By Carly Q. Romalino | Gloucester County Times

There’s a twist to the 2011 Third Legislative District election, as three Assembly incumbents are contending for two open seats, following the recent redistricting of district boundaries.

But Republican Domenick DiCicco, currently serving as a Fourth District assemblyman, believes that the message of government accountability and independence from party alliances could turn Third District voters toward GOP representation in the Legislature.

DiCicco, of Franklin Township, is running for one of the two open Assembly seats along with West Deptford’s Dr. Robert Villare. The pair are up against Democrat incumbents John Burzichelli and Celeste Riley. Senate hopeful Michael Mulligan, of Pilesgrove, is vying for the Senate seat currently held by Democratic state Senate President Stephen Sweeney, who is running for re-election.

“The redistricting changed the dynamics, very much in favor of the majority party,” said DiCicco, who met with the Times editorial staff Thursday along with Villare and Mulligan. “Our message does appeal to the individual voters as well as the Republicans and even soft Democrats … they see some reforms at the state level, and they realize that the only reason those reforms happened is because of the Republican governor. They see what they like and definitely want to see more of it. The current majority party is just not going to get it done. Let’s face it, they haven’t gotten it done.”

Although Republicans in the Legislature have been accused of marching in lock step with Gov. Chris Christie, DiCicco said it’s not because the GOP legislators are caving to the governor’s demands.

“We are aligned philosophically,” DiCicco explained. “The most startling thing we offer is independence. My two opponents are machine politicians … they don’t represent the constituents of this district. They represent a hierarchy, and we don’t. That is our major philosophical difference.”

The GOP ticket believes they bring new ideas to the table, including Villare’s plans to reform medical care, instead of reforming the mere costs of providing that care.

Villare supports a Volunteer Physicians Act that would allow doctors to volunteer their services for those who cannot pay or do not have medical insurance – including those who could be in the state’s Medicaid program. In return, the doctors ask that the state cover malpractice insurance.

“We have convinced the Medical Society of New Jersey to endorse this,” said Villare, a surgeon, who touts the plan as saving $2.2 billion that the state would pay for outpatient services. “When you see the government wasting millions of dollars to give this care, which is the poorest care around, this could work.”

Patients could pay what they could afford.

The plan could take the pressure off hospitals, which are required to treat the poor who cannot pay for care.

Villare has also proposed another plan that would allow the New Jersey Hospital Association to provide a basic insurance plan. The association would be partly subsidized by the state, but Villare said the measure “would take a lot of the burden off the whole sector of health care.”

“Instead of hitting the individuals with a bill for $20,000, they would get a bill to pay toward insurance cost for the care,” he said. “I have not heard of those ideas coming out of the Legislature in the last 12 years.”

In addition to health-related initiatives, the Republican trio is set to take on issues in education if they can garner the votes to take seats in the Legislature.

The Republican challengers believe the limits should be lifted on the length of use for public equipment, including school buses and fire trucks.

“If they are unsafe or they don’t work, retire them. But monitor your assets,” said Mulligan, pointing to a case where New Jersey school buses were retired, then sent to Texas and continued to be used. “We can’t afford this any more.”

Mulligan believes the Opportunities Scholarship Act – a voucher program that lets low-income students attend private schools – should be moved through the Legislature.

The program would be funded by groups and businesses that donate into a fund in return for tax credits.

“It saves kids and it’s going to give some satisfaction to the donors because they are not writing a check to an amorphous association,” said Mulligan. “It’s going to fund the achievers.”

DiCicco said the Opportunities Scholarship Act has been watered down, and currently leaves out parts of South Jersey. Plus, it will act like a bandage to fix failing school systems including Camden City.

DiCicco and Villare think the state should stop pouring money into failing school systems that are not serving students.

“The simplest solution is to give the parents the money and let them decide where they want their child to be educated, as an alternative to holding the Camden school system accountable,” DiCicco said. “My premise is, if it costs $26,000 per student in Camden to educate them, give the parents a $26,000 voucher to go to any school, public or private.”

