I Called This One Back in July
I’ve found that one of the pleasures of blogging is being ahead of the conventional wisdom on a topic, to write something before anyone else and to find that I’m not the only person who feels that way.
Today’s topic: The New Jersey School Construction fund and the $134 million dollars for a high school in Union City.
I wrote about this three months ago, on July 17th (”Is This the Best Way to Spend $136 Million??)”. At the time, I thought that the plans for the new Union City high school, including a football stadium on the roof of the building, was an extravagance that the state should not be funding out of a limited pool of cash. The high school is one of six “demonstration projects” that will eat up almost a half billion of the NJSCC budget.
The money lines from that post:
Well, I look at today’s Star-Ledger, and the story is “Tug-of-war over ‘demo’ schools“. Though the $543 million has been allocated to the six projects, located in New Brunswick, Camden, East Orange, Trenton, Vineland and Union City, none has been actually spent yet, and our legislators are questioning spending all that money when there are many other smaller projects without funding.
Irene Sperling, the director of the Paterson Education Fund notes that all that money “…would buy 10 schools.” Paterson had 43 school projects in various stages of planning, but only 8 have NJSCC funding. Assemblyman Craig Stanley (D-Essex County) wants to look at the money committed to the demonstration schools and possibly redistribute it. “We have to look at every source of revenue”.
It won’t be easy to stop or scale back these projects. New Brunswick, Camden, East Orange, Trenton, Vineland and Union City are all heavy democrat towns. And the construction firm hired by the state to manage four of the six demonstration schools, $337 million worth of projects, has already greased the palms of NJ state democrats with over $1 million in donations since 1997. (Umm… isn’t this pay to play??)
Oh, and since when has the government estimate of project been accurate?? Here’s some shocking news: The final cost of a government run project is always higher than the estimate.. The article quotes the mayor of East Orange who instead of cutting back on the demonstration school in his town is asking for an additional $8.3 million in “inflationary expenses”. Hey, these contractors need fancier trailers with state of the art equipment.