Summit Council President Lisa Allen, widely viewed as a rising star in local Republican politics, has resigned less than halfway through her term.

Allen is moving to a different part of Summit and will no longer reside in the politically competitive Ward 2, which she has represented since her appointment in 2021, the New Jersey Globe has learned.

Holding off on a resignation announcement until last night’s council meeting allowed Republicans to avoid a special election for her unexpired term in November.

Instead, the city’s Republican county committee will submit three candidates to the common council – without Allen, the GOP still has a 4-2 majority – who will pick a replacement; if they don’t, the party will fill the seat.  The interim council member will serve until a November 2025 special election.

If Assemblywoman Nancy Munoz (R-Summit) doesn’t seek re-election next year, Allen had been considered the leading candidate to replace her; that still may be the case.  Another Ward 2 councilman, Greg Vartan, could emerge as a Democratic Assembly candidate in 2025, either against Munoz or Allen, the GOP state committeewoman from Union County.

Allen did not respond to a call seeking comment.

The deputy city clerk, Nicole Kotiga, would not say if she was aware of Allen’s resignation but said a letter of resignation had not yet been filed with her office.

It’s back to school time in New Jersey, and that means students will soon be reuniting with friends they haven’t seen all summer. But in some of New Jersey’s largest high schools, there might be more strangers than friends.

The average enrollment for high schools in the Garden State is just over 1,000 students, according to an NJ Advance Media analysis of data from the 2022-23 school year, the most recently available data. (See how large your high school is in the chart below.)

The state’s largest high school, Passaic County Technical Institute in Wayne, had 3,302 students in 2022-23. That top spot could be challenged in future rankings with the opening this year of the $283.8 million Perth Amboy High School, with a projected enrollment of 3,300 students.

Nearly a year ago, Danish wind energy giant Orsted scrapped two offshore wind farms planned off New Jersey’s coast, saying they were no longer financially feasible to build.

Atlantic Shores, another project with preliminary approval in New Jersey, is seeking to rebid the financial terms of its project.

And opponents of offshore wind have seized on the disintegration of a wind turbine blade off Martha’s Vineyard in Massachusetts in July that sent crumbled pieces of it washing ashore on the popular island vacation destination.

Leading Light was one of two projects chosen in January by the state utilities board. But just three weeks after that approval, one of three major turbine manufacturers, GE Vernova, said it would not announce the kind of turbine Invenergy planned to use in the Leading Light Project, according to the filing with the utilities board.

A turbine made by manufacturer Vestas was deemed unsuitable for the project, and the lone remaining manufacturer, Siemens Gamesa Renewable Energy, told Invenergy in June “that it was substantially increasing the cost of its turbine offering.”

“As a result of these actions, Invenergy is currently without a viable turbine supplier,” it wrote in its filing.

The project, from Chicago-based Invenergy and New York-based energyRE, would be built 40 miles (65 kilometers) off Long Beach Island and would consist of up to 100 turbines, enough to power 1 million homes.

New Jersey has become the epicenter of resident and political opposition to offshore wind, with numerous community groups and elected officials — most of them Republicans — saying the industry is harmful to the environment and inherently unprofitable.

Supporters, many of them Democrats, say that offshore wind is crucial to move the planet away from the burning of fossil fuels and the changing climate that results from it.

New Jersey has set ambitious goals to become the East Coast hub of the offshore wind industry. It built a manufacturing facility for wind turbine components in the southern part of the state to help achieve that aim.