Issue 132: A post about nothing
Migrant buses! Sister city agreements! A takeover at the city council that didn't work!
Good morning! As I’m reflecting on today’s newsletter, I can’t help but think that what I’m sending you is a whole bunch of words about how basically nothing has happened in the last week. I mean, I thought we were going to have a pretty big news week, but on second look… well, there’s a whole lot of nothing. I think you’ll see what I mean in a little bit. I hope you are waiting out this storm (which also somehow was basically nothing?) somewhere warm and dry, and as always thank you for reading! - Amy
The completely epic migrant bus freak out
So to recap a story that first started “unfolding” (if you can call it that) on New Year’s Eve, busloads of migrants from the Texas/Mexico border are being rerouted through NJ en route to NYC. John Heinis from Hudson County News first broke the story:
Yesterday morning, the Secaucus Police Department and town officials received word from the Hudson County Executive’s Office that several busses, a total of four, transporting migrants in route for New York had arrived at the train station at Secaucus Junction.
According to [Secaucus Mayor] Gonnelli, local officials were informed that after being dropped at the train station, the migrants then took trains to New York City.
That’s right, a bunch of people are getting off a bus in a city in NJ, and transferring to another bus to get to NYC — aka, a thing that already happens probably millions of times every day. This is a significant story for the city of NYC, potentially, because it means that Texas has found a workaround to thwart a rule they put into place to slow the number of migrants arriving. But for NJ, all it really means is that Texas figured out something millions of people already know: you can get to NYC via numerous points in New Jersey.
Comments sections predictably exploded, and the NJGOP seized on the story and lost their minds:
Several NJ Democratic politicians responded by not really being too much better than the NJGOP on the issue. In fact, you could be forgiven if you assumed that any of the following statements came from MAGA Republicans, but I can sadly assure you they were from NJ Democrats:
“Our position in Edison Township is that they’re not welcome here … They’re illegal, and they belong on the other side of the border … We don’t want them in Edison, period. That’s the bottom line,” [— Edison’s Democratic Mayor Sam Joshi, the child of immigrant parents, and mayor to a town with a large immigrant population]
“We don’t need anybody here,” said Jersey City Councilman Rich Boggiano. “We have enough problems here in the city right now with all this development, homeless people in the streets, financial trouble. We don’t need the expenses.” [Link to article]
I understand there are people with very real concerns about what it would mean for huge numbers of low/no income people to suddenly show up in a city all at once. I completely understand that were that to happen, it could potentially overwhelm our already very fragile social services and potentially upend housing, schools, and a whole other slew of issues that NJ cities are already struggling with. Potentially. But that’s not what’s happening. We’re really far from that. For now, all that’s happening is that the migrants are passing through NJ. That’s it.
Look, it’s like this: I am writing this on Saturday morning when we are expecting a big snowstorm. Are we going to get 3” or 6” or maybe nothing at all? We don’t know, and predictions are all over the place. By all means, cities should have their plans in place and watch to see what happens closely. But what doesn’t work for anyone is if everyone freaks out and act like there’s already 20’ of snow on the ground and dead bodies piled up everywhere . And it’s one thing for the public to freak out, but to see politicians feed into that and stoke that panic — it’s just disappointing, but not surprising.
I don’t want to compare a busload of human beings to a snowstorm too much, but it’s hard for me not to think about the ensuing freak out about this story in relation to this clip:
Mixed, perhaps, a bit with this clip:
Basically, everyone calm down.
Now, will we need a plan in place in case suddenly things change and we do have a lot of people in need showing up all at once? Yes. As far as I can tell, not a single JC or NJ elected official has come up with some sort of plan to address this in any meaningful way, despite us being a Sanctuary City, a thing our elected officials they were all very happy to see passed back when Trump was in office. Fulop has put out a vague statement after hastily deleting a tweet the day of the first article that was a bit alarmist (although not the end of the world and genuinely not horrible), but he’s also right that we need a statewide policy in order to really make this work long term and for everyone.
The problem is, of course, what people like Boggiano are saying is what a lot of people are thinking. And they’re going to keep thinking that unless we figure out a way to properly address this1. I’d like to suggest that we have plenty of resources we can extend to the migrants should they want to settle here. But it’s going to take real leadership to do that — from electeds, religious leaders, non-profits, and others — not just fear mongering or empty cheerful statements about everyone being welcome.
