New Jersey Adds 4,900 Jobs and….. Unemployment Rises to 5.0%
According to the NJDOL the state added 4,900 jobs in August but the recovery trend remains slow and still lags behind the rest of the country. New Jersey’s unemployment rate went up to 5.0%, while the national rate is at 4.3%, a slight change from July’s 4.2%. Our last article on the state’s employment trajectory pointed to labor force participation...
Election Survey On Statewide Candidates and Issues Affecting NJ’s 21st District
As a follow up to our Election Surveys for New Providence and Berkeley Heights, we are launching one for the entire 21st Legislative District. The purpose of this survey is to understand issues important to voters who reside within the 21st and to get a sense on where they stand on candidates for statewide office. We are seeking responses for...
Jobs Up in NJ, But Trails Nation on Employment and Economic Outlook
New Jersey added 7,500 non-farm jobs in July and unemployment held steady at 4.9% according to July’s DOL report. Most of the growth came from professional/business services (+7,700 jobs) and leisure/hospitality (+3,000 jobs). These numbers were somewhat offset by hits in the public sector, where payrolls fell by 5,600. The numbers paint a steady picture but another report raises questions...
Policy Brief on the Rights of Undocumented Students in NJ
Recently, I provided a brief to local Boards of Education, Municipal Governments and Police Departments on the rights of undocumented students and District responsibilities to their education. I am publishing the body of the email here for the purpose of informing the public on this topic. Translations in Spanish and Portuguese are linked below – those translations are AI generated. Rights...
New Dashboard Lets NJ Residents Track Housing Trends in Their Own Town
New Jersey has just made it a lot easier for residents to understand what’s really happening with housing in their communities. The Municipal Housing Dashboard allows you to see the age and type of housing in your town, track trends in rental and housing costs, determine household economic vunlerability, or check the number of eviction filings in your ZIP code....
Editorial: Aaron Morrill and the Fight for a Free Press in New Jersey
We should all be pulling for Aaron Morrill. He could have done the easy and profitable thing. He could have kept in a mayor’s good graces, taken down or softened critical news, and made sure he had steady access that allowed for the content and clicks that drive revenue for the Jersey City Times. Instead, he chose to do the...
Building Blind: Is New Jersey’s Development Boom Overwhelming Schools and Flooding Homes?
If you want to know where the state is growing, don’t listen to speeches. Follow the permits. The NJ DCA 2024 housing permit numbers tell a story of towns building towers while others are sticking to cul-de-sacs with a few re-imagining shopping strips as live-work hubs. This while communities struggle to deal with infrastructure impact and working families still wait...
NJ Regulators Call Out JCP&L After Three Years of Declining Reliability
The New Jersey Board of Public Utilities (BPU) has put Jersey Central Power & Light (JCP&L) on notice after three straight years of declining reliability across its service area. From 2022 through 2024, JCP&L’s saw more frequent outages and customers experienced longer waits for power outages to be resolved. In 2024, the company recorded a ten-year high in outages. The...
Loretta Rivers: ‘We must not allow silence to be the response to tragedy.’
Following our Deadly Discretion report on the killing of 68 year old Deborah McCalla Terrell, NJ21st invited community members and leaders to share their perspectives. Loretta Rivers, Piscataway school board member and former Democratic candidate for New Jersey’s 17th Legislative District Assembly seat, responded with the following statement: Hello NJ21St, I appreciate the curiosity of allowing me to respond. I...
NJ Education Report Amplifies Call for Clarity on Adaptive Testing
Laura Waters of New Jersey Education Report adds to the questions surrounding New Jersey’s planned adaptive testing rollout. You can Read It Here.
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