NEW BRUNSWICK, NJ—Following a controversy last December that attracted the attention of the national media, Rutgers University will be cutting a check to a New Brunswick soup kitchen for $2,451.90.

The donation represents 734 meals that Rutgers students donated from their meal plans at the University’s four dining halls during the month of February.  For each donated meal “swipe,” Rutgers is donating $3.30 to Elijah’s Promise soup kitchen.

“I am honored to have met such great people in our quest to help feed the less fortunate here in New Brunswick,” said Charles Kratovil, founder of the Operation: Robin Hood (ORH) campaign.  “We will continue to find creative ways to give back to the community that has given us so much.”

The campaign began in December when ORH volunteers solicited donations of takeout meals at two Rutgers University dining halls.  The meals were immediately brought to needy people, at several locations throughout the city.

After learning of the campaign, Dining Services shut down the program by limiting students to only one takeout meal per visit.  The obvious over-reaction, combined with the involvement of Rutgers Police Department, who sided with the activists, garnered attention from the national media.

After controversy erupted, the University and activists agreed to a compromise allowing students and faculty with meal plans to donate guest meals (each plan includes 10 per semester) to the city’s only soup kitchen during February 2010.

The University-sanctioned drive was a huge success and saw an eight-fold spike in donations during the final week thanks to ORH volunteers who distributed fliers to raise awareness of the option to give.  Just 199 meals were donated during the first three weeks of the drive, but an overwhelming 535 were given during the last week of the campaign, including over 200 on the final day alone.

A secondary part of the December 15^th compromise with the University was the formation of a “Meal Plan Reform Committee,” the first in twelve years, charged with examining ways to make the offered meal plans less deceptive and more flexible.

Vice President of Student Affairs Gregory Blimling appointed the committee’s membership in January.  They met for the first time in a private, closed-door meeting Friday February 19^th.  Notes were taken but their distribution to the press or the public was explicitly prohibited.  Their next meeting is this Friday at 3pm.

“I am concerned why this crucial committee is not meeting in public. How is that possibly in the best interests of the users of these meal plans?” said Kratovil.

Recent Media Coverage:

Daily Targum: http://www.dailytargum.com/news/robin-hood-intiative-swipes-to-final-close-1.2168837

Bill Bray, the mayor’s public information officer, knows all about uncovering the truth. As a former journalist, Bill prides himself on his investigative skills. “There was an incident on the wrestling team where they sexually abused a mentally handicapped player. Some of the people involved were potentially related to the town’s administration. They tried to sweep that under the rug and eventually managed to do so.”  Another incident involved a police officer who was killed in the line of duty. The suspect was subsequently killed. They held the cop who did it up as a hero, but later it came out that he had to surrender his weapon because his wife had a protection from abuse ordered on him. “That was another thing I scooped the bigger newspapers on.”

Bill entered journalism because he wanted to be a writer. “A lot of the writers I admired— Stephen Crane, Hemingway— were journalists by trade. And being a realist, I knew that I wasn’t going to graduate college and write the great American novel; I knew I needed something to put clothes on my back and food on my table and that was journalism.” What Bill discovered was that after a day of covering the local happenings, the last thing he wanted to do was write about anything else. “While it hones your skills and sharpens your intellect, it leaves you no time to practice your craft.”

Bill’s involvement with journalism was inspired by his foray into activist politics.

As a freshman at Rutgers in the fall of ’92, Bill was tangentially involved with the Clinton campaign. “I feel I personally locked up all the undecided votes in Voorhees dorm for Clinton,” said Bill, but he quickly became disillusioned after the previously democratically controlled congress came under the reigns of the Republican party.

Around the same time, Bill also started with NJPIRG —a nonprofit, nonpartisan public interest organization. He spent an entire Saturday canvassing in Livingston, NJ in the midst of a snowstorm. “I was knocking on McMansions, begging people to join our clear air and clear water campaign. Not exactly a controversial issue.”

Hundreds of door knocks and an equal amount of “no’s” later, Bill found himself thinking that activism of this brand was not for him.  “I thought: maybe if I became a journalist and presented people with the facts, then maybe they’d come to a conclusion about what to do in terms of moving forward that would align with my own political philosophy.” After graduating, Bill started at a weekly paper, moved to a daily paper, and found himself realizing that people continued to believe what they wanted to believe while others spun the truth for their own personal gains. “If you really want people to come to a particular conclusion, you’ve really got to beat them over the head with what it means because people are too busy in their everyday lives to take the time to examine every little issue.”

So, Bill decided that rather than be an observer he’d become a participant.  What attracted him to New Brunswick was its emphasis on affordable housing and the amount of development in the area. “I think that if a city or country isn’t growing, it’s dying. If you’re going to have an increasing population, you need an increasing job base, you need to encourage new businesses, and you need to build an infrastructure that will support a growing economy.” Bill especially liked that New Brunswick believed in community building, providing not just employment and shopping, but opportunities for housing and education as well. “It’s the model of smart growth in action,” Bill said of New Brunswick, “which is something I believe our critics often fail to recognize. You gotta look at all the facets to make it work.”

We needed gas before the tour could begin, so we made our way to Route 18. Along the way, we passed low-income senior citizen accommodation, luxury apartments, and low-rise affordable housing. “This is Sterling Side,” Bill explained, “It’s a rehabilitation of the old Lord Sterling School, which the Coalition for Democracy incorrectly declares is a school, which is hilarious. The people criticizing us for our school are pointing at a building that’s not a school.”

One of the criticisms that Bill addressed was that of New Brunswick knocking down homes. The demolitions were done through “Hope Six”, a program under the Clinton administration. “It was a nationwide program of saying that high rise public housing has been a failure. It’s led to people being trapped in poverty, drug addiction and related crime, and the deterioration of the inner city neighborhoods where they’re located.

In city after city in various states across the country, the Hope Six program enabled communities to tear down their high rise public housing and/or section eight vouchers. A section eight voucher lets you live wherever you want and if the landlord accepts it you pay a certain percentage of your income toward the rent and the difference between what the landlord charges and what you’re able to pay is paid for by the federal government. What this allows is for someone with low to moderate income to live anywhere. If you put everyone with low to moderate income together, it leads to problems. It segregates them.

“The programs worked everywhere that they have been implemented and yet we’ve been criticized with, ‘Hey you tore down the housing for blah and blah,’ when what we were trying to do was have safe and clean housing. We’ve replaced every single unit in number and then some. Part of the Hope Six plan is that by having the housing replaced you need to show that you had X amount of units knocked down and that we’re going to have the same amount of units either there or other housing to replace that housing. And one of the things we never get credit for is that some of the people who lived in those homes are now homeowners. They were able to get themselves out of the whole public housing process, but no one seems to mention that. They only say scandalous things that they can’t back up with any empirical facts. And while they can’t disclose it to you because it’s private information, the housing authority knows the addresses of where everybody was relocated. They had to record all that.”

“Why can’t they release the information?” I wondered. Maybe they’re afraid someone’s going to become an agent of social Darwinism and start killing the poor, or maybe they don’t want them getting signed up for subscriptions to Forbes or Variety. Although, I get the feeling that someone living in affordable housing’s not going to be interested in streamlining their ergodynamics in order to increase profit margins or what’s going on with this year’s up-fronts. Nonetheless, these seemed like the exact reasons why such information is kept private—except the magazines being kept at bay are about ex-boyfriends with anger problems. And while with enough determination and the proper resources an angry ex-boyfriend could find out whatever he wanted, I was curious to know how one went about verifying the one-to-one ratio of units down to units up. I was also interested in the logic behind the Hope Six program. To me it seemed like the mechanisms that would lead one to living in affordable housing were the same mechanisms that would lead one to criminality or drug abuse. It reminded me of when I’d heard someone say malnutrition caused depression; my first thought was that that which causes malnutrition would lead to depression as well. I.E. poverty, negligent parents, etc.

The logic of the Hope Six program seemed a bit one sided to me, focusing on negative liberty while not incorporating elements of positive liberty— negative liberty being freedom from and positive liberty being freedom to, to borrow the language of Margret Atwood. One might have the opportunity to do something (negative liberty) while still being unable to do it (positive liberty). Can one be said to be truly free to take advantage of an opportunity if one lacks the ability to do so? Someone with a section eight voucher may not have to worry about basic shelter, but are they emotionally, physically, or intellectually capable of finding the employment necessary to sustain themselves (if that employment exists at all)? Such claims might be easily dismissed by someone saying that if someone doesn’t have a job that they just don’t want it badly enough, but such an observation would be indicative of an absence of an in-depth understanding of what it means to be a person, sorta like someone saying, “Hey, you should smile more.”

I didn’t have the opportunity to formulate or articulate any of this at that time. Instead, Bill and I made our way further down Route 18. My attention was directed to the overhaul the roadway received, including noise-walls, increased bus access, local and express lanes, etc. We pulled into Boyd Park, which is right on the Raritan. “I was on crew for about half a week,” Bill said, “long enough to go to a couple practices and a crew party. Before, you’d come down Commercial Avenue, wait for the light to change, and then cross four lanes of traffic to get to Boyd Park,” Then Bill pointed to the pedestrian bridge, “I remember that to get to crew practice, they told you to walk along the embankment of Route 18, jump over the embankment, and run across the other two lanes.”

Bill detailed other redevelopment projects, including the radical transformation of downtown New Brunswick and the addition of the Easton Avenue Apartments. “It was opened in 1994 and was going to be like students living in an apartment. No preceptors, no RA’s, you just rented your apartments and you lived like adults. We went crazy! We partied our asses off so much, so hardcore, that after a year Rutgers said we’d have RA’s and preceptors.”

After making our way through the various development projects in downtown New Brunswick and the area surrounding Rutgers, Bill and I began to tour the Hub City’s educational facilities. “We invented a new way of building schools. We’re basically building them as re-development projects, which has enabled us to do a couple of really great things. First off, traditionally, a project like a school goes up for public option and you’re required to take the lowest possible bidder. That’s a sticky wicket since just because a contractor’s responsible doesn’t mean they’re any good, and by responsible they mean that they meet parameters set forth in the bid specifications. Even if you know they’re bad contractors, you’re forced to take them.”

We pulled into the parking lot of the new high school. From the outside we were able to see fresh classrooms and a daycare area. The school had not only rooms for traditional education, but spaces for vocational training in a cornucopia of fields including business, engineering, international finance, performance and visual art, health care, etc. Bill continued his explanation of why the school was built so quickly and efficiently. “As a redevelopment project, the city is able to appoint Devco, which is a private entity, to pick whatever contractor they want. They can also say, ‘We need you to build this school by this date for this amount of money. If the contractor gets done early, he saves money by having to pay less of a salary to his staff. If he goes over budget, he eats it because he has to pay extra money. “ The result, Bill explained, was that the city was able to save five million dollars and get the new high school open eight months early. “Renovations begin immediately to convert the old high school into the New Brunswick Middle School and that school will be open in September 2010.”

Then Bill addressed an issue that the city has been criticized for. “In 1999, the board of education approved a district wide facility plan that called for the replacement or renovation of all of our schools. Twelve billion dollars were approved to pay for it, but they did a piss poor job managing that money and it’s all gone. Since 1999, what’s been on the drawing board is the demolition and reconstruction of the Red Shaw School. The state managed the project. They ordered Paul Robeson and Red Shaw vacated. Red Shaw was getting knocked down and Robeson was getting renovated. After a year of nothing happening and Red Shaw being knocked down, they said, ‘We don’t know if we have money. Everything’s on hold.’

We said, ‘It costs a lot of money to take everyone who goes to Robeson and ship them out to the swing space. Let us re-occupy our school.’ So, students go to the Paul Robeson school, but there’s no school for the Red Shaw students to go to because the state knocked it down. Until the state gives notice to proceed with the Red Shaw School, nothing can happen. “

The high school was being readied for its January 4^th opening. I remembered hearing that Moxie TV was interested in checking out the opening, and upon mention of their name Bill said, “They better be dropping their kids off at the school because otherwise they’ll be trespassing on school property and, in the wake of Columbine, that’s a no-no.”

“Why’s that?” I asked.

“Daniel Dalonzo presents himself as an independent journalist, but he’s not. He’s a political combatant. He can perfectly be that. Bully for him. But I don’t have to treat him like a journalist. If you’re an independent journalist, there’s no legal obligation for us to comment to you but there is a moral obligation. We try to comment to the press as much as possible. However, if you’re working on a political campaign, I don’t have to spend time telling you what we’re doing because even if I convince you, you’re still actively engaged in trying to get other people to think we’re doing a bad job. “

We were heading to the swing space next, but I’d forgotten what the school there was actually called. “I think I visited Red Shaw,” I said, “That’s the warehouse school, right?”

“They’re not warehouses,” Bill answered.

“What’s a better nomenclature?”

“Schools. They’ve only ever been schools,” we pulled into a parking lot. “They’re called the “swing space” because we were supposed to be renovating and rebuilding schools all across the city. So, the thought was that since in the case of places like Red Shaw, where students couldn’t be in the building because it was being knocked down, we’d have places where students would swing in and swing out.” Bill looked around. “Actually, these two are just warehouses.” The car went in reverse and we drove around the block. “For all the aforementioned problems with the school funding, students swung in but have yet to swing out, except for the Robeson school, which we pulled out of after one year. “

People hear, “Schools in warehouses,” and their interest is immediately piqued. They see the building, which has windows on the bottom and imagine rooms up top with no light sources except for fluorescent bulbs, but such is a mistaken conception. Sheet rock walls, carpets on the floor, drop ceilings, and no second floor; it was supposed to look just like a brand new school A view from the outside, however, wasn’t the same as a tour, so I asked how I’d go about getting one. “Call the board of education,” Bill said, “Actually, I wonder if I can get you in there right now.” No one was there at the time.  “Hi, this is Bill Bray at the Mayor’s office,” Bill said into his phone, “Not sure if it’s possible while school’s out of session, but I’m giving a tour of the city today to a journalist and was calling to see if that’s something that can be done.” The swing space was not a place that the Mayor’s office shied away from showcasing, so a visit in the future is a likely possibility. “This is actually where we brought then Senator Corzine and Senator Ken Salazar for an event,” Bill explained.

