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♪ David: Hey, everybody.

Welcome to "Chat Box."

Earth Day is coming.

We will take the temperature from the New Jersey standpoint.

We will start with this troubling report from the controller about the Essex County government and how they handled their share of public funds during the COVID crisis.

The state says the county's record-keeping was shoddy and in some cases failed to catch fraud and waste.

The county says the report was flawed and it did not give the full picture.

Joining us as the Chief of Staff to County executive Joe D Vincenzo.

>> Thank you for having me.

David: This was not a surprise audit of some kind, was it?

>> I think when it started, it was a surprise audit.

They were checking on our COVID response for a while.

What was surprising was that we feel the report was unbalanced and they didn't give us the credit that we feel we deserve for saving lives in excess County.

David: I saw a memo from the state that seemed to suggest things were going really great over there.

It says, and I am reading for it , during the site visit I was extremely impressed with the workflows established, the combined efforts made, and the ownership the team took upon themselves.

The teamwork and roadmap implemented by the COVID-19 team at Essex County was beyond exceptional.

That came from the state health department.

>> listen, we were allotted nationally, in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal.

We administered over 650,000 vaccination shots.

We administered well over 450,000 tests.

That is almost 1.1 million interactions between vaccines and tests with our residents.

And Essex County has only 600,000 residents.

The lines were short, the people were happy, we were communicating.

The health department team, it is what we are most proud of in the history of Joe's 50 years of public service, my 30 years of public service.

I will go down saying this is the best thing we have ever done because we saved people's lives.

David: In the meantime, the review that examined $10 million in payments made to vendors and about $4.5 million made to independent contractors, it found that, for instance, one worker was paid $130,000 over the course of the year, but nobody knew who she was or what she did.

>> Unfortunately during COVID and everywhere in the world, there are people who are going to find ways to take advantage of the system.

Before this report was published, Essex County authorities found out about this, are investigating it, and that person, if they did something illegal, will be punished.

We were flying in a plane as we were building the plane.

It is 4.5 years later.

I guess they forgot.

I was getting calls from University Hospital about finding refrigerated trucks they needed for dead bodies.

We couldn't get toilet paper.

People were panicking.

People were dying.

David: Those things I hear from all of the public service workers during that period, but at least eight other workers were paid in the vaccination program.

They were also full-time employees of the county, and some of them who had full-time jobs were working on the vaccination program while they were clocked in for the county.

>> Let me clarify that.

I read that they were full-time government workers.

I believe they were working for other public governments, not Essex County.

And there was no way for us to know that.

They came to us, they did what they needed to do.

Dave, and Joe said it, we made mistakes.

We could have done things better.

We could have had a system that was airtight.

But if that slowed us down from administering vaccines, we always would have chosen to move fast, vaccinate, and to save lives.

The most important record we have in this whole endeavor are those people who volunteered their --volunteered there administered 600,000 vaccines.

That was money well spent.

David: Was this lax oversight?

So many no-bid contracts, Robo calls for vaccine sites, and so on.

Who was watching where all this stuff was happening and where all the money was going?

>> We were all watching it.

We were here every day, starting at 6:30 in the morning.

David: But did you not find those things while you were self examining?

>> We found some of them.

The report notes that we fired people when we noticed there was irregularities.

I think it was important -- again, our sole mission -- every day, we had to find volunteers and workers to fill five vaccination sites in five different areas of the county.

We had testing sites, food distribution days.

There were so many different things going on that our focus again was getting enough people to vaccinate -- administer 650,000 shots and save lives.

That was our only thing.

If we could go back, we would do everything the same way.

One thing I think we would change is after reading the report I would have -- I wish we would have called the Comptroller's office in the beginning of COVID and asked them to come out and help us because they clearly could have come out early and we would have welcomed them to assist us, and maybe we would have avoided some of these mistakes we made.

David: There is also this sense of the fog of war because you are like, let's get people vaccinated, let's get them the help that they need and we will deal with the rest of it later?

>> Our focus every day was to communicate to the residents who were scared, who couldn't see their families.

