♪♪ >> From NJPBS Studios, this is "NJ Spotlight News" with Brianna Vannozzi.

>> Hello, and thanks for joining us tonight.

I'm Joanna Gagas.

Coming up, we talk with one to crack down on pop-up parties at the shore.

And Cape May Mayor Zach Mullock is the Democrat taking on Congressman Jeff Van Drew in the 2nd District.

He joins us to talk about his win and his campaign.

But first, the World Cup kicks off this weekend here in New Jersey.

Will it be a boom or a bust for the economy?

We'll take a look.

That's next.

Funding for NJ Spotlight News provided by the members of the New Jersey Education Association and RWJBarnabas Health.

Learn more at RWJBH.org.

All eyes are on New Jersey this week as the state prepares to kick off the first of eight World Cup matches to be played here in East Rutherford.

And while transit officials have been working to ensure that the trains run smoothly, security concerns were heightened after a horrific scene at New York Penn Station yesterday.

Six people were injured in a stabbing while waiting for trains in the New Jersey Transit section of the station.

The suspect was taken into custody and all six victims were taken to the hospital, one of them reportedly with serious injuries.

New York City Police Commissioner Jessica Tish reminded travelers that hundreds of NYPD officers are on patrol at Penn Station, but the section where the stabbing took place is actually controlled by Amtrak police, highlighting the coordination that will need to exist between several entities working together to ensure safety during the World Cup.

Today, Congressman Josh Gottheimer and the White House announced an additional eight million dollars to go to Bergen County law enforcement as well as the New Jersey State Police to support security operations during the event.

This is in addition to the more than 66 million dollars already provided to New York and New Jersey.

And here in New Jersey many of the teams and fans are arriving and they're staying across the state but a lot of the action is expected to be in the Meadowlands region close to MetLife Stadium or New York New Jersey Stadium as it's being called.

Businesses are prepping for the influx of 1 million tourists over the course of the month.

And those businesses are getting an assist from the Meadowlands Chamber, which is also coordinating fan events around the area.

I recently spoke with the Meadowlands Chamber President and CEO Jim Kerkos about those efforts.

Here's that conversation.

Jim, it's great to have you on.

I know this is an exciting time for everyone.

All eyes are watching to see how all of this plays out with the World Cup coming here to New Jersey.

Let me just ask you this.

Some recent polling indicates that the average New Jerseyan feels this is going to be a net positive.

I think more than 60% of New Jerseyans feel this will be a net positive for the state's economy.

How do you see it?

- Yeah, it's a great positive for all of New Jersey.

you know, when we get past some of the negative hype that's been in the press and the media around ticket prices to get in the stadium and the transportation issues.

At the end of the day, we are hosting the world's biggest game, eight of them with the final right here.

It's going to be a tremendous boom to New Jersey.

It's great for all of us, my area, the Meadowlands, to be able to say that we had the World Cup final right here in our backyard is just an amazing, an amazing attribute that we can continue to use to promote our destination.

Yeah, and certainly the ticketing prices and the transportation are important issues and things that folks have been paying attention to and worried about.

But we get to talk about the more fun stuff right now, which is really the fan experience.

And I want to get a sense from you what role you have in helping to craft or oversee some of that fan experience.

Well, you know, being a champion of the region, we learned some lessons from back at Super Bowl.

And Super Bowl, we got a few things wrong.

We expected that just because the game was in town, all this influx of business and activity would kind of come to us.

And that wasn't correct.

And so this time we decided that we were going to create some fan experience moments for the local residents to touch and feel the World Cup and for local businesses to have a role in that.

And so we created fan experiences called Flag Cities.

And it started out as five small local fan experiences, one day, five, six hour kind of events where we would do some viewing and we would have vendor village and food trucks and so forth.

And now it has evolved into seven locations and we're really excited about it.

We can't wait to get started.

So first I want to just laundry list where some of those locations will be.

Oh, sure.

So we were in Jersey city.

We're in Overpeck park in Bergen County.

We're in over, uh, Laurel Hill park in Secaucus.

