- [Narrator] Funding for this edition of State of Affairs with Steve Adubato has been provided by United Airlines.

Kean University.

Where Cougars climb higher.

The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey.

Moving the region through air, land, rail, and sea.

Valley Bank.

South Jersey Industries.

The parent company of South Jersey Gas, and Elizabethtown gas.

EJI, Excellence in Medicine Awards.

A New Jersey health foundation program.

New Jersey Sharing Network.

The New Jersey Education Association.

And by Operating Engineers, Local 825.

Promotional support provided by ROI-NJ.

Informing and connecting businesses in New Jersey.

And by The Chamber of Commerce Southern New Jersey.

[INSPRATIONAL MUSIC] - Hey, everyone, Steve Adubato.

We kick off the program with the mayor of Elizabeth, New Jersey, Chris Bollwage, who has been the mayor since how long, Mayor?

- I was first elected in a 1992 election.

- Why, Elizabeth, for you?

- I was born and raised in a north end part of the city near the airport, went to Blessed Sacrament Grammar School, St.

Mary's High School, grew up to be the mayor of the fourth largest city, pretty cool.

- For people who don't understand or appreciate what Elizabeth is, describe the town.

- So it's a very urban community, and we were home to Singer Manufacturing, which young people aren't going to recognize, but made every single sewing machine in this country since the late 1800s, and then during World War II, it housed over 40,000 workers for the war effort on three shifts.

City of Elizabeth has been a hub of urban activity for hundreds of years, and in the last 30, 40 years, we've really reoriented the economy into a service economy, taking advantage of Newark Airport, taking advantage of the seaport, and making sure we have the ancillary businesses and that part of the community to deal with those massive structures.

- And as the mayor talks about Newark Airport, part of the airport is in Newark, part of the airport is in Elizabeth, and same thing with the port, correct?

- Correct, half of Newark Airport roughly is in the city of Elizabeth.

All of the new Terminal A is in the city of Elizabeth.

The old terminal A is in Elizabeth, and Port Elizabeth, Port Newark, I don't want to disparage my friends in Newark, but Elizabeth has the bulk of the shipping operation, but it always goes by Port Newark, and containerization, that you see all of these trucks, was started in Port Elizabeth by a gentleman by the name of Malcolm McLean who formed Sealand Services, which originated here in the late 1950s.

- And by the way, this interview with the mayor is part of our series called Urban Matters.

We're doing a cooperation with Kean University that the mayor knows well, and the John S. Watson Institute for Urban Policy and Research.

So Mayor, let me try this.

What would you say the most pressing challenges Elizabeth faces, the citizens of Elizabeth, are?

- Well, right now, I mean, one of the good problems they have is we have a lot of traffic.

We are 140,000 plus people on 11 square miles, and people are moving into the city of Elizabeth, probably a good problem to have.

On the negative side of the problem is always the dense population and jobs and making sure the people that live here can find a job.

The second thing is, I mean, immigration is an issue here in the city of Elizabeth as well.

Over the last year, our school system has lost about 4,000 students, and that's going to impact our budget next year with less revenue coming from the state and the federal government, and it's going to cause difficulty, whether it's closing of classrooms, whether it's less schools.

All of that hasn't been decided yet, but that's a problem that faces Elizabeth.

- Hold on, Mayor.

I'm sorry for interrupting, but why is that an immigration issue?

- Because the people who are not no longer in the class have been picked up and deported.

- How impactful has ICE been in Elizabeth?

- We're like every other city.

I mean, they've impacted us, but they've impacted us in a more quiet manner than they have in other cities throughout this country.

- But there is impact?

- Absolutely, people go to work one day, and then they're not there the next day.

People want to know what happened to them.

A little kid in school, best friend is no longer in school the next day.

What happened to that kid?

These issues are real issues for families and friendships that evolve.

It's tough seeing and going to a school watching a kid who may excel in the top 10% of his or her class and their best friend is no longer there.

- Mayor, you've got a grant.

I believe it's a grant.

Elizabeth got a grant of $217,000 in the Clean Communities Funding Program.

What is that and what does that have to do with cleaning up the city?

