utility said that the “slight taste and smell” is temporary while it makes its annual disinfectant change at the said two plants. The water’s interim 11-week condition will last until the disinfectant maintenance has been completed.
Customers are advised that they can reduce the taste by refrigerating a container of the water overnight. It should be noted that Irvington and Maplewood are on the Essex County fringe of the plants’ territories. NJAW customers in Middlesex, Morris, Union, Somerset, Hunterdon and Mercer counties would be more likely affected.
All NJAW customers, starting with their Feb. 13 bill, will be handed a Lead Service Line Replacement charge. The state Board of Public Utilities surcharge is to recover $3.7 million the company has so far spent on its LSLR program. NJAW has to file semiannual reports with the state board on how the surcharge funds are applied.
It is not immediately known whether or when the utility will conduct its LSLR in Irvington or Maplewood.
WEST ORANGE – The West Orange High School Mountaineers boys fencing team was able to host Jersey City’s McNair High School here Feb. 16 thanks in part to a joint law enforcement search for a “generic bomb threat.”
Interim Superintendent of Schools Dr. Lauren Schoen and Assistant Superintendent Hayden Moore said that the high school’s main office promptly called the West Orange Police Department and the Essex County Sheriff’s Office after the threat was perceived earlier that Thursday.
“This threat was shared on a student’s social media group chat,” said Schoen and Moore in their joint statement. “While WOHS was not mentioned specifically, the threat alluded to an athletic event taking place later that afternoon in the high school.”
Arriving WOPD and county sheriff’s officers promptly sealed off the Tarnoff Gymnasium from the rest of the high school building. The sheriff’s K9 unit searched the gym until “no evidence of a bomb or other threat was found at the high school.”
Police and sheriff’s detectives are looking for any connection to the Jan. 30 search of school buses, conducted at the West Orange Public Schools parking lot, that are used by the Roosevelt Middle School. They had acted on an Instagram group chat where an individual talked about bombing a late afternoon bus.
No bombs were found on those buses.
SOUTH ORANGE – Assemblywoman Mila Jasey, by announcing Feb. 7 that she will not seek re-election this year, will be ending 23 years of public service to the village and the outgoing 27th State Legislature District.
The former South Orange-Maplewood Board of Education member, along with West Orange’s John McKeon and Roseland’s Richard Codey, have been familiar names on the Democratic primary and General Election ballots since 2007. Jasey won a special election to succeed Assemblyman Mims Hackett after he resigned due to his bribery conviction while as Orange’s mayor.
Jasey, in 2010, authored the Interdistrict Public School Choice Program – a bill that had eased the transition of private or religious schools to become charter schools. The former Link Community School and former St. Phillips Academy, both in Newark, had been beneficiaries of her bill.
Jasey, however, becomes the 10th state legislator, and the first in “Local Talk” Land, to retire in advance of the 2023 election campaign.
The 2021-22 state legislative district had redrawn Jasey’s South Orange and Maplewood from the “Old 27th LD” into the New 28th District. The village and township are now integral with Irvington, Newark’s “southwest” and Vailsburg-West wards plus Union County’s Hillside.
Jasey, until Feb. 7, found herself being potentially pitted against established 28th LD Assembly Members Cleopatra Tucker and whoever will succeed Ralph Caputo. Caputo (D-Nutley) has been redrawn into the New 34th LD.
Irvington’s Renee Burgess is expected to run for her first elected LD28 State Senate term since being appointed to succeed Sen. Ronald L. Rice, of Newark, since his retirement last year.
BLOOMFIELD – A Newark man has until his Bloomfield Municipal Court appearance to perhaps ask himself whether fighting over a parking space here on Feb. 9 was worth it.
That Thursday’s blotter had patrol officers arrive along Berkeley Avenue to find one man with a stab wound under one of his arms and a man – identified as John Calandrillo, 42, of Newark – standing nearby. They were summoned on the report of “a fight involving a knife.”
There were also several witnesses who told police that Calandrillo and the other man had “a verbal altercation” over a parking space. That argument, they said, ended when Calandrillo stabbed the victim with a knife.
The officers’ field investigation found a knife on the ground that matched the witnesses and victim’s description. They took that weapon and Calandrillo into custody.
Calandrillo was charged with at least simple assault and released later that day.
MONTCLAIR – Township Council, in a pair of introductory resolutions approved here Feb. 8, is about to get the hook on embattled and suspended Town Manager Timothy Stafford.
Theater managers used a hooked staff to pull a failing performer off stage. Performers for “Showtime At The Apollo” would get something similar when the Sandman would escort them to the back. “Get the hook” has since meant to get dismissed or fired.
