>> Funding for "Reporters Roundtable" is provided by RWJBarnabas Health.

Be healthy together.

The MGM insurance group, serving insurance needs of New Jersey residents and businesses for more than 100 years.

Promotional support provided by "New Jersey Business" magazine, the magazine of the New Jersey business and industry Association, reporting to executive and legislative leaders in all 21 counties of the Garden State since 1954.

And by Politico's New Jersey Playbook, a topical newsletter on Garden State politics online at Politico.com.

>> Who said starting a cannabis industry would be easy?

It is "Reporters Roundtable," and I am David Cruz.

Our panel this week includes Charles Stiles, a political columnist for the Record USA Today network, Brent Johnson, the politics reporter for NJ Advanced Media, and Matt Friedman, a reporter for Politico and author of the "New Jersey Playbook."

We will hear from the panel in a few minutes.

We begin today with marking 4/20 with a look at the state cannabis industry with a lawmaker saying the commission created to regulate it should be abolished.

Senator, good to see you.

>> Good to see you, David.

What do you have against the CRC?

You guys, haven't you done enough already with regulatory commissions this year?

>> We saw the CRC cancel their May meeting, but hold an emergency meeting for a corporation that is violating collective bargaining rights.

I have countless small businesses throughout my district and state that are waiting to get on an agenda with no clarity.

Something is not working.

>> So talk a little bit about that.

You are referring to CureLeaf, one of the big corporate entities that are some of the few actually selling cannabis in the state right now.

They had their license renewal denied.

Then a few days later, it was reinstated, yes?

>> Yes.

God bless them.

What about all of this -- in these small businesses in New Jersey that are not able to get on an agenda?

And they see the May meeting is canceled.

I have had good conversations with the Senate President, the speaker, and the Governor's office.

This is a big layer of democracy that has not been working.

I think the staff, Jeff Brown and his team, have worked hard and done good things getting the industry up and running.

But I want to see the commissioners basically come before the legislature.

The Senate had a hearing earlier this year.

But, this is becoming too corporate-friendly.

It is not Small Business- friendly.

When you buy a house or get a new job, you have a date.

You have the ability to plan.

You have small businesses in the state.

I have a number in my district waiting in limbo month after month after month paying their landlord.

I had a mom recently call me saying she would have her son start working at ShopRite because the cannabis facility here is not up and running yet.

I have towns reaching out to me out of frustration.

And the CRC is not working with them.

They are not providing clarity and then they cancel their May meeting to catch up on paperwork.

But they had no problem having a special emergency meeting for a large New Jersey corporation.

David: That is one of the major complaints we hear all the time when we talk to folks about the industry.

That it is all about big weed and the corporate interests able to order and demand a meeting when they get a decision not to their liking.

Sen. Gopal: yes.

Just the chaos of last week of canceling, denying CureLeaf, showing all of these collective bargaining violations and then just weeks later because they have high-profile attorneys, they get an emergency meeting, no questions asked.

Something is not working here.

In a long meeting with the Senate President yesterday, we discussed other topics, including the importance of homegrown and other pieces we need to look at now in the cannabis process that has been going on for the last year.

We will look at this opportunity, not just at the CRC, but other areas of cannabis that may be worth looking at.

David: We talked with the CRC chair on "Chat Box" this weekend.

She says they have done great work over there.

You are clearly seeing more shortcomings of that process.

They also said the law is flawed in a lot of ways.

Consumption lounges, for instance.

You cannot smoke, then have a meal at a consumption lounge.

All of these regulations which are supposed to not only regulate the industry and also create opportunities for small mom and pop shops, for lack of a better description.

All that goes by the wayside.

>> Yes.

I am not beating up on the CRC staff.

They have done really good things.

They created different industries decades ago and I think they have done good things.

There needs to be more accountability.

They cannot just say, we will let you know.

A small business spending hundreds of thousands of dollars that happens to be for social equity and I have a number of them, at least five or six in my district and dozens around the state that reach out to me since the original news report.

They are not saying you will be up in August or July.

There is no clarity.

That is the frustration on this.

I think we should be looking at all those things as they relate to what the future of the CRC looks like.

When I and my colleagues have had frustration that the Department of Labor or different state agencies, the commissioners come in.

The staff comes in and they have to go through the Senate and assembly budget processes.

