Home Care In New Lisbon, NJ

LISBON — After four months on the job, Assistant Town Manager Glenn Michalowski has been promoted to town manager.

The Town Council’s decision follows 10 months with an interim town manager and two unsuccessful hiring searches.

Michalowski, has held numerous roles in municipal government, including a recent three-year tenure as the assistant town manager in Maplewood, New Jersey, a community of 25,000 people.

Ryan McGee, police chief and previous interim town manager, said Michalowski has an abundance of municipal experience, has a positive attitude and demonstrates great communication skills.

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“He’s very down to Earth,” McGee said. “He’ll sit there and listen to both sides of any topics going on. If he doesn’t know something, he’s certainly going to make sure he can get an informed answer to somebody. He’s very transparent, and that’s huge in government nowadays.”

After Michalowski was hired as assistant town manager in June, the town tried twice to hire a suitable town manager. During the first search, the selection committee identified no qualified candidates, according to McGee. A qualified candidate identified in the second search withdrew before the process could be completed.

“There are a lot of vacancies across the state for town manager positions, and it’s a very competitive process,” McGee said.

Following the second search, councilors approached Michalowski about taking on the position.

“After the second meeting and actually going through the interviews and seeing the candidates . . . we were seeing a lot of great qualities and leadership abilities that our assistant town manager (has),” McGee said.

While Michalowski said he has been interested in the town manager position from the start, he didn’t feel comfortable applying for it. Maine’s municipal laws are different from New Jersey’s, and he wanted time to learn. As one example, he said Maine towns are smaller and afford more local control than municipalities in New Jersey.

“I didn’t want to do a disservice to the town of Lisbon not knowing the statutory environment or having a lack of experience and not being super confident in my ability, I guess, at that time,” he said. “But as I’ve had a chance to grow in the organization and meet people I’m working with and work with this council, they had asked me and I kind of felt, yeah, I think it feels good, let’s do it.”

Michalowski said he sees the role of town manager as providing support to department leaders to make sure they are successful, calling them “experts in what they do.”

A New Jersey native, Michalowski moved to Portland in 2021 with his wife, who has ties to Maine. Before joining the Lisbon Town Office, he was the principal administrative officer in Portland’s information technology department.

But with less than a year with Portland, he began applying for assistant town manager jobs.

“I had missed the institutional leadership part of it, helping solve problems and coming up with solutions,” he said.

Michalowski holds a master’s degree in public administration from Rutgers University and has previously worked as a county archivist, census enumerator and municipal transportation coordinator.

“There’s a lot of community connection and community building (in Lisbon), and so it’s nice to be in a community that’s invested in itself,” he said.

After eight years as town manager, Diane Barnes left for the same role in North Yarmouth in January.

McGee became interim town manager for 10 months, the longest in Lisbon’s history, according to town records.

McGee will continue to assist Michalowski with projects until an assistant town manager can be hired.

Editor's note: This is the first in a month-long series on Jersey Firsts, which spotlights innovators who have changed the way we eat and drink with their inventions and groundbreaking businesses.

Go to any grocery store on the East Coast in July and August and you’ll likely find blueberries from New Jersey.

New Jersey, specifically South Jersey and even more specifically the town of Hammonton, which has named itself the “blueberry capital of the world,” has ideal growing conditions for blueberries. Indeed, the sweet and tart berries are one of the only indigenous fruits to North America.

“Blueberries need sandy, acidic soil, which is why the Pine Barrens is the perfect habitat to grow them in,” said Kiyomi Locker, lead archivist and historian at the Whitesbog Preservation Trust in Browns Mills. “They also need access to lots of clean water, which the Pines also offer.”

And just as the state boasts some of the best blueberries in the world — “Nothing tastes better than a blueberry right off the bush in the middle of the Pine Barrens,” said Locker — New Jersey also claims the cultivation of the first highbush blueberry plant, which changed commercial blueberry farming forever. And for that, we have Elizabeth Coleman White to thank.

