Good afternoon comrades!
We had an extremely long meeting last time! We had something like 12 proposals pass in the time between Charlie’s address to us and the arrival of Pete for his street medic training. A few of you voted online, and this will be an option for anyone who is unable to attend meetings from here on out.
The Fight For the Lincoln Annex School:
The day after our own marathon meeting, a few of us were on ANOTHER marathon meeting – this time it was the public hearing for the Planning Board for the project that intends to demolish the Lincoln Annex School. Charlie, when he came to our last meeting and gave us the lowdown, said that if we were able to get 30 people on the call, ask enough questions, and use enough public comment time, that we’d be able to get the meeting past 10:30 and delay the Planning Board’s vote on the project at least until its next meeting.
As it turns out, at its peak, the meeting had 106 participants on the call. There were three witnesses to be cross-examined: Christian Roche(pronounced like the bug that he resembles), the civil engineer for the project, Ken Drucker, the chief architect, and traffic engineer Daniel Disario. Thankfully, enough people were able to cue themselves up for questions(after a few hilarious mishaps where the county officials struggled to properly moderate a zoom call lol) that we did not even get to Disario. We ended up staying on the call until 2AM!
Next Planning Board meeting is November 9th at 7PM. We need to get twice as many people on there if we can, and coordinate it a little better so that we know what kinds of questions to ask, have talking points ready, and be able to do this kind of thing in shifts. We were on that call for a good SEVEN hours, and judging by the disdainful manner in which they treated us, I’m not gonna put it past them to try and have another marathon meeting to get to a vote ASAP.
We only have one witness this time, so we should aim to get at least 200 people on this next meeting. These don’t have to be people who live in New Brunswick or even New Jersey. They just have to be people who believe in the fight and believe in our cause – and they have to be willing to speak for their whole 5 minutes. I’m going to speaking to Charlie this week and see what we can do. Thankfully, one of our new agit-prop officers, Pat, has been working on some stuff for us to support the fight!
Again, the next public planning board hearing will be Monday, November 9th at 7PM!
Mutual Aid
We have given out approximately 21 of the care packages we assembled together. We had planned to make some more this past Tuesday, but there wasn’t enough cohesion to make it happen, and pretty much everyone(myself included) forgot. No matter, we can get together at some other point that can be decided upon at the meeting. We authorized the use of dues money totaling $100 to buy hand warmers for more care packages, and plastic bins for people to store their stuff at the Riverwalk. Thanks to some contributions from Matt, Pedey, and myself, we only had to use $64 of the dues money. Meaning, that there is a surplus of $36 that we can use towards getting stickers made or something like that. We can leave that up to a proposal at the meeting.
Our comrade Jorrell has been teaching free martial arts classes at one of the baseball fields(location #8 on the official map) at Buccleuch Park. They are extremely knowledgeable and helpful, and open to anyone of any level – beginner, intermediate, or advanced. The class meets Tuesdays at 4:30PM and Fridays at 10:30AM. Please come wearing comfortable shoes and clothing! You will have to move around a lot, and it’s a good workout!
Our first collaboration with the United Methodist Church was a success. Tons of meals were made and we are going to do it all again this Sunday at 5:30. Please hit up Danny or use the new #united-methodist-church channel on our Discord server. It’s under the Mutual Aid category.
Proposals Passed:
- the creation of a Conflict Resolution/Mediation Working Group for general grievances, on a case-by-case basis.
- authorization for the use of $35 for Mutual Aid
- a burner phone
- November 8th clothing drive – bring your stuff to the meeting this Sunday if you have it, if not, get in touch with Ming.
- Establishing contact with the organizers of the New Brunswick Community Fridge
- Collaboration with the Refuge Center
- Use of dues money($100) for hand warmers and plastic storage bins
- Making a group venmo(this is contingent upon getting the burner phone)
- the creation of two Agit-Prop officer positions.
- the creation of working group structures. These are essentially smaller, more specific-in-nature committees that only meet on an as-needed basis, rather than weekly.
And finally, a reminder, our meeting this Sunday will be at our regular meeting time (8PM), but it will take place in Hazlet! If you need a ride from New Brunswick, I have three spaces in my car, and will be leaving the United Methodist Church at 7PM. You can hit me up, or let me know in the #meeting-plans channel. And if you live elsewhere and wanna get a carpool going, please feel free!
In solidarity,
Nishad
General Secretary
CJS
Central Jersey Socialists 