Ras Baraka eyes New Jersey governor job after 11 years as Newark mayor

NEWARK, New Jersey (WABC) — Newark Mayor Ras Baraka believes it is time for him to make the move from the mayor’s office to the governor’s office.

“Being in charge of Newark for over a decade, you can see a lot of things we’ve been able to accomplish, but not for as many people as we wanted to accomplish it for,” Baraka said. “I think in the governor’s office, you can do a lot more for people across the state of New Jersey who witnessed in our party the same issues that we have from housing to violence to Medicaid to Medicare to health care.”

In his 11 years as mayor of Newark, the city has seen a tremendous growth spurt – the city skyline is etched with new businesses that moved in and new partnerships have brought more jobs.

“We’ve reduced crime, we’ve changed the lead service lines, we went up twice in our Moody’s financial rating in the city, we’ve turned people’s Section 8 vouchers into mortgages,” Baraka said.

Under his leadership, Newark Public Schools are back under local control and flourishing.

As governor, he wants to control costs across the board to make living more affordable.

“We have too many school districts, we have more school districts than cities, and we have too many cities, more cities than California, which is eight times our size,” Baraka said. “And so it’s incredibly inefficient and we’re paying two or three times for similar services or same services that we could combine and reduce our costs.”

He has multi-pronged plan to address housing, which includes a capital fund for affordable housing, subsidized affordable home ownership, tax relief for home owners, a cap on rent increases, and regulating investment firms that impact housing and raising filing fees for evictions.

On higher education, Baraka says he will push for free community college and partner universities with private sector leaders to recruit and retain local talent.

Some critics called his recent arrest outside the Delaney Hall immigrant detention center a political stunt.

“I was down there every day, if I wanted to do a political stunt, I could have done it at 7:00 in the morning, I’m there every day, 7 o’clock, when I was there earlier that day with the ICE agents out there in the front,” he said.

He was asked if he would try to have it shut down as governor.

“Well, I think what we should try to do as governor is to make sure that we don’t have private prisons in New Jersey,” Baraka said.

There are six Democrats and five Republicans in the running for New Jersey governor. Eyewitness News will profile a candidate for governor each day this week.

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