The soon to be former Hudson County Schools of Technology’s Community Resource Center (HCST CRC) workers, which is slated to close on June 30th, highlighted last week how they already provide services in the proposed $1.3 million county budget amendment.
By Dan Israel/Hudson County View
HCST CRC Outreach Coordinator and HCST Career Development Center Association Vice President David Morel again addressed the Hudson County Board of Commissioners in hopes of further county assistance for the workers expecting to be laid off.
Morel said that the CRC provides services that received initial approval from the board for $1.3 million for legal services, rental assistance, and food security programs for those impacted by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) actions locally.
“We host events with Northeast Legal Services to protect undocumented residents. We are a true one-stop shop. We provide clothing, resume creation, job placement support, ESL classes, and access to phones, computer scanners, copy machines and fax machines,” Morel asserted.
“We also offer forklift certification classes in Spanish, which no other organization in Hudson County provides. We do every single job fair in Hudson County and attend all local college fairs to offer our services and promote post-secondary courses for students who are not pursuing college.”
Morel continued that, in his eyes, the message is clear: the CRC meets critical and growing needs across Hudson County.
“Families rely on us for unemployment assistance, motor vehicle issues, ID.me verification, housing support, and basic guidance,” he added.
“Closing the CRC removes a vital resource for residents who often have nowhere else to run. If you are keep post-secondary, we had staff who played a major role in that office.”
He questioned why the CRC employees providing these services were being laid off as the same programs were being expanded in other areas.
According to Morel, the March forensic audit of the HCST could have been disputed with “two lines,” but wasn’t, adding that none of the HCST board members visited the CRC prior to justifying its closure.
“Not one came to see how we help these residents, how we guide them, how we are a safe haven for people who have nowhere else to go. These are all people in this very room who don’t want these services to disappear. So why are we eliminating them,” he stated.
Morel said that the commissioners knows the value of the CRC, including the job fair which he called the largest in the county, and added that some laid off employees had employment offers rescinded by the county among other issues.
“Three employees had interviews scheduled to Health and Human Services, and suddenly all three were called back and their interviews were cancelled with no rescheduling,” Morel said.
“Another employee was offered to get insurance with $5,000 cost a month to continue for her family after she’s been laid off. Another was offered a job at corrections working from 10 p.m. to 6 a.m. to register inmates for $40,000. This is what our people are facing after years of service.”
In conclusion, Morel asked the board for “fairness, transparency, and accountability” for himself and the other laid off employees and “or the people of North Hudson.”
Commissioner Bill O’Dea (D-2) inquired who will deliver those services in the absence of the CRC, to which Hudson County Administrator Abe Antun told the board that the decision lies with the Workforce Development Board.
Antun explained that since HCST didn’t apply for the grant to continue the CRC and its programs, that the WDB awarded the funds to another organization to provide those or similar services.
O’Dea asked if it was too late for the county to apply for the grant and hire the laid off CRC workers directly, but Antun said he didn’t think the county would have an interest in applying for that.
After more inquiries about procuring the grant funding by O’Dea, Antun clarified that HCST withdrew from the grant because the administrative cost doesn’t cover the overhead cost that the school incurs.
“What happened was, when the WBD split up the funding, instead of keeping everything together, they split it between the county, the school, and Equus. That meant that they split up all of the admin money and it went in different directions,” Antun explained.
Commissioner Al Cifelli (D-9) questioned how the funding was ever spread by WBD between the county, HCST, and Equus, raising concerns over duplicitous costs.
In response, Antun said the WBD is responsible for distributing roughly $6 million, with around 20 percent being administrative costs.
Further, Jenny Davis, Guy’s chief of staff, stated the board should have an offline conversation in the future to discuss what has happened at the WBD for the past four years, adding that they can’t discuss that in public session.
Board Chair Anthony Romano (D-5) called for an Education Committee Meeting, to which O’Dea was on board with, but still vocalized his displeasure with the HCST CRC closure.
“At the end of the day, it was kind of presented that we save x amount of dollars by eliminating the staff, and no one’s given me that exact number, but you really didn’t eliminate x because part of x is admin that you’ve got,” O’Dea said.
“I’ll concede to you if the cost of staff is $800,000 and the admin is $300,000, you’re saving five. You’re not saving eight … That was never presented to us, maybe to you guys on the Board of School Estimate it was, but it was never presented to me.”
According to O’Dea, given a reasonable amount of time, the wages he could come up with other funds to cut instead of the CRC, but he added it’s likely too late.
“There are other grants that they could have looked to apply for that would have included administrative dollars. We talked about something like the only bi-lingual forklift program, right? There’s other DOL grants.”
O’Dea was frustrated that they had not applied to other grants to fund the laid off CRC employees jobs, noting that they should have been looking for them if the previous source was deficient.
“I’m just disturbed by the way this happened,” he further stated.
Davis said the county is lending its employees who focus on grants to HCST to look for new funding opportunities.
“I’m just going to say that is a positive,” Davis said.
Romano again called for an Education Committee meeting before moving on to the next speaker.
Recently, Morel told commissioners that HCST CRC employees who have been “the backbone of the workforce development in North Hudson” are losing their jobs based on “incomplete information” and “incorrect audit findings,” both as HCV first reported.
According to the 12-page audit findings, the HCST CRC lost grant funding to the tune of $1.5 million in 2024.
This followed an intense discussion in May, where HCST officials squared off with the commissioners over program and staffing cuts made in the vocational school district’s 2026-2027 school year budget, as only HCV reported.
HCST was the second biggest line item in this year’s over $769 million county budget, totaling $53,915,069.50 for the upcoming school year, an increase of nearly $11 million from last year.
At the prior meeting that month, O’Dea and Commissioner Kenny Kopacz (D-1) sounded the alarm on some of those cuts, specifically those made to vital post-secondary career programs.
And earlier last week at the public comment budget hearing, Morel asked the county government to make he and the other laid off employees whole on accumulated vacation and sick time.