Sooner or later, NJ is going to have to come up with a plan to take in some migrants, (which is literally something we do already) but we will probably have to take in some more. And that’s something we should all welcome. Screaming and freaking out about this isn’t helpful and only serves to divide our community when people are already walking on eggshells and tensions are super high, right when this moment calls for us to all work together. We’ve all been taught that resources are scarce, and in order to secure things for ourselves and our loved ones, we have to guard what we have closely. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Let’s just all take a deep breath.
Fun with OPRA, Part I
As I mentioned a couple of issues ago, there was a recent editorial co-written by Fulop calling for a strengthening for Open Records laws (aka the laws that allow citizens and reporters alike access to correspondence and documents generated by public employees), despite the fact that his office currently has several lawsuits pending because Jersey City hasn’t been so great about making access to those same records available.
I’m not personally interested in dwelling on that too much, but instead decided to take the editorial as a fresh new start: perhaps now Jersey City has a great new commitment to openness and transparency and the past is in the past, and today is a brand new day! Sure, maybe. So what I did was I filed some OPRAs.
You can do this too — it’s relatively easy. Go to this site, create an account, and fill out the form. If the system works properly, within seven days you should get the documents you’ve requested. Now there’s a few rules: you have to be very specific about what you’re looking for (meaning, you can’t be like “hey OPRA, send me all the examples of politicians doing crimes” or whatever) and you have to be very narrow and focused in your scope (like, you can’t ask for all correspondence between the mayor and his entire staff from the moment he was elected til now). Basically, be very, very reasonable — think about how much paperwork a certain request might generate and the fact that there’s a very small office processing it, think about asking about very specific documents, that sort of thing. But that said, you can request a lot of things — resolutions, ordinances, correspondence on official email channels, memos, etc.
People file OPRAs all the time. Maybe you want to know how much your city paid in a recently settlement that didn’t get much news. A local NJ blogger, John Paff, routinely files them and reports on the on his site TransparencyNJ. You can take a look at that to get an idea of the array of documents you can request.
So, what to file an OPRA about? I thought on the issue for a while. Honestly, I was full on in holiday mode when the editorial came out and not really wanting to kick up too much trouble, but I did want to see if it worked. I thought back to a conversation I had with one of the people who pushed for a the ceasefire resolution a few weeks ago. It was a couple of days after the resolution failed, and she was quite angry about the whole thing failing, and as I talked to her she mentioned a sister city agreement between Jersey City and a city in Israel. She pointed to this as an example of the preferential treatment JC has afforded Israeli interests over Palestinian ones.
Oh come on, I thought. In my mind, sister city resolutions are largely ceremonial — big on pomp, minuscule to non-existent on actual policy. I remembered when the town I grew up in started a sister city alliance with a city in Japan, and how it basically resulted in all of us having to do book reports on the city and learn about it, and that was about it — it’s not like there was suddenly preferential trade agreements with the city or an influx of Japanese tourists showing up. It was a nice little thing that we did; we learned that the world wasn’t quite so big as we thought it was and look at the people in this faraway place who are so similar to us, and so on. I think one of my classes had a penpal in the Japanese city — it was cute and nice and nothing to be scared of. Ok, I suppose “cultural understanding” is a form of preferential treatment, but this seemed like the most harmless thing in the world to me.
So this, I thought, would be a perfectly easy thing to OPRA from the city. The city — I assumed — would have really nothing to hide (because what could there possibly be?), documentation and correspondence would be very limited, maybe it would generate some paperwork that was really sweet and heartwarming between school kids in both places. Not a big deal at all and I’d get my OPRA pretty quickly, and this would put to bed something that maybe is in the backs of some people’s minds which may or may not be festering as an unanswered question. I’d get some practice at filing an OPRA, and maybe get a better understanding of how the system works.
So with that in mind, I set out researching. First, I found an article about the agreement which I think the person I spoke to was referring to (technically we have three sister cities in Israel), and made a note of it. The language of that article took me a bit by surprise:
“We look forward to building a meaningful, long-term relationship with Beit Shemesh that will establish more trade partnerships, work with corporations that can invest in both sides of the ocean, and make sure we have an opportunity to grow together.”