White was born in New Lisbon in 1871 to a family of Quaker farmers. Her parents, Joseph J. (J.J., as he was called) and Minnie White, had no sons. So, their four daughters helped manage their farm called Whitesbog, a chunk of land inherited from J.J.’s father James Fenwick.

“Elizabeth would go every Saturday with her father to Whitesbog and help wherever needed, including overseeing workers in the field, business management and even giving first aid to the migrant workers,” said Locker.

White was encouraged by her father to take over the business. On her own, she studied botany and biology. And she even designed her home at Whitesbog to be ideal for running the farm, with offices and workspaces in the ground floor, said Locker.

In her adulthood, the ingenious White worked with Dr. Frederick Coville to cultivate the first highbush blueberry plant. The two were introduced when White read an article Coville wrote in the USDA Bulletin in 1910 about ideal soil conditions for growing wild blueberries. She asked her father to bring Coville to the farm in 1911 and thus began their work together. They had their first viable crop in 1916, and by 1922, they had started commercial sales.

“This was not an overnight project, it took them a good 10+ years to create the blueberry that we know and love,” said Locker.

More:Where to pick your own apples this fall in New Jersey

The highbush plant is the most prevalent commercial blueberry plant, said Locker, though there is another kind. Lowbush blueberry plants are grown more often in Northeastern states like Maine and New Hampshire, said Locker. They grow closer to the ground, produce small berries and are more difficult to grow commercially.

Before the highbush blueberry plant, there were no commercial blueberry farms, said Locker, making Whitesbog the first blueberry farm in the world.

“I do not think that Elizabeth and Dr. Frederick Coville realized how much the blueberry business would grow around the world,” said Locker. “Prior to the project, there was not even a market in which to sell blueberries, so Elizabeth created the whole market from scratch.”

Locker is quick to give credit to the local New Jerseyans who helped White and Coville along, as well.

“For a long time, no one has really acknowledged the work of the local ‘Pineys’ that Elizabeth and Coville relied on immensely to find the original wild plants that they used to create the commercial berry,” said Locker.

Along with a worldwide blueberry industry, the impact of White and Coville’s work can be seen right here in the Garden State. New Jersey is dotted with family-owned farms, many of which open their blueberry patches for folks to pick themselves in the summer months.

“It really is a labor of love and devotion, many of the farms around us are small farms growing blueberries that were gifted or bought from Elizabeth White herself. It is all about tradition and heritage,” said Locker.

White’s story is kept alive by the Whitesbog Preservation Trust, which runs the Whitesbog Historic Village in the Pine Barrens. They host a blueberry festival every year that runs through the summer and features handmade goods from local artisans. The trust also offers hikes, educational programs, concerts, bonfires and more.

Though New Jersey is no longer the No. 1 producer of blueberries in the country (it currently stands in 5th behind Michigan, Washington, Georgia and Oregon), it is still — in our humble opinion —the best.

Locker agrees, saying, “Nothing says summer in New Jersey more than anything made with Jersey blueberries and it has definitely ingrained itself into our state culture, including being the official state fruit.”

Go to whitesbog.org for more information about blueberries in New Jersey.

Early this spring, the New Jersey Department of Community Affairs told township officials in the self-proclaimed “Blueberry Capital of the World” to make sure the farms they had cited for illegally housing workers in converted storage sheds came into compliance before the season started.

That meant installing sprinklers and meeting other fire safety rules by June.

But in May, another Garden State agency was telling the farmers that their storage sheds were fine.

That agency, the Department of Labor, which annually inspects worker housing, approved 11 farms previously cited by other agencies for construction and fire-code violations, according to documents recently obtained by The Inquirer through the state’s Open Public Records Act.

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By mid-summer, six of the Labor Department-approved farms also would be cited for having illegal septic systems that failed to capture hundreds if not thousands of gallons of sewage each day — filthy water, cooking grease, detergent, and human waste that drained into the groundwater near the fields.