Next we made our way into the fifth ward, the area adjacent to the College Ave campus through which streets like Hamilton and Louis run. “You come on here to Dix Street, which is predominantly a home owner area, you don’t see any litter or parking problems because it’s all owner occupied,” Bill explained, “Two streets over, it’s all students. You can see more litter. You see this, ‘Oh, I didn’t ask for the newspaper, why should I pick it up?’ You live there, take a little pride and pick it up.” We kept driving. “Look at sixteen. You’re not allowed to have indoor furniture on the front porch. You can bring it out with you, but you need to bring it back in. This is what happens: the couch everyone thinks is so cool to sit on and have a beer on gets rained on and then it sits out there till it slowly withers away and dies.”

There was no student run neighborhood pick up that Bill was aware of, although the city is implementing a program called “Stop, Think, Go Green, Keep New Brunswick Clean.” It’s an attempt to get people to not litter. Another program the city has is the implementation of public murals to discourage what’s called graffiti. Litter and various violations continued to pique Bill’s interest. “Here the landlord is in violation. There should be a screened area for those garbage cans.” In the past, there were cleanups and litter would return a week later. Under the new program, door-hangers will be left informing residents that a clean up had occurred and requesting that litter be reduced. “We also want to get volunteers across the city to act as block captains to lead mini clean-ups of their block.” One theory in play is that if residents clean up their own neighborhoods they’ll be less likely to litter in the first place, remedying problems such as overflowing trashcans or bottles falling out of cars upon exit.

We made a stop at the teen center, which is located down the street from what, come September, will be the new middle school. Youths in that age bracket are the center’s most frequent visitors. Inside I saw countless games, a fitness center, a room for film screenings, fliers for various programs and activities, and enough foosball tables to host a tournament. “There’s not enough foosball in my life,” I thought as we exited. As we made our way back into the fifth ward, Bill’s attention once again shifted to litter.

“Do you really think piling up pizza boxes on the curb is how you dispose of them? Living off campus is a lot of freedom, but it’s also a lot of responsibility and if you don’t accept the responsibility you shouldn’t be given the freedom. Look at the dramatic difference across the street. Does Wonder Woman live there? Does she have an invisible force field that prevents litter, leaves, and garbage from piling up? No. She has a tree right there. Leaves fell and she cleaned them up. Here: they haven’t done a thing. And it’s a crime.”

“It’s an actual crime?” I asked.

“Well, it’s not an actual crime, but they can get a violation for this stuff. We have two inspectors who do only garbage and debris. “

“Can you just give them a warning?”

“Some violations you’re required to give notice. Other violations you can just give them a violation. Fire code stuff, if you want to, they can issue them a penalty. You can argue a ticket, but a penalty you have to pay and only then can you appeal it.”

Bill explained that, in the past, he’d issued a few warnings, but he was asked to stop after members of Empower out Neighborhoods perceived that they were the victims of politically motivated intimidation in the form of superfluous violation warnings.

We made our way back to City Hall. New Brunswick has seen a lot of change and even more is coming. There is, for example, a solar farm heading into the area that would rank amongst the largest in the state. And while development might be exciting, I found myself fascinated by the theory behind it as well as curious about the state of education in the city, what’s being done to assist at-risk populations, and the accusations of corruption that I’d been hearing about since I’ve started listening.

I also can’t really tell you what I think of Rutgers because I transferred in the spring of ‘09 and I’ve been a commuter until recently. Being a commuter is like going to an all you can eat buffet and then eating more than your fill to get your money’s worth. You leave with a stomachache and realize that you haven’t gotten your money’s worth at all and that you should have just lived on campus. So, I put down my knife and fork and moved into a place half a mile from College Ave.

I knew I’d missed a lot and had plenty of catching up to do, but where to start was unknown to me. Then, at my first JVP meeting, the topic of Operation Robin Hood came up and I heard the name Charlie Kratovil. I wondered if it was the same Charlie I’d seen doing standup a few years earlier. “I’ve seen him do standup,” someone said, and my suspicion was confirmed. New Brunswick politics is very important in the lives of Rutgers students even if many of them don’t necessarily pay attention to it. I know I didn’t as a commuter. I remember fliers about wards being stuck in my face but having no time to check them out because I had to hurry to catch the train. Charlie seemed like the perfect person to ask about what was going on in Hub City.

I got on the phone with Charlie as soon as I could. He told me about how Democrats have been in control for decades, with a single Mayor serving since 1991. Charlie frequently referred to it as a political machine. It made me think of Streetfight, the documentary that followed Cory Booker during his first mayoral run in Newark. Thoughts of corruption filled my mind. I’d learn soon enough that New Brunswick has had its fair share of scandal.

To challenge the political machine and to provide what he thought would be better representation, Charlie campaigned for a wards-style of government. At the moment, elections in New Brunswick are held at-large, which means that candidates run for office in the whole of New Brunswick. It takes a lot of money to run a campaign and those with limited resources are, as a result, unable to compete. One alternative was to divide New Brunswick into wards, which are like neighborhoods. One would only have to appeal to the constituents of one’s own ward as opposed to the whole of the city. This would allow council members to directly represent their neighborhood’s needs and makes running for political office easier given that someone from ward five likely doesn’t know about the reputation of someone in ward two in the same way someone from ward two does. I also doubt that they’d care as much. From what I heard, wards sounded like a great idea to me. A big chunk of New Brunswick seemed to agree since the initiative only lost by eighty-two votes. [1]

I told Charlie I was mulling over doing my first Johnsonville article on the crime reports Rutgers students have sent to their inboxes. Suspects are often described vaguely. “Black male, 18 to 24 years old.” To me, it seems like the local news. Local news focuses on crime in particular but not on the mechanisms that lead people to criminality. I imagine many people turn to crime because they’re disenfranchised and boxed out of supposedly more legitimate means of commerce, as opposed to getting involved in crime because they just feel stabby. “I just love making people suffer. Sometimes I can’t even fall asleep on account of I’m thinking of all these different ways to stab and rob strangers. I love it when they cry! Lately, though, I’ve been thinking about how really we’re all related. So it’s like I’m robbing my own family. And that just makes me want to do it more! It’s a vicious cycle, really, because stabbing is violent, which is what I like about it. Did I mention I like making people suffer?”

With this in mind, I was curious about what New Brunswick had to offer in terms of keeping people from getting involved in crime. Schools, teen centers, Big Brother/Sister programs, adult education, etc. Somehow, through all this, I was told that the students of the Red Shaw Middle School attended school in a warehouse on Jersey Ave. “A warehouse? When can I see this?” I asked.

“Any time,” Charlie said.

I picked Charlie up the next day and we drove to Jersey Ave. When we arrived at the site it was simultaneously exactly and not exactly what I expected. I imagined brown warehouses in an industrial setting painted in litter, rust, and graffiti; what I found was gray warehouses in an industrial setting, free of litter, rust, and graffiti. It was difficult, however, to distinguish the school from the warehouses. I even made a game of it: school or warehouse?

1. Warehouse

2. The school

3. Both; school on the left, warehouse right

4. I forget which…

As Charlie and I pulled out of the parking lot, I asked him how he had come to know so much about New Brunswick politics. “The main reason I got involved in the stuff I got involved in,” Charlie explained, “was because there was a young woman who I think was interested in me and it was a mutual interest and she recommended that I take an Urban Development course with her. So, I took the class. Of course, at that time, it was awkward to be in the class with her, but at the end I really enjoyed it. I liked learning about the changes in the urban world and how fast the rest of the world was urbanizing. And there were three days in the class focused specifically on New Brunswick. There was some really in depth information on the history of redevelopment in the city. I was fascinated by it. I always take pride in where I live, but learning about it showed me how much I was overlooking or how much was going unseen. So, on my own, over the next few years, I did some researching, took more classes on the subject, and one thing led to another and here we are where we are today.”

Charlie had graduated Rutgers as a journalism major and a poli-sci minor. I later asked if he’d ever written for the Targum. Turns out, he did. The mayor’s office had taken issue with some of Charlie’s writing and Bill Bray, the intelligence officer, had written a letter to the editor pointing out what he perceived to be factual inaccuracies in Charlie’s column. The piece that led to the complaint was eventually taken down from the Targum’s site, but Charlie explained to me what had happened. “Basically in 2007 the federal government came into town as part of a scandal where they arrested, charged, and convicted four city employees involving housing inspections.[2] The primary one was a program that the city took a lot of pride in as a means of giving back to the community through redevelopment. The Neighborhood preservation program is what it’s called. A part of that program was nothing more than a way of funneling the money to specific contractors by giving them the work on the houses. So if you’re a low or moderate income person or family and you have a house, if you need a new paint job, kitchen, whatever, they wouldn’t just write you a check but you’d get a contractor to do the work for you. In that specific program, they were funneling all the work to two or three companies.”

“One of the companies eventually fessed up and said they were basically paying bribes to certain people in order to get the work and that they’d also done free or discounted work for some of these corrupt people on their own homes using federal money from the department of housing and urban development that was given for the purpose of fixing up the homes of low to moderate income people. They were falsifying information, putting things in friends’ and family names so they could do work on their own places, and in the end they pocketed a lot of money. One of the guys admitted to taking seventy-five thousand dollars, another took over one hundred thousand.”

“They both got locked up, one was put under house arrest for six months or something, and another person, unfortunately, shot himself in the head. [3] He was a big person in the city machine. He was the head of the water department, was on the planning board, managed political campaigns…The feds came to his office, took some papers, and he came home from lunch and was told, ‘Hey, the feds were just here and took some information about this thing.’ He said, ‘Okay,’ and shot himself in the head by the water tower in the field actually near where I live.”

“All that aside, I was a new journalist, I was writing this column every week, and, sure enough, it hit the front page of the Home News that Richard Kaplan, the guy who took seventy-five thousand dollars, had, as soon as he got into jail, asked his cellmate if he knew anyone who could murder his wife and make it look like a car accident.[4] He went so far as paying someone who was, of course, an FBI agent wearing a wire to murder his wife and now he’s going to be in jail for an even longer time.”

“So when that happened in the news, I wanted to make that the focus of my column, but I also wanted to bring a personal touch to it. Someone I had met on city council informed me of someone who got a raw deal from the city in terms of their housing situation. Those who were convicted for doing corrupt things were also allegedly doing other things, like forcing people out of their homes to get the property for re-development or if someone just wanted a house to rent or own. I spoke with Robert Lloyd Taylor. He was an old man in senior housing and he told me a story about his house on Howard Street and how he applied for money through this program, that they never did the work they promised to do on the house and that, as a result, he ended up losing the house because they put liens on it.”

“I went ahead with the piece, it was published, and the next day Bill Bray was furious saying that this guy was mentally ill and that whatever he said was irrelevant and shouldn’t matter. He obviously differed greatly from the story Robert Lloyd Taylor gave me. He said that his house was a blight on the neighborhood, that they did all they could to work with him, to make sure that he was getting a fair deal, but I can only speak to what I feel in my heart and that’s that he got a raw deal.[5] Given the way this machine works, the way that they intimidate, and especially the housing people, many of whom are now locked up, I’m sure that Mr. Lord Taylor did provide some useful insight into the story.”

“The real issue at hand, however, was the timely happenings of the ongoing corruption saga and I just wanted to bring the personal side of someone who was negatively affected by these programs. I don’t think I’ll ever really know the full truth about who did what.”

There was even more that Charlie told me about as we drove around New Brunswick, but throughout it all I kept wondering about how someone from the mayor’s office would offer as a counterpoint. When Charlie mentioned, however, that one thing that came out of his particular column was that he went on a tour of New Brunswick with Bill Bray, I saw the perfect opportunity to get a more fleshed out account.

[2] http://www.nj.com/news/index.ssf/2008/08/construction_execs_sentenced_i.html

[3] http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/11/nyregion/11water.html?_r=2

[4] http://abclocal.go.com/wabc/story?section=news/local&id=6059352

[5] http://www.dailytargum.com/2.4988/you-can-t-fight-city-hall-1.493349

Today, the State Senators of New Jersey are being asked to vote on S-3157. If signed into law, it would extend the time citizens must wait between submitting petitions for charter changes from 4 years to 10 years.  This is unreasonable, undemocratic, and harmful overall to civic engagement, and we are asking our State Senators to vote against this measure.

Currently, under the Faulkner Act, New Jersey municipalities can hold votes on charter amendments once every four years. If, through S3157, the waiting period between votes is expanded from four to ten years, it would mean that obsolete and malfunctioning portions of town charters could not be revised or improved with any reasonable speed. For instance, after restructuring their school board for better representation, the residents of any city in New Jersey would have to wait an entire decade before voting on even the most basic reform of local election policy.

This discourages people from taking part in the democratic process, and from addressing long-term problems in their communities.  “The effect of this bill is to discourage and disenfranchise regular citizens from taking an active role in their government,” said Mike Shanahan, Democratic Committeeman from New Brunswick’s Sixth Ward.  “Referendums help give people a voice in how their hometowns are governed.  This bill kills that self-determination.”

The bill also fails to take into consideration the amount of public support for any change in local government–Half of a municipality’s registered voters could come forward with a petition for a charter change, and the town would not be able to put that change up for vote on the ballot until this waiting period had passed.

Among the State Senators, the bill’s sole sponsor is Nicholas Scutari (D-Linden).  In the Assembly, only Annette Quijano (D) from Union has sponsored the misguided legislation. This bill would have to recieve a “Yes” vote from both of these bodies, and be signed by Governor Corzine before he leaves office on the 19th to become state law.

We are voicing our opposition to make sure that this unworkable suggestion does not come to be seen as a reasonable option. As a major grassroots organization in New Brunswick, we see this as crippling to the democratic process. Making sure we keep a fair and workable mechanism in place for people to have their local concerns addressed is of great importance to us as voters.

You can read more about the ongoing process here, at MoxieToday.com

Alex: So did you read our articles last week about Operation Robin Hood?

Charlie: I did, I read all of it. I thought you made some good points…

Alex: So tell me, how did the university respond to Operation Robin Hood?

