Luis Quintana

Councilman Luis QuintanaAt-Large Newark City Councilman Luis Quintana this week told PolitickerNJ.com that he intends to go to Texas to campaign for presidential candidate Barack Obama in the lead-up to that state’s Democratic Party primary on March 4th.

"I love this candidate, Barack Obama," said Quintana, who admitted his own local efforts to stare down the machine makes it easy for him to identify with the first-term Illinois senator’s attempt to buck the system.

Quintana last year campaigned unsuccessfully for state Senate in the 29th district, losing to establishment Democrat - and Sen. Hillary Clinton supporter - M. Teresa Ruiz.

They hear it on the streets of Newark.

But on the first and third Wednesdays of each month, members of the City Council can be sure to receive a barrage of complaints from residents who are worried not only about the murders and gangs but about the cost of living and the threat of corporate interests upending local concerns.

"You're supposed to be standing up and fighting for us," the poet Amiri Baraka cried during the public comment forum of a meeting. "Until I see you fighting, then you're not a good council."

"You're giving tax abatements to developers," cried resident Frank Hertz. "You'd better justify this tax abatement."

And always there is the complaint about the scarcity of jobs.

Luis QuintanaWhen Essex County Executive Joseph DiVincenzo found out this morning that the name "Luis Quintana"' was on a Senate Judiciary to-do list, he angrily reached for a telephone and called the governor's office.

DiVincenzo wanted to know what Quintana was doing on the list months after he thought he made it clear to Gov. Jon Corzine that the at-large Newark councilman should not be considered for an appointment to the Passaic Valley Sewerage Commission.

The fight of the day was between Governor Jon Corzine and Essex County Executive Joseph DiVincenzo.  DiVincenzo wasn’t happy with Corzine over Luis Quintana’s appointment to the Passaic Valley Sewerage Commission, and let the Governor know it in fairly strong terms today.  DiVincenzo made it clear that Quintana shouldn’t be rewarded for mounting an Independent bid for State Senate against the Democratic nominee, Teresa Ruiz.

In the 29th district, independent state Senate candidates Assemblyman William Payne and At-Large Councilman Luis Quintana this afternoon were making the most of their ground games against the favorite, M. Teresa Ruiz, who enjoys the mammoth machinery of the North Ward Democratic Organization.

Ruiz and her team have the line up here in Newark in an overwhelmingly Democratic district, which they're hoping will prove a key difference-maker in putting down the Payne-Quintana insurrection.

Steve Adubato, executive director of the North Ward Cultural Center and one of New Jersey's most powerful political insiders

When his political foes deride Steve Adubato as a Renaissance overlord who controls his fiefdom through a bruising combination of ego and Machiavellian panache, Adubato offers as a counter-argument the work of the North Ward Center.

They may argue with the man, but no one argues with his life’s work - at least not here in Newark where the effects of poverty are up close and all too personal.

Tuesday was special for Adubato. The 74-year old political boss and executive director of the center welcomed child advocate Marian Wright Edelman to Newark to officially open the Casa Israel Child Development Center, and Roseville Child Development Center. These buildings are two of four schools that compose the North Ward Child Development Center, which serves 600 students and is the single largest Abbott School-funded provider of pre-school education in the state.

Essex County Executive Joseph DiVincenzoRunning in a crouch familiar to old-timey Newark sports fans, Essex County Executive Joseph DiVincenzo, Jr., heads out onto the grass - and this time approaches a half circle of women who have stationed themselves outside his press conference at the Turtle Back Zoo. They’re protesting his decision to allow a deer hunt early next year in the South Mountain Reservation.

"I don’t like guns, but I have no choice," he tells them. "We’ve tried trap and transfer. We’ve tried birth control. Nothing works. We have to reduce the deer population."

The YouTube of Newark Mayor Cory Booker making a controversial comment at a Summit fund-raiser in May had been in web circulation for a couple of months, according to the mayor’s staff.

This week, the issue came to the attention of the Newark City Council, and after viewing the YouTube at City Hall after Wednesday's meeting, council members Donald Payne, Ron Rice, Jr., Dana Rone, Anibal Ramos and Luis Quintana condemned the mayor’s remarks. 

Newark City Councilman At-Large Luis Quintana today confirmed that he will run with former Newark Councilwoman Bessie Walker in his independent state Senate bid. Walker had already filed as an independent candidate for the state Assembly.

Now they're joined.

"We've always been friends," says Quintana of the former councilwoman who sought re-election in 2006 in opposition to Mayor Cory Booker's council candidates and lost. Quintana ran against her that year as part of the victorious Booker team.

They don’t make anything in Newark anymore, at least not in the classic manufacturing sense.

But those who are still tied to this biggest of Jersey cities hope to be able to craft something out of what’s left.

In the midst of a political battle to decide what that will be, M. Teresa Ruiz says her opponents want to inflate North Ward boss Steve Adubato into a poster-sized target to obscure the fact that they’re running against a Puerto Rican woman who was born and bred in the City of Newark.