I know my mother is in a nursing home right now with Alzheimer's, and I lost a year where I could not hug her because of COVID.

People forget all that.

We were getting calls every day about, I need a vaccine.

My mom is dying, I need to see my mother and I need to have this vaccine.

Joe DiVincenzo's singular focus, our focus was saving people's lives.

Not only did we do vaccines at the five sites, we haed crews and nurses go out.

We had nurses go to the jail.

That is one of the things I am most proud of.

Look at the rest of the state.

Look how other counties did.

We had one person in our Essex County facility dive COVID.

One too many.

But when you compare it to everybody else, we did an unbelievable job with our COVID response.

David: It is also significant to say the report does not say there was any criminal activity, correct?

>> Absolutely.

It is important to hear that.

It doesn't say that.

David: I think it is also safe to say this is not the only county where mistakes were made.

I think all of the counties -- if all the counties were audited the same way, you're going to find something similar.

Wouldn't you say?

>> I don't want to speak about any other county.

But I am sure at that time, every morning I was assigned to be on the governor's call.

The head of the state Department of Health said, we are flying in a plane while we are building it.

No one has ever gone through this before.

The last pandemic was 100 years ago.

We were learning things on the fly.

We had to get people -- think about this, and I don't think we get enough credit for this.

In addition to the paid workers, we had volunteers come into our five sites to administer shots, volunteers from the Essex County school of nursing, volunteers from the University Hospital.

Millions of dollars of volunteers, community people who wanted to come in.

In addition to paid workers, no one took that into consideration.

Joe D got COVID four times because he was at the sites every day.

He was grabbing test kits and we were saying, you have to be careful.

But again, there were many people whose focus was on getting Essex County residents -- and again, we didn't turn anybody away.

We had residents far and wide, from other counties, even other states.

The state said, if they are there and you have the vaccine, vaccinate them.

David: Now what?

Does the county have to give money back?

How does that work?

And where any of the federal funds that were supposedly at risk, were there any federal funds lost?

Who are you reimbursing and how?

>> At the present time, I don't think we are reimbursing anyone because the only person who has had an issue is the office of State controller.

Everyone else, including our report to FEMA and the feds, have been glowing.

David: Do you know if the state is investigating the other counties as well?

>> I have no idea.

I don't know that, Dave.

This report is valuable.

Again, 100 years from now, if there is another global pandemic, there's things in here people should learn from, and that is the importance of the report.

Hopefully they dust this off and implement some of the suggestions that the controller made.

Again, I hope they don't slow down to implement the report instead of saving lives.

I think that was the first thing and our first mission during this COVID vaccination center.

David: Phil Alagia is the chief of staff to Essex County executive Joe DiVincenzo.

Good to see you.

Thanks for coming on.

>> Thank you very much for having us.

Don't forget the lovely parks and cherry blossoms in Essex County.

David: Love that you got that in.

Appreciate it.

By the way, Earth Day is Monday, in case you didn't know.

We thought we would check in on mother Earth as we head to her special day on Monday.

How is the garden in our garden state?

Let's get an assessment from the director from the NJ Sierra Club , and the environmental and social justice activists and chairman of the New Jersey progressive equitable energy coalition.

Welcome to you both.

I always chuckle around Earth Day, when we refer to the garden state.

But to see it, you really have got to look hard sometimes to see the garden and garden state.

I wonder if each of you could start off by telling me, what is the emergency, the environmental emergency that is concerning you the most right now.

Marcus, let's start with you.

>> Always a pleasure to join you, David.

And I would say, I think the environment will emergency concerning me the most is the fact that the environment is getting put into a silo.

That is the problem.

The only way we solve these issues when it pertains to our environment is we look at it from a collective standpoint in conjunction with everything that has happened.

I feel like when we speak about the environment, we put it over here, and we speak about social justice issues and we put it over here, and we speak about health issues over here, education and housing and all the things that encompass environmental justice.

