>WAVERLY (Iowa)- A sizable donation from a New Jersey philanthropist will fund an expansion at Bartels Lutheran Retirement Community.
David Bolger, president of the Bolger Foundation, pledged $1.2 million to improve the skilled nursing facility at Bartels in Waverly.
Over the years, Bolger, a well-known benefactor, has donated millions of dollars to projects in Northeast Iowa. He has made personal and professional connections in the state.
Deb Schroeder, president and chief executive officer at Bartels, is grateful to the Bolger Foundation for its high level of support. The Bolger donation is the largest gift toward the skilled nursing project, Schroeder said, and may be the largest, single charitable gift to the retirement community in its history.
“This is so significant,” Schroeder said. “That’s a really big gift.”
> N.J. Gov. Christie announces state of fiscal emergency with $2.2B budget shortfall
Gov. Chris Christie seized extraordinary powers to shrink the current state budget today, infuriating Democratic lawmakers ahead of an even bigger fight over the next spending plan and laying the foundation for unprecedented changes in the way all New Jersey governing bodies operate. In an executive order and speech to both houses of the Legislature, Christie said he would close a $2.2 billion budget hole, saying New Jersey is on “the edge of bankruptcy.”
He revoked funds from local school districts, hospitals and NJ Transit and declared a “state of fiscal emergency,” forcing more than 500 school districts to spend their surpluses in place of state aid. The governor slashed programs labeled wasteful and worthwhile, cut aid to colleges and universities and killed the Department of the Public Advocate. He urged pension and benefit cuts for all public employees, and mocked their unions by comparing their objections to his 9-year-old son’s cry of “unfair.” He called opponents of his plans defenders of “the old ways.” “Now is the time when we all must resist the traditional, selfish call to protect your own turf at the cost of our state,” the Republican governor said. “We chose to confront the problem head on by reforming our spending habits, and laying the groundwork for reform. We have set out in a new direction, a direction dictated by the votes of the people of New Jersey, and I do not intend to turn back.” Christie pegs next year’s budget gap — which he will address March 16 — at $11 billion, but his dramatic rhetoric and draconian fixes for this year’s $2.2 billion hole drew sharp objections from Democrats who control both houses of the Legislature.
Top Democrats questioned whether it is legal for Christie to freeze already-budgeted funds, and said shifting the burden to school districts could drive up property taxes next year. “This is an easy thing to pick someone else’s pocket — you’re taking the money from local taxpayers to fill your budget,” said Senate President Stephen Sweeney (D-Gloucester). “It’s wrong.” Worse, he said, Christie abandoned bipartisan governing for a 30-minute televised drama where he could play the hero. “So much for a handshake,” Sweeney said, referring to Christie’s widely praised gesture to invite Sweeney and Assembly Speaker Sheila Oliver (D-Essex) to the podium during his inaugural speech less than a month ago. (Heininger/Fleisher, Star Ledger)
>WEATHER ANNOUNCEMENT FOR THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 11 UPDATE WEDNESDAY, 8:30 P.M.: AT THIS TIME, THE RIDGEWOOD PUBLIC SCHOOLS WILL HAVE A TWO-HOUR DELAYED OPENING ON THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 11. ANY CHANGES TO THIS SCHEDULE WILL BE ANNOUNCED EARLY THURSDAY MORNING.
>Bergen LEADS is a year-long learning and leadership experience for adults who live or work in Bergen County.
We’re looking for 30 talented leaders for the Bergen LEADS Class of 2011.
WANT TO KNOW MORE?
REGISTER TODAY FOR A FREE INFORMATIONAL OPEN HO– USE
Find out how you can become a part of Bergen LEADS Meet alumni and members of the Class of 2010
Bergen LEADS February Open House Schedule Open houses are free of charge. Directions will be sent upon receipt of your registration.
Tuesday, February 16 9:00 – 10:30 am Cole, Schotz, Meisel, Forman & Leonard Hackensack
Thursday, February 18 NEW! 8:15 – 10:00 am Meadowlands Regional Chamber of Commerce Membership Meeting* Rutherford *$500 scholarship available to four MRC members!
Thursday, February 18 11:30 am – 1:00 pm TD Bank Ramsey
Tuesday, February 23 8:30 – 10:00 am Bergen Regional Medical Center Paramus
Thursday, February 25 8:30 – 10:00 am Holy Name Hospital Teaneck
>Steven Lonegan, State Director, Americans for Prosperity NJ
Exposing the HOAX of Senate Bill One
Reference: The truth about Senate Bill One (1), hereafter referred to as S1. This bill falsely represents itself to abolish the radical Council on Affordable Housing a.k.a COAH.