- So we work with Groundwork Elizabeth.

We work with our public works department and the Clean Communities Grant.

During Earth Day, we've had 500 people out here on the steps of city hall that span out in the city and then go and clean it up.

We work on the waterfront on the Elizabeth River, and that grant helps us clean areas that normally would not get cleaned by the normal public works department.

- The housing situation in Elizabeth, in terms of affordable, accessible housing, describe it.

- So affordability is always an issue, whether it's in Elizabeth or any other city in the country, and clearly rents are capped as we have rent control here.

There's currently a debate going on on whether the rent cap should be $20 a month, which it was for years, and the city council removed that cap two years ago.

It's currently in the courts now.

The landlords do not want a $20 cap, and the tenants want a $20 cap.

Currently, rent control can go up 3% a year based on the vacancy that will occur, or tenants who stay can only go up 3%.

There is somewhat a vacancy de-control, but affordability is always an issue.

- Last question, Mayor.

Why are you so bullish on the future of Elizabeth?

- You know, I grew up here, Steve, and that's a great city.

We're the fourth largest city in the state of New Jersey.

We're a city that has a huge economic base on the airport and the seaport, two exits on the New Jersey Turnpike, Route 1 and 9, the access to the city of Elizabeth, and what my favorite thing about Elizabeth is you can dine anywhere in the world here in the city of Elizabeth.

Whatever your ethnic food is, you can get here in the city of Elizabeth, and later this week, former Governor Phil Murphy and his wife are going to come here and watch a soccer match in one of our ethnic restaurants and share some Mexican food and celebrate.

- By the way, we're taping on the 16th of June.

The World Cup is all in, right now.

This may be seen after, but you know what the mayor is talking about.

Mayor, thank you so much for joining us.

We appreciate it.

- Steve, really appreciate the opportunity.

Good to see you.

Maybe we can play golf someday.

- Absolutely, you give me a mulligan on the first hole?

- You can have a mulligan on all 18.

(laughs) - Oh, I'm playing with the Mayor.

We'll be right back right after this.

(grand music) - [Announcer] To see more State of Affairs with Steve Adubato programs, find us online and follow us on social media.

- We're now joined by our longtime friend, Mike Maron, President and CEO of Holy Name Medical Center to fully disclose one of our longtime underwriters.

Hey, Mike, first of all, welcome.

- Thank you, Steve.

Glad to be here.

- What is the new Neuroendovascular Institute at Holy Name and why is it so significant, particularly as it deals with issues of people dealing with strokes?

- So the Neurovascular Institute is critical.

In Bergen County alone, on any given week, there are 400 ambulance calls that go out for stroke-related symptoms.

Now, not every one of those turns into a stroke, but you don't know until you're fully diagnosed in an ER and know what's going on.

And we know in stroke care, time is precious.

The faster you get diagnosed, the faster you get the therapeutic interventions, no matter what they are, the better the recovery, the better the outcome.

So time is the most important factor.

Everybody's working against the clock.

Holy Name as one of the more efficient ERs, you can get in and out of our ER very fast.

And so we're enhancing that with a digital platform that's going to make it even faster and better.

So in the field triage, seamlessly transmitted into the emergency room.

Orders are being placed before you even get here.

Diagnostics are happening before you even get here.

- Oh, Mike, Mike, hold on.

Back up.

You're talking about EMS professionals.

- Right.

- 911's called, they come.

- Right.

- What the heck does that have to do with technology, a potential stroke, and then being treated at the hospital?

Connect that for us.

- All right, so today, unfortunately, everything in healthcare across all platforms is fragmented.

EMS works in a set of software and tools that are designed purely for the paramedics in the field.

They're not designed to connect the paramedics in the field to the emergency room and then the emergency room to the inpatient setting.

So it's all broken down communications.

If time is the most imperative factor, then seamless, accurate communication, non-repetitive communication is the most important factor to get someone into the proper therapeutics, make faster, accurate diagnostics and get them into the appropriate therapeutics.

So that communication link doesn't work very efficiently today at all.

And so we're building a platform to enhance that.

- Okay, let's switch gears.