We're in Newark, we're in Patterson and we're in Bayonne.

And so are these locations all happening on different days?

And East Rutherford.

Can't forget East Rutherford, home of, we'll say MetLife Stadium, but it's being called New York, New Jersey Stadium.

We know it's MetLife.

Let me just ask you this though.

Are these all on different days aligning with the games?

How do fans find out where to go and when?

Yeah, so first of all, FlagCities.com has all the information.

We got some amazing entertainment lined up.

They are, originally we planned on doing them the day before each one of the five preliminary group round games.

And now since we've added a couple of locations, but they're there.

So none of them take place on the same day of an event or a game at MetLife Stadium.

They're either one day or two days prior to that so that we can do some weekdays and some weekend events.

And of course, there will be games going on that are not here in New Jersey.

So folks can still have that fan experience.

How much will it cost them?

Yeah.

So Flag Cities has a twenty dollars for adults and ten dollars for children.

We tried to keep the price as low as possible.

We wanted to make sure that it was really accessible to everyone.

And you know there'll be there'll be fun things.

There'll be all kinds of activations inside.

There'll be soccer.

We teamed up with New Jersey Youth Soccer and the and the Cosmos that are now home at Hinchcliffe Stadium in Patterson.

And so there's gonna be some great soccer activities for the kids.

There'll be ethnic foods.

We're gonna celebrate the the flags of the of the teams that are playing the very next day.

And that's what this is all about.

Bringing this cultural experience together finding the unity and the joy of the of the game and making sure that local residents and businesses get to like I said touch and feel the fact that World Cup is being played right here in our backyard.

Jim you said there were a lot of lessons learned from the Super Bowl and I want to ask you this in terms of business and the businesses around the stadium in this whole kind of Northeast region of the state how are you helping them prepare so that they are spending enough to have what they need on hand but also kind of balancing for what they expect in revenue.

Yeah, I think what our job as a business organization is to make sure we're educating our members especially those in the hospitality sector right so it's all of the restaurants and dining and catering and attractions and retail and we've been working on with seminars on how to do marketing, how to improve their social media, making sure that domestic and international visitors can find them on the internet.

We have a visitor guide, lots of entities in the state are creating these types of programs where we're helping them promote who's doing a watch party, who's doing special events at their places.

And, you know, we try to keep expectations in line.

That's what we've learned also.

But if we don't create the there there, then nobody gets the impact.

And that's what Flag Cities is all about, creating an opportunity for people to come and share and spend some of their discretionary dollars right here in New Jersey and the Meadowlands and not necessarily across the river.

- One of the ways to kind of gauge that is to look at hotel bookings, right?

part of the hospitality industry, of course.

But are the hotel bookings booked up yet?

Are they where you thought they'd be or hope they'd be?

Give us a sense there.

I am unhappy to tell you that they are not where we hoped they would be at this stage a week before the game started.

Many of our hotels are soft.

When I say soft, that means there's still a decent amount of capacity in the region.

And we're doing everything we can to continue to try to drive hotel stays.

In fact, we recently dropped a cute ad in the London media publication that says, never mind the Bullocks, stay in the Meadowlands, right?

So we're trying to get people's attention to come here and, you know, get rid of some of the noise and the negativeness that's surrounding some of these issues and just come and have a good time.

We have capacity.

We, I expect it to be better by the time World Cup comes and goes, but I'm not so sure we're going to get the volumes of visitation that we expected.

There's a lot of things going on in the world and I'm not so sure that international travelers are going to be here in the numbers that we originally thought.

-Yeah, after all we are trying to get them to New Jersey and to understand that they are in fact going to be in New Jersey, right?

We got to leave it there.

Jim Kirkos, President and CEO of the Meadowlands Chamber and the Convention Visitors Bureau, thank you so much.

We wish you the best in all the businesses in the area.

-Thank you for having me, Joanna.

-Well, as summer kicks into full gear and kids get out of school, people from all over will flock to the Jersey Shore.