The following excerpts from S1 debunk the claim that this legislation “abolishes” COAH. S1 actually creates a super bureaucracy that concentrates even more power and money with the State Planning Commission, hereafter referred to as the “Commission”.
S1 empowers the Commissioner of the Department of Community Affairs with sweeping authority to “prioritize” LOW INCOME HOUSING projects and establish “rules” on the management of these projects, in essence establishing a “LOW INCOME HOUSING CZAR”.
I have cited specific passages from the bill and copied these passages directly to this memorandum, including short explanations. The passages speak for themselves. However, it is necessary to provide explanations for those legislators who will be voting on this bill, but appear to have some difficulty comprehending its actual meaning.
Please contact me if you require additional clarification.
The hoax that S1 “abolishes” COAH is exposed on page 1. The bill’s synopsis contains the following sentence in the first paragraph:
”1. (New section) The Council on Affordable Housing established by the Fair Housing Act is abolished, and all of its powers, functions and duties are continued in the State Planning Commission…”
Furthermore, the bill transfers every single prior act, rule and regulation ever promulgated by COAH to the State Planning Commission:
”Whenever, in any law rule, regulation, order, contract, document, judicial or administrative proceeding or otherwise; Reference is made to the Council on Affordable Housing the same shall mean and refer to the State Planning Commission.”
Money, your tax dollars, is the fuel the COAH fanatics need to advance their failed agenda. The following passage, also on page 1, clearly defines that all funding is intact:
”All appropriations and other money available and to become available to the Council on Affordable Housing are hereby continued in the commission, and shall be available for the objects and purposes for which such moneys are appropriated…”
These three simple passages from the first page of S1 expose the truth — COAH is simply being renamed. But that is not all. The newly constituted “State Planning Commission” becomes a hybrid super bureaucracy, even more dangerous than COAH as we know it.
I have stated S1 transforms the DCA Commissioner into a LOW INCOME HOUSING CZAR. This is proven in the following passages describing the Commissioner’s power. Start with the maintaining of the “Register” of LOW INCOME projects, this passage defines the term:
“Register” means The Register of Housing Projects directed by section 2 of this act to be established and maintained by the commissioner.”
The “Commissioner’s” power is expanded with the additional ability to “prioritize” these projects and force their implementation:
“The commissioner shall cause to be developed a system for assigning and designating priority ratings to each project included in the register. Priority ratings shall be based upon the following factors, giving to each factor such weight as the commissioner shall judge to be appropriate:”
The list of factors is long and complex and listed in detail in the bill. They include feasibility, distribution of units, desirability, size, etc. Ultimately, the commissioner has control over every aspect of the project. Under the term “desirability” the “Commissioner” could assume the authority to choose paint colors in the units. This is clearly a Low-Income Housing Czar.
> You all seem to be confusing “travel” sports with inappropriate coaching or a “win at all cost” attitude. I can’t help but think that some of the posts above were written by people, who have never coached a sport in their lives. While I agree that sports from 3rd grade and younger are best structured with a “clinic” approach to teaching fundamentals of a sport, some sports groups in many towns are forced to travel because their numbers are insufficient to allow “in town” games at a given grade level. While Ridgewood is fortunate not to have that problem in many cases, it is not always the case.
The real issue is a “healthy approach” to organized sports, not whether a team competes against other towns. There are countless examples of coaches in Ridgewood, who teach valuable lessons about sportsmanship, leadership and effort, while playing competitively. A little bit of heathy competition is not a bad thing, as long as winning is not valued as the only measure of success and that coaches don’t play their best players at the expense of less experienced or less gifted players.
It should also be kept in mind that recreational programs exist to serve one purpose, while travel programs exist to serve a different purpose. Parents and players need to understand which is appropriate for them. If all your son or daughter wants to do is socialize with his or her friends in an athletic environment, then travel programs are the wrong choice. However, there are many middle school children, who seek active competition with other boys and girls their own age. These children may be well suited for a more competitively geared program. This is not always driven by a parent’s desire for their children. In either case, the quality of the coaching matters. “Dad” may or may not be the right coach.
> Just in : Smoke from faulty motor causes evacuation at Ridgewood High School
Faulty motor causes evacuation at Ridgewood High School.
Students at Ridgewood High School (RHS) were evacuated for about 12 to 14 minutes this morning after heavy smoke in the center basement of the school set off alarms.
>N.J. Gov. Christie, lawmakers propose sweeping pension, health care changes for public employees
Gov. Chris Christie and lawmakers of both parties will unveil a series of sweeping pension and benefit reforms Monday that could affect every public employee in New Jersey while saving the state billions of dollars, according to four officials with direct knowledge of the plan.
