Political gridlock is slap in face to long-suffering taxpayers

Thousands of residents of Hackensack and other towns were scrambling this week to meet the deadline for payment of property taxes, but I haven't seen a single story in The Record of Woodland Park about them or all of those inefficient home-rule communities. 

By VICTOR E. SASSON
EDITOR

In New Jersey, you have to pay some of the highest property taxes in the nation, but you still get jerked around by some of the sorriest politicians anywhere.

The lead story on Page 1 of The Record today reports no progress in breaking the political logjam in Trenton over transportation funding.

Democrats in the state Legislature still don't have enough votes to override Governor Christie's threatened veto of a 23-cents-a-gallon hike in the gasoline tax.

Meanwhile, The Record reports a statewide freeze on transportation projects "is likely to stretch into the fall and past the November elections" (A-1).

Ford Motor Co.

North Jersey residents can only hope Ford Motor Co. will be forced to excavate tons of contaminated soil, if voters approve a November ballot proposal (A-1).

Who can feel sorry for an automaker that has shirked its responsibility to clean up toxic paint sludge and other waste dumped into abandoned mines and a landfill in the 1960s, with the borough's approval?

Excavating the contaminated soil, which is near reservoirs, would cost Ford and the borough's insurance carriers $32.6 million, compared to $5.4 million for a plan to cap it.

Let's not forget Ford was the only major Detroit automaker that didn't declare bankruptcy and didn't need a bailout from the federal government.

Trump the 'flamethrower'

New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman compares Donald J. Trump's inflammatory words about Hillary Clinton and the Second Amendment to those that led to the assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1995.

The wacko racist GOP presidential nominee declared "gun rights supporters might still find a way to stop ... Clinton, even if she should defeat him and then name anti-gun Supreme Court justices," AP reports (A-1).