TOWN WATCH
EAST ORANGE – While N.J. Department of Education officials investigate how the East Orange School District’s 2024-25 budget got into an $8-to-$25 million deficit so early in the school year, Superintendent of Schools Dr. Christopher Irving, in a recent rare interview, explained what he knew and how early he knew it.
Irving, who took the EOSD helm July 1, told THIRTEEN/NJTV Oct. 22 that he began to notice that “what we budgeted for didn’t match the amount of expenditures that we were going to have as we rolled over to the year. It wasn’t until the first September payroll that we realized that, if we left everything where it was, if all expenses remained where they were, we’re going to be short at the end of the (school) year.”
The district, explained the superintendent on “NJ Spotlight,” was on a self-imposed hiring and spending freeze “and the request to release those freezes” when he came in. He composed “my team, who started our own assessment,” who discovered around Labor Day of the budget spending imbalance.
Irving added that the $25 million deficit first announced at the Oct. 16 school board meeting was the projected figure if the city’s public educators did nothing. That deficit has been projected to $8 million should its 93 layoffs or transfers take place as the board of education passed that Wednesday night.
The affected employees – most of whom are represented by the East Orange Education Association – include 71 teachers and aides and four other workers. Another 18 employees would be reassigned to lower pay grade positions. He later said that he is attempting to anticipate “20 percent increase” in health care insurance in January plus cost hikes in transportation, food service and out-of-district student placements.
A volume of teachers and other EOSD employees called out sick Oct. 17 and 18, prompting the district to hold only half-days. NJDOE, who faulted the district for not advising them of the deficit, is leaning towards loaning the $8 million repayable by a 30-year bond issue — as the agency had done for Nutley and Belleville. There has been no indication that NJDOE would take control of the district – like it did Newark for 27 years, Jersey City and Paterson.
Paterson Public Schools had meanwhile held a virtual job fair Oct. 23 to fill 123 of its certified vacancies. Irving is a Paterson native, a PPS graduate and had held that district’s leadership positions before coming here by way of NJDOE’s Trenton headquarters.
NEWARK – Laura L. Cuevas, who died Oct. 26 of injuries suffered in an Oct. 23 car crash in front of Arts High School, was remembered at her Oct. 30 Janaazah prayer service as a dedicated Newark Public Schools art teacher.
Cuevas, who was born in Irvington Sept. 1, 1956, came out of retirement to teach art at the East Ward Elementary School in The Ironbound. The Pre-Kindergarten-through Seventh Grade school was founded in the old Oliver Street School in 2019.
Cuevas and a fellow teacher were going to Arts High for part of a district-wide staff development day, with students being given the day off, Oct. 23. She was rushed to University Hospital after she was pinned between the high school wall and a car that went out of control after a two-car collision on Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Boulevard that Wednesday morning.
A prayer service and burial were held at East Hanover’s Restland Memorial Park. Arrangements were made by Irvington’s Firdous Funeral Home.
The late Laura Cuevas is not to be confused with the still alive Laura Cuevas, of Jersey City The latter Cuevas is an Irvington High School graduate who teaches art in Bergen County and an exhibited sculptor.
Newark police and the ECPO Homicide-Major Crimes Task Force are investigating the Oct. 23 crash. Neither driver have been charged as of Nov. 5.
IRVINGTON – Demetrios H. “Jimmy” Korkovelos, 89, the man behind Jimmy’s Snack Bar counters here and in Newark in the 1970s-90s, has died in his native Greece Oct. 23.
Patrons of the former NJ Division of Motor Vehicles office here at 1295 Springfield Ave. could get refreshments here courtesy Korkovelos while waiting for their license and registration applications were being processed. Patrons at another DMV service office in Newark and truckers and longshoremen at Ports Street and Doremus Avenue also bought fresh sandwiches and beverages at other Jimmy’s locations there.
“Jimmy” Korkovelos, who was born in Mesea Kapsi, GR, emigrated with wife Melpomeni and daughter Artemisia to Kearny in October 1967. They became parishioners of St. Demetrios Greek Orthodox Church, then in Newark’s 210 Clinton Ave., about the same time.
Although Jimmy started working as a carpenter, he bought a lunch truck and began making local construction sites or business stops within a few years. He landed lunch counter concessions with the DMV’s Irvington and Newark offices.
