- [Narrator] Funding for this edition of State of Affairs with Steve Adubato has been provided by Horizon Blue Cross Blue Shield of New Jersey.

Here when you need us most.

The Healthcare Foundation of New Jersey.

The Russell Berrie Foundation.

Making a difference.

New Brunswick Development Corporation.

New Jersey'’s Clean Energy program.

Lighting the way to a clean energy future.

PSC.

Where your story is our business.

The New Jersey Education Association.

Atlantic Health System.

Building healthier communities.

And by The New Jersey Economic Development Authority.

Promotional support provided by ROI-NJ.

Informing and connecting businesses in New Jersey.

And by New Jersey Globe.

[INSPRATIONAL MUSIC] - Hi everyone.

Steve Adubato.

Let's kick off the program with Ginine Mohamad Cilenti.

She's the executive director of the Diabetes Foundation.

Good to see you, Ginine.

- Good to see you too.

Thanks for having me.

- You got it.

We're actually gonna put up the website for the Diabetes Foundation.

Explain to folks what the foundation is and then we're gonna talk about how prevalent diabetes is.

- Okay, great.

Thank you.

So the Diabetes Foundation, we offer many services across the state of New Jersey.

What's important to know is that we are the only one stop shop for free personalized diabetes care across the state.

So, we help individual-- we help children.

We help adults.

We help individuals who are insured, who are uninsured.

We help individuals living with any type of diabetes.

And our goal is to help people get the care they need every day to manage their blood sugar.

We have three different buckets of services that are truly important.

One is financial assistance, because diabetes is really, really expensive to live with.

So we offer free emergency insulin- - Hold on.

Why is that?

- Why is that?

- Why is it expensive to live with?

- Cost of insulin.

Cost of the medications are very expensive.

Even eating healthy is very expensive.

So, it's an expensive- - And the two other buckets, I'm sorry for interrupting.

Go ahead.

The two other buckets.

- Okay.

The two other buckets are, so it's financially, but it's also physiologically difficult because it's progressive disease.

And then lastly, it's emotionally difficult, because you're living with it every single day.

So our services for those two areas include, you know, we have peer-to-peer support groups so people can build a network of care and manage their diabetes every day.

And we additionally have accredited education through the Association of Diabetes Educators that teach people about healthy eating and activity and medication management and things that help them manage their condition over time.

- Let's do this.

It's a progressive disease, correct?

- Yes.

- And there are family members who I know watch this program, many family members on my end who have diabetes or pre-diabetes, if you will.

If not dealt with effectively, efficiently, appropriately, this is a terrible disease, is it not?

- The complications are abundant.

Diabetes is a very high rate of, when you live with diabetes, kidney disease.

You have a high rate of developing kidney disease, lower leg amputation, adult onset blindness, heart attack and stroke.

So managing your blood sugar diligently becomes very important.

- And it also, in terms of disproportionately affecting communities of color, talk about that, please.

- Absolutely.

So, data shows that communities of color are definitely disproportionately affected.

So, I just read a CDC study from 2019 that non-Hispanic African-American adults have a 60% higher prevalence for diabetes than non-Hispanic white adults.

- Why is that?

- You know, there are many reasons.

I mean, some of them are environmental.

Some of them are biological.

So, by environmental, I mean, are you living in a community with access to, you know, healthy, fresh produce- - Or a food desert where there isn't access?

I'm sorry, go ahead.

- Exactly.

Is there walkability?

Are there access to healthcare providers?

Do you have health insurance?

And then, in terms of biological, do you have a propensity for weight or high cholesterol or high blood pressure?

- Complicated stuff.

Again, let's keep up putting up the website for the Diabetes Foundation.

I'm curious about this, funding.

We're an not-for-profit.

You're an not-for-profit.

Your dollars come from where?

- Our dollars come from individuals.

They come from organizations, foundations, such as the Horizon Foundation and other great foundations.

And lastly, we're able to obtain state support through the Department of Health.