In recent years, some shore towns have taken drastic measures to control the crowds, rolling out policies like banning backpacks and setting curfews to crack down on partying that in some cases results in violence and misconduct, like a recent pop-up party at Pier Village in Long Branch.

At the state level, lawmakers are looking to do the same thing by creating harsher penalties for what they say are dangerous gatherings that threaten the safety of the shore.

For a deeper look, I'm joined by Senator Robert Singer as part of our Under the Dome series.

Senator, it's good to see you.

Thanks for being with us.

What exactly would your bill do and how would it have changed the response in Long Branch?

Hundreds and hundreds of people who descended and quite frankly not enough law enforcement it looked like to handle it.

Well, first of all, thank you for having me discussing this important issue.

You know, this was really a concern of us because the beginning of the short season and seeing this pop-up party in Long Branch, it's worrying us that this could be the beginning of a problem for the entire season.

Realizing that, you know, tourism and the shore region is a billions of dollars into the state.

People want to come down for family fun.

They want to enjoy the beach, enjoy the restaurants and the shops and feel safe and secure.

My bill really lowers the standard a little bit.

Presently it's over six people gathering together.

This is a brings it down to four people.

It makes it a crime of the fourth degree which means you can have as much as 18 months in jail and a $10,000 fine or both.

But where our major concern is sending a very clear message we're not going to tolerate it.

You know Long Branch is in Monmouth County.

I represent Belmar in Monmouth County, Lake Cuomo and Avon.

And again you've got Asbury Park, you've got Point Pleasant and the whole Barrow Islands.

These are all on the rail line and the concern we have is it's easy for someone to hop on a train, these pop-up parties come down to the shore and great having.

You know I was quite concerned.

I spoke to some people who were in Long Branch at the time by Pier Village.

One of the restaurant owners locked the door and people were pounding on the door.

One of the clients there told me that they were frightened.

They were terrified what was happening.

Cars were broken into and vandalized.

People on the street were concerned.

This is something that cannot be tolerated.

And we've got to bring not just the attention... - Yeah, Senator, I mean, is there concern that it's hurting the town's reputation and the ability to collect tourism revenue as well?

- Absolutely.

If this spreads as something that is not family valued place to come, people will not come.

And we're realizing one thing, the people that spend money in New Jersey down the shore are families.

They come down for the weekend.

They bring their kids down to enjoy the rides and the recreation on the boardwalks.

They enjoy the beach.

They enjoy the restaurants.

They spend the dollars that are very important to our economy.

But more important, they have to feel safe.

And we're taking a look and reaching out again to the state police, the Attorney General's office, New Jersey Transit, to say you've got to do better.

And they are.

New Jersey Transit is trying.

They're putting undercover police on the trains.

They're trying to decide if there's a problem coming down to let people know.

But we have to send a very clear message.

It will not be tolerated.

Violence will not be tolerated.

Yeah, I do wonder about that preparedness.

A lot of these gatherings are organized and promoted online on social media.

Do you think that law enforcement and local mayors and governments, quite frankly, should be doing more proactively before the crowds arrive?

We have to turn to the state police and the attorney general's office.

Go after these people that are that are bringing these groups down.

You know, keep in mind most of these towns, whether it's a long branch in Asbury Park, rely on mutual aid.

They don't have enough staff on a full-time basis to take care of these kind of situations.

So what happens is they call for mutual aid, all the towns get involved sending police there.

And this is costly because when you start getting the Sheriff's Department involved, state police involved, local municipalities, you're talking about tens of thousands of dollars in overtime and bringing people in that normally would not be on for that weekend.

I think it's a very clear message where it's on it will not be tolerated.

If you dare do this, you will be prosecuted, you will go to jail, you will pay fines, and the people organizing it, we will come after you.

And I have to tell you, this is so important because if we do not get a hold of this early on, we're in for a rough season.

And this again, the thing in Long Branch to me was just I could tell, is it going to happen?

Let's see what we can do.

And if we don't stop it right away, it can spread through the entire shore region.

And again, we could lose a summer.

- Opponents might say, you know, look, the majority of young people come to the shore.

They're not causing trouble.