Villare said members of the Assembly must “have the guts to pull the purse strings,” and “have the diligence and fortitude” to hold government accountable for violating the constitution, which states that funding for education should be equal for all children.

Education costs continue to be the main driver of property taxes in the state. The Republican candidates also see regionalization of school administration as an approach to cut out duplicate jobs and lower school costs.

“Mandate the regionalization of administration. It just makes good sense to have one superintendent with responsibility to provide resources to all the schools in a jurisdiction, and then someone with their feet on the ground in each school,” Mulligan said. “That’s an area we ought to focus on.”

High property taxes are forcing residents out of their homes and out of the state, according to DiCicco, who said the primary real estate transaction in his current district is short sales or foreclosures.

“As long as we continue to fund education with property taxes, we’ll never get it under control,” DiCicco said. “The best model I’ve seen is Michigan, where they switched to sales tax. I would love to explore the Michigan solution. If we ever want to get property tax under control, we have to stop funding education exclusively through property tax.”

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By Maya Rao | Inquirer Trenton Bureau

On a rundown street corner in Millville, Cumberland County Republicans and police officers applauded when Assemblyman Domenick DiCicco stepped up to talk about his proposal to have inmates returned to their home counties after serving their sentences.

Cumberland County is home to three state prisons, and DiCicco and other advocates of the plan voiced concern that inmates not originally from the county were staying in the area after being released – and many were committing more crimes.

DiCicco said at Tuesday’s news conference that when Freeholder Sam Fiocchi came to him to talk about the problem, “I said, ‘Wow, look at this, South Jersey is getting the shaft again.’ ”

Yet how many more South Jersey causes DiCicco, a first-term Republican, can pursue through legislation is in question.

When a redistricting panel redrew legislative boundaries earlier in the year to favor incumbents in the Democratic-controlled Legislature, it shifted DiCicco from the Fourth District to the more Democratic Third District of Senate President Stephen Sweeney.

Republicans had talked about DiCicco’s challenging Democratic Sen. Fred Madden in the Fourth, but now on Nov. 8, he faces Democratic Assembly members John Burzichelli, a legislator since 2002, and Celeste Riley, a legislator since 2009.

A recent poll commissioned by the William J. Hughes Center for Public Policy found Burzichelli and Riley leading with a respective 43 and 44 percent of the vote. DiCicco scored 29 percent of the vote in the poll. His running mate, Bob Villare, who did not respond to messages, scored 28 percent.

A lack of agreement on how the GOP campaign should be run has prevented a coordinated effort in the district, which includes parts of Gloucester, Salem, and Cumberland Counties. Though three candidates of the same party in a district often share a campaign manager, DiCicco has his own, Villare has another, and Senate candidate Michael Mulligan has none.

“Why it didn’t get done was, frankly, indecisiveness,” DiCicco said. “We had a couple of [campaign staff] we were going to hire jointly, and by the time we made a decision, they had already taken other jobs because we kind of just didn’t make our decision quick enough.”

He also brushed off chatter about his house in Franklin Township being up for sale, saying he was trying to downsize to another home in the same area.

If reelected, DiCicco said, his top priority would be to make a 2010 law capping property tax hikes at 2 percent a part of the New Jersey Constitution to ensure that legislators don’t water down the measure after it sunsets in three years.

The biggest difference from his Democratic opponents, he said, “is my record on the fiscal issues. I believe we are overtaxed, overregulated.”

His opponents, he said, do the bidding of the local Democratic machine.

But does DiCicco see himself as beholden to Gov. Christie, a Republican, with whom many GOP legislators rarely disagree?

DiCicco said he agreed with Christie 95 percent of the time. But he doesn’t want to go as far as the governor has proposed in overhauling the civil-service system for public employees and thinks Christie should come down harder on the Delaware River Port Authority, which operates the PATCO transit line and four bridges between South Jersey and Philadelphia.