The Inquirer has also learned that the scope of the illegal housing went beyond the eight cases its earlier investigation found. At least 13 farms — about a quarter of New Jersey’s commercial blueberry farms — have been cited in the last 15 months for lack of residential permits and certificates of occupancy.

The 13 farms violated state construction and fire codes for illegally converting metal storage barns, known as “pole barns,” into housing for the hundreds of seasonal berry pickers.

All but one of the 13 farms, located in Hammonton and Mullica Townships, Atlantic County, and Winslow Township, Camden County, have gone through two consecutive blueberry seasons without coming into fire-safety compliance.

“Whatever it is on the regulatory side that needs to get done, we will get this done,” said Denny Doyle, chairman of the New Jersey Blueberry Industry Advisory Council, which represents blueberry growers in the state. “We want to be on the right side of this.”

» READ MORE: N.J. blueberry farms house workers in storage sheds, pollute groundwater

Lawyers for blueberry growers and other farms are asking lawmakers to change state regulations to allow them to house workers in pole barns without sprinkler systems. Fifty to 100 workers may sleep in bunk beds packed into a huge shed. They are not supposed to smoke inside, Doyle said.

Meanwhile, state and local agencies have not pursued fines, but instead sent reminder letters to the farms requesting that they comply.

This past spring, in advance of the growing season, inspectors from the Department of Labor checked the worker housing at 119 farms to make sure it was “acceptable” for seasonal workers. This state agency follows looser federal rules, which say farmers need to provide shelter from “the elements,” beds that are above ground, clean water, and first-aid kits, and only require fire extinguishers, not the sprinkler systems the state mandates for large residential facilities.

“Standards that we cover are just the federal standards,” said Abdiel Custodio, a department supervisor for the South Jersey region.

The state labor inspectors work from a list with nearly 100 checkpoints: Is there adequate drainage? Is the ceiling at least seven feet high? Is there 50 or more square feet for each person in sleeping rooms?

The checklist also asks whether there is a septic tank or septic system. If so, the inspector checks yes.

“If there is leakage or anything, that is not our jurisdiction,” Custodio said. “We are not trained for that. We are making sure there is a tank there.”

Following the federal rules, the state labor inspectors approved housing at 11 farms that had outstanding violations from local towns for illegally converting storage sheds into housing units, structures packed with bunk beds, no indoor toilets, and no fire sprinklers as required by state code. (The other two farms were not inspected by the state Labor Department this year or last.)

Custodio said his inspectors would not know of those violations, which are outside their purview.

As for any leaking septic systems, that would be the jurisdiction of the county health department and the state Department of Environmental Protection.

In July, the DEP and the Atlantic County Health Department conducted a joint raid and found six farms with malfunctioning or overflowing septic systems.

“Upon arriving at the camp, it was observed that ground in the center of the site was saturated. The large area of saturated soil and puddled water revealed evidence of a grease layer and a strong odor,” a state DEP report said of a July 9 visit to Vaccarella Farm in Mullica Township.

To find the source of the filth, inspectors flushed colored dye through sinks and other outlets and discovered that dirty water was discharging into the ground from a hole in the kitchen and shower building.

The inspectors issued a water pollution violation to owner Anthony Vaccarella and ordered the farm to get a state septic permit.

Two days later, inspectors followed up and found that a blocked pile had been cleaned out and the pollution from the kitchen had stopped.

Other farms, such as Carmen Merlino Farm and LoSasso Farm, had similar violations that were remediated within a few days, sometimes as easily as having septic tanks pumped out and the waste carted off.

The DEP ordered the six farms to apply for a septic permit within 30 days of their July violations. None has done so. The permits would result in annual inspections.

Of the 13 farms issued violations for illegally using storage sheds for housing, five were in Winslow Township, next to Hammonton but in Camden County.

The Winslow Township construction official ordered the five farms to obtain residential permits, which requires fire sprinklers, and certificates of occupancy before workers could live in the pole barns during the 2019 blueberry harvest. Three of the owners asked for time to comply.

