Prospective buyers packed a ballroom at the Molly Pitcher Inn, but few bid.
An auction of units at the nearly completed Metropolitan condo project on Red Bank's Wallace Street was halted early Saturday afternoon after just two were sold.
Officials cited the reluctance of prospective buyers to meet the seller's price expectations.
"I'm a little shocked I thought the property was adequately priced,"
emcee Jon Chipps told the audience of about 200 that packed a ballroom
at the Molly Pitcher Inn
before declaring the event over.
"Obviously, the prices that have
been brought forth are much, much lower than the developer had
expected."
The new president recited the oath of office, and Red Bank tuned in.
They interrupted their usual routines and silenced their lunchtime chatter to watch, their eyes drawn to television screens and the making of what all agreed was American history.
Red Bank voters lined up at dawn on Nov. 4 to participate in the election that today puts Barack Obama in the White House as the 44th President of the United States of America.
Among the one to two million Americansexpected by D.C. police to be present is 88-year-old Elmer ‘Ace’ Godwin of Shrewsbury, one of the surviving Tuskegee Airmen, the African-American pilots who fought in World War II.
Today’s Asbury Park Press has an article about the airmen and their thoughts on today’s main event.
The spreading economic crisis is leaving tens of millions of Americans facing the prospect of hunger as they contend with diminished earnings or joblessness and worse.
According to one estimate, more than 35 million Americans lived in households that struggled to feed themselves in 2007; the toll this year is expected to be worse. Next year, worse still.
In New Jersey, an estimated 250,000 new clients are expected to seek help this year from food banks. And the need isn’t coming only from the inner cities. Now, even affluent suburbs are being affected.
But even as requests for assistance have risen, donations have been on the decline, leaving food bank shelves almost empty and hungry families waiting for something to eat.
“In all the years I’ve been doing this, there have been times we didn’t have money, but we had food,” says Kathleen DiChiara, founder of the Community Food Bank of New Jersey,” a wholesale distributor of food to more than 1,600 charities throughout the state. Now, she estimates the food banks inventory is down “at least 30 percent,” even as demand is up 25 percent.
So those who feed the hungriest of their neighbors are reaching out with a special appeal for donations of food and cash to help. An information blitz includes the above video, full-page ads featuring longtime food bank supporter Bruce Springsteen, and articles and essays appearing today in 103 hyperlocal news sites (that’s what we call redbankgreen) and blogs across New Jersey.
The message: a crisis of domestic hunger is looming.
“This is not going to go away after the holidays,” says DiChiara. “We need to have food drives that are going to stretch out throughout the year.”
Grace Scott, left and Cionna Rosenthal of the Rumson Country Day School help homeowner Yvonne Grayson repaint her repeatedly vandalized Obama sign Sunday morning.
Late last month, redbankgreen reported on a rash of Obama campaign signs being stolen and vandalized in Fair Haven, including one with heavy wooden posts that had been yanked out of the ground.
Homeowners Yvonne and Mark Grayson recovered their homemade sign and put it back in a prominent place in front of the Ridge Road house they’ve occupied for 15 years this time anchoring the posts in concrete.
But the vandalism continued: the sign was pelted with eggs, and somebody left a big bootprint in the center of it. Then, last Monday, six days after the election, Yvonne Grayson awoke to see that someone had poured dark brown paint over the sign.
An act of racial intimidation? The Graysons are African-American, and Yvonne Grayson says she’s angry that her property was vandalized. But she refuses to frame her response in terms of race.
“I’m not going there,” she says. “These are just some folks who aren’t happy their will didn’t win out. That’s the way it works, and they don’t like it.”
But the attack upset students and faculty at the Rumson Country Day School less than a mile east of the Grayson house. Unaware of who lived in the house, they saw it as an assault on free speech.
Here’s a charming video by Larry Higgs of the Asbury Park Press, who accompanied a fourth-grade class from the Red Bank Charter School on a trip to the newly rebuilt 7 World Trade Center recently.
Councilman Mike DuPont takes his lumps at Monday’s meeting.