There is actual oversight.

That's not here at all.

I do not want to speak for the Governor's office but I am hopeful they will share my views on the importance of bringing this into either the Department of the Treasury or the Department of Health.

And at minimum, wherever this goes, I think it is a healthy, important conversation that needs to happen and maybe gets the attention of a few folks at CRC that they have to be more responsible to mom-and-pop small businesses at the state, not just a corporation trying to get to the emergency meeting.

>> You are chair of education.

Your predecessor this week went off on the education secretary at a budget hearing because the department left $3 million of federal money on the table.

That's a lot of chalk.

>> Yes.

It is not just education.

We have seen reports statewide of a lot of federal money.

This is something we have pushed hard with the administration to try to make sure the funds get used.

We have a unique timeframe on learning recovery and these kids during COVID really took a step back by not having in-present education.

We need to spend money now on high dosage tutoring, and a lot of pieces that make these students not have gone backwards.

I share the Majority Leader's concerns.

I do not think it is unique to the department of education.

All of it we need to make sure the funds get out as soon as possible and I am hopeful in the legislative budget that a lot of that will happen.

David: Take me to the budget school funding.

You cannot just keep compensating schools that got shortchanged every year from the budget, right?

There needs to be a change to the formula, yes?

Sen. Gopal: Absolutely.

And is urgent...my Democratic colleagues.

I know they do not all feel that way now, but we have seen, while a district might have gone down in enrollment to 50 or 100 kids, that does not mean their inflation has not gone up, their health care contract has not gone up, mental health care costs have gone up, security has gone up.

There needs to be more transparency in the process.

To blame a school district now for what their predecessors did 15 years ago would be like blaming the legislature or governor now because of a governor or legislature 15 or 20 years ago did not make pension plans.

We cannot afford to hurt the high quality of education.

I have districts here that are "overfunded" because of things that happened 10 or 15 years ago, but they cannot be held responsible for that now.

That was the fault of the state of New Jersey.

That is the one that did that.

In the over-funding and the underfunding, not the local school districts.

I will be pushing hard, as it comes to an end and I hope that Democratic colleagues joined me in seriously looking at this.

David: This is probably not an easy question to answer in a couple seconds.

The elections transparency act.

It seems like a lot of Democrats held their noses and voted yes.

Do you yet regret your vote?

Sen. Gopal: No.

I think, was this a perfect bill?

Absolutely not.

But the bill will have more transparency in funds.

The one that lost in this are the Super PAC's hiding donations.

While contributions have doubled it will be transparent now and it will force groups less likely to get to these independent expenditures and Super PAC's and I think it will show overtime, and that is one of the big positives.

I did not love everything in the bill but I think it will end with ultimately more transparency.

David: Senator Vin Gopal, thank you for taking a few minutes with us.

Panel, Charles, Matt, Brent, good to see you all.

Let's start with the weed situation.

Matt, CureLeaf gets rejected and then it what, rains hellfire down on the CRC?

I am told there was yelling.

What about Vin Gopal Saying we should scrap the CRC?

Matt: I guess they had a protest with some employees.

It is really difficult to get the people you are paying out the protest things, a real grassroots movement there.

I think that Vin Gopal has an interesting point.

How much notice did they give of this meeting?

I am just thinking of this right now.

I will have to search back.

How does it conform with the open meetings act?

It seems like they put it up on their website and it pretty much happened immediately.

I thought the whole thing, it is still only really -- are there any small players selling weed yet legally, recreationally, in New Jersey?

It seems like there was the bill to give the big players a temporary monopoly.

But, the monopoly is still basically in place.

And it really puts a whole lie to the equity thing.

These are giant corporations that were already in the space.

I want to say that one interesting thing about this is, look, I have not actually been to a New Jersey dispenser yet.

But I have tried some of the stuff.

It is OK.

I think what we will see with the industry, think back to beer 25, 30 years ago, not that I was drinking when I was 10.

Not much later, but not then.

Your choice was Miller, Bud, Coors.

>> It was crap.

>> Not terrible beer, but nothing special.

Now you have changes in the law that allow people to form small breweries and like the American beer scene used to be an absolute joke worldwide.

Now we have among the best beer in the world because we opened it up to competition.

>> Charles, I feel like a lot of this is getting put on Diana...

There are other forces at play here.