Charlie: Well, I sent President McCormick a letter last Wednesday, I also spoke with Assistant Vice President Delia Pitts, as I told you guys, and I introduced the issue to them. They seemed very interested in coming up with a creative solution.  Though obviously, first and foremost, we wanted them to reverse their policy change that hurt [Operation: Robin Hood] greatly and really hurt all students greatly. At first they would not budge on that. They said that two take out meals would not return this semester and maybe not even next semester and at one point supposedly Director Sams was speaking with Ross Kleinman, the University Affairs Chair, and he even threatened to take out take-out meals, period, if we didn’t cease the operation. So I’m glad it didn’t have to come to that, but ultimately we had to engage in a negotiation. I’m glad we were able to do that without having to force ourselves into a meeting. Ross Kleinman actually did a really good job of mediating (I use the term loosely). He met with Charlie Sams yesterday. He called me up and he said a lot of things that I didn’t necessarily agree with, but the one thing he said that was important was, “Charlie Sams said he’ll meet with you,” and I said “Okay, set it up, let’s do it tomorrow, immediately. Let’s do it tomorrow and maybe we can work this out without having to go over his head to President McCormick or anybody else.”  I got there today and was pleasantly surprised to see Delia Pitts there, as well as Dean Tim Grim and University Sanitarian John Nason.  Along with me, I brought Ross, and Committeeman Mike Shanahan, and also Stephanie King. It was a very pleasant, very straightforward discussion about everything, including how we can help fight hunger locally, and obviously I outlined a plan for some kind of structure to examine the meal plan system. They said that those both sounded like reasonable requests. And we were able to, in about an hour and a half, maybe two hours, work out a compromise whereby we would cease our operation, the take-out meals would be restored instantly and we would basically work in January to convince people to donate a guest swipe from their meal plan to Elijah’s Promise, we’re told that the cash equivalent—

Alex: Cash equivalent?

Charlie: Well, the “cash equivalent” is not the cash equivalent of what you pay for the meal plan, for the meal. It’s the cash equivalent of what it costs them to make a plate of food…which means, obviously, it’s about three dollars. But, in the end, this is something that typically has to go through the student government process; typically it’s only one charity that can receive the donations per semester.

Alex: That’s another issue that maybe we can address through this whole thing.

Charlie: Right. I’ve heard that that there were only 8-10 charities even put in for that. My question is, why can’t all 8 or 10 be subjected to it? So in the end, they agreed to basically plug Elijah’s Promise into this program without going through the RUSA process, which I would argue dilutes the voice of students in the way that they select the charity. The five member allocations board just sort of whittles down all the charities to two, and then the elected student government—which isn’t even directly elected, but that’s another issue all together—essentially picks which one they think is a better charity, and we’re limited to one per semester. So in the end, this semester there was no charity that people could donate their meal swipes to. The Palestinian Children’s Relief Fund was chosen, there was a slight controversy about it, it was delayed, and then the paperwork was delayed slightly, and now we find ourselves in a situation where dining services won’t be making any charitable donations out of people’s guest swipes for this semester. But I’ve been assured that next semester, Elijah’s Promise will be a charity that people can give a guest swipe to for at least a couple of weeks. And then during another part of the semester, there will be one, possibly two organizations, if the PCRF is still down.

Alex: So they’re willing to look into that.

Charlie: Right, they said basically next semester we could have up to three, maybe, who knows, four. They said there will be options, including Elijah’s promise, which is the one that matters to me. I want us to give back to the New Brunswick community first and foremost. That’s our community, it’s given us so much, and we want to give back to it. So we were able to secure that, and I thought that was the most important thing that they did. And then they also agreed to create a committee, or some sort of body to issue a report with recommendations about how to improve dining services.

Alex: Tell me about that committee. Has there been any agreement from the administration as to how exactly that committee is going to come about, who’s going to compose it, what percentage of it is going to be students, how people are going to be appointed for the committee—any of that been worked out yet?

Charlie: None of it has been worked out specifically, but where we’re at now is I won’t stand for the body being any less than 50% students, which is what I made clear today in the meeting. That’s on record, and Dean Grim said that typically those types of committees are way more than 50% students anyway. I think that the best way to make sure that the student voice is on there is by having them chosen by the elected RUSA representatives. People could put in their applications and then RUSA members would choose, let’s say 5 or 10 students that they feel would be the best representatives of the issues. I think Ross Kleinman would be perfect for it; he was great today. I think Committeeman Mike Shanahan actually really did his research and knew all the flaws in the dining policy currently. He was able to discuss them articulately with Director Sams. Director Sams gave his answers, and those answers were sufficient, but did not necessarily leave room for improvement. I think Mike has some really good ideas about how to improve things.

Alex: Do you guys have any concrete alternatives to the dining hall system as it stands?

Charlie: Yeah, I think right now we have a system that is clearly broken because you have people paying for something that they’re told they’re probably not going to use, and if everyone did try to use it all, the system would collapse. So what we need is a system where the university is honest with people about what they’re giving them and the students. Then, if they use up their meal plan, have an easy way to purchase more meals. Right now the current system is misleading to students and parents, so what we need to do is have some kind of system where if you just lower the number of meals that you’re promising people, it could be easily solved that way. You just basically say, “Well we’re only counting on you to use 65%, so we’re going to give you 65%.” I understand that there are arguments that you are entitled to more if you should find yourself in that situation, and these are all based on the laws of averages. But when you have a mandatory minimum number of meals that you have to purchase to be on on-campus housing, it sort of forces people into a situation where they knowingly sign up for a plan that they don’t even think they’re going to use 50% of, but they’re doing it just to stay in the on-campus housing. So I think that the mandatory minimum is the thing that needs to be addressed. Come up with a system that makes it fair to people in dorms and fair to people off-campus. Today one of the things that was said in the meeting was basically that the meal plans that are less than 105, the non-mandatory plans, are a much better deal than the plans that people are forced to buy into for being in the dorms. And you can actually see it if you break down the prices. If you go in there and ask for a 105 and you don’t live in the dorm, they’ll just tell you to get the 75 meals and get blocks after and you’ll save money. And if you’re in the dorm, they can’t tell you that because you’re locked into the 105.

Alex: So the key to the issue is the minimum and the housing requirement?

Charlie: That’s one way to approach solving it. Another way might be to just overhaul the entire system and say that you get what you pay for. You have points and a banana is one point and a bowl of cereal is one point, and you use your points and you don’t have unlimited food at every visit.

Alex: Make people more accountable for what they eat…

Charlie: …so there is less waste, and more thought going into food decisions. Also, take-out meals are not really equivalent to an “all you can eat” buffet, where you can actually sit there for hours on end and eat two or three meals in one sitting and ten plates of food. With a take-out meal you get a fixed amount, so perhaps that should be weighted differently. And guest meals are a big issue, too. Some people I know, for example, Grace, would not go to the dining hall if she didn’t have someone to go with her, so I used most of her guest swipes one semester, whereas other people feel totally comfortable going to the dining hall by themselves and never use guest swipes. Nevertheless, there’s no way to really buy more guest swipe. Everybody has 10, even if you have 285 meals, you only get 10 guest swipes.

Alex: I suppose the only way that you can buy more guest swipes is if you pay the full price to enter. Anybody off the street can eat at Brower if they pay the full price.  So what would you say to people who would be upset with an overhaul to the system because the system, for whatever reasons, keeps things cheaper? What if the changes that you’re insisting upon, whether they are fair or not, force prices up overall? If prices go up, are some people going to be upset about this?

Charlie: I would first of all encourage anybody with any view on the dining situation to put in an application and try to be on this committee to make their voice heard, because I’m not a student. I haven’t had a meal plan since 2003. I have opinions, but quite frankly, my opinions should not—and do not—matter on this issue. In the course of our operation, which was primarily about fighting hunger, we engaged with a lot of people who were really passionately opposed to the current system for a variety of reasons—some people hated the guest swipes, some people just thought that the hours of the dining hall were bad, and wanted to get back at them. But really, the students should be the ones who decide the dining plan, and I think anybody with any view should be welcome, not just people who want to overhaul the whole thing, but people who are for the status quo if they truly do believe in it. So I would say to anybody who has any thought about the dining plan that you should try and join this committee. Administrators consistently complain that they try to have forums and meetings and students just don’t come out and don’t seem to care. Whether it’s about housing policy, dining policy, building new buildings, or College Avenue Greening, they say they reached out, but nobody came out. Well, now they have the students engaged. We have over 4,000 students who joined the Facebook group that basically opposes the current system. And those students should be engaged; they shouldn’t leave their advocacy to Facebook. They should be actually engaging in a real discourse with the people who can make the changes.

Alex:  What do you think tipped the scales for the administration to make them engage this issue in particular?

Charlie:  I think the emails students were sending to them helped, but it was sort of a bizarre series of circumstances that led this to become a large news story, much larger than it should have been. Involved in that was the fact that the police were called on us, when they probably shouldn’t have been. There was this silly argument over this one small group of donated meals in which the dining services did presumably steal and destroy some meals. There were photographers [Brendan and Dan of the Johnsonville Press] that were there at the right place at the right time, who took pictures of the police, the meals, and me there. Their pictures and the story was the lead story in one of the few Targum papers that people actually read. It got a lot of play in the print media, the story online was very popular, it was effectively spread to Facebook and then somebody must’ve heard about it elsewhere because the TV truck came to town for channel 9.

Alex: I remember they talked to you for that.

Charlie: They did, but I didn’t call them. My boy Mike M. calls me up, and I’m on my way to something downtown and he says there’s this news guy that might want to talk to me. And I was like, yeah, yeah, but then he goes, “No, it’s a TV guy,” and I said, “Oh okay, I’ll get back there,” and so we were both on the news that night. After that, I think that the rest of the mainstream media in New Jersey took notice. Star Ledger wrote about it, Home News Tribune wrote about it, and then the AP picked it up, so that Star Ledger story was all over the place. So the story blew up and it kind of took a life of its own. There were things that were written that were positive about us; things that were written that were negative about us. And there were things that were negative about the administration. I know yesterday the Jersey Guys, the most popular radio hosts in NJ, were talking about this for an hour. I called in and they were very supportive and you know, basically that momentum scared the university and made them think that whether or not they had made an error, that they had to give some sort of concession. Later that night I received a response from President McCormick at 6:30pm. It was very thoughtful and appropriate. And then Charles Sams agreed to meet with me this morning, and everybody there was very friendly because I think they wanted to put this behind us and quite frankly, I do too, because this is bad publicity for everyone involved if we’re bickering about how to best help the hungry. It’s just sensationalism.

Alex: Ok, so what’s going on here today?

Charlie: We wanted to show that there is more than one way to crack a nut, and if the take-out situation is not going to be conducive to collecting donations, that we do what Elijah’s Promise has always encouraged groups to do—make a bunch of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, throw a piece of fruit in there, a bottle of water, and a pre-packaged snack, and make a brown bag lunch. And then give them out. I know some soup kitchens feed you a hot meal, and then give you a brown bag to go, or they just give them out to the community. So this is what we’re doing.

Alex: Where’d the food come from?

Charlie: This was a generous donation from one Lucy Kratovil, my mother. She and my dad were very proud after they saw the coverage. My dad donated $100 to the soup kitchen and my mom donated all this stuff, so it’s a good thing. There are hungry people eating this right now.

Alex: Thanks for talking to us Char.

Charlie: Thank you guys.

By now, Charlie Kratovil is a well-known figure in the New Brunswick community. His most recent attempts to bring grassroots change and “good” to New Brunswick have been gathering a lot of support, but some criticism as well. Johnsonville Press Editor in Chief Alex Giannattasio and Editor Grace Hong sat down for a conversation with Mr. Kratovil to get the inside scoop on what he’s been up to since the end of the Wards Campaign.

What follows is the full transcription of that hour and a half conversation. Do not ask how long it took to transcribe. We include it here, in it’s entirety, for the public record. For those completely unfamiliar with the issue, the entire interview provides an in-depth explanation of exactly what has gone on between Operation: Robin Hood and Rutgers Dining Services this past week. For those who are well acquainted with the issue, I would suggest using the question prompts, displayed in bold, as a guide for finding material of interest to you. Further, for those interested in a more speedy read of the overall piece, major quotes have been highlighted, and reading through these will provide a good glimpse at the interview as a whole.

Alex: Tell us about Operation: Robin Hood (O:RH)

Charlie: This whole O:RH was something I had always wanted to do since I came here six years ago as a freshman. I had a meal plan, I saw the system wasn’t really working, and I saw tremendous poverty in New Brunswick, and people who needed meals. It’s something that if I had the time to do then, I would’ve done, but I had neither the time nor the organizing skills to make it happen. So now that I’ve graduated and finished working on this two-year campaign, I wanted to finish off the decade looking back saying, “What can I give back?” because this New Brunswick/Rutgers community has given me so much. Well, l thought this was a great idea I‘ve had all along–and I’m not the first one I’m sure–certainly not by any stretch of the imagination. But with all these resources, all these volunteers who are just sitting around now that the election is over, along with other people who wouldn’t work on the wards campaign in a million billion years but would work on this, it gives them a chance to get plugged into the New Brunswick community. It brings the students and the non-student community a lot closer, and is just generally a good thing to do. So, that’s why we started it and it started off as a smashing success.

Alex: How’d you go about it?

Charlie: Real simple. We handed out handbills. Brower is a great setup because there is really one way in and one way out, and you can tell who is getting take out and who is not. So if you see someone who’s headed to take out, you say, “Hey, can you get two, give one to me, and we’ll take it right to the soup kitchen in New Brunswick.” People with extra meals loved the idea; people without extra meals still loved the idea, but obviously they couldn’t do it. The first day I gave out 100 flyers and we got 36 meals in an hour, just doing lunch at brower, one dining hall, in one hour. It shows that a lot of people have extra meals that they’re trying to burn, and that they want to give them to good cause.

Alex: And you brought the meals to…?

Charlie: Straight to the Elijah’s Promise.

Grace: You spoke with them beforehand?