Is the ordinance that wouldn’t die finally dead?
As he has repeatedly over the past ten months or so, Councilman Mike DuPont tried getting his ban on plastic bags passed by Red Bank’s governing body last night.
This time, even his fellow majority Democrats sat in deafening silence when called upon to second the proposal so it could be voted on.
The rebuke followed a PowerPoint presentation by DuPont that several food and plastics industry representatives ripped as factually inaccurate; a critique by a Broad Street merchant who claimed she’d been misled about the scope of the ordinance; and a scolding by a resident that the council was wasting its time on something so “petty.”
The decisive election race remains undecided, but a top Monmouth County Democrat is getting ready to take a close look at “a handful of well-paying jobs” if the party wins control of the board for the first time in 24 years, according to today’s Asbury Park Press.
And the party affiliation of job-seekers may be a factor in determining who gets jobs that frequently pay $100,000 a year or more, Freeholder John D’Amico tells Press reporter Bob Jordan.
D’Amico says that party ties may be a factor in picking among job applicants “if there are more than two or three equally qualified people interested in a particular position.” He stresses that the review has not yet begun.
D’Amico’s comments were made as both major parties await the results of the John Curley-Amy Mallet race for the second of two seats on the board. Republicans had a 3-2 majority going into the election; a win by Mallet, of Fair Haven, would tip control to Democrats.
Republican Lillian Burry, Curley’s running mate, retained her seat, and Mallet’s slatemate, Glenn Mason, lost. Now, only 18 votes separate Mallet and Curley, out of more than 271,000 cast, with some 3,200 provisional ballots to be reviewed and counted.
Today’s Asbury Park Press reports that Democrats have dispatched four volunteer lawyers to oversee the handling and counting of an estimated 3,200 provisional ballots cast Tuesday in the Monmouth County Freeholder race.
There’s no official count yet of the ballots, nor of their contents, leaving the matter of who won Amy Mallet of Fair Haven or John Curley of Middletown unresolved.
From the Press:
According to unofficial results from the Monmouth County Clerk’s Office, Mallet has 135,688 votes, compared to 135,670 for Curley.
Mike Mangan, spokesman for the county Democrat organization, said he’s confident Mallet’s lead will hold up, in part because tallies of provisional votes “usually break for us.”
Voters exit the Hook & Ladder Fire House on Mechanic Street, site of the district 1 polling station, after casting their ballots Tuesday.
Long an island of aqua in a red county, Red Bank went inky blue this year, throwing itself behind the presidential candidacy of Barack Obama and taking away from Republicans the only two seats they held on the borough council.
According to the Monmouth County Clerk’s office, the county overall went for McCain/Palin by a margin of 51.3 percent to 47.4 percent over Obama/Biden.
But separate data provided by the borough campaigns showed all nine Red Bank districts lining up behind the president-elect, giving the Dems a 2,889 to 1,556 victory.
That’s nearly 65 percent of the total. District 9, in the southwest corner of town along Newman Springs Road, was most emphatic in rejecting McCain, going for Obama by a 440-to-37 vote majority. (Click map to enlarge)
At the local-race level, the sweep was nearly as thorough.
Amy Mallet of Fair Haven and John Curley of Middletown remain locked in squeaker of an election for Monmouth County Freeholder this morning.
“It’s quite a battle,” Republican Curley tells redbankgreen.
The county clerk’s website has Mallet, a Democrat, leading Curley by just 18 votes, out of more than 271,000 cast betwen them. Curley says he heard late last night that the difference was just 11 votes.
Either way, the outcome is likely to turn on the interpretation of roughly 3,000 provisional votes, and how many of them survive scrutiny, Curley says.
Ninety-three-year-old Jacqueline O’Shea signs in to vote at Borough Hall in Sea Bright Tuesday.
By SUE MORGAN
A year after a disputed mayoral race that has yet to be resolved in court, Sea Bright voters dispatched two Democrats from the borough council and replaced them with Republicans one of whom has held the office before.
That gives the GOP a 5-1 advantage on the council starting January 1.