DiCicco has been an outspoken critic of DRPA, which has faced a public outcry over spending on economic development and raising bridge tolls 25 percent, to $5. Christie last year said he would not renew authority CEO John Matheussen’s contract if the agency did not make reforms, but he has not pressed the agency lately.

“There should be a shake-up of leadership,” DiCicco said. “I would like to see him put more focus on it . . . at some point, the DRPA should undergo scrutiny at the same level as other authorities.”

The state GOP has paid for mailers on behalf of DiCicco that criticize Burzichelli and Riley for voting for numerous “job-killing” tax increases.

Among the votes Republicans said they were referring to by Burzichelli – when Riley was not yet in office – was his support of paid family leave in 2008, which slightly increased taxes on employees’ wages.

“They’re just saying taxes, but some were legitimate . . . increases, where the case was made in order to run the program that it made sense to do that,” Burzichelli said.

He also cited the endorsement of Third District Democrats by the New Jobs PAC, which donates to candidates it deems business-friendly.

And as chairman of the Assembly Committee on Regulatory Oversight and Gaming, Burzichelli has sponsored bills that implement deregulatory proposals outlined in Christie’s executive orders.

“We know people want government to be smaller, but we also have priorities involving some safety-net issues,” Burzichelli said.

He noted that DiCicco – in concert with other Republicans – did not back Democrats’ efforts this year to rescind Christie’s cuts to women’s health care and an after-school program for low-income youth. Those restorations were part of a Democratic budget that the governor vetoed because he said the state lacked the money.

Democrats have paid for mailers against DiCicco, saying that he has all the wrong priorities and that he refused to restore property-tax rebates for seniors while voting to hold the line on taxes for the richest 1 percent.

That claim refers to the attempt in 2010 by Democrats, including Burzichelli and Riley, to reinstate the so-called millionaire’s tax and to use the proceeds to restore senior tax rebates. Republican legislators voted against the measure and Christie vetoed it, saying more tax increases would hurt the state.

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By Jim Cook Jr. | The News of Cumberland County

MILLVILLE — Somewhere in between the sofa and wall in Ms. Hazel’s home on the 500 block of 3rd Street is a bullet hole.

“I was sitting on the porch when I saw a man on the corner (of 3rd and Oak streets) pull out a gun. That’s when I went in the house,” she said. 

Hazel is her first name. She wishes her last name not be released.

“I didn’t know he was gonna shoot it.”

Her daughter was sitting on the couch, but wasn’t hit by the bullet that penetrated the side window and hit between the sofa and wall. 

“Had I known the neighborhood would turn out to be this bad when I moved in many many years ago, I would have moved somewhere else,” Hazel said. “It wasn’t always like this.”

She wouldn’t say exactly what she did for a living, but did say she worked in the capacity of interacting with state prison inmates.

That’s why she supports a new legislation that was discussed in an outdoor press conference across the street from her home Tuesday afternoon.

The bill, supported by state, county and municipal republicans, urges state prisons to return released inmates to their county of origin.

Republican Assemblyman Dominick DiCicco, who sponsored the bill, hopes this will keep criminals who have served their term out of Cumberland County.

“We have a prison system that is releasing inmates back into the county,” DiCicco said. “We’re finding more and more instances of crimes being committed in our county.”

DiCicco called the legislation “common sense.”

“When a prisoner gets released from a facility in this county, their home county has to share the burden of rehabilitating that prisoner,” DiCocci said. “This will keep South Jersey from bearing the unnecessary burden.” 

Pointing out homes on the 3rd and Oak streets block that bore bullet holes, DiCicco said South Jersey is “losing the battle on crime.”

The second part to the legislation will include securing funds in support of the state prisons that they hope to use to increase the police force, according to DiCicco.

“We need to beef up the police force,” DiCicco said. 