The proposals would require workers and retirees at all levels of government and local school districts to contribute to their own health care costs, ban part-time workers at the state and local levels from participating in the underfunded state pension system, cap sick leave payouts for all public employees and constitutionally require the state to fully fund its pension obligations each year.
Details of the four-bill package to be introduced Monday were provided to The Star-Ledger on the condition of anonymity because the four officials were not authorized to speak in advance. The proposals go further than several past efforts at reining in taxpayer-funded pension and benefit costs, and if enacted would represent a major early victory for the new Republican governor and Democrats who control the state Legislature. But supporters anticipate an angry response from public employee and teachers unions that wield considerable power throughout the state — though lawmakers argue rank-and-file workers would have safer pensions than before.
Christie’s office declined to comment, as did top Democrats and Republicans involved in crafting the bills. All sides had made their feelings clear last month, when Senate President Stephen Sweeney (D-Gloucester) announced the upper house’s intentions to fix a system that would otherwise “go bankrupt.” Lawmakers of both parties pledged their support, with Christie saying “bipartisan action is critical to reforming a broken pension and benefits system.” Hetty Rosenstein, a state director of the Communications Workers of America, which represents 60,000 state and local workers, said she was still studying the bills but believes the reforms are misguided. For most rank-and-file employees, benefits are “not extremely lucrative…They are not out-of-whack,” Rosenstein said Saturday. “This interferes with the collective bargaining relationship and it’s not going to save any kind of significant money.” Steve Baker, spokesman for the 200,000-member New Jersey Education Association, said Saturday the teachers union is still reviewing the bills and had no immediate comment. (Heininger, Star Ledger)
In 2007, the most comprehensive report to date on global warming, issued by the respected United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, made a shocking claim: The Himalayan glaciers could melt away as soon as 2035.
These glaciers provide the headwaters for Asia’s nine largest rivers and lifelines for the more than one billion people who live downstream. Melting ice and snow would create mass flooding, followed by mass drought. The glacier story was reported around the world. Last December, a spokesman for the World Wildlife Fund, an environmental pressure group, warned, “The deal reached at Copenhagen will have huge ramifications for the lives of hundreds of millions of people who are already highly vulnerable due to widespread poverty.” To dramatize their country’s plight, Nepal’s top politicians strapped on oxygen tanks and held a cabinet meeting on Mount Everest.
But the claim was rubbish, and the world’s top glaciologists knew it. It was based not on rigorously peer-reviewed science but on an anecdotal report by the WWF itself. When its background came to light on the eve of Copenhagen, Rajendra Pachauri, the head of the IPCC, shrugged it off. But now, even leading scientists and environmental groups admit the IPCC is facing a crisis of credibility that makes the Climategate affair look like small change.
“The global warming movement as we have known it is dead,” the brilliant analyst Walter Russell Mead says in his blog on The American Interest. It was done in by a combination of bad science and bad politics.
The Village of Ridgewood wasn’t organized as a separate municipality until 1876. By then, the settlement we call Ridgewood was almost two centuries old. The land that Ridgewood occupies was originally a hunting and fishing ground of the Lenni Lenape Indians that became a part of the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam founded in 1624. Forty years later, the British captured New Amsterdam and renamed it New York.
After New Amsterdam became British, King Charles 2nd gave New Jersey to Sir Carteret and Lord Berkeley, two of his most loyal supporters. In 1674, Lord Berkeley needed money to finish his mansion in London, and sold his half of the colony to two Quakers. New Jersey was then divided into the Province of East Jersey owned by Sir Carteret and the Quaker Province of West Jersey. In 1687, the East Jersey Proprietors granted several hundred acres in Bergen County to Isaac Kingsland. Johannes Van Emburgh bought some of this land in 1698. The area was then known as Hoachas (now Ho Ho Kus) and as Paramus by 1725.
After the Revolution, the settlement had grown to about 20 families and was known as Godwinville, after a war hero. However, Godwinville was never a separate municipality. The entire northwest corner of Bergen County was a large municipality known as Franklin Township formed in 1771 from a section of Saddle River Township. Within Franklin Township, there were numerous unincorporated settlements such as Godwinville.
In 1848, the Patterson and Ramapo Railroad was completed providing Godwinville with easy access to New York City. In 1853, Samuel Dayton bought the Van Emburgh estate and with the idea of establishing a suburb. Cornelia Dayton renamed Godwinville “Ridgewood” to attract buyers from the city. The population exploded from several hundred in 1850 to over 1,200 by the time of the centennial. Ridgewood built its own school but was still a part of Franklin Township. The population doubled again by the turn of the century.