Charlie: Yes. I didn’t want to get stuck in a situation where we had a bunch of food people thought was going to a soup kitchen not go to it. So I said, “We have some takeout meals donated by Rutgers students. Is that the type of thing you’d accept?” The answer was yes, so we brought in the meals. There was a tense moment when we popped open the thing…”Two cheeseburgers and fries, is this good?” “Perfect”. Well, they actually said “Let me check with the boss.” The boss said, “We’ll take it,” so we’re good. Later that night we had a bunch of nachos, which are probably something that they wouldn’t have taken, and also they were closed when we got there, so we just drove around and gave it out to people. Middlesex County Resource Center, The Ozanam Shelter, the train station…just generally places where people who might be hungry hang around. So we did that, and got rid of 30 meals that way, threw some subs in my fridge and brought them in the next day. After two days of doing this at two different dining halls, we got over 100 meals donated and delivered, either directly to people or to the soup kitchen, and the soup kitchen and the people were loving it. I mean, obviously, if someone walks up to you and asks you, “You want some nachos?” and you’re really hungry, then it’s like a dream come true. So it was an astounding success and I suppose the higher-ups at dining services found out just what this meant for them, and they flipped out. They absolutely lost their cool and crossed lines that they shouldn’t have crossed.

Alex: What happened and what did they do? And let’s discuss maybe why they were upset in the first place, and what brought them to do what they did. But first, what happened?

Charlie: Well, Director Sams came out and he asked to speak with me, so we went down to his office.

Alex: Date and time?

Charlie: This was Tuesday (Dec. 8), probably around 1:30pm. We had already gathered about thirty some meals and we were about to send them to the soup kitchen at 2PM. He said to me “Get your stuff, come downstairs, you’re talking to me.” And he basically started out the conversation by saying, “First of all, that’s a health hazard up there, food borne illness, blah blah blah, we’re going to confiscate the meals and destroy them.” In this case, food borne illness meaning time and temperature, that’s the standard here at Rutgers. So Director Sams says, “We’re going to take these meals and we’re going to destroy them.” I said, “No you’re not, those are not your meals, they were donated, I have a record of it.”

Alex: What record?

Charlie: We had everybody sign a little thing that had the time that you gave [your donation] and your Eden email and your name. That way when we went to drop it off–“Oh, when did these come in?” “These are from too long ago, we can’t give ‘em” or, “These are fresh, we can give ‘em.” That’s what I’m talking about in terms of health. Standards are time and temperature. For certain things like chicken or beef, there’s a certain amount of time that they can be without refrigeration or without proper temperature.

Alex: How’d you take care of the temperature?

Charlie: We delivered them while they were still hot. That day was probably the longest gap we had. We began taking the meals at noon, they were supposed to be at Elijah’s promise by two, but in the end they didn’t get there until 2:45 because of this whole scene. Basically, [Charlie Sams] said his piece, said “What you’re doing is inappropriate, it’s unauthorized and you’re not allowed to solicit in the dining halls.” And I said “I’m sorry, I didn’t know that was the policy. We won’t solicit in the dining halls anymore, we’ll take it outside.” And he said, “Well, yeah, that doesn’t change the fact that we’re still confiscating the meals,” and I said, “No you’re not,” and he said, “Well, then I’m gonna get the police,” I said “Please, get the police here” and he picked up the phone, “I need a patrol man here.” He was under the impression that he was gonna have me arrested and have other people arrested who were involved in this. I think he really thought that because he’s a higher up–he’s one of the top guys in the Rutgers admnistration–that this sort of thing would automatically go his way.

Alex: The Director of Dining Services a top guy in the Rutgers Administration?

Charlie: Well, yeah, he reports directly to Greg Blimling. He figures he owns the building and the area around it, that it’s just his turf, so he can call up the cops and they work for him. I beg to differ: since these meals were donated already, and they were paid for. They’re not his to take, certainly not if he’s going to throw them in the garbage. So I said, “This meeting is over,” and he calls the police and I start moving the food out of the lobby and onto the steps. We got all the food out there…he actually sent some of his employees to go out there and grab the food back, which had already left the building, and bring it back into the building presumably to destroy it, so we stood guard over whatever food was left. He took about half, about fifteen meals, and there were like 20-25 meals leftover. We stood there guarding it until the cops came. Then it was this whole big thing, and of course the cops initially said, “Yeah, you’re gonna have to let them take the food and just move along,” and I said, “Actually no, whoever comes out here and picks up this food and brings it back into the building, I’m going to file a police report against them because they’re stealing food that has been entrusted to me. It was given to me under the impression that I’m taking it to the soup kitchen, so you’re not taking this food from me.” The cops agreed that they were not going to carry the food, they weren’t gonna touch the food, they quite frankly thought what we were doing was a good thing, and that Charlie Sams was being a little irate. We spoke very calmly with the police, we explained our position, and [the police] would go inside and talk to Charlie Sams for 20 minutes or a half hour, and come out and call the supervisors and the sergeant came out and they talked to him for a while, came out, and said, “Yeah, you’re gonna have to leave the food” and I said, “Nope, we’re going to file a police report against whoever takes it.” And he says, “Give me another thirty minutes.” He comes out 30 minutes later and says, “You can take the food.” And so after an hour stand-off in front of Brower Commons, we finally get to put the food in the car and take it to Elijah’s Promise. That night, we did the whole operation at Brower again with no problems. At Neilson we actually did get kicked out. This time, it was students, current students, who were in the building.

Grace: They were kicked out and told they weren’t allowed to come back into the take-out lines?

Charlie: Not only that, but they were told they couldn’t even canvass outside the building because it has the little ramp leading up to the take-out area, and they were told, “No, this is Rutgers property you gotta keep walking, you gotta get off of Rutgers property”—students, mind you!

Alex: They go to school here!

Charlie: It was just outrageous behavior…so the next day, we came back..

Grace: Why do you think Dining Services employees willingly took part in this fight with students?

Charlie: People associate themselves with a team. They’re like, “Oh, students are trying to take from us, this is our paychecks, this is our money, this is our budget,” and so they feel like they have to act. It’s funny how predictable it is—people end up acting in this horrible way, stealing food that’s been donated and throwing it in the garbage. It’s just like—what would make someone do that, you know? And it’s similar to the machine in New Brunswick politics, the Rutgers machine, that protects the status quo and essentially protects the resources that keep the system going–this scam of a system–that forces people to buy too many meals, and then the profit just kind of vanishes at the end of the semester. And so, in the end we came back the next day, we were right outside on the steps like we had agreed to, and we were having just as much success. We weren’t catching everybody who was getting take-out, we were wasting fliers on people who weren’t going to get take out, but in the end, we were still getting a couple of meals donated every minute, and so they called the cops back. The cops come, they keep pushing us further down the steps, and they say, “Actually, maybe just stay on the sidewalks for now,” and then we found out that they had changed the policy from two to one [take-out meal per student]. Everyone was really pissed, obviously. People were coming out saying, “I wanna give you a meal but they won’t let me down there.” They say even if the line’s short, you can’t get back in line and get another meal, they said strict orders from the manager, only one meal per student and you can’t come back. That effectively hindered our entire operation to the point where we were getting 5-10% of the donations that we would’ve gotten if they had kept the policy the way it’s been for years. My understanding, or my logical presumption is that first they thought the cops really were going to arrest us because they said so, and when that didn’t work, they said, “What the hell are we gonna do now? We gotta change the policy to just one,” and in the end, in exploring how to change that policy back, we basically exposed that the Rutgers dining system only plans for you to use 60-65% of your meals—that was the figures I was quoted by the Assistant Vice President yesterday. The rest are called “phantom meals” that never get cooked.

Alex: Quoted by who? Assistant vice president of what?

Charlie: Delia Pitts. She’s of student affairs, Greg Blimling’s underling. I spoke with her yesterday at length and she was very helpful, but ultimately the only reason I was there was to get dining services to change their policy back, and she informed me that that was not going to happen this semester, and maybe never. She said maybe I should focus my energy on something else, like collecting cans from the dorms, and I said “That’s great, I’ll look into that for sure,” but in the end, this dining services policy is the problem.

Alex: Go on about that, these “phantom meals” and what she told you.

Charlie: Well yeah, she basically just said, “I don’t know if you care about this, but dining services says that they only anticipate 60-65% of the meals actually being used,” and she tried to play it off as some kind of good thing about the system. “See, the advantage is you only have to pay for 170 meals, but if you’re really hungry you can eat all 250.” She made it seem like you’re getting a discount. These meals are already $7-16 a piece depending upon your plan, and I know for a fact that those takeout meals cannot cost them that much to make. Eating in the dining hall, $7-16 is a fair price for an unlimited amount of food. But to use two of your swipes, which can be as much as $32 to get four burgers, or three burgers and a hot dog, or something, is just insane. It’s like Giant stadium prices, it’s like a concession stand more than it is like a valuable meal plan. And they’re telling me these meals are actually coming at a huge discount, that this is actually much cheaper than they would be if we actually followed a real system where one meal was actually paid for by somebody, that these whole phantom meals entitles people to somehow get away with not paying for using the full price. But if everyone were to use the full thing, then the whole system falls apart, is basically what I was told yesterday by high ranking people in the Rutgers administration, and quite frankly, as far as I’m concerned, that’s on them. They’ve been the ones who’ve allowed this system to get so out of hand that basically it doesn’t add up.

Alex: Do you know more about how this system came about, when it started?

Charlie: I do not know anything about that, I just know that since I’ve been here you could get two takeout meals and that was sort of the best way to eat away at your meal plan and even with that, it’s almost impossible to finish a 210 meal plan as a freshman. People have 150 meals left over. I had over 100 meals left over at the end of my first year.

Alex: I’m confused as to how this system functions. What’s the value here, to having so many meal points? Is it simply put that they’re taking whatever excess profit they can and using it for….

Charlie: Other things? Well, here’s what I think. I think it has to do with the housing, because they tie the meal plan to housing. They say, “If you’re gonna live in a dorm, you’ve gotta get at least 105 meals, and if you’re a freshman you gotta get 210, no choice in the matter.” If you want to live in the dorms, that’s the price to pay. And they use that. It basically makes the prices of the housing look cheaper than it really is, because you think you’re paying for the meal plan separately, when you’re really not using the full meal plan. You’re essentially just making a donation,, or an extra tax that you’re paying to Rutgers. It also makes the meals look cheaper if you say, “You’re getting a thousand meals,” when you know full well you’re not going to use them. It makes the rate look cheaper, makes it look like “Oh, I’m only paying 10-15 dollars a meal.” if they actually show you what it’s probably going to look like, it would look like you’re paying $25-35 a meal, and you know you can go to a gourmet fancy downtown restaurant in New Brunswick and eat for that price. You could eat for that kind of price every day, every meal, and actually save money and have more freedom to say “Well today, I’m going to eat here, and tomorrow I’m going to eat there.” With the meal plan, they lock you in, you’ve already paid for the meals, and they have a vested interest in you not using them all. So, that’s what we’ve exposed here, that they actually will actively try to prevent you from finishing your meal plan.

Alex: “Exposed” might be a little strong, I mean, I’ve known about this since I was a freshman, and everybody who is a student here knows about this. The question is why they do it, and what do they do with the excess money.

Charlie: I really don’t know, I think housing has something to do with it, and also just in general it makes the meals look cheaper when in reality you’re paying an exorbitant price per meal.

Alex: To me, I think this could be the start of a more in-depth investigation. It’s a real issue. People have talked about this many times. But nobody’s done anything about it, nobody’s campaigned about it, nobody’s canvassed for it, so it’s a good thing to look into.

Charlie: In the end, what I was hoping to achieve with this was not just to feed hungry people this winter, but to make it easier for students to use their unused meals, and create a long term solution for that. Not just to have volunteers collecting food and driving it to the soup kitchen every day, but to force the university to have some sort of better way. If you go to the University of Cincinnati, it’s a very simple process. In the very beginning of the semester, you pick a charity, and at the end of the semester, whatever meals you have left over, they donate a portion of that, about 25% of the meals left over, so if you have 100 meals, they’re going to take 25 meals put a dollar value on that and write a check to the charity of your choice.

Alex: Wow, that’s great.

Charlie: Right? And that’s just one university. In Rutgers New Brunswick, we have not only the dining halls refusing to put the leftovers to people, but if you eat a tray at Brower and you leave half a burger on the tray, that food is chopped up and given to pigs on Cook Campus. All the hundreds of thousands of leftovers every day, at Brower, Neilson, and Busch, and Tillet—it gets turned to food for pigs. Rutgers Camden, on the other hand, they give it to soup kitchens. So you have to think, there must be a better option for us. The end goal is to get the University to adopt some sort of better system. Right now, the system is five people who are on the RUSA allocations board part of the student government, go through every charity, or every student group that has put in a charity, an narrow it down to two. And they say, “These are the two charities this year,” and then they put it to the entire RUSA government, and those elected people who, I’ll say right now, are elected in a way that I don’t like, but they’re elected nevertheless, those people get to pick between the two, as to which one is the better charity to give the donations to, and then students are limited to donating one of their leftover meals, and in exchange for that donation, the university makes a two dollar contribution to that charity, which this year, as you probably know, is the Palestinian Children’s Relief Fund and it was very controversial. I mean, quite frankly, I would much rather have my donation go to something I could see. And it’s a really politically divisive issue, and so if you’re a student who, for whatever reason, disagrees with the charity that is chosen, you’re out of luck.

Grace: So, are you suggesting that now that you’ve discovered this weakness in the system for Rutgers, this is something you have a vested interest in solving in the coming period of time? Is this a new project that you see yourself being involved in now that you’re done with the Wards campaign, and since Operation: Robin Hood cannot continue?

Charlie: That was the plan. First of all, EON is not done. I’m still on the executive council of EON, and EON is going to continue to do good work. There is also a recount on the fourteenth, though I wouldn’t get my hopes up. Nevertheless, EON is alive and well. As far as this operation, it was specifically listed from the beginning that that was the end goal, to get Rutgers to come up to examine what the best way is to give people an option to put their extra meals to good use in our community, in New Brunswick and Piscataway. Right now, there is literally no option for that, except for Operation:Robin Hood. It’s the only way that people could in any way help the local community with their unused meals.

Grace: Do you think that the name of the operation may have impacted the way the administration perceives the group?