For me, the biggest problem is with the knowledge we have, with the recognition the EPA has made, all these institutions have made about the connections between environmental justice and all these issues, having that information and still having environmental justice over here by itself, I think that is the biggest issue we are always going to have because we will never have the collective support in order to gain the leverage and political power and exert our will to get our legislation passed.

That is what I see.

David: It is all connected, right?

>> 100%.

Thank you for having me, David.

I agree 100% with you, Marcus.

Everything is connected and we have to look at everything holistically.

I want to add that recently we saw in the news that this upcoming hurricane season is actually the most aggressive ever predicted in our history of predicting hurricane seasons.

That adds more to the urgency of climate change and protecting our infrastructure and people, our communities.

In New Jersey specifically, there's a package of rules which deal with how we built and how we prepare to deal with the threats of climate change, to deal with sea level rise, wetlands protection, to deal with things with flood hazard, with storm water and how do we prepare ourselves so that our infrastructure can handle that and we don't continue to put people in danger when we experience incredible amounts of storms that bring a lot of precipitation at a given time.

This life-saving package of rules has been delayed for four years.

As a matter of fact, Governor Murphy announced last February that he was going to propose this by summer of 2023.

We are still waiting.

These are life-saving roles.

We need to protect infrastructure, we need to protect our communities, and we need to deal with climate change.

I see that as a really urgent problem.

David: Let's talk about this environmentalist governor and his climate plan.

It seems like it was on a roll, but then suddenly roadblocks and it all started with the offshore wind situation, where Orsted dropped all their plans to come into jersey.

What has the administration done right, and what have they done wrong?

Let's go to you, Marcus, first.

>> The thing they did right was they started off ambitious.

I think leadership needs to be ambitious.

I think when you are cognizant of the situation you are in, it is urgent and dire.

You cannot go along with the status quo.

You have to be ambitious and set some very significant goals, so I applaud the administration for that.

I think it is up to us, the viewers, activists, the regular season, it is up to us to hold them accountable, then make sure there is feasibility with everything they are proposing, like make sure, is this realistic?

Will this be inclusive of different communities?

I applaud the Murphy administration for being ambitious, but I think there's certain areas where it is a little more thought that should have been put into the planning, more should have been brought to the table before certain plans were enacted because we see the pitfalls.

That is one of the problems we had, that we bring in activists after the cake is already baked when you should have had us there from the beginning so we can help you see the pitfalls.

I think he has done a pretty good job, but I think one of the biggest problems we have is that we allow polluters to provide our talking points, and that is a problem.

Anyone making money off of a situation is going to suppress information so that you don't see the truth, and the truth is, we have to make this transition.

It has nothing to do with what we want to do.

The reality is, we continue on with the status quo of utilizing fossil fuels, then our future is doomed because it is creating so many changes in our environment, but it is impacting our health too, which is more important.

David: Ambition is great, but if you fall short of your ambitions, it is even more glaring to the public because you promised the moon and you didn't even get to the stars.

I think of, for instance, the great push from this administration towards electrification in general.

Electrification of cars and encouraging the use and sale of electric vehicles.

Then there is legislation and rules that are really counterproductive to that, no?

>> 100%.

We saw that by Governor Murphy doing a lot of work to be able to adopt the advanced claim cars rule package, -- clean cars rule package, which means all car sales need to be 100% clean energy, whatever energy is not dependent on gas.

That got adopted at the end of 2023, now we are seeing how EV buyers are not being equitably addressed when it comes to paying the fair share for the maintenance of our roads.

Now, EV's just got signed by the governor into law.

Buyers when they purchase their new electric vehicle, they have to pay a fee that is not in the ballpark of what users of regular cars pay for through their gas tax.

On top of all of that and not being equitable, you need to pay for years.

These are thousands of dollars, a lot of incentives going away.

Even though we are pushing new vehicles to be fair in emissions by 2035, at the same time you're telling them, you have to pay more if you're going to buy those vehicles.

Absolutely contradictory.

It really doesn't make sense because we have to wrap it up at the beginning.

These are the important years in order to set the trend to get to where we need to get.