They're not vandalizing.

Tougher policing might create tension between the communities and law enforcement.

What do you say to that?

- Well, first of all, again, people coming down to have a good time are always welcome.

And young people are welcome.

But this isn't that.

These are young people coming down to create problems.

Let's stop kidding ourselves.

They're not coming down just, you know, Long Branch, unfortunately, is very close to the beach.

So you take the train down, you can walk to the beach very easily.

But they're not coming down just to enjoy the beach and having a nice time.

They're coming down to create problems and to see how far they can push the lever on this.

And very, very honestly, it's not to be tolerated.

And again, the safety of families, the safety of residents here, their properties, their property values is of utmost importance.

Because again, if this group turns around and thinks that they're going to run the shore region, we will not have a tourism season.

We cannot afford to lose that.

It is too valuable to New Jersey and to the shore area.

And second of all, it's a bad quality of life issue.

I live down the shore.

I enjoy the shore.

Everyone does.

And we want to people feel welcome and safe down here.

These groups don't want that.

They want to create problems and havoc.

And you know what?

It's not just kids stuff.

When you're breaking into cars, when you're trying to get into locked doors in restaurants, when you're terrorizing people, that's not fun.

And you know, one other thing we have to keep in mind, these aren't like young little kids coming down here.

I hate to look at some of these young people.

They may be 17 and 18 years old, but they're certainly six foot two and muscular and everything else.

So they're a frightening image a little bit when they want to be.

So again, people that want to come here and enjoy the shore, welcome.

Young people want to come and enjoy the shore, welcome.

But people want to come down and create havoc, you're not welcome and we will come after you.

- Senator Singer for us.

Senator, thanks so much for your time, we appreciate it.

- Thank you and let's have a great summer.

- "Under the Dome" is made possible in part by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, a private corporation funded by the American people.

- Well, the primary elections are now in the rear view and candidates are gearing up to take on incumbents this November.

In South Jersey, Cape May City Mayor Zach Mullick is looking to take on Congressman Jeff Van Drew and flip that seed back to blue.

He joins me now to talk about his campaign and his plans for the district.

Mayor, thanks so much for talking with us.

Congratulations on your win.

Why do you believe you are the right candidate to represent voters in the second congressional district over your opponent, your now opponent, Congressman Jeff Van Drew.

Well, thank you so much for having me.

And you know, I, I've been traveling all of South Jersey over the last four months talking to all different types of people.

And I'm born and raised here in South Jersey, been mayor of Cape May for the last six years, been on city council for eight.

And I think I have a really strong sense of South Jersey and what the needs are of the people of South Jersey.

And frankly, over the last four months of talking to people, regardless of their political status or what party they're affiliated with, I'm hearing a lot of the same things from so many different people.

And so I think what I'm hearing mostly is that people want to change.

They want leadership who is really working for them, not for any individual, whether it be the president or anyone else, but they want someone that they feel is really working for them.

So let me ask you this, affordability is a big thing that we see as part of your campaign.

There are a number of things I want to get through, but you've outlined some specifics that we haven't seen, I'd say, as kind of broadly as many other candidates.

Not kind of the same talking points that we hear over and again from many Democrats.

One is you want to challenge this interest percentage that's charged on credit cards.

It seems like a nuance, small nuance, but it sure does affect a lot of people.

What's your issue there?

Well, actually, and I have to tell you, it was an idea that I'd heard before, but one that at one time was supported by President Trump.

Apparently he no longer supports it, but when he said he supported it, I said I agree with President Trump on that.

And frankly, I think that's what we need to do as a country is when other parties have good ideas, let's join them and get those things done.

And yeah, so when he said that he wanted to put a 10% cap on credit cards, I said I totally agree with that.

Unfortunately, a lot of families right now are relying on credit cards to get by on a daily basis.

And we all know the interest rates on so many credit cards, and frankly, in my opinion, are predatory, over 25% interest rate.

And that is crushing families and getting them on this cycle where they can never get out of debt.

So I think capping them at 10% would be a major deal, yeah.