- I was just gonna ask you that.

So, there is government funding of the diabetes, and that's the Department of Health?

- Yes, it's the Department of Health.

They're funded through the federal government to do diabetes education and self-management programs.

And the diabetes foundation's lucky enough to provide one of those services.

- Personal support.

Describe what that means.

- Oh boy.

Personal support is so important.

Today, one in 10 people are living with diabetes, and if trends continue, the CDC is stating that by 2050 one in three people will be living with diabetes.

And how do you live healthy?

It's about knowing your own body, right?

It's about successfully understanding how food impacts you, how activity impacts you, how your medications impact you.

So, personally, obtaining information and getting tools to put in your toolbox to help you live healthy is extremely important.

- How'd you get into this?

- I have an affinity for helping individuals who are unable to access care anywhere else.

I have a background in, you know, my father has type two diabetes.

My grandmother died of complications due to type one, and for my grandmother for example, she did not have access to insulin.

She couldn't afford it.

And it cut her life short.

She died before she was 51 years old.

And I got into this because I wanna make sure that that doesn't happen to anybody else.

- Managing diabetes.

What does that really mean, to manage it?

And I know the insulin's a part of it, but it's just a part of it.

Please.

- Again, it's about understanding your body.

So, there are many different factors to managing your health.

There's, you know, there's definitely the medication management like you're talking about, but monitoring your blood sugar.

There's eating healthy, being active, coping.

Stress is a huge factor that increases blood sugar.

So, how do you learn to cope with your stress?

And that's another big factor.

And lastly, it's really just understanding your risk factors and then how to problem solve if you are not feeling well.

- But, go back to the beginning, meaning screening.

Screening for diabetes is really important, because early detection matters?

- Yes, absolutely.

So, if you, the longer you go, like we spoke about in the beginning, diabetes is progressive.

So the longer you go without knowing that you have diabetes, the longer the disease is impacting your body.

So, to get screened early on to know where you are is truly important to your lifelong success in managing your health.

- So important.

Again, one more time, let's put up the website for the Diabetes Foundation.

And we will continue to do work in this area in terms of public awareness.

And we look forward to having you on again, Ginine.

Ginine Mohamad Cilenti, executive director of the Diabetes Foundation.

Ginine, thank you so much for joining us.

We appreciate it.

- Thank you.

Have a great day.

- You too.

Stay with us.

We'll be right back.

(grand music) - [Announcer] To watch more State of Affairs with Steve Adubato, find us online and follow us on social media.

- We're pleased to welcome back to our show, Debbie Wals, who's the director of the Center for American Women in Politics at Rutgers University.

Debbie, good to see you.

- Nice to see you, Steve.

- Debbie, what is going on?

What is going on in the state legislature that we are losing so many women who are just choosing not to run again?

Yes, a few members of the assembly are running for the Senate, but that's not what I'm talking about.

What's going on?

- Well, it is a record year for women not running for reelection.

And there's a mixed story there, right?

Some of them have been serving for quite a while and they're tired and they're moving on.

Some have had some health issues.

A couple we know are not running again, Sadaf Jaffer in particular has called out misogyny and anti-Asian, anti-Muslim hate as part of why she is not running again.

- After one term.

- After one term, after one term.

And that's something we have to look at and we have to look at in a hard way not just here in New Jersey, but across the country because it's one thing to elect women to office, but it's another thing to retain them, right?

And we have to make sure that these spaces and these environments are places that women can stick around.

And this issue of racism that women seem to face and the violence that women face at higher rates than men do.

And I'm not necessarily talking about physical violence, but the kind of aggression that's displayed on social media that their families are then victims of.

And you have to take a hard look if you've got young kids do you want them exposed to that?

Do you wanna be afraid for them to go to school?

You know, people get emails that say "I know where your kids go to school."

And you know, even if they were never gonna act on it because they're sitting in their mother's basement with a Slurpee, but this is the kind of harassment and violence that we know people in politics face, but women are disproportionately impacted by this.