“I am still in the process of gathering pricing and engineering information for the fire suppression system,” Neil H. Pastore III of Pastore Orchards wrote.

Big Buck Farms and Bluebird Farms also asked for extensions. None of the three returned calls requesting comment; nor did officials at the township’s construction office.

Because all 13 farms are within the protected Pine Barrens, they also must get approval from the Pinelands Commission for any new housing.

“We would make sure development is not being developed in wetlands, and if a new septic system is proposed, that it’s in an area that does not disturb the wetlands,” Chuck Horner, the commission’s director of regulatory programs, said.

So far, none of the 13 farms has started the permitting process.

Doyle, of the state blueberry council, owns D.G. Doyle Farms, a 15-acre commercial blueberry farm in New Lisbon, Burlington County. His small farm, which does not house temporary workers, was not cited for housing or environmental violations.

Doyle said a group of about 18 growers has hired an attorney to lobby agencies and lawmakers seeking less stringent fire-safety rules for seasonal farm camps.

“A fire suppression system is very, very expensive,” Doyle said. “All growers that I know have fire extinguishers, fire alarms, sounding devices, as most of us do in our homes.”

He said he understood why hotels and year-round facilities need sprinklers. But blueberry harvesting lasts only about six weeks, he said.

In June, a group of state legislators introduced a package of bills that would loosen fire codes for agricultural housing. The bills would bar townships from enforcing any laws stricter than the eventual state code.

The Assembly passed the bills out of committee. The Senate versions are being considered in committee, and a vote could take place in late fall.

If the farm group is unable to exempt housing sheds from having fire-suppression systems, Doyle said, farmers will just have to comply.

“If it comes down to our industry has to do this, then assure your readers we will do this,” he said.

Guy Villax, CEO of Hovione, stands in the central hall of the company’s new R&D center in Lisbon. On the wall beside him is a mural with photographs commemorating the family-owned pharmaceutical chemistry firm’s milestones since it was founded by his parents, Ivan and Diane Villax, 59 years ago. There is also a nearly floor-to-ceiling portrait of Steve Jobs, the cofounder of Apple.

? Revenue: $274 million in 2017, with a goal of $300 million for 2018

? Active projects: 167

? Products: Generic APIs

? Services: API manufacturing, particle engineering, formulation services, spray drying, drug-product manufacturing, continuous tableting, product licensing, inhalation drug development

? Employees: 1,600

? Manufacturing sites: Loures, Portugal; Macau, China; East Windsor, N.J.; Cork, Ireland

? Manufacturing capacity: 596 m³

Guy Villax is fond of extolling innovation and inspirational figures such as Jobs and Charles Darwin, who on another mural is quoted regarding species’ responsiveness to change. That mural also nods to an evolution in how Hovione regards the scientists who work in R&D.

His father, he explains, was a man of his times. “He didn’t give much space to empowerment and all that,” he says. Villax, on the other hand, has been giving employee empowerment a lot of space recently.

The 7,000-m² R&D center was designed with low-walled cubicles and picture windows looking into labs and conference rooms. A large tote board on the second floor lists the company’s patents, with a good number of entries—failed applications—crossed out with red lines. Banners from the ceiling celebrate the launch of new drugs for which Hovione supplied active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs) and other services. There were four in 2017, close to 10% of the 46 drugs approved by the U.S. Food & Drug Administration.

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Villax says he wants to get chemists to look up from the bench at the big picture. “It feels a little less inhuman, not doing the Charlie Chaplin things,” he says, referring to Chaplin’s skewering of the machine age in the film “Modern Times.” “If you give people a sense of what it’s all about and how they contribute, they fill in their batch records with greater care. But to keep people excited about doing new things, you have to give them the right tools.”

R&D at headquarters is one thing. Manufacturing on three continents is another, for a family-owned firm with plans to double capacity at most of its sites. But Villax sees a continuum from the lab to the plant in which developments in both realms are guided by innovative science and customer demand. It’s a philosophy that has kept Hovione afloat as many other firms in the drug service industry get swallowed up by financial buyers or big corporations.

