New Jersey’s new governor orders creation of statewide ‘Report Card’ website
On her first day as New Jersey’s governor, Mikie Sherrill on Tuesday signed a series of executive orders, including one creating the “New Jersey Report Card,” a website fed by data from across the state, designed to keep tabs on how agencies are performing.
Sherrill’s fifth executive order calls for an “interactive, public-facing online portal” with information on “select” programs, an “interactive state budget analysis tool” and evaluations of programs and how they’re affecting residents. The new website is to be fueled by data from executive agencies, shared with the state’s Strategic Initiatives & Economic Opportunity Office, a new body, created by the governor’s fourth executive order (along with a new Operational Performance Office), intended to “strengthen New Jersey’s capacity to deliver better, faster, and more cost-effective public services and economic growth outcomes.”
The fifth order also creates a “cross-agency permitting team” and a “regulatory simplification team,” both operating out of the office of Kellie Doucette, herself occupying a new role as the state’s first chief operating officer. The permitting team is directed to catalog all permits issued by agencies and develop a permitting dashboard that contains “shot clocks,” timeframes related to permitting processes “that reduce permitting review and approval delays,” according to a press release.
Sherrill, a Democrat, also followed through on a campaign promise of pursuing new efforts to protect children online. Her sixth executive order creates a new office, the Office of Youth Online Mental Health Safety and Awareness, in the state Department of Health, designed to coordinate “whole-of-government” efforts to “keep kids safe online.” In a piece published in the New Jersey Globe last April, she outlined detailed aspirations to “hold Big Tech companies accountable” for harming children and families. The plan included a broad range of reforms imposed on private industry, including requiring social media platforms to display warning labels, the creation of a “social media addiction observatory” and banning cell phones in schools. She’s also said that social media companies should be held liable for their divisive, scammy, extreme or potentially dangerous content.
More than two weeks before her inauguration at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center in Newark on Tuesday, Sherrill began naming appointments and issued a press release confirming that Dave Cole, the state’s chief innovation officer, will stay on.
