OPINION
Rutgers has awarded bids for the next phases of the $600 million renovation of its medical school and hospital in Newark. I hope its commitment to the health and welfare of our residents extends to our local construction and labor forces, and Rutgers pressures its developers to use Newark companies as subcontractors.
These city contractors have proven their worth when Newark successfully completed the one of the largest municipally-run and financed infrastructure programs in decades when we replaced all 23,192 lead service lines in our city in less than three years. That project has been held up across the country as a model for eradicating lead in water, and over the last several testing periods we were proud to report to the EPA and DEP we have 0 parts per billion (ppg) in our drinking water, far below the EPA’s acceptable level of 15 ppg.
I would hope Rutgers University’s new president William F. Tate IV would be sensitive to our desire to have developers use Newark-based minority- and women-owned businesses to bolster our economy. Dr. Tate’s background in psychiatric epidemiology and social policy tells me he is well-versed in the health and economic needs of the community that surrounds the Rutgers’ New Jersey Medical School and University Hospital.
A project of this magnitude can have a major impact on the local economy in obvious and not-so-obvious ways. About 70 percent of our $192 million lead-line replacement program stayed in the Newark economy. We created a union-wage workforce of Newark residents through apprenticeships with labor unions. An engineering inspection company was launched. Restaurants and pizza places catered our community meetings. A woman began a service to travel with our crews and clean up after them so the contractors could move to the next job. Rutgers’ $600 million budget for the medical school should set aside money for entrepreneurial opportunities for its neighbors.
This is not us asking for a favor.
This is part of a historic agreement that dates back to more than a half century to 1968, when New Jersey College of Medicine and Dentistry was invited to relocate from Jersey City to Newark by Mayor Hugh Addonizio and promised a 167-acre swath of the residential blocks in the Central Ward.
The arrogance of the plan was stunning in its indifference to the thousands of Black Americans who made their homes in the neighborhoods Addonizio described as “blighted.” Their blocks would be leveled for the new school with no guarantee the new teaching hospital would cater to the dire needs of the community, which in those days were deemed “social” not medical.
The short history here is that this forced location helped give rise to Black alienation and anger that in part led to the 1967 rebellion, and an all-star team of Newark activists including Junius Williams, Harry Wheeler, Louise Epperson and my father formed a coalition that led Newark Agreement, in which promises were made to ensure the medical school would serve the community ad infinitum.
(The long history can be found in a 2021 essay called “Broken Promises to the People of Newark: A Historical Review of the Newark Uprising, the Newark Agreements, and Rutgers New Jersey Medical School’s Commitments to Newark” written by five prominent doctors, researchers and professors from the Newark medical community and published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health.)
The Newark Agreements were a nine-point binding social contract between the Newark community, the medical school, and governments at the local, state, and federal level. It reduced the size of the hospital footprint and promised to develop, operate and maintain comprehensive health programs and services, including mental health, for residents of Newark.
It also charged the school with “actively recruiting minority students, faculty, and professional staff and “work with the school to develop ‘career ladders’ for non-professionals in the health field” and assure residents “admission to the teaching hospital without bias.”
The Seventh and Eighth points dealt with hiring “minority” employment at the construction and that the medical school would include “affirmative action clauses into contracts and subcontracts” and employ community residents in “as many of the … jobs as as possible.”
There have been challenges ever since, most notably the hospital’s decision de-emphasize pediatric care, which we fought against. But that was evidence that the Newark Agreements could not be taken for granted, and due diligence was needed to make sure the medical school and hospital kept their end the bargain.
We hope the renovation will improve and extend vital medical services, but so much of a healthy community begins with meaningful employment at good wages and we won’t let Rutgers forget about those parts of the Agreement.