Charlie: I mean, I will agree that the naming of the program certainly could be construed as oppositional. But basically, the way I saw it, there are fortunate people in New Brunswick–usually Rutgers students who are getting a degree and have a meal plan paid for in advance, and they can eat whenever the want, and get two take-outs whenever they want–and there’s a lot of really less fortunate people in New Brunswick. The name “Robin Hood” might imply “stealing from the rich and giving to the poor,” when really it’s actually a donation being made out of someone’s heart, out of good will.

Grace: Well, you’re stealing from Rutgers, technically. That’s what Rutgers would be thinking. It’s the school that would be the “rich” in the equation, not the students, since they’re not the ones losing money.

Alex: Is the dining hall a private corporation?

Charlie: I believe it’s an internal operation, part of the Rutgers system. But, I don’t think Rutgers is rich. It’s pretty clear that the university is in dire straights financially. And I think that a lot of people are [in dire straights] all over New Jersey, and I think that something that really annoys students is when their parents are already paying to put them through college, and now they’re going to have to go home over winter break and their parents are going to ask them, “How many meals did you use?” and they’re gonna have to say, “I had a 120 meals left over,” or something, and they’re going to feel bad. The parents are going to feel as though they lost money and they’re gonna get into a fight about it, and it’s all because of a scam that Rutgers Dining Services has been pulling on students since I’ve been here. In the end, it’s about having the fortunate help the less fortunate and it’s about actually making a totally legitimate donation without breaking any rules, and we were just a vessel to help that happen. And that’s why we used the name Operation: Robin Hood. Like I said when I started this thing, it’s just an operation. It’s just a way to accomplish something good with a simple plan, raise awareness and make a point, and show that we care. And then move on to try to expand this into a greater framework for helping the needy in New Brunswick, period. We wantto mak e it a lasting instrument for positive change in this city, not just a one-off operation. That’s why we called it Operation: Robin Hood, and we see where it takes us. And then next year, when the students get back, hopefully we’ll have a huge base of support and we’ll have the right tools and the right knowledge to make real changes to the policy in the university and in the city to help needy people.

Alex: Why do you think the University or the individuals within the U. decided to challenge you on this? Is it just a matter of turf, or something? Because student organizations regularly do all sorts of soliciting and canvassing in and outside of Brower. So why specifically would they come after you?

Charlie: It’s all about the Benjamins. It’s all money, it’s very simple. Dozens of different groups solicit every week in front of Brower commons, some with permits, some without, nobody really questions them or says, “Get off of here, this isn’t your area.” People are out there wit mega-phones, blasting music—there’s all kind of solicitation going on outside of brower.

Alex: Traditionally that area outside of Brower is considered the Free Speech zone, isn’t it?

Charlie: What Dean Brim told me yesterday is that free speech does not include solicitaton–you’re not allowed to ask anybody to do anything. You can tell people what you think, but you can’t ask them for something. So, nevertheless, I put in the paperwork yesterday (Dec. 9) through a valid student organization for us to get the right to use Brower Commons every day from now until winter break from 11am till Midnight. We have that approval. The county board of health came out there and checked out the whole situation and said that it was sufficient. We’re taking food to the soup kitchen quick enough, we’re taking records of when the food is donated, and in general it’s nothing to be concerned about. So we have approval for everything now, those are just little roadblocks they threw in the way hoping to trip us up, hoping we’d give up, you know? They send the cops there the first day–lesser people would’ve backed down and just said, “Yeah, take the meals, we’re done here, we don’t want any trouble,” but we stood up for what was right. We said, “These meals were donated, we’re not going to stop this, this is a good cause.” And the next day, they bring the County Board of Health in, thinking that they’re going to be able to act on this, but they gave us the green light, and then they sent Dean Brim out there and tell us we’re not allowed to solicit anywhere on Rutgers property without his approval, and then we put in the paperwork to make that happen, and they’re left with no choice but to change the policy that’s lasted for years here. All because of one thing, and that’s money. Dining services tried to shut down an anti-hunger campaign for one simple reason – to save money. It’s not because they don’t like me, or they don’t like what we’re doing, or they don’t like the name of the program; it’s because it’s all about their bottom line, and they cannot afford this, or at least they don’t think they can.

Grace: Right, like we were discussing earlier, they don’t actually have all the food available. Everything comes in a pre-ordered quantity, and if there’s a spike, then they run out of food quicker and they’d have to have more money to buy more food than their initially budgeted amount. In which case, if you’re donating 50-100 meals a day for two weeks, you can be pretty sure they were not prepared for that kind of increase in consumption of their food. So this operation is on hold right now?

Charlie: Yeah, I think that under the current system it’s gonna be very hard for us to get enough donations to make it worth our while to be standing out their with fliers and driving the food there to drop off one or two meals to the soup kitchen, so…

Alex: As long as there making it a one meal per person policy…

Charlie: Right, it’s going to be very difficult. Now as exams start to finish, people do have that one or two days where they really have nothing on their plate, literally they just have nothing to do. So hopefully, we can organize one or two days next week at a couple of places where we’re just gonna get the word out massively via the internet and fliering saying, “Just come during this time, and get one take out and donate that, and then we’ll drive it.” Obviously we’re going to be looking into collective action since we have so many people who care about this and are outraged at the behavior of these people. We’re going to be organizing collective action, maybe to try and get this guy to resign, obviously to try and get McCormick to overturn the policy change, but also maybe come up with a better policy long term that’s going to be sustainable so that this doesn’t happen again–where these guys are caught with their pants down. And also just in general, collective action to raise awareness about this problem. It’s really two problems, that’s what started this whole thing. There’s the problem with the students being overcharged and scammed and forced to buy more meals than they’re going to use and then there’s the problem, that’s more serious, of people going to bed hungry.

Grace: So you guys have a meeting tonight. What do you hope to accomplish at this meeting?

Charlie: It’s going to be very interesting because there are going to be a lot of people there who I’ve never met, and I don’t know what they know about it–it’s probably just from the Targum or our facebook group, but I would anticipate we’re gonna have a lot of people there tonight who are PO’ed at the administration and the dining services. We’re going to have to see what it is they want to do because I can’t just show up with a plan and say, “Here’s what we’re doing guys, follow me.” I mean I could, but I want to see. I know somebody’s already organizing a petition, I know other people are researching into the facts of the situation and trying to expose more about this basic injustice as far as the students are concerned. But in the end, I’m sure we’ll all kind of speak with one voice and move in the same direction, and I hope we could really accomplish some changes. I know getting all the press today was probably very helpful, in the Targum, and I’m sure Johnsonville Press will be getting the word out, and the Home News Tribune has yet to write about it [they since have], but I’ve written an open letter to McCormick, and like I said, I’ll give that over to you guys, and hopefully he’ll take some action. He’s made hunger his main issue and that’s why I thought this program was going to succeed.

Alex: Why didn’t you talk to McCormick at the beginning?

Charlie: I haven’t been able to find McCormick yet. The only place I was able to find him was in the bathroom yesterday, but I didn’t think it was an appropriate place or time to approach him. I was pondering sending an email to RAH (Rutgers against Hunger) but I honestly didn’t know who was involved in that besides President McCormick, and this is just kind of a grassroots thing, it’s slapped together. I just said “Make a flier” and there it is, it doesn’t even say “Operation: Robin Hood” on it, this is just “flying by the seat of our pants” organizing. We’re just trying to do good as quick as we can since there’s not much time left. We had to get this off the ground. It would’ve been great to have RAH’s support but in the end, the same things that they’re saying right now, whatever they’re saying right now, all the excuses that they’re making, all of them– “the meals are pre-discounted” – or whatever way they spin it, they would’ve said the same thing if I had gone to them and put it through the “proper channels” which are two words I’ve heard way too much of the past three days. “Proper channels,” which I’ve even heard to refer to the garbage– “the food has to go through the proper channels,” “we’re gonna let the food go back to them and they’re going to put it through the proper channels.” Nevertheless, if this whole idea had been put through the “proper channels,” Charlie Sams and dining services would’ve said the same things he’s saying in the newspaper today, basically saying they can’t allowed it because they don’t have the resources to let students do what they want with their meals. And if everybody got all their meals, they would collapse, the whole system would fall apart, That’s really not a good system. They would’ve just said the same thing they said to me yesterday, “You should try to collect cans from the dorms, there’s probably going to be a lot of cans at the end of the semester that are going to be sitting around.” We would’ve entered into sort of a negotiations or discussion about it and that discussion would still be going on today, and it would still be going on in January, and it would still be going on in February, and in the end, maybe they would say, “Well, we’ll let you donate two meal swipes in stead of one at the end of the year, to whatever charity that the student government chooses,” and that would be their idea of compromise. In the end, I wanted to help people in New Brunswick. Like I said, the decade is coming to an end, and we’re all looking back—well, what did we accomplish? What did we do, what did we forget to do, what did we want to do that never happened? And this was something that I’d always wanted to do, and I think it really gives people a chance to do one good deed this year, not that they haven’t done others, but looking back at how much you take from the community, how much good stuff came your way this year, and yet that there’s still people who didn’t get that much good stuff this year, maybe give something back, just one hour. And really, if all the people that said they were going to volunteer just gave one or two hours over these two weeks, we would’ve been able to do an immense amount of good in New Brunswick.

Grace: Were you, or are you, aware of any of the other legitimate organizations that have been trying to fight hunger in this area?

Charlie: Yeah, I mean all these organizations are really in need right now because there are so many more hungry people than there were just even a month or two ago—Elijah’s Promise, I know NJPIRG always has a hunger and homelessness campaign that I’ve been in touch with very closely, and just in general, there’s a few different churches that have food pantries in the churches, and I’ve been talking to people who organize those that are actually working to try to make a new food pantry in the basement of the church right on College Ave, where we’ve had our fundraisers and stuff. That’s their initiative, they want to turn it into that, but I was helping them clean it up, and by January that should be up and running, so like, it’s not just like a “Fuck you Rutgers,” kind of thing. We really are committed to trying to make a lasting change in New Brunswick.

Alex: Yours is a political movement, as opposed to all the other alternative anti-hunger movements in the area. There are tons of groups working on hunger, that if you felt obliged to help feed the hungry just for that reason, you could go through those “channels”. But you have an ulterior motive here, which is also to instigate change in the dining services.

Charlie: You’re 100% right. We are a political movement, and I’ve been trained in that whole school of thought and organizing, and I saw this as a way to kind of shed light on how the system isn’t working for anybody except for the people at the top. It was a good way to do good, and demonstrate that at the same time, because like I said, machines are very predictable, and that’s the disgusting thing about it. These people, who are good people, find themselves stealing food that’s about to go to hungry people and throwing it in the garbage for no other reason than their job or the role that they play in the structure. That’s the type of thing that we unfortunately exposed, and I was hoping we wouldn’t expose it. I was hoping that President McCormick would stand up for us and say, “Yeah, these guys are doing a good thing, we’ll find the money somewhere else and we’ll pay for the extra food, and we’ll make it happen.” I mean, Rutgers Against Hunger has already done great work and I wanted to join their cause.

Alex: No you didn’t though. If you did, you would have joined Rutgers Against Hunger, instead of doing this.

Charlie: Well no, their cause is my cause—it’s the same cause. They’ve had six meeting, I haven’t been at any of those six meetings in the past year, but that doesn’t mean we don’t have the same goals. The people who work on that thing, including President McCormick, do want the same things that I want. I just have a specific angle on New Brunswick, I approach this from a New Brunswick angle. I cleared it with Elijah’s Promise, I said, “will you take food if I can get you food?” and I said to the students—I didn’t clear it with the administration but I cleared it with the students—I said, “You think this could be the type of thing that would work? Would you volunteer for this type of thing? Do you think we could actually get students to get what they paid for and put it to a good cause?” And people said yes, so I organized it, and I was hoping that the university would be almost forced to support it because there were so many people who cared, because of the hard times this year, etcetera, etcetera, but right now the powers that be are actively fighting it.

Grace: Well, thanks for talking about this operation, but you also told us that EON is alive and well, and you’re still organizing, so what’s EON up to, and what does EON’s future looking like?

Charlie: We, right now, are trying to transition into the next phase of our existence. We were very passionate and very focused on the Wards Question. Obviously that was the reason that the organization was created–to advocate and win wards. And we came very close; there’s a recount, like I said, on the 14th, but I’m not sure if that will be the end of it, or if there will be a contest to the election, but with that said, we aren’t only focused on wards now. We have an immense, broad, swath of things that people are doing. But because we had all invested so much, 110% of our energy, into the wards thing, now that we’re free and able to take a week off and sit back, we each kind of want to go into a different direction, and that’s a good thing. That we’re all still together as one family, but that we all have different things we’re working on. I’m working on an anti-hunger initiative with Rutgers students and the New Brunswick community. But we’re also working to expand a mentorship program. Martha [Guarnieri] is working very hard to basically try and get more Rutgers students to help in the public schools in New Brunswick, and I think that, though I’m not sure if EON will be involved, I’m sure that where they will stand is in favor, but I’m pretty sure that someone is going to put a question on the ballot about changing the way that the school board is elected, or rather, making the school board be elected instead of handpicked by the mayor. And that could be on the ballot November 2010, and I’m sure EON would stand in support of that because we’re a democratic organization that supports democracy. I’m not sure if EON will be sponsoring that, I know there’s a parents group that is getting very active called PLACE. One of the elected committee people, Yolanda Baker, started that, and she’s trying to get parents involved. That’s probably going to be an issue that is big in the mayoral campaign and just in general. It’ll be a referendum. I know there’s another group of people who kind of were tangentially involved in the Ward campaign, who are organizing to put a question on the ballot about de-prioritizing marijuana as the lowest priority crime for police to look for in New Brunswick. That would be Avi Scher, who’s in the student government. He sort of started that whole thing and they’ve got a totally legal petition it seems, and he’s out getting signatures to put that on the ballot for November 2010, or actually I think they might want to get a special election on that one. I think that you know a lot of people in our movement are working on student issues, student government, there’s a whole big discussion…

Alex: You’re referring to the “Student Union” thing?

Charlie: Right, that’s exactly what a lot of our people are focused on right now, is winning incorporation for the student government.

Alex: That’s a lot of stuff going on.

Charlie: Yeah, and these are all things that are going on, it’s part of a movement, some of it is through EON, some of it is not.

