Today is Election Day in New Jersey. Polls are open from 6 a.m. to 8 p.m. for voters to make their picks for governor, State Senate, Assembly, and two statewide ballot questions. Additionally, voters will cast their ballots in numerous county, municipal and school board elections. New Jersey Spotlight
Gov. Phil Murphy and Republican challenger Jack Ciattarelli spent Election Day eve urging voters to show up at the polls in a New Jersey governor’s race in which turnout is especially critical. Murphy, a Democrat seeking a second term, took part in interviews on national cable news and held get-out-the-vote rallies in the Democratic strongholds of Union City and South Orange. Ciattarelli, a former member of the state Assembly, continued his crisscrossing trek of the Garden State, making eight campaign appearances throughout the day—including stops in Middletown, the town where Murphy lives, and ending the day with an event in Raritan, his own hometown. NJ.com
The final round of polls finds Gov. Phil Murphy leading GOP nominee Jack Ciattarelli by an average of eight points, which is exactly the margin in Nov. 1’s Rutgers-Eagleton Poll. Eagleton found Murphy at 50% and Ciattarelli at 42% among registered and likely voters. That’s a bit closer than last week’s Monmouth, FDU and Stockton university polls, but closer than a four-point margin reported Monday by the Republican-leaning Trafalgar Group. NJ1015.com
In the first year of early in-person voting in New Jersey, 207,863 residents took advantage of the nine-day window prior to Election Day where voters could cast ballots on machines at centralized polling sites within their counties. That’s about 3.2% of the state’s more than 6.5 million registered voters who visited one of the 139 early voting locations. The state has received 495,000 votes by mail as of Sunday. NJ.com
Buoyed by a Jersey City mayoral and gubernatorial race, 32,000 Hudson County voters have already cast their ballots for the 2021 election. Some 14,500 Hudson County residents voted during the state’s first in-person early voting season (Oct 23-31), which equates to 3.5% of the county’s 415,000 registered voters. Another 16,500 residents voted by mail, for a total of 7.7% of registered voters have already had their say. “For the first year of in-person voting, it went very smoothly. We are pleased with the numbers,” Hudson County Clerk E. Junior Maldonado. “On the first day we had some connectivity issues, but after that everything worked out well.” The Jersey Journal
New Jersey’s acting attorney general recently updated written guidance for law enforcement in what he described as an effort to protect voters from intimidation at the polls. The guidance does not make major changes to guidance released in October 2020, following what the office described as “troubling reports of voter interference in other states” in the 2020 election. The document outlined police officers’ role in protecting voters from intimidation and “the limited nature of their role under certain other election-related laws.” North-JerseyNews.com
Experts advising the CDC are scheduled to meet Tuesday to consider whether to broadly recommend the use of the COVID-19 vaccine for children ages 5 to 11 years. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration on Oct. 29 authorized use of the Pfizer vaccine, the first it has cleared for that age group. The shots, given in two doses three weeks apart, contain one-third the dosage of the vaccine authorized for people 12 years and older. The FDA’s authorization was the first of two steps needed before the shots can become widely available to children. Once a vaccine is authorized, the CDC sets policies about whether people should get it, which groups and on which schedule. The Wall Street Journal
New Jersey state officials sought to reassure parents who are on the fence about children eligible to receive the COVID-19 vaccine. Members of the Murphy administration pushed back that children aged from 5 to 11 do not need to get vaccinated because of key health metrics trending in the right direction and concerns that the clinical trials were conducted quicker than other vaccines. “This pandemic, everytime you think you got this thing licked, it comes back at you,” said Gov. Phil Murphy at a press briefing Nov. 1. “I am hoping that those days are over. But just because the numbers are getting better, I would plead with people to not use that as the excuse not to get vaccinated, including for your children. We do not know the future here.” North-JerseyNews.com
Across all New York city agencies, 91% of workers complied with the city’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate. About 9,000 municipal employees have been placed on unpaid leave due to not complying with the mandate and are eligible to return to work as soon as they get a first dose. Another 12,000 city workers had yet to get their first dose of a COVID-19 vaccine, but had applied for a religious or medical exemption and are allowed to continue working while the city evaluates their requests. The New York Times
