South Orange BOT election
Here's the video of Sheena's kick-off speech:
cramer said:
Here's the video of Sheena's kick-off speech:
https://www.facebook.com/nubia301/videos/10104343685795642/
Link doesn’t seem to work unless you are friends with the person who posted it
cramer said:
“Taxes in New Jersey are absolutely absurd and in South Orange, the average home is assessed at $580,000 with a $17,500 tax bill to go with it. Taxpayers are subsidizing inefficiency and duplication of services at every level of government,” said Collum. Recognizing Maplewood Township Committee members in attendance, Collum listed various shared services already successfully put into place including courts, code enforcement, field maintenance, senior services, and tax collection and argued having 565 municipalities and 600 school districts is not sustainable or efficient for taxpayers, “we’re better and stronger together and next up is fire services which is the second largest expense in both towns’ budgets that can operate more efficiently as one department and save money.” In the long term, Collum joked that she hopes one day both towns will have the community support and political wherewithal to finally “put a ring on it”.
That's great but approximately 60% of our tax bill is for the schools. Shared services is a nice idea but will have a small impact on our property taxes.
yahooyahoo said:
That's great but approximately 60% of our tax bill is for the schools. Shared services is a nice idea but will have a small impact on our property taxes.
Shared services have an impact if they allow South Orange (and Maplewood) to come under the 2% budget cap.
eta - The estimated cost savings of merging the fire departments is $582,000 - $1.6 million annually (split between SO and Maplewood.) That's significant.
yahooyahoo said:
That's great but approximately 60% of our tax bill is for the schools. Shared services is a nice idea but will have a small impact on our property taxes.
So we should not try?
My understanding is that the NJ MFBA (Firefighters Mutual Benevolent Association) is part of a PAC and is contributing large amounts of money to DDF's campaign. DDF is opposed to the merger of the fire departments. There has never been a PAC formed for a South Orange municipal election. Wow! There's going to be a lot of money pouring in from the outside.
If she is opposed to this I wish that she would have told us why sometime over the last several years. I'm open to discussions.
cramer said:
My understanding is that the NJ MFBA (Firefighters Mutual Benevolent Association) is part of a PAC and is contributing large amounts of money to DDF's campaign. DDF is opposed to the merger of the fire departments. There has never been a PAC formed for a South Orange municipal election. Wow! There's going to be a lot of money pouring in from the outside.
DDF is having an event on March 26 and a Gold Sponsor donation is $6400! How do you compete with that?
$6400 for a municipal election in a town of 16,000.residents.
cramer said:
cramer said:DDF is having an event on March 26 and a Gold Sponsor donation is $6400! How do you compete with that?
My understanding is that the NJ MFBA (Firefighters Mutual Benevolent Association) is part of a PAC and is contributing large amounts of money to DDF's campaign. DDF is opposed to the merger of the fire departments. There has never been a PAC formed for a South Orange municipal election. Wow! There's going to be a lot of money pouring in from the outside.
$6400 for a municipal election in a town of 16,000.residents.
Holy moly! You are not kidding!
There are other heavy hitters contributing to DDF's PAC. They're not fooling around.
I hope that the residents are going to be able to see through all of this.
I wonder if spending that much money (assuming she actually sells some $6400 plates) would have any kind of negative impact in such a small community.
Is the name of the PAC available? Will we know how much they spend?
Interesting. This is the first bullet under the "Fiscal" section of South Orange Forward's website:
"Evaluate all services to our community to responsibly control costs by pursuing opportunities for cost savings"
Apparently merging fire departments is not responsibly controlling costs. If what is written above is true.
mrincredible said:
I wonder if spending that much money (assuming she actually sells some $6400 plates) would have any kind of negative impact in such a small community.
Is the name of the PAC available? Will we know how much they spend?
mayhewdrive knows much more than I do about this, but I think the name of the PAC and the amounts it contributed will show up on the NJ Elec reports. The names of the donors to the PAC will not be available.
Okay so how do you know about the "other heavy hitters" you mentioned above?
mrincredible said:
Okay so how do you know about the "other heavy hitters" you mentioned above?
The grapevine. Don't want to mention by name yet. It's just that I'm irate.
cramer said:
mrincredible said:mayhewdrive knows much more than I do about this, but I think the name of the PAC and the amounts it contributed will show up on the NJ Elec reports. The names of the donors to the PAC will not be available.
I wonder if spending that much money (assuming she actually sells some $6400 plates) would have any kind of negative impact in such a small community.
Is the name of the PAC available? Will we know how much they spend?
Sometimes the NJ Elec reports lag and the contributions from DDF's PAC may not even be reported until after the election. For instance, if a PAC makes a donation of $6400 for the March 26th event after the event (the invitation says sales end April 2,) it probably wouldn't show up in a NJ Elec report until after the election.
That's what I was wondering.
I don't know how much candidates typically spend in our municipal elections.
Okay this is a bullet point further down under Public Safety for South Orange Forward:
- Protect our ability to govern our Fire Department.
mrincredible said:
That's what I was wondering.
I don't know how much candidates typically spend in our municipal elections.
mayhewdrive is the expert.
The largest individual donation ever made in a South Orange election was $2500 given by Stuart Wainburg to Nureed Saeed in the 2017 BOT election. Wainburg is the principal of Wainco Realty, which contested the approval of the conversion of Village Hall to a restaurant/beer garden.
Until Wainburg's $2500 donation, the largest amounts that I am aware of were $1000.
The whole process of election reporting is fairly complicated. For anyone so inclined, you can read all the rules at https://www.elec.state.nj.us/pdffiles/forms/compliance/man_cf.pdf
The reality is that enforcement is incredibly weak and the best approach is for the public to insist on transparency from the candidates and through the media.
Past elections have varied widely, depending on whether or not they are contested, but they generally cost between $10k-$20k (normally raised by a combination of contributions by the candidates and money raised by donations from friends/family/neighbors.)
I do wonder how much our VP raised at her rollout. I kicked in. Hopefully she did well.
Enough with the speculation. Is there somewhere I can go to find platforms? Like what do each of these candidates stand for? I don’t have a lot of time to go to each of their websites ( if they even exist ) and need a one shot overview comparison. Aside from watching debates, where can I find this? I think I speak for many voters on this.
It’s way too early for that. Most candidates don’t have websites up yet. Even when they do, you cannot do an Apples to apples to comparison. Don’t you think they are all going to say they will control taxes, protect the public and be inclusive?
You need to actually listen to what they say, learn about their personal experience and find out what they have actually done. It goes much deeper than reading a website.
I've just concluded some polling. Sheena's campaign is on fire and only a fully merged FD can put it out.
cramer said:
mayhewdrive is the expert.
The largest individual donation ever made in a South Orange election was $2500 given by Stuart Wainburg to Nureed Saeed in the 2017 BOT election. Wainburg is the principal of Wainco Realty, which contested the approval of the conversion of Village Hall to a restaurant/beer garden.
Until Wainburg's $2500 donation, the largest amounts that I am aware of were $1000.
Elaine Harris gave either $2900 or $5633 to Sullivan, Mihu, and Kika (AKA Village First) in 2013, according to a search of the NJ ELEC filings. See the form C1 filed on 5/8/2013. There seems to be some missing information from their filings, so it's hard to tell exactly how much she contributed. This form is for $2900 out of an aggregate $5633, but there are no other forms accounting for the additional $2733. They also received $2244 from Alma Anderson, $1450 from Joe Kika, and $1100 from Geraldine Mehu. That was a well financed campaign.
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It was nice to see that 2 of the 3 slates were at Sheena's kick-off on Sunday. I don't think anyone from DDF's slate was there.