According to the Monmouth County Clerk’s office, C. Read Murphy, who served as a council member in the 1990s, was the top votegetter, pulling in 441 out of 1,664 votes cast, or 28.19 percent. His running mate, beach club owner James LoBiondo III, netted 454 votes, or 27.28 percent.
A Rumson voter signs in at the Forrestdale School polling station Tuesday afternoon.
By SUE MORGAN
By 8p, Democratic Borough Council candidate Michael Steinhorn expected to have picked up his campaign signs, all 25 or so of them, that he had strategically posted around Rumson.
Ninety minutes later, when he learned had come in last behind two GOP council incumbents, Steinhorn was already gearing up to be an unelected advocate for more than 1,300 residents who supported his challenge to years of one-party leadership in town.
“They haven’t had a choice (of candidates) in 25 years,” Steinhorn told redbankgreen, echoing the central plank of his campaign message.
The other 5,100 or so voters decided to stay in the comfort zone that Republicans have provided them over the town’s 101-year history, a run of dominance so complete that no Democrat is believed ever to have been elected to borough office in that time.
Shaun Broderick won a second term with 2,537 votes, or nearly 40 percent of the total, and Council President Robert Kammerer trailed closely at 2,516 votes, or 39.3 percent, returning him for a third term.
Out are two Republican incumbents and in come a Democrat and an independent after Little Silver voters dealt their harshest rebuke to the GOP in a decade Tuesday.
Of 6,445 votes cast, the largest share, 1,681, went to attorney Daniel O’Hern Jr., for 26.08 percent of the total. He was followed by hardware store owner Dan Levine, who captured 1,540 votes, or 23.89 percent, according to the Monnouth County Clerk’s website.
Incumbent Republicans Jerome Koch and James Banahan held off a challenge from a single Democratic candidate in the race for two seats on the Fair Haven Borough Council Tuesday.
John Curley at home in 2006, when home was Red Bank.
Figures relased by the Monmouth County Clerk’s office indicate that former Red Bank Councilman John Curley leads his nearest Democratic opponent by just 108 votes out of 250,000 cast between them in the race for county freeholder.
Absentee and provisional ballots could determine the outcome of this one.
“We don’t know yet” if he won, Curley told redbankgreen by phone at 10:40p. “We’re in a donnybrook.”
Juanita Lewis embraces her campaign manager, Christine McKenna, after her win in Tuesday’s Red Bank Council election.
Red Bank voters skied straight down the Democratic column in Tuesday’s elections, hoping to elevate the first-ever African-American to the presidency and making the borough council into a solid, single-party affair for the first time in a decade.
Knocked aside in the process were incumbent Councilwoman Grace Cangemi, seeking her first full council term, and her running mate, John Tyler Jr.
Slated to join the council on January 1 are Ed Zipprich and Juanita Lewis, who styled themselves as “progressive Democrats” in the mold of Howard Dean.
But unlike squeakers of recent years, this race wasn’t even close. Zipprich racked up 2,343 votes and Lewis, 2,322 in an unofficial tally. Cangemi netted 1,813 and Tyler, 1,625.
Election officials are expecting record turnout today, according to the Asbury Park Press.
Here’s what redbankgreen found in the first hour of voting activity in Red Bank this morning:
6:00a: More than a dozen voters stand in line in the predawn darkness outside the 6th district polling station at the Calvary Baptist Church on Bridge Avenue (above).
After voting, Linda Vega tells redbankgreen that she’s not usually up and about so early.
“I’m excited,” she says. “I get to be a part of history.”
Monmouth County is one of six counties statewide that may have to revert to paper ballots for first-time voters because of a crush of last-minute registrations, today’s Star-Ledger reports.
From the article:
Warren, Atlantic, Bergen, Monmouth, Ocean and Salem counties recently began sending letters warning the voters that they are registered but must cast provisional paper ballots, said state Division of Elections spokeswoman Susan Evans. Other counties, including Morris and Somerset, may also require some voters to cast provisional ballots.