On March 30, 1876, Ridgewood finally became a separate Township. Actually, Ridgewood was fifteen years ahead of the rest of the state. It wasn’t until the early 1890s that New Jersey adopted legislation requiring each municipality to establish a Board of Education and fund all public schools with a municipal-wide property tax. In just a few months in 1894, numerous settlements with schools incorporated as separate municipalities. Twenty-eight municipalities were incorporated in Bergen County alone. Part of Ridgewood Township went to the new Borough of Midland Park and another part went to the new Borough of Glen Rock. At the same time, Ridgewood changed its municipal form of government from a Township to a Village. However, to this day the school system is still officially known as the “Ridgewood Township Board of Education”.
Almost all of the 1894 municipalities were incorporated as Boroughs, the most common plan of municipal government in New Jersey. In a Borough, the governing body consists of six Council Members and a directly elected Mayor who acts as the chief executive.
Ridgewood was one of the few municipalities that incorporated as a “Village.” In this rare form of local government, the public elected five trustees who selected one of their members as Village President to preside over the meetings. There was no Mayor. The Village plan proved unsuccessful because it lacked clearly defined management responsibilities.
During this period, the Trustees organized the village departments and planned a civic center just west of the train station. However, the civic center was defeated in 1909 and the Village built a municipal building and firehouse at Hudson and Broad streets. This remained as the municipal complex until 1955 when the Village purchased the Elk lodge built in 1928 on North Maple Avenue and converted it into the current Village Hall.
In 1911, Ridgewood reorganized for a second time adopting the Commissioner plan of municipal government, but retaining the name “Village”. The municipality was divided into three departments – Public Safety, Finance and Public Works. The voters elected three Commissioners who each had full executive authority over one of the departments. The Commissioners also selected one of their members as Mayor to preside over the meetings, but the Mayor had no executive power other than as a Commissioner of one of the departments. At the time, the Commissioner form was considered as a reform, but today few municipalities retain this plan. Each department tends to become a fiefdom and is too dependent on the management skills of its Commissioner.
In 1970, Ridgewood recognized the need to professionalize municipal management and adopted the more modern Faulkner Act Council-Manager plan. Under this form, the public elects five Council Members who act as a Board of Directors. Their principle responsibility is to hire and oversee a professional Village Manager who has full executive power for all departments. The Council also selects one of its members as Mayor who presides over the meetings but has no executive authority.
Many of you heard about a story that ran on Reuters yesterday about the coming Middle-Class tax increases. Of course in Washington they don’t call it a tax increase – they are not renewing the Bush Tax Cuts and tax rates will therefore increase when the cuts come to an end – but in Washington, that is not considered raising taxes. The White House, unhappy with the story, asked (or told) Reuters to remove the story. By yesterday evening the story was no longer available. It was replaced with a message saying the story was withdrawn and would be replaced with a new story later in the week.
There are two attachments to this email. 1) a screen shot of the actual story, and 2) a screen shot of what appeared after the story was obediently removed by Reuters
At a time when sports tutors seem as plentiful as piano teachers and high school games are routinely nationally televised, Peter Barston has learned something important about youth sports.
Mike Barston, left, with his son Peter, who has toured youth leagues in Darien, Conn., asking youngsters their reasons for playing sports. Adults may lean toward turning children’s games into an approximation of professional sports. But ask young players what they want, and the answer can be disarmingly simple. More than training to be a Super Bowl star, more than even winning, youngsters play sports for fun — at least they do in Darien, Conn., Barston said.
He has not proved that scientifically. But a research project spearheaded by Barston, a sophomore at Fairfield Prep, makes an intriguing case that while parents dream big, their children focus on the small stuff.
Since August, Barston has toured youth leagues in Darien, asking this question: Why do you play sports?
His preliminary findings are not far from what the Michigan State researchers Martha Ewing and Vern Seefeldt concluded in 1989. Their study of 28,000 boys and girls around the country asked, Why do you play sports? The top answer then was “fun,” followed by “to do something I’m good at” and “to improve my skills.” “Winning” did not crack the top 10.
“It shows kids are out there to get away from their lives and have a good time with their friends,” Barston, a recreation league second baseman, said. “They’re not out there just to win.”
Barston said his initial reason for undertaking the survey was simply to compare the views of young athletes today with those from 20 years ago. He estimated that he had spent more than 100 hours on the project, and now he is thinking bigger.
Barston has been toying with the idea of starting a Web site where he would post data and encourage other young people to start “Why Do You Play?” projects.
“The Web site idea is very preliminary,” he said. “I am trying to think of ways to spread the word and get other people to do this in their hometowns.”
Parents and league officials in Darien have praised Barston’s efforts. Guy Wisinski, a member of the junior football league’s board, said the survey was a “touch of reality” for adults.
“It reminds us why kids play sports in the first place,” he said. “It’s not about winning a championship in the fourth grade and having that be a life achievement.”
An earlier version misstated the board on which Mike Barston serves.
