ORANGE, NJ — Although the Tuesday, Jan. 31, deadline has passed, there is still no word as to whether the Orange Board of Education has decided to add a referendum to the March 14 special election ballot that will ask voters for permission to bond for $2.5 million that BOE President Cristina Mateo has said is needed to fund necessary capital improvements at city schools. In that election, Orange voters will select two new BOE members to round out the board.
Also not addressed is whether Stephen Edelstein, the attorney hired by the board at a special meeting Monday, Jan. 23, will file a legal injunction seeking to stop the changeover from a Type 1 board format, in which board members are appointed by the mayor, to a Type 2 format, in which board members are directly elected by voters.
According to Orange Business Administrator Chris Hartwyk, when a majority of Orange voters agreed with Public Question No. 1 in the November 2016 election to change from a Type 1 school district to a Type 2 school district, the city was no longer allowed to issue bonds using its credit to raise money on behalf of the Orange School District. Since Orange is now a Type 2 district, the BOE has to use its own credit to issue bonds to raise money, but voters have to grant permission.
“The school district had come to us with a request for capital improvements — boilers, playground improvements; a lot of the money was being spent on emergency-type fixes,” said Hartwyk on Thursday, Jan. 19, at South Ward Councilwoman Jamie Summers-Johnson’s Community Meeting. “Unfortunately, what we’ve discovered after we passed the bond ordinance and since the election in November is that, because the referendum was passed approving the change of the board from a Type 1 district to a Type 2 district, the city is no longer allowed to issue debt on behalf of the school board and, therefore, the bond ordinance that the city passed in November, we’re no longer able to fund the projects that the school board had asked us to fund.
“We contacted our auditor, as well as our bond counsel, met with officials from the Division of Local Government Services and the Department of Education and, in fact, were told that the city had to remove the debt from our annual debt statement, as an effect of the referendum that was passed in November.”
On Tuesday, Dec. 20, 2016, Orange City Council President Donna K. Williams and a council majority voted to approve Ordinance No. 56-2016 to raise $2,506,000 for capital improvements in the school district.
Williams echoed Hartwyk on Wednesday, Jan. 25, saying, “Once the citizens of Orange voted to have an elected school board and the question read that it would go into effect immediately, so because of that, we cannot bond on behalf of the school board. They have to do it themselves.”
According to Williams, Jan 31 was the filing deadline for the current seven-member appointed Orange Board of Education to ask the Essex County Clerk’s Office to add the referendum.
“The good news is that the school board still has the opportunity, along with the candidates that are running for office to fill the two positions, (to) put the question of that bond as a referendum for the March 14 election,” said Williams on Wednesday, Jan. 25. “They have until Jan. 31 to get it to our county clerk, Chris Durkin, so it can be on the ballot.”
As the Record-Transcript went to press this week, Durkin’s office had not responded to inquiries about a referendum to approve bonding for capital improvements in the district or an injunction from Edelstein seeking to stop the change from an appointed board to an elected board.
Williams insisted the change of board types didn’t lose the district $2.5 million and the BOE could still use its own credit to bond for capital improvements, meaning there is no need for a special election to change back to the former board type.
“There are many people in the city of Orange who have asked the City Council time and time again ‘can we go to an elected school board?’ ” said Williams. “First things first; the council has the power to change from an appointed to an elected school board by just doing it by a vote of our seven members of council. And the other way to do it is by referendum. Because we didn’t’ want to make that decision amongst ourselves, we wanted to take that to the people, we did it by referendum, so the people that are pushing it in fact are the citizens of Orange.
“And if you look at the vote of those who voted, 70 percent of the people in Orange, of our residents, of our constituents, of the people that we work for, said: ‘We want to go from an appointed school board to an elected school board.’ That being said, we did not have our first and second reading of the bond ordinance until after the Nov. 8 election.”
On Tuesday, Nov. 7, the same date as the state’s gubernatorial election, Orange voters will elect three new BOE members or re-elect existing members.
Adding to the confusion for voters, the BOE members decided to limit the voting hours for the special election on Tuesday, March 14, from the regular hours of 6 a.m. to 8 p.m. to a shortened 1 to 8 p.m. voting time. The rationale was that the board would save $4,000, the difference between $45,000 for the longer day to $41,000 for a shorter voting day.
But Durkin and others said it shouldn’t cost that much for the board to hold a one-day special election, so Williams and the council majority voted 6-1 to approve Resolution No. 23-2017 at their Jan. 17 meeting, giving the board the $4,000 for the longer election day.
Attempts to contact the BOE’s business administrator, Adekunle James, for comment about the bond referendum and proposed injunction were unsuccessful by press time this week, as were attempts to reach Edelstein at his law firm.
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