Related: How Hovione grew from a basement lab to a global pharmaceutical services company

Indeed, Hovione has been adding tools beyond the lab, including at its plant in nearby Loures, where it is doubling manufacturing capacity and starting up a finished-dosage drug plant it acquired in 2015 and then retooled.

Meanwhile, the company is adding a second pilot plant at its smaller-scale facility in East Windsor, N.J., and commissioning the second of two manufacturing buildings at a large-scale facility in Cork, Ireland, capacity that has been mothballed since Hovione bought the site from Pfizer in 2009.

The company has also added a wholly new tool in New Jersey—a continuous tableting plant—for which it has a contract to work with Vertex Pharmaceuticals. Hovione will offer the service for other customers there and in Lisbon, where a similar plant is scheduled to be installed.

Hovione invested about $100 million in 2017 and plans to spend as much again this year and next. The plan over the next three years is to continue investing, especially in Portugal, where the firm will add 165 m³ of chemical synthesis capacity, a spray-dryer building, and a 1,200-m² analytical lab.

Hovione’s capacity expansion is ambitious but somewhat conventional for a firm whose major investments have historically startled industry watchers. In 1985, for example, Hovione built a plant in Macau, the first instance of a European drug service company investing in China. In 2002, it opened the New Jersey plant, starting a trend of European firms establishing small-scale beachheads in the U.S.

Then came the Cork acquisition, which, in addition to bulking up manufacturing capacity with a plant Pfizer no longer needed, brought a huge spray-drying facility. Hovione pioneered and remains a leader among firms offering this now-popular service.

If anything, the move into tableting is a bit of catch-up for Villax, who not long ago spoke skeptically of peers adding final-dosage service to chemistry. The merger of DSM’s pharmaceutical chemical business with Patheon’s finished-drug service was a seeming vindication of this one-stop-shop approach. Several other firms, including Siegfried, Carbogen Amcis, and Aesica, also invested in dosage-form manufacturing, as Hovione held fast with chemistry alone.

Villax finally blinked in 2015, purchasing a plant literally over the fence from Hovione’s main site in Loures. Villax insists he would never have added dosage services if the plant weren’t adjacent to API manufacturing. He says the company now has two customers for which it does particle engineering, API synthesis, and final product manufacturing at the one site.

He emphasizes that Hovione had signed up Vertex for continuous tableting before committing to the cutting-edge technology in New Jersey. Dosage-form service “is not a leap or change in direction,” he insists. “Who do you think showed us the way? The clients.”

In New Jersey, site general manager Filipe Tomás is focused on increasing capacity for clients in the early stages of drug development. “This site cannot be at maximum capacity,” he says. “We expect to be at 60% to 70% occupancy and always be a door to customers when they have a lead.”

And that door is about to open on continuous tableting, which is beginning registration runs and is set to go into commercial production next year. Hovione’s hope that the service will be of interest is borne out several miles away at the Rutgers University Engineering Research Center for Structured Organic Particulate Systems. There, engineers have worked with Vertex and Janssen Pharmaceuticals, firms that Douglas Hausner, associate director of industrial liaison at the center, describes as early adopters. Hovione hired several students and engineers from the center as it secured the contract with Vertex.

Tomás sees the addition of tableting as a natural progression in pharmaceutical services rather than a break from Hovione’s chemistry tradition. The new apparatus, a three-story rig with a belt of tablet troughs running from top to bottom, is utterly unlike the pilot reactors elsewhere in the facility. “This is a technology that we think adds value,” specifically that of speed to market, Tomás says.

He points to a newly constructed space near the tableting machinery in which the company may add blister packaging, a service Vertex is not currently signed on for. The site has also doubled its research space with the creation of an open environment that mirrors the new Lisbon center. Along with a significant increase in staff, the New Jersey labs have increased technical firepower in areas such as particle design and engineering.