And we're seeing it at every level.

I mean, look at what happened to Nancy Pelosi's husband, right?

That is at it's most egregious, but it takes away from wanting to think about staying in office.

- The other part of this is we just had an interview with a leader in the Latina community who was arguing very effectively that women of color, that for Latinas it is especially difficult as well.

Largely not only the fundraising issue is challenging, raising money to run a campaign, but also that the quote unquote old boys network, if you will, the old party boss system, the county chair system, just not particularly open to women of color.

True?

- Yeah.

Steve, you and I have been talking about this, I feel like every few years I come on and we have this conversation and it doesn't change dramatically.

- We're going in the wrong direction now.

- Yeah, and our state is unique in the ways in which those county party chairs, and in some cases people who aren't even elected, who serve in position, who have positions of power that make decisions about who runs and who doesn't run.

And they are looking at people like themselves.

And these folks are largely white men.

- Older white men.

- Right, and they pick people that look like them.

They groom them, they bring them along and they run them.

And in our state, unlike most other states, the party is in effect endorsing in the primary.

And it makes it very, very difficult for new people, women, people of color, women of color in particular, to break in because those doors to money and the volunteers and the organization is not behind you when you are running off-line.

And that just makes it very- - One second, one second, Debbie.

Lemme clarify off-line.

I don't wanna get arcane here, but Debbie and I, being students of the political process, we get too inside, you know, inside baseball, if you will.

Don't worry, I don't have any other props.

- Okay.

- So the party line is given to someone by the party organization.

The line is the top line, the preferred line, off the line is often very hard to find on a ballot and very hard to win from that position.

Please pick it up from there, Debbie.

- Yeah, so if you don't have that ballot placement, but it's so much more than the ballot, right Steve?

It's also the money, it's the organization, it's the get out the vote operation.

It's, you know, most people go in to vote and they're Democrat or they're a Republican and they see who the party is endorsing, and that's their clue, right?

That's how they know who to vote for.

- Even if they don't know that person.

- Right, right.

So they may not know who's voting, I mean who's running necessarily and where they stand on everything.

But they go, "Well, this is the Democrat who's running with the party endorsement and I'm a Democrat and that's who I'm gonna vote for."

Or "This is the Republican and they've got the party endorsement and I'm a Republican."

You know, party is the greatest predictor of how you vote.

And knowing, you know you sort of assume that your party leadership on either side is doing the vetting for you.

But what the problem is is when they're doing the vetting you're not learning enough about the other people running.

And it just rules out those folks.

It makes it so much harder.

And there are exceptions.

We've seen it, but they are so rare.

- Right.

- That we all talk about them when they pull it off, right?

- Real quick on this, New Jersey used to be in the top 10 of the number of women in the state legislature.

Now we are 21st in the nation for female representation in the state legislature.

Real quick on this, explain to folks that's running for office, getting elected to office, the impact of having fewer and fewer women in the state legislature in terms of public policy, please, Debbie?

- Sure, well, I will just say for the record, we used to be in the bottom 10 for decades with states like Mississippi and Alabama and Kentucky.

And then things changed.

People, honestly, Steve, people got indicted, people got thrown out, and party chairs looked to women and they put women in in those spots.

- They were men who got indicted, men who got- - Men who got indicted.

It was men who got the boot.

And women came in and took their place.

And we moved up and we did for a brief period, we were in the top 10 or top 15, we're now down to 21st.

It matters because women bring, and women, women of color bring different perspectives to the table, different life experiences, and they legislate differently.

They have different public policy priorities.

It is not for nothing that in New Jersey, we were for a long time, one of only two states with paid family medical leave.

And that was because of Loretta Weinberg, right?

Because a woman - Senator Weinberg.

- was there who said "This is a problem."

The fact that a woman who has a baby is not thrown out of the hospital after 24 hours.

They have no more drive-by deliveries.

