Last year, YOUR PHONE CALLS AND E-MAILS stopped the Newark Arena deal from moving through the State Legislature. In fact, a senior member of the Senate Appropriations Committee told me that he had never received as many phone calls and letters on a subject in his over twenty years in Trenton.
Together, we argued that it made no sense to spend hundreds of millions of taxpayers’ dollars on a sports arena, at the same time as the State was cutting funding for public education and property tax relief.
Additionally, we pointed out that six different academic studies have conclusively demonstrated that sports arenas do not stimulate significant economic development, and that the State could attract more new jobs to its cities, for no cost to state taxpayers, through simply expanding the Whitman Administration’s Business Enterprise Incentive Program.
For this, I was attacked by political operatives close to Jim McGreevey as a racist. One even called me a Nazi.
Accordingly, I must say that I took great pleasure in reading the attached articles which say that the Sports Arena project is now dead.
Note that one is by liberal newspaper columnist Fran Wood of the Star-Ledger. Even she agrees that spending this much taxpayers’ money for an arena does not make sense – not even for Newark!
You proved that when citizens take action, they can still force our state government to do the right thing. Congratulations!
- Bret Schundler
For Newark, Victory in Defeat