Back in Lisbon, Cláudia Ferreira, general manager of R&D services, says research and technology have seen many changes in recent years but have still followed one basic course. “Hovione always takes advantage of its core way of working, which is science driven and innovation driven. That hasn’t changed.”

Rafael Antunes, senior director of R&D, adds that remaining a family-owned company allows Hovione to take risks and make long-term investments, including in its research endeavors. “We like to be challenged,” he says. “We feel we have to differentiate ourselves from the competition, to set the bar high on the technologies we adopt, and to have the right people.”

Related: At 50, Hovione Takes A Big Step

Hovione employs about 90 Ph.D. scientists. Under a program launched five years ago, 11 Ph.D. students are doing research at the firm. The four who have completed their program have been hired by the company.

“What you have in our industry, as in so many others, is an expansion of knowledge and technology,” Villax says. “You have to keep up, and you have to solve problems faster.”

James Bruno, president of the consulting firm Chemical & Pharmaceutical Solutions, says that Villax makes some risky moves but that they tend to pay off, with the latest venture in continuous tableting appearing to be another good one.

“Sometimes I’ve scratched my head and said, ‘What is he thinking?’ ” Bruno says. “But five years later, you got to go back and say, ‘Well, you know, that was a pretty good idea.’ I think Guy always has a tendency to be a step ahead of everybody else in general. He’s doing things that people are thinking about doing.”

Related: Continuous drug production advances

Villax says he’s often challenged on the question of whether, despite a good run, a major disruption in pharmaceutical technology might “get Hovione bankrupt.” This, he admits, is a good question.

But he also points to an uninterrupted line in pharmacology development that has yet to be disrupted by genomics, digital technologies, and other game-changing leaps in science.

“I think the pharmacy is something relatively unchanged for 30,000 or 40,000 years. Even when you had hunters and gatherers, I’m sure there were some people who knew what certain plants did for you. So I can’t see what is really going to disrupt us,” he says, smiling. “Famous last words!”

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TRENTON — While a task force this spring was holding public hearings to decide which institution for disabled people the state should close, authorities were investigating a case of medical neglect at one facility that was so severe, a woman needed to have part of her arm amputated.

In April, the medical staff at the Vineland Developmental Center wrapped a woman’s hand so tightly to protect a fractured pinky that an emergency room doctor eight days later described it as “mummified” and consumed with gangrene, according to state Health Department inspection records. The left hand of the woman — a ward of the state — was amputated just above the wrist May 11.

The state has since fired seven temporary nurses, suspended three permanent nurses and is moving to terminate seven other nursing staff connected to her care, state Human Services spokeswoman Nicole Brossoie said.

Because of this probe — and another that found that 11 residents in one cottage were “deeply scratched” and their bodies marked with “carvings” over nearly two years — Vineland was the only one of New Jersey’s seven developmental centers placed in “immediate jeopardy” earlier this year by federal officials, potentially threatening funding.

The investigations were among hundreds of pages of research documents the Task Force on the Closure of State Developmental Centers said it consulted, but panel members say they were not among the main factors used in making their decision.

In July, the panel voted to keep Vineland open and instead shutter Woodbridge Developmental Center in Middlesex County and North Jersey Developmental Center in Passaic County by 2017 — a decision that will uproot nearly 700 people and disrupt more than 2,600 state jobs.

The task force concluded it would be too hard for economically depressed Cumberland County to absorb the loss of jobs and meet the demand for housing and vocational programs that former Vineland residents would need. It reasoned that Woodbridge and North Jersey are in more financially stable communities with more housing and program options.

RELATED COVERAGE:

• Panel formalizes decision to close 2 N.J. institutions for disabled despite objections

• N.J. task force ordering closure of two state institutions for disabled people posts report online

• Vineland Developmental Center to stay open

• N.J. panel recommends closing two institutions for disabled

Task force chairman Craig Domalewski said the panel considered information about the Vineland investigations “generally relevant. But we were not asked to make a decision based on a licensing inspection.”