We've been doing programming around the physician shortage.

Obviously, check out our previous interviews with some of Mike's colleagues on the nursing side.

We just did one with one of your colleagues talking about the nursing shortage.

Stay on the physician shortage.

Connected to graduate medical education, particularly the new residency program and OBGYN, obstetrics and gynecology, the residency program.

What does that have to do with the physician's shortage in the OB universe?

- So part of it is, it's a combination of factors.

You have to produce more physicians first and foremost to overcome the shortage that is here and only going to exacerbate over the next decade.

There's no doubt about it.

There's no dispute about this.

The shortage of physicians over the next 10 years is going to become more acute than it is even today.

So one, solve that problem, train more doctors.

Get more doctors, get more people interested in the field.

So you have to have more training programs to get them through.

But the second part is, especially for New Jersey, how do I keep them in New Jersey?

New Jersey has an incredible breadth of training programs from South Jersey to North Jersey that have been around for years.

Unfortunately, we do a very, very poor job of retaining those recently trained- - Why is that, Mike?

Why are we losing so many docs?

- There's a host of reasons.

A lot of it has to do with New Jersey itself, cost of living.

They're coming out with incredible debt, and if I can go somewhere south or Midwest and make the same money and have a much lower cost of living, I'm going to do that.

Part of it is the absence of creative innovation.

So if you want to enhance and capture that young population, it's not always just about the economics, it's about fulfilling a purpose and tap into that character of why'd you become a doctor in the first place?

You want to help heal your fellow man.

How do you do that?

How do you reinforce that?

Does the work environment acknowledge, reward and celebrate when you perform in that fashion?

That all becomes part of training.

So why Holy Name wanted to really get into training?

One, create our own pipeline.

But two, because of the culture here, which is becoming less and less frequent out in the world.

We want these physicians understanding, yeah, you can become a doctor and make a good income.

You can also become a doctor and have an incredibly powerful impact on your fellow man from a humanistic standpoint.

- Mike, switch, do the other side, the nursing piece.

We've done a lot of programming around the nursing shortage.

There's a program with your folks together with our higher ed partners at Rowan University.

- Correct.

- What is that?

- So we are now a teaching affiliate of Rowan, for both graduate medical education and for our nursing school.

So we've synchronized the curriculum at Holy Name with Rowan.

So a high school graduate who's not sure what they want to do, want to get into the healthcare industry could enroll.

You have to pass the entrance exams and you have to meet all the requirements.

But you can enroll in Holy Name's School of Nursing, 100-year-old program, has incredible outcomes, produces incredible nurses.

And then so now you graduate in two years, you pass your nursing licensing exam.

You are now a licensed nurse.

You can start working, very lucrative job, very flexible, and continue on with Rowan for another two years to get your BSN.

- Are there more and more partnerships or should there be?

Because I know your Neuroendovascular Institute is tied to Columbia.

- Correct.

- Columbia University.

Do you see hospital, hospital systems and higher education collaborating more and more, Mike?

- I think they have to.

- Because.

- I think because you need that higher education, you need that caliber of training.

The sophistication of healthcare is only intensified, and that's not going to diminish, it's going to get worse.

And so to have partnership of that pipeline to keep not just new, but to keep all the people here that are active in treating current, right?

So when you take an academic and educational mindset to what you do day in and day out, that makes the non-student practitioners, whether it's a nurse or a physician or a technician better at what they do because they have to think a little deeper because some student is watching them training.

And so it makes everybody sharper, more proficient at what they're doing.

It's an all-around benefit for everybody.

- Mike, before I let you go, give me one minute real quick.

AI and healthcare.

- Major, major, big impact.

Moving very, very quickly.

A lot of good come out of this, but equally a lot of bad.

And so I am concerned at the pace that it's moving.

I am concerned that the majority of the industry does not understand AI and what it really means, how it operates, how it learns, what it can do.

In the AI world, there's a term that's very common.

Anybody who goes onto the public domains of a ChatGPT or a Claude and if you've read any of the literature, there's a term called hallucinating.

So AI will falsify and fill in gaps of knowledge to make itself look intelligent unless you strictly train it not to.

