Reporting

New Jersey has hundreds of public school districts. Almost none hire lobbyists.

State disclosure records show more than 500 public school districts operate across New Jersey. Only two appear in state lobbying disclosure records. Middletown is one of them.

The distinction stands out even more today. The district is facing a significant budget shortfall and planning to close schools to address it. That contrast raises a basic accountability question: when a public school district hires a lobbying firm, what decisions is it trying to influence, and what did students and taxpayers receive in return?

In Middletown, the public record reveals two disclosure systems that are usually examined separately: campaign-finance filings from the November 2025 Board of Education election and New Jersey lobbying disclosures filed by a Trenton-based government affairs firm. When those filings are read side by side, they show overlapping names, vendors, and timing — a pattern similar to one identified in our prior research on how campaign spending and political media intersect in Monmouth County.

They also raise several unanswered questions about how the district engaged a lobbying firm.

The most direct document-based link is this: CLB Partners LLC reported “Middletown Township Board of Education” as a represented entity on a Form L1-A annual lobbying report, listing $15,000 in receipts and identifying the entity’s business type as “School board.”¹

Separately, the joint candidates committee that backed three school-board candidates in 2025 reported a donor whose employer was listed as CLB Partners.²

Our review also identified at least one contribution that does not appear in the candidate committee’s campaign finance filings required under New Jersey election law. It is one of several contributions that point to a broader network of relationships surrounding the board, where public money, lobbying activity, and local elections intersect.

On March 2, 2026, the Middletown Township Committee met for a workshop session at the municipal building on One Kings Highway, where residents used public comment to press local officials to get involved in the Middletown school district’s plans to close schools.

The most pointed exchange came from resident Bernard Daus, who urged Mayor Tony Perry to step in as the district considers closing three schools, calling it an “imminent threat” to the community and arguing that closures would “fracture” Middletown’s neighborhoods.

The New Jersey Election Law Enforcement Commission has filed two enforcement complaints tied to political fundraising and reporting in Holmdel—one naming Rocco Impreveduto, a municipal candidate, and his treasurer, and a second naming the Holmdel NJ Republican Committee and its organizational treasurer.

The filings matter because an ELEC enforcement complaint is a formal step in the agency’s enforcement process: it lays out proposed findings and legal conclusions, and it starts a case in which respondents can request a hearing before any final decision is issued.

The complaint against the Holmdel Republican Committee is the first enforcement complaint issued for the 2025 election cycle.

The U.S. Department of Justice filed a federal lawsuit on February 26, 2026, seeking a court order that would require New Jersey to produce records from its Statewide Voter Registration List (the “SVRL”), including “all fields” the department says it demanded in earlier letters.

The case, United States v. Caldwell, was filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of New Jersey (D.N.J.) as a statutory records-demand enforcement action under the Civil Rights Act record-demand provisions, according to the complaint. The defendant is Dale G. Caldwell, sued in his official capacity as New Jersey’s lieutenant governor and secretary of state, court documents indicate.

The complaint says DOJ is seeking the SVRL records to assess New Jersey’s compliance with federal voter-registration list maintenance requirements, including those in the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA) and the Help America Vote Act (HAVA).

Federal courts in California, Michigan, and Oregon have recently dismissed lawsuits by the Department of Justice that sought to force states to hand over full, unredacted voter registration lists, including sensitive personal data. Those rulings signal growing judicial resistance to the DOJ’s broader campaign to obtain private voter information from dozens of states, with judges warning the efforts could threaten voter privacy and state control of elections.