The Korkoveloses stayed with St. Demetrios when the church moved to Union in 1989. (The parish had looked at property in Maplewood.) The family, including younger daughter Dina Lena, had meanwhile moved to Livingston and New Brunswick.
The family elders closed or sold off Jimmy’s Snack Bars in 1995 to retire to Lamia, GR as a general contractor. The DMV moved its Springfield Avenue office after 1987. 210 Clinton Ave., is home to the Greater Mt. Moriah Missionary Baptist Church.
Brothers Aimilios, Giorgios, Hippocrates and Photios and five grandchildren also survive Demetrios. He was buried at North Arlington’s Holy Cross Cemetery, after a Funeral Mass at St. Demetrios, Oct. 30.
ORANGE – The long dormant gas station and garage here 43-45 So. Center St., thanks to an Oct. 22 administrative consent order among its current and recent ownership and the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection, will soon get visitors’ attention.
NJDEP and current owner AEN Urban Renewal LLC will be supervising the remediation of the 85-year-old filling station by a contractor hired by the latter party. Some of that work, including removal of its metallic underground storage tanks and contaminated soil, will be funded by a $40,000 civil administrative penalty being paid by AEN and recent owner 43-45 S. Center St LLC.
The ACO ends a four-year pursuit of the owners by the agency for failing to comply with the latter’s 2019 remediation order. DEP Commissioner Shawn LaTourette and Attorney General Matthew Platkin, in their Oct. 22 announcement, said that the 43-45 S. Center St. case was among the 72 environmental justice cases filed since 2018 statewide.
Most of the cases involve petroleum or solvent soil contaminated by metal underground tanks that have rusted and sprung leaks. While many of those metal tanks have been replaced with concrete ones (like the new one installed at the former Delta station at Irvington’s Springfield Avenue and Grove Street), many of the older and/or gas stations have not.
The station on South Center and Reock Street’s northwest corner opened in 1940 as LO Gas by Louis O. Lomeo and stayed in the Orange family’s hands into the 1970s. What gasoline and oil band Louis and Joseph sold was not immediately known.
The corner station and auto body shop has had six businesses when the last ones – Lark’s Transmission Service and Alex Automotive – were the last active tenants in 2000. Records on when, or whether, its underground tanks were replaced were not available as of press time.
LaTourette and Platkin’s joint announcement also named individual stations or garages in Irvington, Newark, Trenton and Long Branch as being subjected to DEP compliance suits. AER, of Rochelle Park, also owns built property at 61 S. Center St.
WEST ORANGE – Some concerned Watchung Heights and Tory Corner parents have been holding a petition drive on ipetitions.com to replace a school crossing guard here at John Street and Whittlesey Avenue.
The petition drivers and signing petitions have said that the guard is needed so that students can safety commute between that intersection and the Washington Elementary School a block south.
“Cars often roll through the stop signs or don’t look out for pedestrians,” said the petitioners’ statement. “This intersection formerly had a crossing guard, and we strongly feel that the position needs to be reinstated. There have been reports shared of close calls.”
Washington Elementary, opened in 1895, was West Orange Public School’s first dedicated building. Its 450 Kindergarten-Fifth Grade student body includes a classroom that once housed the West Orange Public Library. WES and a monument to the British loyalists who used to populate the neighborhood during the Revolutionary War stand at the corner of Main Street and Washington and Whittlesey avenues.
The Washington School PTA is to present copies of the petition to WOPS, the Township Council and the West Orange Police Department. WOPD supervises the hiring, training and placement of crossing guards.
SOUTH ORANGE / MAPLEWOOD – A Dec. 12 sentencing hearing for a township man, barring an appeal or the unexpected, is slated for a township man who a State Superior Court found him guilty Oct. 17 of murdering his mother here in a luxury apartment by the South Orange border Jan. 4., 2021.
The jury, after a day-and-a-half of deliberation, found Benjamin Avrut, 38, guilty of first-degree murder of his mother, Gwen, 70, 48 months ago at The Top apartment tower. Avrut’s defense attorney tried to prove that the mother beat her son and committed suicide.
