The Ridgewood Blog Brings a Free Market Laissez-faire Point of View to Local, New Jersey State and National Issues.
Updated March 05, 2017
Posted March 05, 2017
Hey big spenders
Special interests spent $68.3 million last year lobbying the public, state lawmakers and Gov. Chris Christie’s administration. While total spending was down 2.5 percent from 2015, “spending to promote more funding for state transportation improvement kept lobbying expenditures relatively high,” according to the Election Law Enforcement Commission, which compiled the data.
You remember that one: the fight to replenish the broke fund that pays for road and rail improvements by hiking the gas tax for the first time since Ronald Reagan was president.
Health care was another issue that prompted lots of lobbying.
Here are the top 10 spenders:
Talks are under way to avert a potentially protracted tax battle between non-profit hospitals and the communities that host them, said the prime sponsor of a bill that tried unsuccessfully last month to work out a solution.
Assemblyman John Burzichelli said Tuesday that talks are underway between the New Jersey Hospital Association and the New Jersey League of Municipalities with the aim of helping redraft legislation in the wake of a landmark Tax Court ruling that called into question the property tax exemption of non-profit hospitals.
He said there have been no talks thus far with the administration on the issue, nor does he expect any while Christie is pursuing his bid for the Republican presidential nomination. Christie vetoed the earlier bill in January at the end of the last legislative session.
Burzichelli, D-Gloucester, the chair of the Assembly’s appropriations committee, said he and three other co-sponsors recently resubmitted the bill, but added that the document likely will serve as a “place holder” until a revised bill can be worked out.
“Everybody’s regrouped coming out of the hectic last session,” Burzicelli said of the informal talks.
But he warned if no agreement can be reached, “it’ll be a field day for the tax attorneys.”
The bill stemmed from a state Tax Court decision last summer in which a judge invalidated the non-profit Morristown Medical Center’s property tax exemption. The hospital’s parent company agreed to pay $15.5 million to satisfy back taxes and interest plus make annual payment of about $1 million as tax on the for-profit component of its operations.
The Record Read more
N.J. hospitals are well prepared to fight Ebola, state medical officials say
OCTOBER 4, 2014 LAST UPDATED: SATURDAY, OCTOBER 4, 2014, 1:21 AM
BY JAMES M. O’NEILL
STAFF WRITER
THE RECORD
New Jersey’s 71 hospitals have the space and equipment, and their medical staffs are trained, to react to any patient with a suspected case of Ebola, including moving them to an isolation room immediately, state health officials say.
Since early August, the Health Department has held conference calls and issued alerts to share and review protocol for handling patients who may be carrying the virus.
And in the past few weeks, North Jersey hospitals have run drills simulating cases of patients checking into their emergency rooms saying they had recently been in West Africa — where the recent Ebola outbreak is centered — to ensure that they isolate such patients for treatment, officials say.
Local ERs have installed signs at their check-in areas asking patients to let staff know immediately if they have traveled recently to the region and have fever and other Ebola-related symptoms, such as vomiting, diarrhea and severe headache.
Officials say the case of Ebola in Dallas this week — where information that the patient had been in West Africa was apparently not transferred to medical staff — only reinforced the need for hospitals to take down the travel history of anyone showing signs of the illness.
“There’s definitely a heightened sense of awareness about this, and hospitals will certainly learn the lesson from the Dallas case about the importance of communicating critical information,” said Shannon Davila, an infection-control nurse with the New Jersey Hospital Association.
– See more at: https://www.northjersey.com/news/nj-state-news/n-j-hospitals-well-prepared-to-fight-ebola-1.1102418#sthash.VQGu8aJQ.dpuf