But like ultimately, eh? Of course JC wants more companies to move here. And vice versa with Beit Shemesh. Ok, maybe this is a little bit more complicated than just book reports and penpals, but this doesn’t seem to be anything sinister. I mean, we’re currently courting a museum from France and we don’t have a sister city agreement with them — cities want investment; that’s not strange. I’m sure if a company in Belgium wanted to move here, we’d do whatever we could to make that happen. This seems totally normal.
But then things took a bit of a turn. Searching around, I found an old list of Jersey City sister cities and found out something that was uh, not at all what I expected: we have a sister city agreement with a very small city in Florida, with a population of just over 10,000.
Wait, what?
Again, in my mind (up to this point), sister cities are about cultural exchanges. And we have a number of them that make sense — a city in China, a few in India, one in the Philippines — but the one in Florida was unexpected. It’s… just a town in Florida. What kind of cultural understanding do we need to grow with them? Make all your “Florida is its own country” jokes you want — it’s really not. We can literally drive there. You don’t need a passport. What? (Also, if I’m reading this chart correctly, I think it says we’re flying the flag of Florida over City Hall, a thing I probably should have looked into but really, I just want to believe we’re not actually doing that.) And in terms of luring businesses here, how many businesses can possibly exist in a city of 10k? (To compare, Beit Shemesh has a population of over 100k — if these agreements are about getting businesses to relocate, that certainly provides a lot more opportunities to entice companies over here.)
But this created another really perfect situation: I mean, there can’t possibly be anything nefarious going on between JC and Florida, can there? I mean, give me a break — it can’t be anything too weird. Right? This has to be an even easier request than the one in Israel.
So on December 22nd, I filed OPRAs for both Beit Shemesh (Israel) and Palatka, Florida (USA). I asked for a full copy of the resolutions for both, and correspondence between the mayor and business administrators of both cities. On Dec 27, Deputy City Clerk John Hallanan wrote back to me, requesting a more narrow window of time for my request involving correspondence related to Beit Shemesh (this was 100% my mistake — I meant to refine the time I was requesting correspondence from, and accidentally left it off. Absolutely no shade to JC for this one — that was my error; I remembered to note it for the Florida city, but not for the one in Israel).
Anyway, I haven’t gotten it yet. According to attorney CJ Griffin who has represented a number of people and consulted on countless OPRA lawsuits, you’re supposed to receive your request in seven days. Now, we just had the holidays (I assume that’s business days, which we’d be right up against the deadline for that if so, given the days off), and in the case of Beit Shemesh, we have my error to factor in which may result in a few more days’ delay. Really, none of this is worth complaining about — the city may be well within its right to take a little bit of time getting back to me, and it’s unreasonable to expect an instant turnaround on something like this as they certainly have other things to do. So far, everything is running smoothly and normally, and no need for concern. If it comes back to me this week, that will be pretty great and about as fast as anyone can reasonably expect.
Since this story is so long and has some weird twists to it, I wanted to lay it out to you now, before anything substantial happens. Which… bear in mind, I’m 99% sure literally nothing substantial is going to happen. I’m still really convinced that this is all going to come back as a big fat nothing — again, lots of platitudes and nice things said about the cities involved but very few actual results — because I just really don’t think JC is enough of a force in the world where an agreement with us (for what, trade? immigration? to/from Florida? WHAT??) makes any actual sense. But I’ll be following up with this in subsequent weeks as I hear back from the city.
ICYMI
There was an attempted semi-coup (sort of? maybe?) in the city council over who was going to serve as City Council President which failed, and Joyce Watterman is now president again. This entire thing played out pretty strangely… honestly, just read the article. The whole thing is really odd.
There is a campaign underway to keep JC’s Division of Planning’s meetings hybrid (they were set to revert to in-person only starting this week). Read more about that here. If you’d like to write to your local officials to urge your support for this, the Lincoln Park North Neighborhood Association has some tips here.
There are people who will always be anti-immigrant because they’re racist. But there’s also a sizable amount of people who might be concerned about this issue because — at least in part — their anxieties have been ginned up by both politicians and the media.