The Mahwah kindergarten teacher was blunt and unapologetic. She wanted out of New Jersey.

Sitting before the state’s Employee Residency Review Committee, the teacher quickly made her case. She wanted to move to Manhattan to live with her boyfriend. She didn’t own a car. She said she could take a bus each day from New York to her job teaching kindergarten at a Mahwah public school.

The move to New York would be good for her personal life and her wallet.

“That’s not a very compelling reason to leave,” said Douglas Ianni, one of four members of the state review committee in Trenton hearing the teacher’s case last month.

Under the “New Jersey First” law, nearly all public employees hired after 2011 are required to live in the state. The only exceptions are for workers who can prove a financial hardship, cite a health reason or provide proof they are “critical” in their workplace.

Flipping through the Mahwah teacher’s file, Ianni came across a letter from an assistant superintendent saying the woman had been selected to take on a team leader role in her school. That was enough for the teacher to be deemed “critical” in her job.

The state Employee Residency Review Committee voted unanimously.

She could live wherever she wanted. And just like that another state employee was exempted from the state’s residency law.

The teacher jumped up with a broad smile on her face and left the hearing room as another nervous applicant took her place in front of the committee.

When Gov. Chris Christie signed the “New Jersey First Act” in 2011, supporters said the idea was long overdue. If you work for New Jersey -- in a state, county, municipal or school district job -- New Jersey should be your home, the law said. If you are being paid by New Jersey taxpayers, you should pay state and local taxes and be a state resident.

But in the more than seven years the law has been in effect, at least 2,310 public workers have been given temporary or permanent exemptions to live out of state, according to an NJ Advance Media review of state records. About 80 percent of those who applied and had their cases voted on by the committee were granted permission to live elsewhere -- usually New York, Pennsylvania or Delaware.

Many of the reasons workers want to live out of state are complicated and deeply personal: Divorce. Complex child custody agreements. Crippling debt. Elderly parents. Fatal and debilitating illnesses. It isn’t unusual for applicants to burst into tears as they appear before the committee in Trenton and list their reasons for wanting to live outside of New Jersey.

In other cases, public employees were granted permission to live out of state for no reason other than they had a letter from their bosses saying their jobs were “critical” to the state and they would be difficult to replace them if they quit over New Jersey’s residency requirement.

A state Department of Labor spokesman declined to comment on the process. He said the department does not keep publicly-available statistics on how many people applied to the state Employee Residency Review Committee for exemptions each year or how many of the requests were granted or rejected.

NJ Advance Media reviewed records from the 83 public meetings the review committee has held since the law was passed in 2011. The documents show:

--The committee has considered 3,083 cases for exemptions to the residency law, including some cases involving multiple people with the same job title and others where the same person has appeared before the committee several times to ask to live out of state.

--In 2,310 cases the committee voted to grant temporary or permanent exemptions to the law. Another 560 applicants were rejected. In three cases the results were either sealed for an unspecified reason or the result of the vote was not revealed. The remaining 210 applications were withdrawn, delayed or not voted on.

--It appears it has grown easier to be granted an exemption to the law over the years. In 2012, the first full year the law was in effect, the committee voted to grant about 71 percent of applicants exemptions. So far this year, nearly 90 percent of requests have been granted.

--Those applying come from a broad swath of state agencies, school districts and local government entities across the state -- from the Office of the Governor to state hospitals, local prisons and state colleges. But the majority of those asking to be exempt from the law appear to come from public school districts, especially those close to the Pennsylvania border, where less expensive housing and lower property taxes are just a few miles away.

Public employees await their turn to appear before the four members of the New Jersey's Employee Residency Review Committee in March 2017 in Trenton. The committee has the power to make public employees exempt from a law requiring them to live in New Jersey. (Kelly Heyboer | NJ Advance Media for NJ.com)

The Employee Residency Review Committee did not respond to requests to comment about the numbers.

There have been calls to repeal or amend the “New Jersey First” law almost since the day it was approved by the state Legislature and signed by the governor. Then-Gov. Christie praised the law for helping “increase employment opportunities for New Jersey residents, by ensuring that citizens throughout the state enjoy access to public positions in their communities.”