David: I want to talk about environmental justice and it is a term that sometimes can confuse people.

But basically, we are talking about poor folks, immigrants, black folks, brown folks stuck in areas where they get the incinerators, the recycling centers.

Let's talk about that in the context of the latest example, which I have to admit, full disclosure, very close to me, the discussion about Liberty State Park and the notion that the state is trying to flood the park, which the state counters is actually trying to alleviate flooding in the community, mostly black and brown and poor and immigrant people, around the park.

You got to a lot of these DEP sessions.

It is a lot infuriating, isn't it?

>> It is infuriating, it is appalling.

I don't know how they wake up every morning.

The truth of the matter is that groups like these people who are misinforming the public, they are really just lying about the really robust plans that the DEP has developed, along with the Army Corps of Engineers to not only restore the park, clean up the park, but actually bring resiliency into the park to deal with the impacts of sea level rise.

Everything they are trying to do is to prevent flooding in the streets of Jersey City.

It is a great opportunity.

If we are already making the park better as it needs to be, let's take this opportunity to provide resiliency to the communities, which do your point earlier, black, brown communities, and low income communities are the ones that are always in danger from the impacts of climate change.

David: It drives me crazy because you have black and brown leaders who are going to black and brown communities and saying, look, if we build a hockey arena here, that is going to provide jobs, etc.

And they downplay the environmental impact of constant flooding because, what, they figure people in these communities don't care?

>> I would say, just to go back to the previous point, ambition is important, but it can be inconsistent with the message.

I don't fault ambition.

I fault people who are giving mixed messages and passing legislation that is inconsistent with the ambition they are shooting for.

The same thing applies here.

We are really ambitious with our goals come up with Liberty State Park and all throughout the state, but the reality is this.

We are forgetting the why, and I think it is important for us always to keep in mind the why.

Why is environmental justice a thing?

We seem to think we can talk about environmental justice without speaking about environmental racism.

It is not a coincidence why these certain groups are in these communities.

It is not a coincidence why these -- this country is founded on exploitive processes.

This is why we need to prioritize justice for these communities.

I say that because we can't look at things like one or the other sometimes.

Sometimes there are going to be inconsistencies in communities because priorities are different.

Some communities have the luxury to think about only flooding.

Other communities have to think about job creation.

And we have to be honest about that.

If you're communities were left out of opportunities and you have to think about sustaining your family, people are going to think about job creation.

So, it is our job -- our job -- to improve our messaging to explain to people that we can sustain our environment, we can save our planet, we can create clean, green jobs that are beneficial to your household, but also beneficial to your health.

And we have not done a good job of that.

Now you have people who are prioritizing projects that bring jobs while those same projects are exacerbating problems like flooding and heat in their communities.

And we have to do a better job with our messaging because we have people fighting when in reality we are on the same team fighting the same racism that has always existed.

We have to do better with the messaging.

David: It is our state, it is our earth.

Great to see you both.

Thanks very much.

And that is "Chat Box" for this week.

Thanks to Phil Alagia for joining us earlier.

A programming note, next week's "Chat Box" will be a full hour as we welcome the Democratic candidates for U.S. Senate.

We will have a discussion on important issues facing New Jersey and the nation, from wars to recession to immigration, student loan debt, and more.

It is not a debate.

It will be an informal but candid, and we hope in lightning.

It streams Thursday, April 25 at 6:00 p.m. on the YouTube channel and airs on NJPBS next Saturday at 6:00 and Sunday at 10:00 a.m.

In the meantime, follow us on X, and get full episodes of "Chat Box" and more when you scan the QR code on your screen.

I am David Cruz.

For the crew here in downtown Newark, thanks for watching.

We will see you next week.

Announcer: Major funding for "Chat Box with David Cruz" is provided by the members of the New Jersey education Association, making public schools great for every child.

Promotional support is provided by Insider NJ, a political intelligence network dedicated to New Jersey's political news.

Insider NJ is committed to giving serious political players an interactive forum for ideas, discussion, and insight.

Online at insiderNJ.com.