Alex: What you have done is empowered, to use your own title, a large population of people in New Brunswick to get political active.

Charlie: Right, and that’s really cool.

Alex: And now you can see the cascade of events that will result from that.

Charlie: Yeah. In general what I’ve been doing is trying to be more involved in city hall, because there are all these various little boards and commissions–the traffic commission, the rent control board, the zoning board, the planning board, the friends of the public library, the environmental commission–all these important bodies that make a lot of decisions just sort of amongst themselves and nobody ever goes to these meetings, nobody ever really voices their opinion. But I’m trying to get in there and get to know these guys and find out what streets they are paving this year, what sidewalks are in most need of repair, how the new street signs are going to go up, whether they are coming along at the right pace, is the weather effecting it—these kinds of little things.

Alex: Sort of keeping them on their toes…

Charlie: Exactly. Now that the election’s over, these guys have a job to do, and so do we. And for us to only be focused on elections would be an error. Elections are a tactic to win things that you want to deliver to your constituents, to people. But the fact of the matter is, this election was decided by 82 votes. So the people on the city council, just like if the mayor hands them a law and says, “Pass this,” we can hand them a law, and say “pass this” and there’s a good chance that they will if it’s a good law because they know that we represent half the city, that we have half the city behind us. And these people, if they want to be re-elected, are going to have to respond to our concerns. I’ve already noticed, especially with the unfortunate death of George Coleman on Route 18, that the city council has been much more respectful and just in general, responsive to what we’re saying to them, rather than just saying “bah, these guys will be gone, we don’t need to worry about them.” They’re actually saying, “Okay these guys are here to stay, we’re going to have to work with them if we want to survive and remain in politics.” And so that’s what I’m trying to do in addition to the hunger thing, in addition to all these other things. But what I want to do is keep these guys on their toes and make sure they’re doing what’s best and bring our ideas as a group to them. Because the election is over, it’s not about “well, who’s ideas are better?” it’s about, “We both have ideas, let’s get together and put that to the good of the city,” instead of going back and forth about why what they’re doing is wrong and what we’re doing is right and vice versa. Now it’s time to work together. That’s what we’re doing right now.

Grace: Awesome.

Charlie: We’ll be having a convention. I’m not sure if it’s going to be EON or Coalition for Democracy, but we’ve always said for this 2010 election coming up, we will let the people of New Brunswick decide who the organization supports, so there will be a convention, probably at a school in NB, and any city resident, even if you can’t vote you can still come and undocumented people would be included, and you’d get to vote for who you think the mayor should be, and who you think the two council candidates should be, and everybody who puts themselves in that convention will sign a pledge that they’re not going to run against the victors of the convention if they lose.

Alex: Do you still have mayoral ambitions?

Charlie: It’s been something that I’ve said I’m going to do, and I’ll be honest, it is my dream, but we will see where the next decade takes us.

Alex: You might be a little green for this election at this point…

Charlie: Well, I mean, I don’t know about that, I just think that I don’t have to decide yet whether I’m throwing my hat into the ring. I want to see who else wants to throw their hat into the ring; I want to see if I think I’m the best candidate. I’ve always said as far as the people I know, and people involved in the town, I did think I was the best candidate, and we’ll see if that’s still the case when it all shakes out and people decide what their ambitions are. But I do have the ambitions, that’s for sure, and I think if I don’t run for mayor in 2010, I might run for city council in 2010. There are a lot of options and there’s always the option that I wouldn’t run for anything. I do love being involved and I’ve managed to campaign for fifty different people and I wasn’t one of them. And that was probably the most fun I’ve had all year helping these people who were new to politics learn how to actually represent their community and help out. I do enjoy being a part of these movements regardless of whether it’s me on the line or what else we’re supporting, if what we’re supporting is the best for the city. I love New Brunswick, that’s the bottom line, so I’m not sure if I’ll run, but it’s definitely an option.

————

Follow up questioning after Thursday’s Meeting:

————

Grace: We were interested in knowing what the results were of Thursday’s Meeting?

Charlie: Yeah, we had a few people there and we discussed what we thought was the best way to do the most good in the next week. So what we’re going to be doing is organizing some kind of direct action this week to try to get dining services to change, or restore their old policy, and also make a real commitment to fighting hunger locally. So whatever that commitment is, in exchange for that, we would cease our operation. If they could donate a certain number of meals a day to Elijah’s Promise, or allow students one meal swipe per day to Elijah’s Promise or something, that will actually make a difference in the community, and also obviously restore the policy about takeout to what it was because there’s no reason to punish everyone for a few people in the student body and alumni who wanted to do good in the community.

Grace: What do you mean by “direct action” though? What kind of direct action do you plan on taking this week?

Charlie: Well, what we’re going to do is basically get together and pay President McCormick a visit and you know, ask for a meeting with him, and basically try and rectify this situation in some way that satisfies both parties. It’s going to be Tuesday at 2PM and we’re going to get together at Scott Hall 123.

Grace: How many people are you expecting?

Charlie: I have no idea, but I think there a lot of people – everyone with a meal plan right now is definitely upset or pissed off because they just basically lost a big chunk of their meal plan or, what used to be considered theirs, just basically got taken from them. So they’re all very angry, and the people without meal plans are supportive of what we’re doing and want to see some real attempt from the university to fight hunger locally.

Grace: Are you aware of any broad opposition to you in the student body as well?

Charlie: I am unaware of any “broad opposition,” I’m aware of a Facebook group, is that what you’re suggesting?

Alex: Well, there are a couple of Facebook groups, right?

Charlie: Yeah, there are. We have a Facebook group that’s got 750 people in it. I know there’s a much bigger one that an old housemate of mine started, and that one has like, 4.000 members. I joined the other one, the one that was spreading lies about me and I’m now banned from that one, so I can’t even tell you how many people are in that one.

Grace: Yes, that was actually another question I had for you. There have been rumors going around that you have been paid of by Elijah’s Promise—and I’m assuming that this is the group called “Corruption in the Dining Hall—Please, get it Right,”–they’re the ones suggesting that you were paid off? Somebody else also suggested that you were somehow making money off of the donations you had collected. Is that in any way true or is that just criticism that has gone awry?

Charlie: I don’t know what it is, but I’ll be honest, it doesn’t make any sense. I don’t know how I would be making money by giving food to the needy. The soup kitchen would not pay for those meals. There’s really no way to make money unless I just went to a corner and started selling them on the corner, but I didn’t do that, I gave them out and I donated them to a soup kitchen. I actually think it’s really offensive that somebody who is actually spending their time volunteering doing good work is going to get accused of making a profit when it’s just the opposite. I could be making money, but I’m deciding not to, and instead spending my time giving back. It’s really just outrageous, and really not even worth responding to. I think that it’s without merit, and it’s slander.

Alex: Well, those allegations come from anonymous parties for one thing, so its hard to sort it out at all, right?

Charlie: Right, there’s no citation.

Alex: There’s no citation; the people who said it apparently didn’t want to be quoted. However, those people are purportedly inside Elijah’s Promise, so the question becomes were you, or any of your volunteers compensated in any way for the activities that you engaged in? I’m not saying that you made money or not, or anything, all I’m asking is, did money change hands?

Charlie: Good question. No money ever changed hands. We drove food that had been donated within a pretty short amount of time. We drove it to the soup kitchen and delivered it – we signed in a log, it’s called a donation log, and presumably that donation log is still there and has records of all except one of our deliveries. I know one time the log was full, so I just couldn’t fill it out. But in the end, money never changed hands; it’s without real factual basis as to why it would even change hands. It’s a soup kitchen, they accept donations, sometimes they were accepting multiple donations from different groups and different types of donations, but money never changes hands. So to assume that it does without real concrete evidence is alarming really, and without a factual basis for why money would be changing hands. ]]> http://johnsonvillepress.com/an-in-depth-look-operation-robin-hood-and-charlie-kratovil/feed/ 7 http://johnsonvillepress.com/eon-press-release-election-update/ http://johnsonvillepress.com/eon-press-release-election-update/#comments Mon, 09 Nov 2009 20:17:53 +0000 Alex G http://johnsonvillepress.com/?p=833 FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE – Saturday, November 7, 2009
Gap closes further in ward election
Accepted ballots yield 81 yes votes

New Brunswick, NJ—Commissioners for the Middlesex County Board of Elections announced the unofficial count of provisional ballots Saturday morning in New Brunswick’s hotly contested municipal referendum.

The referendum question, if approved by voters, would change the way the City Council is elected to a ward-based system.

Ultimately, of the ballots accepted by the board at a public hearing yesterday, 81 were cast in favor of the question and 47 were cast against, narrowing the gap in the race to 82 votes.

The Coalition says the election is not by any means over until voters can be sure their voice was heard, including provisional or absentee ballots that were rejected in error.

“We want everyone’s vote to be counted and we will explore all avenues to ensure everyone’s vote counts in this important election, including a thorough recount if necessary.” said Martin Perez, spokesperson for the Coalition.

The unofficial tally of votes is currently 2,474 no to 2,392 yes.

10/30/09
Alex Giannattasio and Matia Guardabascio interviewing Martha Guarnieri and Charlie Kratovil of Empower Our Neighborhoods:

Alex: We’re coming down to the home stretch on the Wards Campaign. You guys nervous?

Martha: Nope. We’ve got ‘em. We got the votes, they’re there.  All the hard work we’ve done over the last few years allows us to identify our voters by name, so we know our voters at this point.

Charlie: Nope. We’re winning right now, we’ve got ‘em on the run. When we say we know our voters, we mean we know their names and addresses and phone numbers and we’ve talked to them before and they’ve told us they’re going to vote yes. All we have to do is remind them to do it. We ran a real grassroots campaign.

Alex: That’s one thing that I wanted to talk about so lets start there. What are the main demographics in New Brunswick? Who are the registered voters that you’re speaking to and where are they located?

Martha: The big populations for us are the student population, which is huge, the black population, which is getting smaller and smaller, and the growing Latino population. And then there are old, white homeowners, and I guess younger white homeowners in certain parts of town, which are usually people who work for the city. Among people who are “Yes [for wards] Voters”, the two biggest populations that are going to bring us the votes are students and Latinos, which makes sense because they are two of the strongest parts of our coalition.

Charlie: And they’re also the two most disadvantaged, underrepresented groups in New Brunswick

Matia: That’s the Coalition for Democracy?

Martha: That’s right, EON is essentially a lot of students, and the Latino Leadership Alliance is a lot of Latinos, and these two are among the strongest groups in the Coalition, in addition to other community allies.

Alex: In which wards are those two bases–Latinos and students–mainly located?

Charlie: Students are located in primarily two different wards: ward six and ward two. Ward two is Cook/Douglass, Ward six is Rutgers Campus.

Alex: Talk about the general populations there.

Charlie: Over the past thirty years, as Rutgers failed to meet the need for student housing and people wanted to live close to the campus, the students had no choice but to start renting the off campus housing near campus.

Alex: When was that?

Charlie: It happened slowly, starting in the seventies. When the last ward election happened in 1986, first of all it happened in August, so no students were around, and in fact a lot of people were on vacation. So they purposefully picked the worst time to have it. But also, back then the sixth ward was predominantly middle class homeowners, and if there were students living there, it wasn’t ten to a house, but maybe, a landlord on the first floor renting the second floor to one or two students. So now, times have changed big time, especially in the past ten years, to the point where students constitute around 90% of the population. Homeowners don’t even live there anymore; the ones that do are generally elderly, people who are comfortable and for whatever reason want to stay there. But there are no NEW homeowners moving in and buying homes. The only people buying homes are people who want to rent them.

Martha: Except for over in Eagonville, which is what we call the area where Joe Eagon lives over by Saint Peter’s across from Bucchelic Park. Technically that’s part of the sixth ward, but its well separated, over on the edge of town. It goes to show how vastly different neigborhoods can be: you’ve got St. Peter’s, a big blockade, on one side of which you have beautiful homes, clean streets, no parking problems, no crime issues, and the most gorgeous park in Central New Jersey, and on the other side what essentially amounts to a ghetto, the student ghetto, or the Central Avenue ghetto.

Alex: I used to live in that ghetto.

Charlie: Exactly. Now that’s ward six. On the other side of Hamilton is ward five, and in the past couple of years students have begun to spill over into that ward now, High Street, Plum Street, Division Street. When was the last time they built a dorm? They built Easton Ave. Apartments in 1994, they built Rockoff Hall in 2006…

Alex: …All the while the school continues to accept more students…

Charlie: …And they’re building more housing on Busch and Livingston, where people don’t want to live. I don’t have to tell you that College Ave. is the most coveted place to live, followed by Cook/Douglas, yet they haven’t built anything there to live in. The only thing they have built has been the luxury-apartment-style housing which costs more and isn’t as close to the campus as you’d want.

Martha: They’re doing some of it on Easton Ave, over by Century Apartments and across from the Shell Station. But it’s not Rutgers that’s doing it, its some contractors building privately owned living space.

Charlie: But to get back to the point, Wards two, five and six are increasingly becoming student occupied. As Martha accurately pointed out, unfortunately the African American population here has been shrinking…

Alex: Why is that?

Martha: Because they knock down projects.

Alex: Which projects?

Charlie: The New Brunswick Memorial homes. They were four high-rise project towers. They knocked them down and built something that couldn’t hold nearly as many families.

Martha: Watch the video of them knocking down the projects: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZNeuppsmD_k

Charlie: That was in 2001. But in general, they’ve been destroying neighborhoods systematically, eyeing it up as a neighborhood they want to redevelop, and then they find the best way to drive people to want to leave for a variety of reasons, because there’s nothing good in the neighborhood, or they drive all the drug traffic there, or because the landlords there don’t maintain the properties. One of the biggest accomplishments of some of the people in our movement is we won rent control in New Brunswick, specifically eliminating something called vacancy decontrol for many properties. Basically, vacancy decontrol meant that if no one lived in your place, you could jack up the rent to whatever you wanted. So if you could force your own tenants to move out, and then leave the place vacant for a month, you were exempt from rent control law, which had been on the book since 1970-something. This actually destroyed so many neighborhoods in New Brunswick because the landlords actually had a vested interest in not letting the tenants stay, the tenants didn’t get any of the repairs they wanted or the services they wanted, and so they would move every year. Constant moving meant no sense of community.