- Another thing that we saw the president vocal on, although the steps that he took, some have questioned, he says he wants to make a change to who's able to purchase housing, including single family housing, taking it away from big business.

He actually did pass an executive order on that, but then changed what it means to actually be a big business so that it's still not really, I would say, having much impact in terms of changing who can make those purchases.

Explain that a bit and what your position is.

You just explained it exactly right.

I was all for that and again, vocally supportive of the plan that the president had.

And again, that is what we need to get to as a country to get together and make these compromises to get things done for the public.

I thought that was an example of a really good idea.

And yes, why are we allowing hedge funds to purchase thousands of single family homes at a time.

It is making the affordability of housing, you know, the average age for the first time homebuyer now is older than me.

I'm 40.

Some say I look a little older than that.

But I'm 40 years old.

And the average age is older than I am for the first time homebuyer.

For so many years, the backbone of our middle class was home ownership and energy, two things that we're absolutely failing at right now as a country.

One of your primary opponents was very vocal in opposition to this data center that's coming into Vineland.

I want to ask your position on it.

Do you believe that this data center, one is wrong for the region or two needs to be held to different standards?

Different standards, 100%.

And I think what was very clear is the community certainly did not understand what was happening when it was happening.

And listen, that's a little bit of a local issue in regards to that area.

But let me say this, as mayor of a local town, something that is so important is just simply transparency and communication.

And those are two things that we, as a country, are failing at and local municipalities are failing at.

I have found as mayor that the more transparent, the more information that we give people, the more supportive they become of our projects because they better understand them.

And there's less... Go ahead.

Sorry.

Let me jump in here because you say this is a local issue.

We did see in New Jersey, Governor Sherrill has rolled out this kind of four-pillar statewide approach.

If you were to be elected to represent the second congressional district, do you believe and would you fight for any type of national kind of model or requirements, guidelines for these data centers?

What would that look like?

Yes, 100%.

And even the president, again, has been talking about actual ownership of the American people in some of these data centers and big tech industries.

But the president himself said the other day that he agreed with Bernie Sanders, Senator Sanders, on some of his ideas in making sure that the American people have a stake in AI.

And I completely agree with that.

Yes, I have serious concerns and share with many of the folks that ran in this campaign on the environment.

Water, you know, Cape May is home to one of the nation's only desalinization plants on the East Coast.

That's because of saltwater intrusion into our wells.

That is going to happen all throughout New Jersey.

Yep.

- Sorry, trying to get a lot in, and I don't mean to keep cutting you off, I apologize.

But I wanna get to Medicare, because on your website, you talk about supporting Medicare, which is healthcare for those 65 and older, nothing about Medicaid.

Do you agree with the Trump administration rollbacks of Medicaid, or would you fight to reinstate that coverage?

- Fight like heck to reinstate both Medicare and Medicaid.

And one of the reasons that I got into this election was the big beautiful bill.

The big beautiful bill took away Medicare and Medicare while at the same time giving tax cuts to billionaires and adding trillions of dollars to our nation's debt.

100% we need to support Medicare and Medicaid, Social Security, all of those things that so many people, and by the way, heard that from so many people in South Jersey.

And just as a reminder, the big beautiful pill passed by one vote, Jeff Vandrew's vote.

That is why your vote matters so importantly, and that is why your representatives vote matters so much.

All right, we have to leave it there.

Cape May Mayor Zach Mullock, you are the Democratic challenger going up against Congressman Jeff Van Drew down in District 2 and first Democrat elected mayor in 50 years in Cape May.

Thank you for taking some time to talk to us today.

We appreciate it.

Thank you so much for having me.

I appreciate it.

Be here anytime.

That's going to do it for us tonight.

I'm Joanna Gaggis for the entire team here at NJ Spotlight News.

Thanks for being with us.

We'll see you right back here tomorrow.

NJM Insurance Group, serving the insurance needs of residents and businesses for more than 100 years.

Is that?

Wow.

[MUSIC PLAYING] It's going to be OK.

[LAUGHTER] [MUSIC PLAYING]