Elections Director Robert F. Giles said the only difference is that their provisional ballots will be counted Wednesday instead of election night.
“They’ll have a private booth off to the side with a privacy screen to fill out the ballot,” Giles said. “It’s a paper ballot and it gets put in a secure envelope. It just gets counted beginning the next day.”
The Independent Fire House on Mechanic Street does double duty as the district 2 polling station on election day.
Will the lines be long? Will the flow of voters through the polling stations be smooth?
That remains to be seen. But the better prepared voters are for what awaits them, the fewer delays there will be, right?
Here’s some basic info for Red Bank voters about where to cast ballots, how, and what to do in the event you encounter a glitch on Tuesday.
WHEN AND WHERE: Polls are open 6a to 8p.
Here’s the voting districts map, with inverted Vs indicating the location of the polling places; note that district 3 shares a polling place the First Aid Squad on Spring Street with district 7. (Click to enlarge)
If you need more detail about the locations of the polling places, here’s the address list, at left.
Admit it: you’ve read the two public questions on this year’s ballot over and over again, and the “interpretive statements” that purport to explain them, and you don’t know what to make of them.
First, you’re not alone. And second, there’s help.
A statewide poll released today reports that support for one of the two questions varies dramatically depending on whether a plain English version of the question or its official interpretive statement is read.
When asked whether they support an “amendment to the state constitution to require all state agencies to get voter approval for any money they borrow through issuing bonds,” 75 percent of respondents said they would, while 9 percent would not. That statement was formulated by the FDU pollsters.
However, when the question was put to respondents using the actual “interpretive statement” found on the ballot, which is intended to explain the proposal, only 46 percent said they would support it and 28 percent would not.
From the PublicMinds website:
“When the question is in clear language, voters have the opportunity to form a definite opinion,” said Peter Woolley, a political scientist and director of the poll. “When the question is put in legalese many people wont sort it out and cant make an intelligent choice.”
Ayala Naphtali, with neighbor Andrew Crockett, had a spare Obama sign to replace the one stolen from her yard. Below, Yvonne Grayson’s sign is anchored in concrete after vandals ripped it out of the ground.
A rash of campaign-sign thefts and a case of repeated vandalism in Fair Haven have backers of Sen. Barack Obama wondering if someone in the town’s majority party can’t tolerate a different point of view.
In the last 10 days, at least five residents from various parts of town have reported thefts of national campaign signs, says police Chief Darryl Breckenridge. From what he can tell from records, at least four of those were Obama signs; he was unsure about the fifth.
And another resident has come forward with an account of someone pulling a 50-pound custom sign out of the ground earlier this year after three lightweight signs were taken from her front lawn.
Breckenridge says reports of sign theft and vandalism are not uncommon during election season. But supporters of the Democratic presidential candidate can’t help but think that they’re being targeted in a town that tilts Republican.
Andrew Crockett, whose sign was stolen early Saturday, tells redbankgreen he can understand a little juvenile vandalism, but doesn’t think that’s what is going on, not with his sign being stolen shortly before dawn last Saturday.
“If this is a McCain person doing this, please my reaction is unprintable,” he says.
Inspired in seemingly equal parts by Karl Marx, Woody Guthrie and the Clash, singer-songwriter Billy Bragg has cut a singular path through the world of popular music.
On Sunday, the iconoclastic guitar slinger from Barking, England brings his axe and distinctive voice to Monmouth University for a solo performance that’s bound to include commentary, both spoken and sung, on world events.
We caught up with Bragg by phone earlier this week as he was packing his bags to come to America; in that conversation, he talks about driving himself to parts unknown, the global credit crisis, and the value of boots that don’t leak.
Interested parties can read all about it only in today’s edition of Red Bank oRBit.
Several dozen citizens turned out at the Pilgrim Baptist Church on Shrewsbury Avenue in Red Bank last night to watch the final presidential debate between senators Barack Obama and John McCain on a projection screen suspended above the altar.
The event followed pot-luck dessert gathering in the church basement.
Officials cited the reluctance of prospective buyers to meet the seller's price expectations.