Alex: What would you say to homeowners who might see the City’s redevelopment-by-whatever-means policies as a good thing in the medium to long run that will bring more wealthy homeowners to and raise property values in those neighborhoods?

Charlie: I would say, what we really need is to look at the specific instance of redevelopment and whether or not they actually helped anybody at all. Who benefited? Was it mostly the developers? The construction companies? Or was it the people in the neighborhoods, the tax payers. I would argue that in almost every case, it was the developers and the people who were in on the construction. The reason for that is that almost every redevelopment project in New Brunswick gets a thirty year tax abatement, which means that because we’re so happy that you’re gonna come to town and build your new thing, we’re not gonna make yo upay taxes for thirty years. So, all these arguments you hear from the machine about how “we’re bringing in all of this money, making things cheaper for the residents, and we can hire more police and fire fighters, and still keep taxes low”, is actually a misleading argument. Most of these redevelopment projects cost the taxpayers money. The City chips in to fix up roads and this and that, and gives away our most precious resource, our land.

Alex: The result of which is this puzzle-work of a city, where a gated community might be found right next to a low income area, separated by a busy highway.

Martha: Take for instance Ward One, which constitutes Rutgers Village and the Dewey Heights area. You can’t even access the place unless you drive down Rt. 18. It’s completely isolated from the rest of New Brunswick, and in fact, that’s where most of the cities people live. Thomas Peoples, a member of EON, has lived in New Brunswick for 51, his whole life. He visited the neighborhood for the first time this year; he said he didn’t even realize it was part of New Brunswick until now.

Charlie: There are 32 neighborhoods (depending on how you slice it) and four apartment buildings. All except for one of the City department heads live in four neighborhoods. The Mayor, City Council members, the Police Director, the Sanitation Director all live down there. Now while the city council is important in theory, in practice it basically functions like a rubber stamp for the Mayor, passing all the laws the Mayor passes to them. The people who actually run the City are the ten department heads, people appointed by the Mayor. All of these department heads live in those four neighborhoods, excepting one who lives in a luxury apartment complex just outside of town. And it’s no wonder that their streets are clean, and the cops protect their neighborhoods, and they don’t have the same problems having traffic improvements made. These people are in touch with THIER neighborhoods, they know THEIR problems, and they address them. They enjoy the benefits of ward-based government, without a wards-based system. They are granted the special treatment of being guaranteed someone in their neighborhood who cares about them.

Martha: I always tell this story, probably too much, about the time we tried to get a speed bump installed in Ward Four over by Joyce Killmer park. It’s a very dangerous area for children, and after a little boy was hit by a car, his grandmother, and the crossing guard from that corner came down to City Hall along with a few other people and petitioned for the city council. The City Council president, who lives down near Ward Four was very insensitive to them, and didn’t want to give them special treatment because she doesn’t rely on them for her votes, even though they’re her neighbors. In a wards based system, if she were the fourth ward council person, she would not have been able to do that without risking her reelection.

Alex: Let’s talk about the specifics behind EON’s campaign strategy.

Martha: As I was saying earlier, since we know all of our voters, basically the tactic now is to make sure that they actually do vote, particularly for the students. That might mean helping them to vote early, or getting them to the right polling stations on Tuesday. At this point, we are not canvassing as heavily as we have, except in those swing districts where we can still steal votes from the machine, for example, in the Pine Street Park area and Riverside, places where if we aren’t there, they’ll vote with the machine, but if we hustle, they could swing to us. So now we’ve targeted these areas and sent in our best canvassers. We also have people making phone calls to voters, and it’s important that our callers know their shit, know about the city and know their issues. Third is covering the city with literature, having people with Wards tee-shirts distributing information to potential voters and making sure the community is as aware as possible of the issue. We’re also always compiling a lot of information, trying to figure out who is going to the polls and when, so as to be able to follow up with the base on election day. We need to be able to communicate between polling places, headquarters and street teams, so that everybody is where they need to be. A really awesome –and daunting–thing about the next couple of days is that we have a group of about 75 people coming to help with the last few days of the campaign. We call them the “Weekend Warriors”. A lot of students who didn’t have time before, because of midterms or whatever else are calling us to be like “I’m in now!” so our street team is about to explode tomorrow morning.

Matia: How many people did you say you have working with you?

Martha: About 20 working full-time, and another 30 or so on the periphery, although like I said, that periphery is about to triple in size.

Charlie: People just keep coming in and asking us how can I help; this weekend we will have an unprecedented number of volunteers working with us. I just want to be clear that we do have a lot of people coming from different places, who have a special connection to New Brunswick for whatever reason. Maybe they went to Rutgers for a while and then left because they couldn’t afford it, or people who’ve lived in Jersey for some time and know how messed up New Brunswick is, and they really care and want to change things here for the better. That’s the difference between us and the political machine here: we bring people from other towns who volunteer because they’re committed to change, they bring people from other towns to vote–for instance, people who own property here but don’t live here.

Matia: So, approximately what percentage of the people working for EON would you say are students vs. non-students?

Martha: I’d say around 80% are students, [to Charlie] would you say that’s fair?

Charlie: I would say that 80% of the hours put in are done by students. I’d say it’s about 50/50 as far as people involved is concerned. Its just people with kids and jobs can’t come in during the day, but they help where they can.

Martha: There are also quite a few people out there talking to their neighbors and friends whose hours aren’t clocked, but who are still invaluable to the cause.

Matia: You mentioned to me earlier your policy for distributing funds back into the community. Could you talk about that please?

Martha: Well, while the machine tends to recruit school kids or out-of-towners to distribute literature in the area, we decided to hire people from around town to help with distribution. So we started hiring three or four people a day to go out and hand out our literature for us. We think it’s important that we put any money we have for the campaign back into the community. We could have called up some of our college friends who live kinda cushy lives and could have used a few bucks for beer money, but I’d much rather inject that money back into the communities that need it most, so that’s what we do.

Matia: One of the things that I think has gotten lost during this campaign is the people who are working it. Actions speak louder than words, and I think this is a prime example of just that happening.

Charlie: Well here’s another thing about the phones. I don’t know if you’ve heard the Mayor’s phone message to city residents, but it’s what is known as a robocall. Politicians who are out-of-touch with the people use them all the time. On our end, we have real people calling their neighbors and talking to them. It’s a two way conversation, we can hear what they have to say, they can ask us questions and we can answer them, whereas the Mayor is calling up every resident in the City, telling them how to vote and hanging up. Another thing was the push poll they recently put out. Push polling is a time honored tradition in politics, it’s where you call up, pretend to be an independent subject that just wants to know how you are going to vote, but ask the question in such a way that predisposes you towards one candidate or another. I actually got a call from these people. They said “Hi, this is Unite New Brunswick calling to let you know that the mayor wants you to vote against this new wards question on the upcoming ballot; the current system has kept taxes to a minimum and created better schools. Can we count on your vote?” So I said “Oh, that’s great! I just moved to New Brunswick, what has the current administration done to improve the schools?” She responds “Oh I don’t have that information.” So I asked “What exactly is the question on the ballot?” She responds “I don’t have that information.” So I asked “How many people are on the New Brunswick city council?” “I don’t have that information”. So I asked “Are you calling from New Brunswick or somewhere else in New Jersey?” And she says “No, I’m not in New Jersey, I’m calling from the South.” I said “The South, as in, of America?” These guys don’t know anything, they’re just an out of town corporation being paid to send the message out.

Martha: When they called me, they asked me whether I’d be voting with the Mayor, and when I told the woman I would not, she just wouldn’t take no for an answer. I tried to tell her I was the President of the opposition party, but she just said thanks for my support and hung up. So I don’t even know if the results of the push poll are accurate…

Alex: Obviously one of the most prominent claims the City levels against the idea of real student representation in New Brunswick is that we are transients, who don’t stick around long enough to deserve a say in policy. Charlie, how long do you plan to stay here in New Brunswick.

Charlie: I’m planning to stay around for the foreseeable future. There is no place I’d rather be. People give me shit for not being a lifelong New Brunswick resident. But obviously, I had no choice where I was going to be living before I turned 18. I’m fully committed to this city and its people, whether or not this question is passed. The entrenched political machine is not with the people. I’m gonna fight these guys until they’re done.

Alex: How about you Martha. You’re president of EON and campaign manager of the Wards campaign. Will you be here for the foreseeable future?

Martha: I really like this city a lot. If I move anywhere, it’ll be for a few years to go to law school before I come back. New Brunswick is such a story. It’s just so clear who are the bad guys and who are the good guys. I want to see it through.

Charlie: Yea, you know, in politics often times you doubt yourself and your not sure whether you’re doing the right thing, but here, every time I’ve never doubted it because the people here are SO crooked and so out of touch with the people they are supposed to represent. I’ve never had to doubt that by fighting them tooth and nail I was doing the right thing. By the way, the number one thing that makes people who love New Brunswick and would want to stay leave is our school system. Our school system is a miserable failure. You see the twenty-somethings and thirty-somethings walking around downtown with little babies in strollers. Mark my words, their days in this town are numbered, because when it comes time for those kids to go to school, those people are going to leave New Brunswick. They simply can not feel safe sending their kids to a New Brunswick school. Middlesex County just released a report that we’re number one for violence in our schools.

Alex: Since we’re riffing on that now, tell me some problems you have with the school system.

Charlie: Well, for starters, the kids living in my neighborhood are currently attending elementary school in a warehouse on Jersey Ave. Before that, they were attending school in this beautiful brick building, the old high school. The Mayor ordered that it be torn down, because he wanted to get state money to build a new school. The money fell through, and now they get bussed across the train tracks to attend school in a warehouse. That’s been the case for about six years now, so at this point, that’s what the kids know as school.

Martha: But the City just says it’s nice on the inside. City Spokesman Bill Bray calls it the “swing space”.

Charlie: It’s not just that school though. Every school in New Brunswick has trailers. The Schools are failing our kids.

Alex: What about the brand new high school the city is building?

Charlie: The new high school is a great initiative, but if the kids can’t read by the time they get to ninth grade, its useless.

Alex: Do you have a position on the specialization structure that the new high school will institute?

Charlie: I honestly like the idea. I know I would have liked it in high school because I was always in classes I thought were dumb, and I just wanted to take the classes I wanted to take.And honestly I think that’s the direction that education is moving in, and it’s a step in the right direction. But a bigger step in the right direction would be building an elementary school in my neighborhood so the kids there could learn to read.

Matia: After this whole wards thing i s over, would you say that the schools will be the next big issue on your agenda?

Martha: I can’t speak for the whole coalition, but personally, my big issue is the schools

Charlie: I think we need to elect our Board of Education in the town. It’s criminal that the Mayor can appoint them, leaving the parents no recourse to implement change. What do you say to a parent whose kid can’t get a good education because the Board of Education doesn’t need to listen to what they have to say?

Martha: I was really confused when I first came to Rutgers because it seemed that the students didn’t really communicate with the community at all. So what I wanted to do at first was to create the world’s biggest mentoring program, with Rutgers students mentoring New Brunswick kids. And it would encourage more New Brunswick kids to go to Rutgers. This is something we could do even without the coalition.

Charlie: I was in the RU Big Buddy program. There were 100 big buddies and 100 little buddies. And the new Principle of the school, who is one of the highest paid members of the Board of Education, Susan McGinty, didn’t like the program, didn’t like Rutgers students coming to her school and talking to her kids. She wanted to exercise some control over the situation, so she said, this year, we’re only going to have 20 big buddies and 20 little buddies, and only for special ed students. We ended up negotiating to 30. So 60 Rutgers students who came out to a general interest meeting, who were willing and able to help out New Brunswick schools were turned away, and told “maybe next year”. There are people who say “Oh, well there must be some reason they did this”. Well, keep in mind, this program is free, it doesn’t cost any money and is completely volunteer-based. It’s just that the administration and the Board of Education actively fight to keep students out of the schools. This is what we are experiencing in New Brunswick: a divide and conquer tactic. The use negative attacks on me, on EON, and on students getting involved. They actively fight to keep the communities apart. They tell the students “don’t go into those neighborhoods, you don’t want to go in those neighborhoods, and they spread all these crazy scare tactics in the community, telling people that the students are all socialists, are all drunks, only want to piss on your lawn, and they continue to succeed election after election. But what’s happening now is the students and the community are starting to work together, and once that happens, the sky is the limit. Things like this mentorship program will happen, and will happen on a massive scale. Because the students do want to get active and do want to make New Brunswick a better place.

Alex: Let’s change gears here. What is it going to take for you guys to win this election? What are the necessary ingredients for victory?

Martha: We need 75 people here, working hard Saturday Sunday Monday, and we need about 200 people on election day.

Matia: What is the expected turnout for this election, and how many votes do you need to win?

Martha: We expect a turnout of around 6000. 3100 votes will win. We expect to win between 2700 and 3300 votes.

Matia: So you think it’s going to be close.

Martha: We do. I think it’s gonna be close, and I think we’re gonna be dragging people out to the polls by their hair, down to the last minutes.

Matia: Are you providing transportation to the polls?

Charlie: Of course. We are working with Amigo Taxi. Not only will they be carrying “Yes for Wards” signs on their taxis but they’ll give anyone a ride to the polls for free.

Alex: I’m glad you guys are realistic. I came in here expecting to hear about how you were gonna win 80% of the vote.

Martha: I spend all my time looking at databases and talking to staff and I think that if we hustle in the next few days I think we can take it. Clearly they’re beating us on the lawn sign front — they got more of them and they’re bigger. And they can pay people to put out their lit, so they got more of that…

Charlie:…and they can mail out their stuff to everyone…

Martha:…and in those swing districts, we are out there all day. We put our literature somewhere, leave and come back, and they’ve covered it up with their literature. It is literally war like that. You also have people like Councilman Jimmy Cook and Aide to the Mayor Kevin Jones, who are the two black leaders in the City government who are out there canvassing for the city a lot.

Alex: So you’ve really got mobilize those two bases: students and Latinos.