Although the vote was taken in public and preceded by seven public hearings and visits to the centers, parents and union workers tied to Woodbridge and North Jersey are stunned and angry. They are meeting with attorneys to challenge the decision.

“They’re expecting us to send our children down there?” Marylyn Carr of Rahway said upon learning of the investigations.

Carr, 77, said officials informed her they would eventually need to move her son, Eugene, who has lived at Woodbridge for nearly four decades. She could choose to send him to a group home or to Vineland — about 100 miles away — if she wanted to continue institutional care.

“This is heartbreaking,” she said. “They are used to the people who take care of them. You can’t do this to them. I hope all of the people in New Jersey can sleep at night knowing that they saved money for you at the expense of these innocent people.”

TASK FORCE COMPROMISE

Gov. Chris Christie has made no secret of his plan to reduce New Jersey’s reliance on institutional care. The average annual cost for one person at a center is $270,000, and about 2,400 people live in them. The state is also being sued by disabled rights advocates to follow federal law and relocate more able-bodied disabled into community housing.

Christie’s budget last year called for closing Vineland, and his administration began transferring residents and workers. Then Vineland’s most vocal legislative supporter, Sen. Jeff Van Drew (D-Cape May) intervened. He introduced a bill that the governor and Legislature supported creating the five-member task force to decide which centers would close.

File photo/The NewsThe Vineland Developmental Center, which will remain open despite allegations of patient abuse. Several nurses connected to the care of a patient have been fired.

Nancy Thaler, a task force member, said the law laid out five specific criteria to guide the decision: the local economic impact of losing a center, the ability of the community to provide or develop services for those leaving the centers, the number of residents who wanted to leave or didn’t oppose moving outside the region, the state’s ability to maintain operations, and projected repair and maintenance of each center.

“No one piece of information or experience was the defining factor. … The process was as neutral as possible,” said Thaler, executive director of the National Association of State Directors of Developmental Disabilities Services. “The members of the task force took this very seriously. We had a visceral sense that these decisions would deeply affect people’s lives.”

The task force considered unemployment data by county in 2011, confirming Cumberland County had the highest jobless rate, 13.3 percent — well above state average of 9.3 percent. But Passaic County, where North Jersey is located, had a 10.9 percent unemployment rate, third highest among the seven counties being looked at. The task force voted North Jersey should be the first to close.

When, in 2007, the task force examined which center had the most people who could live in the community, it found only 20 percent of Woodbridge residents could make the transition, the third lowest. Vineland had the second highest, 36.5 percent. North Jersey had 27.1 percent.

“When you take all the information and lay it out developmental center by developmental center, there is no perfect case to keep one center open and close another. There is room for people to act completely in good faith and reach different conclusions,” said Domalewski. He said other data convinced him southern New Jersey’s financial outlook is much worse than the rest of the state.

“The economic effect would have been devastating,” Van Drew said. Cumberland is “the county with the highest unemployment rate. The children in this county have the highest poverty rate. Most of the folks who work there are of color and the majority are single providers for their families.”

WHAT THEY DIDN'T LOOK AT

The medical neglect and the physical abuse investigations at Vineland are “unacceptable in any developmental center, which is why constant monitoring is needed,” Van Drew said. He said such incidents happen at other developmental centers, noting a doctor at Hunterdon Developmental Center was suspended last month amid accusations he performed unauthorized bone tests on patients.

Tom York, a legal consultant to some families with relatives at Woodbridge and North Jersey who is likely to represent them in future legal action, said despite the trend to move away from institutions, federal law requires government to meet the needs of the individual. People “have the right to have treating professionals make judgments about how their needs are best met. That can’t be overridden by political decree.”

York said transferring from institutional care to community housing has its own set of problems. “They are more likely to be abused in the community, it is less likely to be reported, and mortality rates are higher in the community,” he said.

The task force concluded the four other facilities — Woodbine, New Lisbon, Hunterdon and Green Brook — should not close “due in part to the operational needs” and “the difficulty of replicating the services provided. … in a cost-effective way.”

The task force report may be found here.