It also learns off of, with large language models, need accurate databases to learn from.

Our data structure, especially in healthcare, is anything but clean and accurate.

It's a mess because of how it's evolved over the last 40 years.

And so AI penetrating undisciplined data is going to give you undisciplined AI.

That's a bad outcome.

- Mike, we'll continue the conversation about AI and a whole range of other healthcare related topics.

Hey, Mike, thank you for joining us as always.

We appreciate it.

- Thank you, Steve.

Appreciate it.

Honored to be here.

- You got it.

Stay with us, we'll be right back.

(grand music) - [Announcer] To see more State of Affairs with Steve Adubato programs, find us online and follow us on social media.

- We are pleased to once again be joined by our good friend and colleague, Elizabeth McCarthy, President and CEO of the Community Food Bank of New Jersey.

They are partners as it relates to creating greater public awareness around food and security issues.

Elizabeth, good to see you.

- Good to see you too, Steve.

Thanks so much for having me.

Always, the website is up right now of the Community Food Bank.

First, tell everyone what it is, then I want to talk about reduced SNAP benefits.

- Yeah, Community Food Bank of New Jersey serves 11 out of the 21 counties in the state of New Jersey, and our mission is really just to, very simple, to fight food insecurity through immediate hunger relief as well as long-term solutions.

- Okay.

Reduced SNAP.

SNAP, a federal program, a food supplemental program.

It's cut.

What exactly is cut?

When was it cut?

And why is it so impactful and dangerous?

- Yeah, so the cut came as part of the passing of HR1 last summer.

It was a cut over the next- - The big, beautiful bill?

- I don't like to use that name, but yes.

- I don't know, but that's what people refer to.

- Yes.

No, as people know it, you're absolutely right.

And it is a cut that over the course of several years will be $200 billion towards SNAP cuts.

850,000 people in the state of New Jersey are receiving SNAP benefits, and it will be so detrimental because it's the difference between people having nutritious meals and not having enough food to eat.

- Who are we talking about that is most affected by this?

- Yeah, I think that's a great question because there's a lot of myths about sort of people on SNAP.

80% of households who are in SNAP actually do have a working member of the household.

We're talking about children, we're talking about seniors, we're talking about veterans.

We're talking about people who really rely on that supplemental amount of funding to get food on their table.

- But Elizabeth, if someone says, devil's advocate, "Wait a minute, so there's a job requirement."

And you just said, Elizabeth, this is your field, you know it.

Vast majority of people, there's a working professional or someone working in the home.

So how does the job requirement make it harder for people to get SNAP benefits if they prove that they're working or volunteering or going to school, etc.

Go ahead.

- Right.

Yeah, it is complicated.

For some people, it's populations that used to not have that requirement.

So like veterans, for example, or youth aging out of foster care.

We know that those are populations that have been traditionally very difficult to employ.

Why?

They have undiagnosed mental health issues, they might have unstable housing, and they're now are going to require to have that work element.

So that's one population.

For others, it's the documentation and the consistency that it has to be 20 hours every week.

So we have a lot of people in New Jersey that have seasonal employment, that have gig employment, that their hours might go up and down.

And so they will not always be in compliance with the 20 hours, and now that flexibility is not there.

And also, it's just, the uploading of the documents.

This may sound silly, but administratively, it's a very hard thing for some people to comply with, to be able to submit the documentation that they need to prove that they are working.

- So say someone goes on your website right now.

Is there a section of the website that helps clarify some of this confusion for people so they can go through the process and get their benefits?

- We are developing that further, but there's definitely, if you look at our SNAP Outreach page or our Community Connections, people can call, people can go to the website and get connected to somebody who can help them navigate that.

- Okay.

Let's stay on this.

I'm curious about the question of where the state comes into this.

We're talking about a federal program.

The SNAP program is federal.

What is the role from your perspective, Elizabeth, of state government, state funding, state programs as it relates to addressing food insecurity in the state of New Jersey with nine million people?

- Yeah, there's implications on the state level as well as on the county level.

So for the state, part of what HR1 did was move some of the cost of the SNAP program.

- HR simply means house resolution for those following.