CureLeaf got a new meeting and a reversal in like three days.

Charles: That shows you where the leverage and power is in these early formative stages of the industry.

And its role here in New Jersey.

I think Senator Vin Gopal Makes a lot of good points and his call for abolishing the unit will really be sort of like a good negotiating point.

I think it will force maybe not the abolishment of this, but, it will raise all of these questions to the fore and into the front of the agenda.

David: Brent, what are the chances the CRC makes it through 2023?

Brent: We are one year into this and I feel that a lot of things on the table could be changed.

And, that could very well be one of them.

It is a brand-new industry and it will be interesting to see what happens in year one to two.

David: the Rutgers strike is technically not over.

Suspended, not ended as the signs say.

Let's assume there will be a full settlement.

Charles, the governor stepped in early on this and everyone has given him credit.

Is he the hero and what does that get him?

Charles: I think for labor and the unions, yes, he is a sort of delivering for them.

He has raised expectations that he would be some pathetic to their needs.

And is sympathetic to their needs and he came in and brokered it.

Just his mere presence alone, they say, benefited them.

But I think the real player was the surplus in the state budget having the money and ability to pay your way out of the crisis.

We still do not know what that have for that is.

Waiting in the wings we have the state college unions that have been quietly beginning negotiations.

Their contract is up in June.

They have about 10,000 employees and they are basically saying, Well, we want what they got because 50% of our members are adjuncts and non-tenure-track people.

If it is good for them, it is certainly good for us.

There is a price tag.

Whatever the price tag of Rutgers will be will be substantially higher once the state colleges intervene.

David: We covered the rally for the medical faculty this week.

They got left out of the settlement.

They stepped aside.

They said, for the other unions to get theirs.

They agreed to suspend the strike.

Did they suspend the strike too early maybe?

Brent: I think the pressure here is that there are only two weeks left in school and finals and commencement are coming.

That put a lot of pressure on them because then you have to really start picking sides.

That kind of thing was going to start happening.

There was a time crunch here.

They made it very clear that the strike came to a halt, but, it had not ultimately ended.

There are still a lot of things that could play out here.

You hear that the strike is threatening to come back as early as this weekend, maybe, early next week.

There is a lot that is still at play here.

I know the fight over the faculty unions on the medical side, after the merger of the medical school with Rutgers is a big deal now.

It is still not to be concluded yet.

>> Matt, the governor says neither students nor taxpayers will foot the bill for any increases.

Who does that leave?

Matt: I am confused.

I don't know.

It has to be one or the other some way.

[laughter] I think they will gut Rutgers athletics and take all of that money.

David: The football team will pay.

Charles: It is easy to look at a contrast with athletics and how much wasted money there is in the program.

The student newspaper at Rutgers has done a great job of exposing data.

But I have to be careful.

Full disclosure, my wife was a lecturer at Rutgers.

It is kind of crazy that not just at Rutgers, but that at colleges, not just Rutgers, private colleges, every year, tuition goes up and up and up at every college and it is amazing that so much workload is done by adjuncts who are paid so little.

Where does this money go?

We often talk about sports programs, which do take a lot of money and never seem to be on the chopping block.

But, how much administration do you need at some of these colleges and universities?

There seems to be really a huge level of administration.

That, just as a layperson, I don't know what 90% of these people do.

David: Charles, your colleague Ashley had a revealing piece about the Senate president's opaque election filings over the years.

A lot of unclear reimbursements.

He failed to properly disclose $.5 million in campaign spending over the past 15 years?

What is that about?

Charles: What that is about is we really don't know.

You could ascribe it to sloppiness.

You could also, friendly, ascribe it, or attribute it to not really wanting to disclose who was getting paid.

Who knows?

That is the big question and the purpose of disclosing the names of vendors and businesses.

So, people have a clear picture of it.

Of who is getting paid.

So, there is no conflict or somebody is not getting improperly paid.

So, and, the irony here is he was a paragon of disclosure throughout this.

He defended it as we are going to open up new doors of transparency.

David: He was the only one that spoke on the Senate floor in favor of it.

Brent, transparency lawyer CJ Griffin points out that so many of the election complaints do not result in penalties because they are minor violations for small companies.

Is election filing overrated?

Brent: I don't know.

I think there needs to be some agency in place there but obviously things need to improve.

This is also an area where reporters have taken up the mantle.