But critics said the law was keeping good employees from taking public jobs in New Jersey. Schools, including public charter schools in Newark and North Jersey that recruit teachers from New York City, said they were losing good applicants because of the law.

“Sometimes residency requirements sound good on paper, but if they have the potential to exclude a whole group of qualified people, especially in the teaching field, they can be short-sighted,” state Sen. Peter Barnes (D-Middlesex) said in 2014 when he sponsored a failed bill rolling back part of the law.

The “New Jersey First” law made news again last year when it was blamed as part of the reason NJ Transit had trouble hiring enough engineers to keep its trains running.

In September, the state Employee Residency Review Committee voted on a blanket exemption for all NJ Transit employees in “mission essential” jobs, including train engineers, bus drivers, conductors and rail maintenance workers. So, NJ Transit is free to hire out-of-state workers for those jobs.

The “New Jersey First” law has also been cited in a lawsuit against Rutgers University challenging whether four appointed members of the Rutgers Board of Governors should lose their unpaid positions because they live outside of New Jersey. The case has raised questions about whether the residency law should apply to volunteers, including those appointed to state boards, in addition to paid public employees.

It is unclear what percentage of public workers are now exempt from the law requiring employees to live in the state. In addition to the more than 2,300 who have been granted exemptions by the committee, the law already exempts university professors and some college employees along with anyone hired in any public job before the law was passed in 2011.

The law gives workers one year to move to New Jersey after they are hired. Failing to do so can cost employees their job.

Most of those who want to ask for an exemption need to take a day off work and make a trip to Trenton for one of the Employee Residence Review Committee monthly hearings in a meeting room with sweeping views of the city on the 13th floor of the Department of Labor building.

“The judgement room,” one of the applicants said ominously before March’s meeting as a group of about 40 nervous public workers waited to walk in.

Inside, a panel of four appointees, headed by Ianni, the human resources director for the state Department of the Treasury, sat at a table. One by one, public workers were called up to make their case for why they don’t want to live in New Jersey.

At March’s hearing, the cases included: a Department of Labor worker who wanted to move to Pennsylvania to care for her aging mother; a Lenape Regional High School teacher who wanted to move to Pennsylvania because his wife is working in Philadelphia; a newly-married Lawrence Township employee who wanted to move to Delaware, where her new husband lives with a medical condition; and a Department of Corrections officer who needed to move to Pennsylvania under the terms of a shared custody agreement her husband has for his son.

All of their exemptions were granted.

In other cases, employees -- including a speech pathologist from a Lawrence Township school, an information technology worker from Hudson County Community College and the communications director for the state Department of Environmental Protection -- gave little or no reason why they wanted to live out of state.

But each had a “critical need letter” -- a statement from their bosses saying they worked in an important public job and would be difficult to replace -- so they were quickly granted passes to live outside of New Jersey.

In other cases, employees were given temporary exemptions to live in New York or Pennsylvania so their teenagers could finish high school or so they could continue to get in-state tuition for children attending Pennsylvania or New York colleges. That means the employees can live out of state for a year or more with the committee’s blessing, but they will eventually need to either move to New Jersey or reapply for another exemption.

The committee was largely sympathetic to the employees asking for exemptions, suggesting to several that they withdraw their applications and return another month with additional documentation proving their cases if it looked like the panel was going to vote to deny their requests.

One of those who withdrew their requests and promised to return another day was a Pennsylvania man who wanted a $9-an-hour part-time job with the state Department of Environmental Protection to stay active after his retirement. He expressed frustration when the committee members raised questions about whether he had made his case to be exempt from the law.

The part-time, hourly job had no job security and little incentive to move his family, including his wife and elderly mother in law, to sell their house and move to New Jersey, he said.

“The entire fabric of my life is in Pennsylvania,” he said. “I’m settled in my life.”

He agreed to withdraw his application for now and return, perhaps with a note from his doctor calling for him to be exempt from the “New Jersey First” law for medical reasons.

Kelly Heyboer may be reached at kheyboer@njadvancemedia.com. Follow her on Twitter @KellyHeyboer. Find her at KellyHeyboerReporter on Facebook. Find NJ.com on Facebook.

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