The council passed both resolutions past midnight Feb. 8 5-0. The first would end the paid administrative leave Stafford has been on since Oct. 26. The other would keep him suspended but with a notice that he can “be subject to removal” in 30 days.
The council first put Stafford on paid leave after CFO Padmaja Rao filed a hostile workplace and whistleblower retaliation lawsuit against Staffords and the township. A second similar employee suit has since been filed and the sworn statements from two other employees have since been publicized.
Rao, in January, added Mayor Sean Spiller’s name as a respondent.
Although both resolutions are subject to next month’s final vote, the state administrative Faulkner Act has started a countdown clock on moving Stafford from paid leave to unpaid suspension. The act allows Stafford to collect up to three months’ salary as severance.
Stafford may leave with up to six months’ salary, depending on what negotiations and/or litigation may take place.
GLEN RIDGE – What borough police officers found along one of Glen Ridge’s streets early Feb. 14 was taken away by a Newark police-contracted flatbed tow truck later that Tuesday.
A car found parked and unoccupied along the 700 block of Bloomfield Avenue at 3 a.m. first got patrolling officers’ attention.
There is no overnight curbside parking allowed in Glen Ridge. Bloomfield Avenue is also an Essex County road.
The officers ran a license plate check – and discovered that the vehicle’s registered owner, a Newark resident, had been reported as missing.
Newark Police Division officers arrived on scene and called for a tow truck. Newark has taken over the vehicle and the investigation.
Details – including how the car got here, whether anyone saw the driver and/or the missing person’s identity – have not been disclosed as of press time.
BELLEVILLE – The fate of the former Irvine-Cozzarrelli Funeral Home, of “The Sopranos” fame at 276 Washington Ave., now rests with a final vote from the Township Council since Feb. 9.
Belleville’s Planning Board accepted Daugherty Planning & Development’s recommendation to designate 274-78 Washington Ave., its 272 Washington Ave. driveway and the 1.5-story house behind it at 163 Valley St as a “non-condemnable area in need of redevelopment.”
The township’s planners and the Township Council will now wait to see what plans the property owner, Premier Developers, of Englewood Cliffs, will come up for the 1887 funeral home and 1897 house. Premier has been building The Essex – a 158 unit, five-story apartment building on a former used car lot at 102 Washington Ave.
There are residents and neighbors who are concerned that 276 Washington Ave., after decades of care by the Irvine and Cozzarellis, will be replaced by something similar to The Essex. Such a plan would demolish the funeral parlor celebrated as the setting for several “Sopranos” scenes.
One concern about Feb. 9’s vote is whether Mayor Michael Melham and At-Lage Councilman Thomas Graziano had voted their approval Feb. 9 or had abstained. Both have votes on the nine-member planning board.
Some observers believe that Melham should have abstained Feb. 9 like he and De Pena should have Sept. 27.
Melham, Deputy Mayor Naomy DePena and Councilman John Notari had prevailed in a 3-2-2 Sept. 27 council vote that granted Daugherty the AINOR study contract. Graziano and Third Ward Councilman Vincent Cozzarrelli abstained; First Ward Councilwoman and Second Ward Councilman Steve Rovell noted “No.”
Melham, DePena and Garziano were honorees of a Feb. 18, 2022 cocktail party thrown by Premier as “A Better Belleville” campaign fundraiser.
NUTLEY – Township Fire Department HAZMAT crews and DPW employees have been analyzing what chemical was dumped into a branch of The Third River here – and who did the dumping – since Jan. 26.
Nutley HAZMAT was promptly called to Booth Park, where the tributary converges with The Third River, about “an oily sheen” being seen. The emergency crew deployed absorbent booms to contain and collect the film.
Nutley DPW workers meanwhile checked storm drains that feed the tributary along Stager Street between Ravine Street and as far west as Franklin Avenue.
They were also looking for evidence that would tie the petroleum-based slick to a dumper.
“All of our stormwater catch basins eventually empty into the Third and Passaic rivers,” said Mayor Joseph P. Scapelli “Contaminants entering the Passaic River watershed adversely affect fish and other wildlife in and around the rivers. I advise residents not to dump or throw any waste into our catch basins in an effort to avoid polluting our waterways.”
The person or persons who dumped or have dumped into waterways are subject to state and local fines plus cleanup costs under the N.J. Pollution Control Act. The fines and restitution covers dumped leaves and trash.
The Third River in Nutley is also called the Yantecaw River. It empties into the Passaic in Clifton, just north of the Nutley border.