Charlie: Yea, well, they are organized and ready to go so, well see.

Martha: One thing to keep in mind is that those two groups are the groups that are going to get F-ed with the most on election day. Even if its pollsters being particularly or purposefully slow, long lines will deter students, so we have to be mindful.

Matia: Where can we find out the results?

Charlie: The votes are counted at 8pm. But we’ll work on getting the results posted in real time online.

Alex: Do you think they will call for a recount?

Martha: Sure, if it’s super close…I wouldn’t put anything past them at this point…

Charlie: I don’t think there will be much room for gerrymandering this time; we’ve got it on the ballot, that’s what counts. It isn’t over after the election. But the fact of the matter is that ours is a movement that is growing, theirs is a political patronage machine, and it is shrinking.

Alex: What are some rookie mistakes you guys made during the course of the campaign?

Martha: Internally, the biggest mistake was the difficulty of getting the coalition, which was in charge of running the campaign, to communicate effectively with the army of campaign volunteers. It can make for a situation where you are duplicating work, so coordination is key. There was a point two weeks ago where the campaigners did not endorse a decision made by the coalition, and that caused some confusion, and we had to get the groups together to resolve the issue. Externally, it is very very hard to organize the black community. I don’t know that that is exactly a fault, it’s just the truth, and it’s something we are going to have to work on in the future.

Matia: Why was it so hard?

Charlie: It’s because black people have been systematically targeted by the current administration, to the point where they don’t feel there is any way they can make change. They’ve seen so many candidates come and so many people go. It’s because they’ve been here so long and they’ve never gotten their fair say. And they’ve actually been booted out of town by the hundreds, by families after families, moving to Virgina, moving to South Carolina, moving to Franklin, moving to North Brunswick, because the current administration has actually made quite an organized effort to facilitate that movement.

Matia: Would you highlight the demolition of those projects as evidence of this?

Charlie: Yea, there’s that, but it doesn’t stop there. The area where the Hyatt is now, Hiram Square, the oldest part of the city where New Brunswick actually got its start was all torn down under the leadership of Mayor John Lynch, the currently incarcerated, formerly most powerful politician in New Jersey. He made the unprecedented step of taking a trip to Washington to lobby the US Congress to remove the historic designation from that neighborhood–because it was occupied by black and Puerto Rican populations. That area was home to the largest collection of historic architecture in New Jersey and perhaps America, a fact that almost made it the home to the John Rockefeller-funded colonial city (second only to Williamsburg, VA). There’s still some colonial architecture on George Street, but the vast majority of it was destroyed by John Lynch.

Matia: Are you calling him a racist?

Charlie: I’m saying his policies were racist. He might have had the best interests of the city at heart, but his policies were discriminatory and they lacked compassion for the people he was supposed to represent.

Alex: We’re about to run out of tape, so I think we’ll end it there. Charlie Kratovil and Martha Guarnieri, thanks for your time and good luck on Tuesday.

Charlie & Martha: Thank you.

Mr. Bray is, in fact, the very reason why mainstream outlets such as the Home News Tribune have mysteriously remained silent about EON and wards, despite their vehement support for putting the ward question to a vote during the summer. In July, the Home News called the City’s attempts to de-rail the question “disgraceful” and “arrogant”. [1] Only after Mr. Bray and Mayor Cahill paid a visit to the Home News, and every other newspaper that wrote positively about the campaign for wards (or even wrote about it at all), did the media change their tune and hush up about the arrogant and unjust behavior of the New Brunswick city government.

Before I dissect the misguided and rhetorical arguments made by Mr. Bray and the political machine that forced him to make them, allow me to first index the numerous factual errors in the article that appeared last week:

1) To my knowledge, no one in the campaign has ever claimed that the City switched to an at-large system in the 1970′s. We have known for some time that 1915 marked the change from ward-based to at-large elections in New Brunswick.

2) Referring to the fact that our petition to change the city back to a ward-based system had two questions, Mr. Bray claims that “legally, the two questions … cannot be on the same petition.” That is completely untrue. While both could not be adopted according to state law (the one that gets more votes wins), they can and have been placed on municipal ballots together in Middlesex County.

3) The second question on our petition does not specify “at-large” as Mr. Bray leads you to believe. In fact, the second question merely makes for a larger City Council with four more seats, but does not specify how they would be elected. The first question encompassed both of our goals, a larger Council and ward-based elections, while the second addressed only the former. So, our questions were not contradictory, but rather complementary. Voters could feel free choose one, both, or neither.

4) Mr. Bray callously contends that “none of the people who signed the petition could have understood what they were signing.” While I cannot guarantee that all 1,116 signatories fully understood the the petition they signed, I assure you most did. I am unaware of any statute that specifies one must understand an issue to any degree in order to sign a petition. In fact, I have heard many stories from the campaign about voters who signed our petition simply because we are a political movement seen as a challenge to the hated Cahill administration. Additionally, many voters signed the petition merely because they knew and trusted the person who had asked them to sign, or because the person who knocked on their door was polite and knowledgeable about the city. Perhaps if Mr. Bray ran the world, everyone who signed a petition to change their government would be subject to an interview and a short quiz afterwards to make sure they fully understand the messed up system that they want to change.

5) Bray attempted to argue: “If we were really duplicitous and corrupt, and trying to pull one over on EON, we would not have said anything about the petition, played the old shell game with them.” He once again is incorrect. He, and the political machine he represents, are most certainly duplicitous and corrupt. In fact, they did play a shell game with us. Knowing they did not have what it took to win an election they knew they couldn’t control because of the “Obama factor,” they settled for a judge they knew they could control. The judge in our case was Heidi Willis-Currier, wife of Randall Currier, a Vice President at Devco, the city’s quasi-governmental redevelopment authority. This connection explains why she ruled in our favor on September 2, only to change her mind September 23, the day before the ballots were printed. The old shell game.

6) One of the more revealing and laughable claims Mr. Bray makes is that, if, hypothetically, the administration was corrupt and duplicitous, that the move they would have made would be to get “a couple hundred of our friends to tip the scales in favor of at-large.” Not sure if he saw the election results, but over 12,000 people voted in New Brunswick on November 4. The reality is the political machine in New Brunswick is dying quickly as its base erodes and, apparently, according to Bray himself, they really can only muster a couple hundred votes when it counts nowadays.

7) According to the article, the City objected to the inclusion of an interpretive statement on the ballot on the grounds that “the time for certainty… is not at the ballot box.” In fact, the City made no formal objection to having an interpretive statement on the ballot. They may have grumbled to each other, but objecting to it would have been stupid. Many ballot questions in New Jersey are accompanied by interpretive statements. They are frequently used to explain complicated or confusing issues, such as ours, in plain English.

8 ) The article also claims Judge Currier issued a stay because there was a group of people who did not know what they were signing. I am assuming this refers to the 10 individuals who came forward, most of whom were closely connected to the city machine, and claimed they were duped into signing our petition over the summer. In fact, these arguments got almost no traction in the courtroom or in the court of public opinion. Judge Currier issued the stay because state law specified that our petition needed to be certified by August 25 in order to appear on the November 4 ballot. Our case was heard before Judge Currier on August 14, with 11 days to spare, but Currier elected to take a three-week vacation before ruling. When Currier returned to the bench September 2, she ruled in favor of EON and ordered the City Clerk to certify our petition which he did the following day. We began our long-awaited campaign, only to find out three weeks later that, despite turning in our petition almost two months before the certification deadline, the machine’s legal wrangling and Currier’s vacation had delayed the process just long enough to disenfranchise 1,116 voters.

9) Ordinances of the City Council must be introduced, passed once (first reading), and passed again at a later meeting (second reading). Last summer, the City Council attempted to pass an alternative ordinance that would supersede our petition for wards, known as the Charter Study Commission (CSC). State law clearly prohibits two simultaneous attempts to change a municipality’s form of government, so whichever comes first is given precedence. The law is clear that the submission of a citizen’s petition to the City Clerk prevents the existing government from passing any competing proposal, such as the CSC, even if it has already been introduced and passed on first reading. In blatant disregard of that law, and in the face of vocal opposition from angered citizens who packed the Council Chambers, the Council passed the CSC ordinance officially two days later. Mr. Bray continues to purport that the CSC should take precedence because it was introduced and passed on first reading before the petition was submitted. This was an argument the City’s lawyers made in court as well. However, they lost because the law clearly states that the defining moments are when the petition is turned in and when the ordinance is passed on second reading. We beat them. Fair and square.

10) Bray continues with his flawed legal knowledge to contend that, by our logic, we (or anyone really) could “kill every ordinance the city tried to pass.” Wrong again. He is sorely mistaken as the statute we cited and used to win this particular argument in court applies only to charter change ballot questions, such as the wards vs. CSC situation. Other ordinances would not be prevented from being acted on by the Council regardless of any petitions filed.

11) Bray cites unnamed lawmakers who have claimed that the current system of at-large Council elections was “adopted as a means of unifying the city, in order to avoid certain neighborhoods bargaining with each other at the expense of smaller or weaker ones.” While lawmakers may have cited this logic before, it is precisely the opposite of the truth. In reality, at-large systems specifically permit just the type of bargaining these advocates feared. New Brunswick is a prime example, where student and poor neighborhoods are systematically disenfranchised by powerful, more affluent neighborhoods on the edge of town. Bray continues “It was hoped that by uniting the city under an at large system, political back scratching could be circumvented—or at least kept at a minimum.” I think anyone who has a basic knowledge of New Brunswick politics knows that the hope of those lawmakers is far from reality in our city today.

12) Bray’s ultimate downfall is his anti-student rhetoric and aloof, holier than thou attitude. He flippantly asks about student involvement in Piscataway politics, which has a ward system. I and my colleagues in EON cannot speak to that because we do not live in Piscataway, nor do we care about it like we do our hometown of New Brunswick. Bray continues to hate on Rutgers students: “A lot of people who signed the petition are in dorms. A lot of them are new registrants, 18 or 19 years old.” So what, Bill? What more should theses people have to do to be counted by their government? Students who want to get involved in the town they call home are treated as outsiders who need to pay their dues before having a say in Bray’s world.

13) Bray also made unsubstantiated claims about our campaign rhetoric. While I can’t speak for everyone in our movement, I always try to represent our campaign and our arguments with the facts to back them up. I do not say things like “all city council members currently reside in one or two wards” because I know they live in four of the five wards. I would contend, however, that the current City Council members miserably fail to represent the vast majority of their constituents in Wards 2 and 4, as well as Ward 5, which has not had a representative on the Council in decades. Along the same lines, the Council fails to represent the majority-student neighborhoods in Ward 6, which are rundown and suffering from countless fixable problems, but they are sure to cater to residents of the affluent, predominantly white Bucceleuch Park neighborhood.

14) Bray calls redistricting, which will be necessary when the ward question wins, a “daunting administrative task, at great expense to the taxpayer.” This is a complete mischaracterization. Redistricting is a process that the county undertakes every few years as is. It does not cost any money as it is a part of the job of county and city officials to do this when necessary. He also tries to claim that because ward lines will eventually be redrawn, that by associating one’s self with their ward somehow means that they “misunderstand” wards. Guess what Bill? I understand this issue pretty damn well and I proud to call myself a resident of Ward 6. What ward does Bill live in?

15) It is said in the article that Bray “takes issue with the assumption that students would be better represented by the implementation of wards.” I contend that students in New Brunswick are treated as second-class citizens by their own elected officials and city government hacks like himself. Any change to the current system only stands to benefit students, especially ward. I mean, it can’t get any worse for us, can it Bill?

16) Towards the end of the conversation, Mr. Bray begins pontificating about what life might be like with wards, “New Brunswick has always been a port of entry city. The constant flux and movement of people in, out and around the city would make it difficult to fairly implement a solid ward system.” I believe very truly that New Brunswick is a special and unique place, but I’m sorry, it’s just misleading to pretend that this is the only city in New Jersey where people move into, out of, and around frequently. In fact, I’ve seen a connection between residents and their neighborhoods that I have yet to experience elsewhere.

Mr. Bray is the textbook definition of a hack. While he preaches incessantly how New Brunswick has improved so much since his time at Rutgers, he is not even a resident of New Brunswick and has not been for years. He is, in fact, an elected official in his suburban hometown of Oxford, over a hour away.

Furthermore, Mr. Bray, an RU journalism major and former reporter, has built up a reputation around town for intimidating and mistreating journalists who report negatively on the Mayor’s administration. I’ll tell an example that affected me personally as a journalist, but there are countless other stories of Mr. Bray’s manipulation of the press.

I had a bi-weekly column in the Daily Targum last year. Almost always, the day after my columns appeared, my editors would inform me that Mr. Bray had screamed at them for an extended duration, either in person or on the telephone. When the editorial board of the Targum expressed support for me, he became so desperate to stop my column (on grounds that my work with EON was a conflict that prevented me from writing objectively, even on the Opinions page) that he actually issued a “news embargo” against the Targum. For over a week, Bray refused to give quotes, event access, or information to the student newspaper. When the President of Mexico came to speak at Lord Stirling Elementary School during the “embargo,” a Targum editor was told by the Press Secretary of Mexico that he had “specific instructions from the City” to deny the newspaper access to the event.

So, what this means is that Mr. Bray, who is paid a salary from the city budget to serve in the role of “City Public Information Officer,” actively withheld public information from a major newspaper in the City. There are emails to the Targum’s editorial board from Bray’s city email address that prove this allegation. In addition to failing to perform his duties as a public official, the motivation for the failure is even more damning.

Ultimately, Bray and the machine succeeded in getting the Targum to bring a premature end to my column. He, with the help of the Mayor, has also succeeded in essentially silencing the Home News and Star-Ledger on the ward issue.  However, in the twenty-first century, online media like the Johnsonville Press will finally provide a real outlet for those who see this manipulating machine for what it is.

I would end by saying that Bray and his shenanigans must be stopped, but the truth is that he is a self-important, arrogant ass (as his last name suggests) who actually gives the entire administration a bad name. By building such a poor reputation with the media, the public, and even his own colleagues at City Hall, he actually does more to bring down the machine and further distrust than to build it up and garner support for Cahill’s policies. So, to Mr. Bray, thanks and keep up the great work!