Newark School Advisory Board candidate Dr. Chris Pernell is fighting the residency issue hard tonight, and vowing to remain a candidate in the race in spite of a challenge filed by her opponents. 

"I'm a Newark home owner since 2006," Pernell told PolitickerNJ.com. "I am not dropping put of the race. Emphatically: I did not and will not drop out of the race. The only reason this challenge was issued is because people are perceiving me as a threat. I am new Newark."

Pernell is a member of the For Our Kids ticket backed by North Ward Democratic leader Steve Adubato. Her opponents, the South Ward Councilman Ras Baraka-backed Children First, filed a challenge to her voting record as it relates to residency.

THE IRONBOUND - Newark insiders say the April 27 School Advisory Board race has the potential to be the most competitive and important city contest in nearly a decade.

"We're in the national spotlight, how great is that?" For Our Kids ticket candidate Tave Padilla asked a crowd of East Warders Tuesday night at the Mediterranean Manor in the Ironbound.

And it's true.

The confluence of $100 million of Mark Zuckerberg foundation money and the education reform designs of national media stars Gov. Chris Christie and Newark Mayor Cory Booker meet the jagged edges of street politics in this local drama, which boils down to North Ward Democratic leader Steve Adubato and For Our Kids on the one side and South Ward Councilman Ras Baraka and the Children First Team on the other.

In the aftermath of a man going berserk in the environs of a bubbled corporate catwalk, U.S. Sen. Bob Menendez (D-Hoboken) and South Ward Councilman Ras Baraka tag teamed today to call for increased security at the Newark’s Gateway Complex - home of Menendez's and U.S. Sen. Frank Lautenberg’s (D-Cliffside Park) offices.

Newark South Ward Councilman Ras Baraka criticized the Booker administration tonight during his State of the South Ward speech at George Washington Carver Elementary School on a stage that included several recognizable state-level luminaries in a legislative election year.

Essex County Executive Joe DiVincenzo, state Sen. Richard Codey (D-Roseland), Assembly Speaker Sheila Oliver (D-East Orange), state Sen. M. Teresa Ruiz (D-Newark), Assemblyman Tom Giblin (D-Montclair), Assemblywoman Grace Spencer (D-Newark), Assemblywoman Cleopatra Tucker (D-Newark), North Ward Democratic leader Steve Adubato and others attended the event.

Crunched in a drafty corner of City Hall in the second season of the Sundance Channel's Brick City, Booker campaign manager Pablo Fonseca hears that Ras Baraka has defeated Oscar James II in the Newark South Ward race. 

He barks an expletive, then groans into his cellphone about campaign dollars. 

It is gut-level campaign misery, and yet Fonseca - in his best attempt to highlight the positive - grits through the joyful hugs celebrating his boss's victory- trying to squeeze out a convincing a grin.

But the damage done preludes the second knee to the groin Team Booker sustains that night in 2010 when Central Ward Councilman Charles Bell can't get by challenger Darrin Sharif, setting up an unraveling of Booker's budget plans. 

In a Newark swamp of gang violence, xenophobia, glory, murder and urban squalor, politics undergirds the second season of Brick City, which begins with Gov. Jon Corzine campaigning alongside Mayor Cory Booker en route to losing his re-election bid, and climaxes when the mayor weathers his own 2010 re-election.

NEWARK - The potential shrinkage of Essex County Democratic Party representation could mean the loss of an African-American senate seat in a delegation where black numbers have already dwindled. 

Essex ties Bergen as the county with the most state senators: six, and while that's meant a ten-year Democratic Party power surge in Essex with five of those six seats occupied by Democrats, party leaders are now quietly bracing for the possibility of losing one of those seats next year as Republicans make a play for bulking up in a growing county like Ocean, home to just three senators.

"I don't think anyone knows what's going to happen," said Democratic Party political operative Phil Alagia, chief of staff to Essex County Executive Joe DiVincenzo.

Still, population trends favor Ocean County. The 2007 Census estimate for Ocean recorded 558,531 people, making it the fastest growing county in the state of New Jersey, up from 510,916 in the 2001 census. From 2000 to 2006, Essex County's population declined from 793,633 to 786,147.

If Dems must loss an Essex seat, much of the speculation centers around Republicans and Democrats teaming up to deep-six state Sen. Richard Codey (D-Roseland).

NEWARK - Bedlam ensued by slow degrees tonight at Bethany Baptist Church as Mayor Cory Booker outlined a plan to lease the city's water infrastructure and met the scorn of an entrenched opposition.

"We believe our MUA (municipal utilities authority) and other austerity measures will help us get through this time," argued the mayor, hours after a mostly skeptical city council again voted to defer the matter.

The second of Booker's five ward whistle tour to discuss his MUA, designed to plug a $70 million budget hole this year and take chops at the budget in the years ahead, this Central Ward venue featured the front-of-the-room presence of new Central Ward Councilman Darrin Sharif.

Sharif had observed last night's West Ward fiasco and vowed to rule his hearing with a stronger hand. The Rev. Bill Howard tried to help early when he reminded residents packed into the basement gym, "Glad to have you in the church."

NEWARK - He doesn't hear it. 

He doesn't have to hear it.

A searing, disapproving whistle blows on Broad Street in his direction, and inside City Hall, Mayor Cory Booker grins at a prospective headline: "Booker Implosion," but refuses to abide any storyline that puts him in less than fighting shape in a crisis. 
 
Statewide his fans (and rivals) in the Democratic Party establishment shuddered at the mayor's endorsement of Gov. Chris Christie's 2.5% constitutional property tax cap as evidence of Booker's submission to the new Republican governor and incapacity to rise as a statewide counter-force to Christie.

NEWARK - South Ward Councilman Ras Baraka said he has no intention of changing his vote against Mayor Cory Booker's proposed municipal utilities authority (MUA) to generate $70 million in revenue.

"Mismanagement," Baraka said. "He's had a full term in office and frankly it speaks to mismanagement."

At a press conference this morning that Baraka attended, the mayor said the city lost $27.4 million in state aid this year, and got jolted by a rise in healthcare costs from $58 million in 2005 to $78 million in 2010.

Political trouble in Brick City gurgled up to the surface this afternoon for Newark Mayor Cory Booker, as a new blood city council signaled they don't intend to back his policies without a fight.

Or maybe not at all.

"If my boiler breaks down, I don't give my house to the bank; you can get a loan to avoid selling it," said At-Large Councilman Luis Quintana, reflecting on the mayor's desire to put control of the city's water supply in the hands of a muncipal utilities authority (MUA). 

The move would enable the city to avert what Booker says is a 37 percent tax hike to plug Newark's $180 million city deficit.