Go ahead.

- Big beautiful bill.

We can call it that for this purpose.

Move some of the funding towards the state so that the state will actually be required now to have more of a match towards this.

I think we're very lucky in New Jersey that New Jersey has kept the SNAP, the minimum benefit at $95.

Not every state has done that, but it does mean that's more of a burden for us to bear as well.

And then New Jersey has a very county-based system.

So the place where people go to get their SNAP benefits and to stay in compliance is at the county level, which means that there isn't always consistency so far through no fault of their own, but that in what that requirement will look like and how it's going to be implemented, because the federal government hasn't been entirely clear about what it should look like.

So that's still evolving even as people are being removed from the SNAP roles already.

- Elizabeth, what impact has all this had on the Community Food Bank?

- We're really just starting to see the impact because the first people who lost their benefits started in May.

But we are already hearing from our pantry partners that they are having people come to them and say, "I got to the grocery store.

"I didn't know I didn't have SNAP anymore "and there was nothing on my card."

So that's very concerning.

The anxiety that goes into that and sort of the stress level for people of really not understanding the new qualifications is very concerning and it's just- - Hold on one second.

I'm sorry for interrupting.

So your SNAP card, it's like an ATM card, right?

- Exactly.

- You're saying someone, it's not inconceivable, clearly, that someone would have a card that has no money on it, but you wouldn't know it.

- Right, they could go into their portal to check, but I think like anything, if you're consistently getting that month after month, maybe you're just used to going to the grocery store and having the funding there.

And so people have gone, like they did in November with the government shutdown, and found that they did not have SNAP benefits.

- So how does the federal government, how does government communicate to people, "Hey, "you don't have these benefits anymore," or, "You do"?

- Yeah, the communication's been really tough.

It's been very surprising to us talking to SNAP recipients as we do often, to hear how little people were informed about it.

And I'm not saying that they haven't mailed things out, but you know how it is.

You get mail, you get a lot of mail, you get a lot of paper in the mail that people are maybe reading not as closely as they should.

It's also not always geared.

We've been trying to put in a bill to lower the reading level of the materials that are put out because it's a complicated system.

Any of us who've tried to fill out government forms for anything knows it can be complicated.

And this is very similar.

- Before I let you go, the role of the Community Food Bank of New Jersey in all this, you're talking about helping people navigate the system.

You're talking about communicating with the pantries that you serve.

Anything else we're missing in terms of the role of Community Food Bank?

About 40 seconds left.

- Yeah.

I mean, the big part is those people helping people navigate SNAP and then also unfortunately- - Say it again.

People help, say it again.

People helping- - Helping people navigate SNAP.

So with the work requirements, all of that, really understanding what it means and how they can fulfill the requirements.

And then also we're the last resort.

We are where people are going to turn if they cannot get their SNAP benefits restored.

- And one more time, people go on the website.

What tabs are they looking for?

- They can look for Community Connections or SNAP, and they will, if you just search in there and if they need to find food, there's a key called Find Food where you can put in your address and it will tell you where to find food near you.

- Elizabeth McCarthy, President and CEO of a great organization, making a difference every day, the Community Food Bank of New Jersey.

Elizabeth, thank you.

- Thank you, Steve.

- You got it.

I'm Steve Adubato.

We thank you so much for watching.

We'll see you next time.

- [Narrator] State of Affairs with Steve Adubato is a production of the Caucus Educational Corporation.

Funding has been provided by United Airlines.

Kean University.

The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey.

Valley Bank.

South Jersey Industries.

EJI, Excellence in Medicine Awards.

A New Jersey health foundation program.

New Jersey Sharing Network.

The New Jersey Education Association.

And by Operating Engineers, Local 825.

Promotional support provided by ROI-NJ.

And by The Chamber of Commerce Southern New Jersey.

- The EJI Excellence in Medicine Awards was established in 1939, shining a light on New Jersey's health care leaders.

Current awards include the Excellence in Medicine, Research, Medical, Education and Community Service.

EJI also funds annual scholarships to medical, dental, pharmaceutical and physician assistant students throughout the state.

Learn more at EJIAwards.org.