Two North Jersey Democrats recently went on the record claiming that President Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) will lower health care costs within their respective districts. Rep. Tom Malinowski revealed his IRA report for New Jersey’s 7th Congressional District, detailing how the new law would positively impact thousands of his constituents through a more affordable prescription drug plan, along with lowering insurance premiums. Meanwhile, Rep. Josh Gottheimer offered the $35 dollar cap on insulin each month would greatly help the roughly 5,700 residents who need the medicine within his district, many living on fixed incomes. “Can you imagine a parent having to ration their children’s lifesaving insulin, or a grandparent not having enough in their pocketbook for their grandchild’s birthday gift because the cost of insulin has bankrupted them? It’s heartbreaking and unacceptable,” said Gottheimer. North-JerseyNews.com
U.S. inflation eased to 8.3% in August as gasoline prices cooled but not as much of a slowdown as economists had expected. Gasoline prices declined sharply in August, down 26% from a month earlier to a national average price of $3.72 a gallon. But the core inflation climbed by 6.3% in the year through August, compared with 5.9% in July. While gas prices and used car and truck costs have begun to dip, other prices are rising fast enough to fully offset those declines: Prices climbed by 0.1% on a headline basis over the course of the past month as prices for meals at restaurants, rents and new vehicles picked up. The Wall Street Journal
Thousands of residents can expect to see applications for Gov. Phil Murphy’s ANCHOR tax relief program arriving in their mail soon. The state Department of the Treasury announced Sept. 12 that application instructions were mailed to eligible homeowners and residents on how to file for the new Affordable NJ Communities for Homeowners and Renters (ANCHOR) program. In order to be eligible, homeowners and renters must have occupied their primary residence on Oct. 1, 2019, and filed state income taxes. The Record
In Essex County on Friday night, it was the changing of the guard in more ways than one with Irvington City Council President Renee Burgess being elected by Democrats to be the State Senator of the 28th Legislative District. Any suspense was gone when Assemblywoman Cleopatra Tucker (D-28), the preferred candidate by Ronald Rice to replace him after 36 years in the seat, rose to announce that she would be supporting Burgess. Now State Sen.-elect Burgess (D-28) will be sworn in sometime later this month, and face voters in one of the state’s most Democratic districts for the first time this November in a special election. North-JerseyNews.com
The Irvington Town Council appointed Darlene Brown to replace Renee Burgess as Council Member at Large and voted Jamillah Beasley as President of the Council. Brown was a commissioner for the Irvington Housing Authority since 2014 and became the Chairwoman for the Irvington Housing Authority in 2017. InsiderNJ
Bloomfield Third Ward Councilwoman Sarah Cruz indicated she’s open to the idea of running for a seat in the Assembly in the redrawn 34th Legislative District. Bloomfield is currently one of the largest towns in New Jersey to have zero hometown representatives in Trenton. Cruz’s fellow Bloomfield Councilwoman Wartyna Davis has been mentioned as a potential candidate as well; if she were elected, Davis would be the first openly gay woman to ever serve in the legislature. New Jersey Globe
Paterson Police Chief Ibrahim Baycora has accused Mayor Andre Sayegh of trying to force him out of the job by unfairly blaming him for Paterson’s spike in shootings and by degrading him with verbal tirades and scathing emails. In a lawsuit filed in New Jersey Superior Court on Sept. 9, Baycora accused the Sayegh administration of trying to set him up for failure last February by only providing him with half the 30 officers he asked to have assigned to a special overtime unit that was supposed to combat violent crime, claimed an unidentified City Council member threatened to shoot him during the March 5 council meeting and he was the only member of the Paterson police department who did not get hazardous duty pay earlier this year for working during the COVID-19 pandemic. The Record
A former Paterson police sergeant for a group of cops who targeted and stole from residents was sentenced to 33 months in federal prison Sept. 12. U.S. District Judge Katharine S. Hayden sentenced Michael Cheff in Newark federal court following his trial and conviction in May on charges of conspiring to deprive an individual of civil rights and falsifying a police report. Cheff maintains his innocence and plans to appeal his conviction again after being denied a new trial in July. The five ex-officers who testified against their former boss—Matthew Torres, Jonathan Bustios, Daniel Pent, Frank Toledo and Eudy Ramos—all pleaded guilty to their roles on the squad in return for a lenient sentence. NJ1015.com
Justice Department officials have seized the phones of two top advisers to former President Donald Trump and blanketed his aides with about 40 subpoenas in a substantial escalation of the investigation into his efforts to subvert the 2020 election. Federal agents with court-authorized search warrants took phones last week from at least two people: Boris Epshteyn, an in-house counsel who helped coordinate Trump’s legal efforts, and Mike Roman, a campaign strategist who was the director of Election Day operations for the Trump campaign in 2020. Both men were central in the effort to name slates of electors pledged to Trump from swing states won by Joe Biden in 2020 as part of a plan to block or delay congressional certification of Biden’s Electoral College victory. The New York Times
The Justice Department said it would accept one of the Donald Trump’s proposed candidates to serve as a third-party arbiter to review documents the FBI seized from the former president’s Mar-a-Lago home last month. Raymond J. Dearie, a former chief federal judge in New York, has the qualifications to do the job of special master, prosecutors wrote in a court filing Sept. 12, as do the two candidates they had proposed, retired federal judges Barbara S. Jones and Thomas B. Griffith. The rare point of agreement came after Trump’s lawyers pressed the court to allow an independent attorney to review all of the documents the FBI seized in its search of Mar-a-Lago, including those marked classified, saying they didn’t trust the Justice Department to accurately represent what was in them. The Wall Street Journal