That was women in the state of New Jersey.

- Or excuse me, Debbie, state Senator Teresa Ruiz leading the effort as it relates to affordable, accessible childcare.

Example, if you will, our Reimagine childcare initiative that could happen with a male legislator, but it hasn't.

- No, because you know what happens?

It's women who understand and raise it up.

It's not that the men don't support it, but Teresa Ruiz has been, is an extraordinary example of someone who has prioritized education.

- That's right.

- And kids in a way that it's not, again, it's not that the men in the legislature don't care about education, don't care about kids, but will they make that a top priority?

I mean, she has been such a leader on that.

So it takes women's voices and it takes a diversity of women's voices.

So white women, black women, Latinas, Asian-American women, Muslim women, you know, it takes those different voices.

And honestly it's why we want diversity overall in our legislature.

- Debbie, I'm sorry for cutting you off there and unfortunately there is time issue.

Debbie Walsh joins us again to put things in perspective.

Debbie is the director of the Center for American Women in Politics at Rutgers University.

Debbie, thank you so much.

We appreciate it.

- Thanks so much, Steve.

- You got it.

Stay with us, we'll be right back.

(grand music) - [Announcer] To watch more State of Affairs with Steve Adubato, find us online and follow us on social media.

- We're now joined by Mike Renna, President and CEO of South Jersey Industries.

Mike, good to see you.

- Great to see you, Steve.

Thanks for having me.

- You got it, tell everyone what South Jersey Industries is.

- So, South Jersey Industries is a energy holding company based out of Folsom, New Jersey, which is down by Hammonton.

We own two natural gas utilities in the state of New Jersey, South Jersey Gas Company and then Elizabethtown Gas Company.

In addition, we've got a number of non-utility businesses primarily focused on renewable energy development.

- The connection between South Jersey Industries and the Governor's Clean Energy Plan, and your interaction with the New Jersey Board of Public Utilities, please talk about it.

- Sure, look, you know, the Energy Master Plan is something that every administration does.

It's a blueprint for that administration's view of energy and energy use in New Jersey.

Back in 2019, the governor put out the Energy Master Plan for his first term, and that included a, I think a rather unprecedented, in this state, move, towards renewable energy and decarbonization, all things that, as a utility and someone who's proud to serve, you know, 700,000 plus homes and businesses in the state, we welcomed.

So our job was really to try to figure out how we fit, and really not just fit in terms of the energy's future and the energy transition, but what ways our infrastructure can help to accelerate it.

And that's really what we've been focused on for the last four years, now I'm going on five years, and all of that is done in partnership with our regulators at the Board of Public Utilities.

- Mike, do us a favor, give us one concrete example that moves this conversation from a policy conceptual conversation around clean energy and decarbonization, if you will, our carbon footprint, to a tangible, practical, relatable example of what needs to be done and how you and your colleagues at South Jersey Industries are involved, go ahead.

- So I can give you three, right?

And they're all interrelated, so if you look at a natural gas utility, right, our primary assets and focus is really the infrastructure.

It's the energy delivery system under the ground that currently brings natural gas to your home or your business.

The ways that we can really help to accelerate decarbonization and this energy transition, the first is by modernizing our system, right?

The more that we can reduce leaks on the system, the less methane, fugitive methane that gets into the atmosphere, which is a very potent greenhouse gas.

We've invested billions of dollars to modernize our system and now have the lowest leak count in our history.

South Jersey Gas Company, we're in like, the 20 range in terms of leaks, where, you know, just a few short years ago, that would've been in the hundreds.

So that's one, the other is energy efficiency.

We are actually incented to help customers reduce energy, right?

So, I mean, the easiest way to reduce emissions is to use less and to burn less, right?

So we are incentivized, we have a number of programs that help customers become more energy efficient and use more gas, and our profitability has been really delinked from usage.

So that's how we are incented to help customers use less energy.

Third is now what's called renewable natural gas, and that is taking methane from other organic sources, landfills, wastewater treatment facilities, food waste.

