How to beat the traffic in Belmar

Hopefully the rain will let up this weekend and residents and tourists alike can enjoy our beautiful Monmouth County beaches. The only downside of a trip to the beach is traffic and parking.  Belmar Mayor “Lawless Matt” Doherty has a solution to that problem.  Land a helicopter on borough property at Silver Lake!

On July 7 a friend of the mayor’s who just happened to donate $2500 to Dirty Doherty’s campaign coffers chartered a helicopter to fly him and his very recently betrothed fiancée away for a romantic getaway .  Our friends at Common Sense for Belmar have been all over the story.

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Cuba: art and music, race and Joann Chesimard, income inequality

By Muriel J. Smith

Photos by Tricia Curtin and Nancy Zockoll

Part Three of a series 

They’re a musical group, the Cuban people. They love to dance, are proud of the salsa, automatically start to move rhythmically whenever they hear music, and can dance at outdoor restaurants on cobblestoned streets with abandon and joy.  There are plenty of discotheques and nightclubs in and around Old Havana, and it seems that 90 pesos, about $10 American, is the going fee for entry. The one evening our group of six Americans and eight Cubans decided to go, the club had had a fire earlier in the evening, so the club part was closed. The restaurant, however, was open, but we opted to move on.

There is no doubt there are two different and distinct styles of living in Cuba.

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Arnone: Shark River dredging to restart imminently

Freehold Director Tom Arnone told MoreMonmouthMusings that the NJ Department of Transportation has agreed to restart the Shark River dredging project despite the fact that the Transportation Trust Fund has yet to be renewed and funded. The news came to Arnone from a DOT official via phone after business hours on Wednesday.

NJ DOT spokesman Kevin Israel confirmed that the project will restart in an email to MMM.

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Grenade launcher, 30 pot plants seized in Howell drug raid

HOWELL — A cache of weapons, including a grenade launcher, and 30 pot plants were seized from a township home on Friday, police announced on Tuesday. Christopher Kilbride, 42, was arrested after police raided his Route 34 house, the former home for high-level officers with Naval Weapons Station Earl, Howell police Detective Sgt. Christian Antunez said… Read the rest of this entry »

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Second Sandy Hook beach closed for high bacteria levels

SANDY HOOK — Another beach at Sandy Hook has closed because of elevated bacteria levels. Gunnison Beach was open for sunbathing on Tuesday but beachgoers weren’t allowed in the water because of high bacteria levels, according to the Sandy Hook’s Facebook page. The closing comes as New Jersey is in the middle of a heat wave,… Read the rest of this entry »

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JCP&L Takes Another Run at Spinning off Transmission Assets

 Jersey Central Power & Light is still trying to win regulatory approval to spin off its transmission assets into a separate company. In an amended petition, the state’s second-largest electric utility is slightly modifying a previous proposal rejected earlier this year by the New Jersey Board of Public Utilities. In denying the spin-off, the board balked… Read the rest of this entry »

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Greg’s List: Things to do in Monmouth County this weekend, July 29-31, 2016

By Greg Kelly

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Friday, July 29

• Leader of the Pack by Spotlight Players (Matawan) – MORE INFO
• Monmouth County Fair (Freehold) – MORE INFO
• Red Bank Sidewalk Sale – MORE INFO
• To Kill a Mockingbird by Holmdel Theatre Company – MORE INFO
• Butler by NJ Repertory Company (Long Branch) – MORE INFO
• “And Then There Were None” by Center Players (Freehold) – MORE INFO
• The Little Mermaid at Algonquin Arts Theatre (Manasquan) – MORE INFO
• “Presidents at the Monmouth County Shore” Exhibit (Ocean Twp.) – MORE INFO
• “Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives” Art Exhibit (Belmar) – MORE INFO
• Visionary Tattoo Arts Festival (Asbury Park) – MORE INFO

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With transportation funding negotiations deadlocked, County has plan to restart Shark River dredging

Freeholder Director Tom Arnone said he will announce a plan to restart the Shark River dredging project Wednesday morning at the Shark River Marina in Neptune Township.

The project, which had restarted on schedule on July 1 was halted at midnight on July 8 when Governor Christie’s executive order halting projects funded by the Transportation Trust Fund took effect.

The legislature failed to pass TTF funding with a $.23 per gallon gas tax on June 30th. The Senate’s plan was to increase the gas tax while phasing out the estate tax and reducing income taxes on retirees.  Christie and the Assembly agreed on a bill that would have raised the gas tax and reduced the sales tax from 7% to 6%.  Senate President Steve Sweeny and Assembly Speaker Vincent Prieto agreed to pass a revised version of the Senate’s original bill last week.  Yesterday, Christie said the Democrats plan is “dead on arrival.”

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Cuba: It’s more than cars!

By Muriel J. Smith 

(photos Tricia Curtin and Nancy Zockoll)

Indeed, they really are all there, those classic American-made cars of the 1950s. They’re all over the well paved and not so well paved roads of Cuba, and most of them are taxis.

There are thousands of them, all brightly painted, the sun bouncing off shiny chrome; all with their windows down…pre-air conditioning days, remember…their interiors either plush or vinyl cleverly patched or taped to look good, and who knows what under the hoods to keep them purring, or growling gently as they navigate the streets.  The cars presumably date back to the 1950s when they were new, Cuba and the USA were friends, and Cubans enjoyed a middle class status that enabled them to purchase foreign cars.  For good reason, most chose American rather than Russian vehicles, though some of them were also available during ‘the special period,’ the time in the 1960s when Russia was the alleged friend of Cuba. The vehicles have been handed down from father to son, and with an embargo prohibiting the import of car parts, have been kept in running condition through ingenuity and a strange conglomeration of makeshift and re-made parts.  Cuba is on good terms with Venezuela, so fuel for the vehicles is no problem. Nor do they spend a lot of time or effort on repairing windows that no longer rise or close, given those 90 degree sun-filled days.

But there’s so much more to Havana than cars.

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Moran donates to Wasserman Schultz’s reelection campaign

Maggie Moran, the Managing Director of the Asbury Park based Democratic consulting firm Kivvit and the wife of Belmar Mayor “Lawless Matt” Doherty, announced on facebook yesterday that she has donated to the reelection campaign of Debbie Wasserman Schultz.

Wasserman Schultz is the Chair of the Democratic National Committee until Friday. She announced her resignation after DNC emails that proved she rigged Hillary Clinton’s Democrat nomination for president were released.  She was then named Honorary Chair of Clinton’s campaign.

That’s perfectly consistent with the Monmouth County Democrats’ ethos that it is OK to cheat and the ends justifies the means.

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