Responding MPD officers came to 818 West South Orange Ave. to find G. Avrut mortally wounded at 12:56 p.m. that Monday. She was pronounced dead at the scene at 1:36 p.m.
MPD and ECPO detectives found B. Avrut, then 35, on surveillance recordings having entered the tower apartment and later left to board a Dodge Charger before 12:30 p.m. Police found the Charger and the son on the Newark-Irvington border Jan. 11. He was found with bloody socks and his mother’s cell phone and was charged with murder the next day.
County prosecutors asserted that Benjamin had strangled Gwen with a telephone cord and beat her to death. They said his motive was to acquire a $6 million inheritance presumably to continue feeding his drug habit. Her obituary and Jan. 11 funeral service mentioned her daughter but not Benjamin.
Early accounts had a second man driving the Charger and being let in by Benjamin. It is not clear whether that man, if he existed, was charged as an accomplice.
Most of The Top’s parking lot, which was also used by Gruining’s at the Top and a Howard Johnson’s restaurant, is in South Orange.
BLOOMFIELD – Township detectives said that a Newark man and suspected serial shoplifter went to the same store one too many times here Oct. 16.
Police officers who responded to a shoplifting report from the Walgreens at 77 Bloomfield Ave. that Wednesday found nearby a man identified as Jermaine Raab, 44 and a container of laundry detergent.
Raab did not have a receipt to show BPD officers that he bought the $52.43 worth of detergent. He did have six outstanding arrest warrants, found by a computerized records check, for allegedly making five-fingered discounts at the same pharmacy.
Raab was spotted on store security video as having boosted there Aug. 15, 16 and 18 and Sept. 13 and 17. The store’s loss prevention officer said that Raab’s thefts cost it “hundreds of dollars worth of merchandise.” His court appearance date at Bloomfield Municipal Court was not announced.
The Ampere Walgreens is in the former Eckerd and Rite-Aid building. The pharmacy, Mavis Tire store and Bloomfield/Staples Plaza are on the site of the former Erie Railroad Orange Branch freight yard.
MONTCLAIR – It took a suspect’s own social media video posting for authorities to crack a seven-month bias incident at a business district restaurant case and arrest a township woman.
That suspect’s recorded “My Bad” has landed her a Dec. 3 State Superior Court hearing – with ECPO and New Jersey Attorney General’s Office attention.
The owner and employees of Eli’s Gyro first reported to responding Montclair Police March 11 that a woman entered 571 Bloomfield Ave and began ripping down blue-and-white flags and decorative lights from their awning at 5:50 p.m.
The woman, who appeared to be video recording repeatedly shouted, “they’re killing children” and “I don’t support this – and asked the staff if they knew that there is “a genocide going on.” When a server told her that she had Greek flags in her hand and that she was in a Greek restaurant, she replied, “Oh, I thought it was Israel. My Bad,” and left.
MPD bias detectives promptly notified their colleagues at ECPO and NJAG as a standard operating procedure. They also reviewed the gyro place’s security recordings – and found a woman matching the flag-puller’s description handing out handbills in support of Palestine there a week before.
The cold case heated up on Oct. 15 when a detective came across a TikTok video clip from “@ambamelia” entitled: “The time I mistakenly thought the flag for Greek was for Israel and took the restaurants flag down OMG.” She is heard on the clip as saying, “I don’t stand for Zionism.”
MPD detectives identified the person as Amber Matthews, of Montclair. She has been charged Oct. 27 with bias intimidation and harassment. The TikTok clip has been taken down.
BELLEVILLE / NUTLEY – The NJDOT’s next phase of work on Washington Avenue may have started when you read this.
Paper “No Parking” signs, effective Oct. 6-22, have been placed over the curbside parking meters between the avenue’s Joralemon and Little streets Oct. 4. Each direction’s curb lane will be through traffic-only for the duration.
NJDOT contractors are expected to block the center lanes and cross intersection traffic with concrete Jersey barriers. Milling, paving, handicapped curb cuts and new traffic signals will then be installed.
The work and process are similar to what was done this summer between Mill and Rutgers streets and Rutgers and Rossmore streets.
The work, being done in phases, is to improve the NJ State Route 7 section of the avenue for motorists and pedestrians. Its last phase is to include the Nutley portion north of Carmer Avenue sometime in the next three years.