We don't have a lot of them in New Jersey, but we're very active in the dairy space, right?

Taking the manure from dairy farms and converting into what is a usable and blendable gas that can go right into the gas stream, has a huge impact on the level of carbon in the gas.

- Mike, go back again, the dairy farm thing, the dairy farm renewable energy thing.

I keep trying to understand this.

I did not do well in science in high school or college, so go ahead.

- That's okay, I didn't either.

I took a visit to a dairy farm for me to fully appreciate it.

So when you think about it, right, the farms that we're investing, they have anywhere from 3,500 to 11,000 heads of cattle, right?

And so it's an enormous operation.

In fact, one of the ones we're involved in, it's a 20 acre barn, and it's just filled with milking cows, and those cows produce a lot of waste.

That waste is traditionally just sent to a lagoon where the methane, as it, you know, as it decomposes, the methane is then flared into the atmosphere.

So it really doesn't have any, you know, the environmental impacts, right, are not mitigated or curtailed in any way.

What we're doing is adding an anaerobic digester to the facility where the manure will go, as opposed to a lagoon.

And that manure will be treated through heat and through the injection of, really, bacteria, and it'll produce a solid, a liquid, and a gas.

The solid becomes their bedding, the liquid becomes fertilizer, and the gas becomes a gas that you can blend into the natural gas pipeline and mix with geological natural gas and brings down the carbon content.

- First of all, thank you.

No one has explained that as well as you just did.

Mike, let me ask you this.

For those who don't buy into the carbon footprint issue, the climate change issue, the decarbonization issue, and think it's, quote, "Political," well, I guess everything's political, but there's real science here, is there not?

- There is.

Look, you know, I mean, that's the thing, right?

We have, for the last four years, really kind of repositioned the company, and, you know, while we are a utility, and right now, the product that our utility delivers is geological natural gas or conventional natural gas, right?

We are ultimately an infrastructure company.

We're agnostic to the molecular content of that fuel.

If we can safely blend other organic, you know, gases and/or hydrogen into our gas stream safely and bring down that carbon intensity, you know, we're all for it.

Because yeah, I mean, look, this is real science.

Natural gas is a very clean burning fossil fuel, but it is still a fossil fuel, and it does, you know, it has a methane component to it, that's when it combusts.

So, you know, we're looking at doing everything we can to help to, really, as I said, accelerate this energy transition.

You know, Steve, look, one of the things you have to think about too is people talk about electrification, and the problem is that infrastructure doesn't exist yet.

Whether it's the windmill off the shore or the transmission to move those electrons to homes and businesses, all of that infrastructure still has to be built.

The one advantage we have, and I keep using this word accelerate, is our infrastructure exists, and it's capable of removing these lower carbon fuels, and that's how we really try to position our company.

- Mike Renna, President and CEO of South Jersey Industries.

Mike, we appreciate you joining us.

It will not be the last conversation we have on this topic.

- Great.

Thanks Steve.

- I'm Steve Adubato, that's Mike Renna.

Thanks for watching, we'll see you next time.

- [Narrator] State of Affairs with Steve Adubato Is a production of the Caucus Educational Corporation.

Funding has been provided by Horizon Blue Cross Blue Shield of New Jersey.

The Healthcare Foundation of New Jersey.

The Russell Berrie Foundation.

New Brunswick Development Corporation.

New Jersey'’s Clean Energy program.

PSC.

The New Jersey Education Association.

Atlantic Health System.

And by The New Jersey Economic Development Authority.

Promotional support provided by ROI-NJ.

And by New Jersey Globe.

- (Narrator) New Jersey is home to the best public schools in the nation, and that didn't happen by accident.

It's the result of parents, educators and communities working together year after year to give our students a world class education.

No matter the challenge, because parents and educators know that with a shared commitment to our public schools, our children can learn, grow and thrive.

And together, we can keep New Jersey's public schools the best in the nation.