Mayor Ras J. Baraka announced today that Deputy Mayor John Palmieri, Director of the Department of Economic and Housing Development, will retire on Friday, March 1 to focus on family and personal issues. Deputy Mayor Palmieri helped move several key initiatives forward including transportation and smart growth strategies such as MX-3 Zoning, the PATH train extension and a plan for Opportunity Zone investments. The City’s Chief Operations Officer, Natasha Love Rogers, will serve as Interim Deputy Mayor/Director while a task force is formed to conduct a national search for a new leader of the Department of Economic and Housing Development.

Ms. Rogers, a former investment banker at Goldman Sachs, has more than 15 years of experience in supply chain management, real estate law, infrastructure and project finance, impact investing, tax law and tax incentive-all areas that are essential to economic development. Rogers worked in both the private and public domains, having underwritten/financed nearly $3 billion of transactions in her finance career and worked as a law clerk for Nixon Peabody, which has one of the largest Community Development Finance practices in the country, for HUD in Washington, DC, focused on community finance, as well as for the CFTC, a financial regulator, drafting Dodd-Frank legislation. As COO of the City of Newark, Ms. Rogers has been focused on driving greater efficiencies across all City Hall departments, while maximizing the City’s $675 MM budget. She will continue to focus on these areas while also managing and maintaining Newark’s portfolio of $4.6 billion of EHD projects.

“I am extremely grateful to the Mayor for not simply providing me an opportunity but really being a hands on CEO and understanding his community and all of its constituents,” said Ms. Rogers. “There is plenty of work to be done. The City’s portfolio is significant. But this very moment is special to me. I left a high paying and rewarding career, for the first time, over ten years ago to pursue my passion of creating sustainable urban cities. I left a second time to work in the city of my birth. As the first woman to hold to this position, I can only think of my mother, who left her hometown in North Carolina as young woman, to pursue her own passions. She and her brother made a conscious choice to live in Newark. I am a manifestation of their dreams.”

Some of her most notable clients and transactions has been the NJ Turnpike, The Port of Los Angeles, McCormack Baron Salazar – an affordable housing developer, American Dream Mall, AeroFarms, and various NFL and NHL franchises. Ms. Rogers holds a JD and MBA from Washington University in St. Louis and graduated cum laude from Rutgers University with degrees in Industrial and Systems Engineering and Urban Economics. She is a proud Central Ward native, having grown up in New Community and now lives in the downtown district. Ms. Rogers volunteers her time to Newark Kids Code and the Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship. Additionally, for over a decade, she has been a devoted member/volunteer and advocate for the Urban League Young Professionals. She is a Leadership Newark alum and a New Leaders Council alum.

The new task force consisting of both public and private members, led by Ommeed Saathe of Prudential Financial and Aisha Glover of the Newark Alliance, will help guide improvements to the City of Newark’s Economic and Housing Development processes, strategies and implementation in order to expand its commitment to inclusive growth and ensure transparency and efficiency. The task force’s scope will also include working to identify and onboard a new director, build a robust capacity to allow the city to compete for large corporate relocations, review and align functions of disparate extra-governmental entities that currently play a role in economic development, and make the development and permitting process more easily navigated by residents and first-time entrepreneurs.

All changes will be effective March 1, 2019.

Share this: Facebook

Twitter

LinkedIn

Tumblr

Pinterest

Skype

Reddit

WhatsApp

Print



Related

Comments

comments