It's not an easy thing to report on.

It is something every reporter is equipped at doing and could learn to do better.

There needs to be some sort of agency looking over this.

Maybe it needs improvement.

I always found it funny they kept saying they signed and passed a bill that is not perfect.

I did not know there was a time clock that required them to pass something.

Like, why not make it perfect and then pass it and assign it?

This is not like filling a record contract in 1993.

This is something you will not see always.

It will continue to be talked about in the coming weeks.

David: There will be great examples in that regard.

New Jersey is great for that.

Time for our "Only in Jersey" moment.

Headlines and notes that are quintessentially Jersey.

Brent Johnson, why don't you start?

Brent: I saw the governor named September 23 Bruce Springsteen Day.

It seems weird that it did not exist already.

I think there should be some sort of algorithm that comes up every time it is some celebrity's birthday on social media and it says, if they are from Jersey, it immediately comes up they are from Jersey and you will see Jersey produce more famous people and celebrities and artists and so on per capita than any other state and we should get the recommendation for that.

David: The irony of Bruce Springsteen is almost all of his songs were about how living in Jersey sucked.

Brent: But he stayed there the entire time.

That is the great thing about being in New Jersey.

David: It is called Stockholm Syndrome.

Brent: Because he loves it.

David: Charles?

Charles: I want to tip my hat to Brent's colleague Matt for the story about the governor's lavish furnishings for the new statehouse and his office and the million dollars for that rug.

That reminded me of back when I first came to the state house and I did a similar story about a person named Whitman putting in $50,000 worth of carpet in the state house shortly after she took over.

They sweated that story.

They were not happy about it.

But I would say, though, it was not some rug from Soltan about, I think.

It was not some antique or some Turkish or Persian rug.

It was just piled burgundy carpet that you could have got at some discount carpet store.

To me, it looked pretty cheesy.

I don't know how $50,000 is adjusted for inflation.

But it could roughly amount to the same cost.

David: The governor said he is not taking the rugs with him when he leaves.

We are stuck with him.

Matthew, you have one?

Matt: A fun thing I am enjoying, Senator Testa on the other side of the state in Cumberland County.

After Newark's embarrassing sister city agreement with the fake United States of Kailasa.

Sorry if I don't know how to pronounce that.

It is fake, after all.

Senator Testa introduced a bill that would require the Secretary of State to vet all sister city agreements knowing the bill does not have a chance of passing.

He was just needling his opponent.

He did not like that and spent the first several minutes of his state of the city speech ripping into Mike Testa, a state senator from all the way across the state.

I was shocked that is how he chose to begin his speech but it was very entertaining.

My question is, I don't know if Testa really got under his skin and that is what this is about or if Baraka feels like this is a good opportunity to contrast myself with this right wing guy from South Jersey.

David: Both are potential gubernatorial candidates so it could get interesting over the next couple years.

Mine comes from my hometown, Jersey City.

If you follow Major League Baseball, you know that last weekend was Jackie Robinson Day.

Celebrating the trailblazing Brooklyn Dodgers who broke the color barrier in Major League Baseball in 1947.

But, those who know know that it was April 18, 1946, one year earlier when, as a member of the Dodgers AAA affiliate Montréal Royals Robinson became the first African-American to play professional baseball at the old Roosevelt Stadium on Bankers Avenue in Jersey City.

Depicted here in "The Jackie Robinson Story," with Jackie Robinson in what looks to be Florida, maybe.

Anyway, the game and America have never been the same since.

And it happened only in Jersey.

That is the "Roundtable" for this week.

Charles, Brent, Matt, good to see you all.

Thank you and thank you, Senator Vin Gopal, for joining us.

Follow the show on Twitter @RoundtableNJ and get fresh content every day when you subscribe to the YouTube channel.

From all the crew here in downtown Newark, thank you for watching.

We will see you next week.

>> Funding provided by RWJBarnabas Health.

Let's be healthy together, NJM Insurance Group, servicing insurance needs for New Jersey residents and businesses for more than 100 years.

Promotional support provided by "New Jersey Business" magazine, the magazine of the New Jersey Business and Industry Association, reporting to executive and legislative leaders in all 21 counties of the Garden State since 1954.

And, by Politico's New Jersey Playbook, a newsletter on Garden State politics online at Politico.com.