Meeting with Khalid Wright
4/6/13 - by Jim Gerrish
I met with candidate for Third Ward Council,
Khalid Wright, at Sunny's Cafe on Sanford Street for about an
hour. Khalid had arranged the meeting through his Facebook page after I asked him to give me some additional details on
his stated goals:
Better
Education, A Modern City, and Efficient and Effective Government
Let me get right to the answers, which Khalid
had no difficulty explaining in great detail in a way that showed
me he had been thinking about these things and talking about them
to people for quite some time.
A Better Tomorrow= Better
Education
Khalid favors empowering parents in their children's educations
and would like to see an elected board of education in the future
primarily made up of parents who actually have children in the
schools. He also has plans to convert the old VLD/Cicely Tyson
building on Elmwood Avenue into a vocational and technical
school. Currently our school district sends East Orange students
to Newark for vocational training, but Khalid feels we can do a
better job here in the city. Not all of our students want or need
college after high school. This would offer those students an
alternate way to further their education. Some may still decide
to attend college later on in life when they know more about what
they want out of life, so it's not closing a door- it's opening
another door to another path they didn't know they had.
Khalid also pointed out examples of where the
current third ward council person, Ted Green, running for his
third term, has failed the city in the past. Green had plenty of
chances to oversee the Water commission, but only waited until
there was a crisis and suddenly he saw an opportunity to use the
crisis to get himself re-elected, when it should have been
addressed over a year before it became public. Khalid has been a
member of the East Orange Water Commission since 2006. In 2010,
he helped to bring a group of East Orange students to the
Watershed area to plant trees, a vital method of insuring that
our artesian wells use nature to purify our water. Projects like
that teach real-life science and math, not just classroom science
and math, and that's also part of his educational improvement
plan.
A Better Tomorrow = A Modern
City
Khalid is one of the few council candidates
who understands the power of this Internet. Staying in touch with
his constituents on a regular basis is just one step towards a
more modern city. He answers his e-mail regularly and has a small
staff of campaign managers who alert him to questions that show
up on his Facebook page as well.
Some of his other ideas involve making use of
abandoned schools, like Washington and the old Elmwood school and
developing those properties to earn income for the city and thus
reduce property taxes. He also pointed out some other examples of
boarded up buildings and neglected property that needs to be
addressed in the Third Ward.
He wants to modify the street parking permit
program so a family gets one car permit free and only has to pay
for additional family cars. He is also open to alternate side of
the street parking so the parked cars won't stop street cleaning
and plowing.
A Better Tomorrow = Efficient
and Effective Government
Khalid's ideas on efficiency begin with
reducing the number of council members. We currently have ten
council members drawing salaries of about $47,000 each plus
benefits and expenses. Newark, which is larger than East Orange,
gets by with 9 council members. Orange has 7 council members.
Khalid thinks we could also get by with a council of 7, one for
each of the five wards and two at large, which would increase
both efficiency and effectiveness at the same time. Firm term
limits also would keep council members from thinking of the
position as a career rather than as a public service job that
needs to be done and then they should move on with their lives.
He wants to put city documents on-line and
video council meetings so the public knows what is going on in
their city government. When I pointed out that our local access
channel 34 can't be seen by the rising number of city residents
who have dropped Comcast in favor of Dish and DirectTV, he agreed
that the council needs to deal with all TV providers in the city
to make sure they carry our local access channel free of charge.
Before we started talking about his campaign
ideas, I got to know Khalid personally. I found out he and his
family have lived in East Orange a long time and that he knows
the details of the city, and especially his own Third Ward, very
well. His ideas about Vocational and Tech school versus College
reflects his own background- he went from high school into
Culinary Arts, so he knows the ins and outs of the restaurant
business like a chef. From there he went to work for Cablevision,
and both jobs taught him something politicians rarely learn about
good customer relations and maintaining customer satisfaction.
You can read his own biography on-line HERE. The
important thing is that he is well qualified for the job and has
the additional advantage of NOT thinking like a politician when
it comes to carrying it out.
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© 2013, James
Gerrish Temporary Custodian of the Web site