Freeholder Sam Fiocchi, who is also working with DiCicco on the bill, referenced an issue involving a March 2010 accident where a suspected and formerly convicted criminal Michael A. Jones reportedly hit a Vineland resident while driving a stolen vehicle during his flee from police.

Jones had more than 50 arrests, 21 convictions and four aliases (with social security numbers) to his record. He had been previously released from state prison in Cumberland County, according to Fiocchi.

Jones was from Essex County.

“It’s a very serious issue,” Fiocchi said.

Millville Police Sgt. Jody Farabella, who is running for Freeholder in the next election, said there are approximately 10,000 inmates currently being held in the county’s Bayside, South State and South Woods prisons.

“This county is on top of all the wrong lists for this state,” Farabella said.

Republican Sheriff candidate Mike Barruzza said he also wants to decrease the amount of families relocating to the county with a family member in state prison.

“I hope to bring electronic visitations over the internet to the state prison,” Barruzza said. “An inmate would have three online visits with a friend or relative, each lasting 20 minutes.”

He said he hopes this will decrease the amount of in-person visits to the jail, decrease families relocating to Cumberland County and encourage released inmates to move back to their home county.

On the municipal level, Millville Director of Public Safety Dave Vanaman “strongly supports” the legislation.

“Perhaps some of our problems would disappear if all released prisoners are sent back to the county jurisdiction they came from, and do their parole in their county,” Vanaman said.

Assemblyman DiCicco also added that the legislation does not restrict a released inmate from moving to Cumberland County.

“That would be too harsh,” he said.

He also added that the legislation is completely new and has not been tested in other counties with state prisons.

“We’re the first.”

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By THOMAS BARLAS Staff Writer | The Press of Atlantic City

MILLVILLE — Republicans running for 1st Legislative District and Cumberland County seats are backing a plan that would return convicted felons to their home counties after being released from state prison.

The candidates charge that a number of the convicted felons released from Cumberland County’s three state prisons after serving their sentences stay in the county, where some return to a life of crime.

The candidates support the plan proposed by Assemblyman Domenick DiCicco, R-Gloucester, Camden. DiCicco said during a press conference here on Tuesday that another part of his proposal could have the released state prisoners reporting for parole in their home counties. He said that could discourage those persons from choosing to live in a county that could be a significant distance from their parole reporting location.

DiCicco said he has no statistics regarding the number of released convicted felons who opt to remain in a particular county.

“It’s mostly anecdotal,” DiCicco said of the information on which he’s basing his bill.

Cumberland County Democratic Committee Co-Chairman Doug Long said he didn’t have a comment on the proposal.

“As long as we’re protecting the rights and safety of the citizens of Cumberland County, that’s my concern,” he said.

DiCicco pitched his bill during a press conference on the corner of 3rd and Oak streets. City police described the area as being in a high crime location.

Attending the conference were Republicans running for state Senate and Assembly seats in the 1st Legislative District, which includes Cape May County and parts of Cumberland and Atlantic counties, and the Cumberland County Board of Chosen Freeholders. The county sheriff and members of the Millville and Vineland police departments also attended the event.

Of New Jersey’s 13 correctional facilities, three — Bayside State Prison, South Woods State Prison and Southern State Correctional Facility — are within Cumberland County’s borders. State Department of Corrections statistics show that, as of Tuesday, the three facilities were home to 7,940 inmates, almost a third of the 24,637 state prisoners.

State officials said they had no information on how many of the inmates in Bayside, South Woods and Southern State had been Cumberland County residents before incarceration. Nor did they have information on the percentage of released convicted felons that opt to stay in the county where they are released.

Cumberland County Prosecutor Jennifer Webb-McRae said last month that there are differing views on the effect the three state prisons are having in Cumberland County.

Webb-McRae said parole officials contend that “it’s generally not the case” that persons released from those correctional facilities remain in Cumberland County. She also said the opinion of law enforcement officers on that topic differs from that of parole officials.

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Contact Thomas Barlas:
609-226-9197
TBarlas@pressofac.com