What’s Important to Know About NJ This Week – 02/03/2024

Feb 3, 2024

Water Might Taste Different Soon, New NJ Education Commissioner, ACLU Challenges Facial Recognition, Pension Payments on a Hot Streak, Syphilis Makes a Comeback…

Berkeley Heights, New Providence Among Communities that Might Notice a Change in How Water Tastes
from Patch

During the change, officials said customers in the affected counties may notice a slight taste and smell of chlorine in their water. This is normal, the company said, and customers wishing to reduce the taste of chlorine can place water in an uncovered glass container in the refrigerator overnight to dissipate chlorine faster.

Laura Norkute, director of water quality with New Jersey American Water, said the switch is made annually to provide an extra measure of disinfection to the company’s distribution system. Read More

NJ’s Next Education Commissioner
from NJ Education Report

Dehmer is currently Executive Director of the Heldrich Center for Workforce Development at Rutgers University. Before that he was Assistant Commissioner and Chief Financial Officer of the DOE. Earlier in his career he headed numerous offices within DOE and helped design the state’s school funding formula in response to the Abbott v. Burke rulings that required the state to fund 31 low-income school districts at the same level as wealthy districts. In 2020, when then-Commissioner Lamont Repollet resigned, Gov. Phil Murphy appointed Dehmer Interim/Acting Commissioner of Education. Read More

ACLU Lawsuit Challenges Reliability of Facial Recognition in Arrests
from New Jersey Monitor

The American Civil Liberties Union has weighed in on a wrongful imprisonment lawsuit a Paterson man filed after Woodbridge police arrested him in 2019 as a shoplifting suspect solely based on a facial recognition system match.

The controversial technology is supposed to be just one of several investigatory tools police use to solve crimes, but Woodbridge officers relied on it exclusively to identify Nijeer Parks as the man who stole $39 in merchandise from a hotel, despite Parks’ insistence that he had never been to the township nor knew where it was. Read More

Will Murphy Be Able to Continue Streak on Pension Payments?
from NJ Spotlight

Gov. Phil Murphy is planning to include another full employer pension contribution in the new state budget he is scheduled to unveil to lawmakers later this month, a key member of the administration told top state pension officials Wednesday.

The latest promise on pension funding means the state would extend its current streak of making full pension payments to four straight years after going more than two decades of shorting such contributions or, in some years, making no payment at all. Read More

Syphilis on Comeback Tour in NJ
from NJ.Com

Cases of syphilis more than doubled in New Jersey in just five years as the national number of cases hit highs not seen since the 1950s, the CDC said a health alert issued this week.

More than 1,700 cases of syphilis were diagnosed in New Jersey in 2018, CDC data shows. That number surged to more than 3,600 in 2022, outpacing the concerning national trend showing an 80% increase in syphilis cases. Read More