The Senate Judiciary Committee will investigate allegations Donald Trump sought to use the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Manhattan to support Trump politically and pursue his critics, the committee’s chairman said on Sept. 12. The allegations are in a new book by Geoffrey S. Berman, who was U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York from 2018 through June 2020, when he was fired by Trump. Berman’s book portrays Trump Justice Department officials as motivated by partisan concerns as they tried to initiate criminal investigations or block them. The New York Times
Starting in September 2023, New Jersey will provide students from low-income and middle-income families with free breakfast and lunch as part of a larger effort to combat food insecurity across the state. Under the legislation signed Sept. 9 by Gov. Phil Murphy, the state will expand access to free or reduced-price meal programs in K-12 public schools, as well as launch a public awareness campaign educating families about their options. The move by state officials came a day after Rep. Josh Gottheimer in Bergenfield called for the U.S. Senate to pass the Keeping Kids Fed Act. North-JerseyNews.com
New Jersey is home to 10 of the top 200 nation’s top colleges and universities, according to U.S. News & World Report rankings of 1,500 schools released Sept. 12. Princeton topped the nation’s list of national universities. In the top 100, Rutgers-New Brunswick tied for 55th, Stevens Institute of Technology tied for 83rd, and New Jersey Institute of Technology tied for 97th. Among public universities, Rutgers ranked 19th in the nation, up from 23rd last year. NJ1015.com
New Jersey on Sept. 12 reported another 589 confirmed COVID-19 cases (the lowest single day since March) and one new confirmed death. There were 839 patients with confirmed or suspected coronavirus cases reported across 70 of the state’s 71 hospitals. Of those hospitalized, 87 are in intensive care and 30 are on ventilators. New Jersey’s rate of transmission was 0.88 and the statewide positivity rate for tests conducted Sept. 6 was 9.5%. North-JerseyNews.com
Hoboken has announced the city will hold a COVID-19 booster clinic on Sept. 13 to distribute the new vaccines created to target the highly-transmissible Omicron variant. The clinic will be held at 605 Jackson St. from 4 to 7 p.m. to provide 300 of Pfizer’s updated boosters to residents 12 years and older who have received their primary vaccine doses or boosters at least two months ago. Hudson Reporter
A New Jersey lawmaker that sponsored the plastic bag ban said he will consider allowing single use paper bags as residents have complained of a glut of reusable bags from home deliveries. “The only glitch so far that we’ve had (during the ban) is the fact that the home delivery of groceries has been interpreted to mean you have to do it in a reusable bag and what’s happening is the number of these bags are accumulating with customers,” State Sen. Bob Smith (D-17), co-sponsor of the bill to ban plastic bags. “We know it’s a problem. We agree it’s a problem.” Smith said a solution could be to amend the law to allow grocery delivery services in New Jersey to use paper bags or cardboard boxes for online orders. NJ.com
An Assembly committee this week will weigh whether internet gambling should be allowed to continue. The Garden State legalized some internet wagers in 2013, but the bill that ushered the practice into the state set its expiration date as late 2023—the new bill would push that deadline to 2033. New Jersey’s casinos brought in nearly $1.4 billion from internet gaming in 2021, a 41% increase over the $970 million reported in 2020. That increase followed a stunning 101% rise in internet wager revenues spurred by pandemic shutdown orders in 2020, according to the Division of Gaming Enforcement. Casinos’ total gaming revenue was $2.6 billion in 2020 and $4.2 billion last year. New Jersey Monitor
Two dozen business and labor organizations are urging legislative leaders to block a Murphy Administration proposal to delay requiring thousands of apartment buildings, public schools and government buildings to eventually replace their heating systems with electric boilers. In a letter to Senate President Nicholas Scutari (D-22) and Assembly Speaker Craig Coughlin (D-19), the coalition argued that complying with the rule will lead to significant increases in rents, property taxes and grocery bills at a time when the Legislature is focused on reducing those costs. The DEP is expected to finalize the rule within 90 days. NJ Spotlight News
A busy section of Route 7 that links Hudson and Essex counties prone to flooding is getting $26 million in repairs and upgrades to be funded by federal infrastructure grants. Sens. Bob Menendez and Cory Booker along with Rep. Bill Pascrell, Jr., announced the grant award Sept. 12 for work on a two-mile section of Route 7 between Jersey City and Belleville, which periodically floods because of its proximity to the Hackensack River. NJ.com
Lafayette Township is the latest town to approve a redevelopment plan that will add housing to a retail complex. The Shoppes at Lafayette, formerly known as Olde Lafayette Village, will offer a village-style mix of retail, restaurants, professional services and housing to rejuvenate the site with 138 residential rental units. The Lafayette Land Use Board approved the plan earlier this year for the construction of four, three-story apartment complexes offering one or two bedroom units. New Jersey Herald
Belleville’s construction official and zoning officer filed a whistleblower lawsuit alleging Mayor Michael Melham lied to the state Attorney General’s office, sparking an unnecessary investigation. Frank DeLorenzo claims the mayor has been retaliating against him since the Fall 2018, when DeLorenzo denied the mayor’s application for a building permit that allegedly violated township codes. The lawsuit alleges Melham repeatedly harassed the public works director, which constitutes retaliation and violations of the state’s whistleblower law, known as the New Jersey Conscientious Employee Protection Act. NJ.com
And finally…Oxfam has rated New Jersey as the eight best place to work in the United States. News12 New Jersey