Knowlton is looking to use nearly $300,000 of its federal coronavirus pandemic funds to help residents of the Columbia hamlet with private wells contaminated by road salt. The preliminary plan is for the town to use the federal money to pay the initial purchase and installation costs for the filters plus an additional filter. Once installed and tested, the future maintenance and filter replacement costs will be the responsibility of the homeowners. New Jersey Herald
The Jersey City Economic Development Corp. announced $1.5 million in COVID-19 Small Business Microenterprise Grants focusing on brick-and-mortar and mobile businesses with five employees or fewer. The city-funded program will provide upward of $50,000 for business-related costs incurred throughout the COVID-19 pandemic to assist microenterprise businesses that provide goods and/or services within Jersey City. In order to qualify, the household income of the business owner or owners cannot exceed 80% of the city’s Area Median Income limit. ROI-NJ
Cresskill parents are pushing for help with reopening the district’s middle/senior high school, which has been shut since the remnants of Hurricane Ida flooded the building. About 1,000 sixth to 12th graders have now been out of school for a nearly 600-day period, stretching back to the beginning of the coronavirus shutdown. Specifically, the parents want additional support from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the state and the county to expedite funding, inspections and approvals for the complicated project. The rebuilding must comply with state Department of Education and fire marshal requirements. The school sustained more than $19 million in damage from the storm. The Record
A Monmouth University Poll recently found the majority of the public views climate change as a very serious problem that requires federal intervention. In the poll, 76% of Americans said the world’s climate was undergoing a change, which was leading to natural disasters, extreme weather patterns, and sea level rise. The results were similar to prior polls, with 78% reporting the same in November 2018 and 70% in December 2015. Of note, the most recent poll found only 48% of Republicans believed in climate change, a return to 2015 levels (49%) and markedly below the 64% reported three years earlier. In contrast, 94% of Democrats and 81% of Independents said they believed in climate change. North-JerseyNews.com
The Biden Administration pledged to heavily regulate methane while the United Nations held a climate change summit in Glasgow this week. Methane, a potent greenhouse gas that spews from oil and natural gas operations, can warm the atmosphere 80 times as fast as carbon dioxide in the short term. For the first time, the Environmental Protection Agency intends to limit the methane coming from roughly one million existing oil and gas rigs across the United States. The federal government previously had rules that aimed to prevent methane leaks from oil and gas wells built since 2015, but they were rescinded by the Trump administration. The New York Times
Sen. Joe Manchin (D-WV) criticized Democrats’ $1.85 trillion Build Back Better bill and withheld his support for a legislative framework that the White House had cast as a consensus acceptable to all members of the Senate Democratic caucus. “I’m open to supporting a final bill that helps move our country forward,” said Manchin on Nov. 1. “But I’m equally open to voting against a bill that hurts our country.” The federal lawmaker raised concerns about its possible impact on the national debt and inflation, attacking the decision to fund many programs on a temporary basis that he characterized as possibly being “a recipe for economic crisis” if its programs are funded for longer. The Wall Street Journal
Gov. Phil Murphy anticipates the looming lame duck legislative session in New Jersey will be an active and productive one. “Lame duck is upon us—win, lose, or draw,” he said. “Without getting into a lot of detail, you’re going to see us with a pretty robust agenda. There’s still work to be done, still unfinished business.” New Jersey Globe
New Jersey’s One-Stop Career Centers won’t offer in-person appointments for people seeking help with unemployment until some point in 2022 despite all government offices set to open by the end of this month. Currently, the career centers that are open are offering meetings by appointment for career help. Gov. Phil Murphy acknowledged that for people who have been struggling to get their claims resolved, it would be meaningful to get face-to-face time with a Labor representative. “I think there’s comfort in, ‘I’m looking at you, you’re looking at me,’ and you’ve got an unemployment issue that’s weighing heavily on you and you’re frustrated,” he said. New Jersey Monitor
The state Education Department has rejected Paterson’s application for $28 million in so-called “stabilization aid,” a one-time infusion of funding the school district hoped to use to eliminate overcrowding in as many as 800 classes. The district had planned to use the extra money to hire an additional 183 teachers because so many Paterson classes have more than 30 students enrolled. Sixteen other districts in New Jersey received money under the supplemental funding program, in exurban counties like Cape May, Monmouth, Salem, Sussex and Warren. The Record
And finally…The American Farm Bureau Federation says Thanksgiving will be the most expensive yet as prices increase. News12 New Jersey
