Editors black out Hackensack election campaign

North Jersey Media Group, the Borg family's publishing company, hasn't disclosed whether the U.S.S. Ling, above, and a naval museum will be able to stay after it redevelops about 20 acres along River Street, including the old headquarters of The Record, below, empty since mid-2009.

The tallest part of the building at 150 River St., right, is an elevator shaft and stairs that would have accommodated the addition of a 5th floor. At least one editor arranged trysts with a secretary in the staircase above the 4th-floor newsroom, where no secret was safe.

Judging from coverage in The Record, readers outside Hackensack -- and thousands who live here -- might not know 11 candidates are involved in one of the most important municipal elections in city history.

The struggle between reformers and powerful allies of the ruling Zisa family is being played out in forums sponsored by the Prospect Avenue Coalition, Bergen County NAACP and others.

All 5 seats on the City Council will be decided on May 14 -- in an election that historically has never engaged voters, despite rising property taxes, declining city services and insider deals with a select group of lawyers that have looted the city treasury.

No campaign coverage

The Record hasn't covered any of the forums, and likely will publish a prefunctory pre-election story that will amount to little more than he said/she said.

That contrasts with more than 3 years of intense coverage of the city Police Department.

Starting in 2009, the paper printed a series of stories about Ken "I Am The Law" Zisa, the former police chief and state Assemblyman, culminating in coverage of his trial and May 2012 conviction for official misconduct and insurance fraud.

Long, detailed stories about state and federal lawsuits filed against Zisa by police officers -- and administrative hearings for cops brought up on charges -- filled The Record, to the exclusion of routine coverage of the proposed city budget, school board election campaign and other news.

That pattern continued through 2012.

Since then, routine coverage of Hackensack has been hit or miss, even though it is the county seat, the most populous community in Bergen County and the city where The Record prospered for more than 110 years.

Ignoring change

Mike Mordaga, who became the city's first civilian police director on Feb. 4, stepped up patrols to fight street crime and started a crackdown on moving violations by drivers, among several other, sweeping  changes.

Mordaga also has asked the non-profit Hackensack University Medical Center and Bergen County to give back to the city in lieu of paying property taxes.

Today, Hackensack readers will search The Record's Local news section for that story or anything else about the city, as they have on so many previous days. 

They're responsible

So, get up from your computers and put down your mobile devices and give a big round of applause to Deirdre Sykes, the six-figure head assignment editor who apparently spends more time planning her next meal than she does the next day's Local news section. 

And don't forget to cheer Steve McCarthy, the assistant assignment editor who supervises Hackensack news coverage.

Two restaurants on Main Street in Hackensack are outside the zone represented by the Upper Main Alliance, a public-private partnership that was set up in 2004 to promote the struggling shopping district.

Main Street boycott?

No restaurants on Main Street in Hackensack will be taking part in "The Taste in Hackensack 2013," a food-centered fund-raiser set for Sunday at The Shops at Riverside.

Two restaurants from outside Hackensack and the Stony Hill Inn, the lone city representative, will join shopping-center restaurants in serving samples of signature dishes to raise funds for a Hackensack High School scholarship fund.

The event is named cleverly. It's "The Taste in Hackensack," not "The Taste of Hackensack."

The lack of Main Street participation raises a question about the effectiveness of the Upper Main Alliance, a public-private partnership set up in 2004 to promote the city's struggling downtown.

Slow poke on the Garden State Parkway

Garden State Parkway traffic during a difficult Friday evening rush hour.

 

Below is a link to a video shot on the Garden State Parkway in March that shows just about every other car passing a driver who sets his cruise control to 60 mph.

This is a follow-up to my discussion on Sunday of how The Record ignores speeding drivers and the apparent lack of enforcement that allows them to drive as fast as they want, terrorize law-abiding motorists and blow through red lights.

In Hackensack, Police Director Mike Mordaga has begun to crack down on moving violations by drivers, and his officers issued a couple of hundred more summonses in March than in the same month of 2012.

Maybe, the Road Warrior will lift his head out of one of those enormous potholes he likes to write about, recognize what Mordaga is doing in Hackensack and find out whether other towns are following suit.

And what about the state police? Why not ask for data to show whether enforcement is way down, as many law-abiding drivers suspect?

Here's is the link to the video:

In the slow lane on the parkway 

Speeders get a pass from the Road Warrior

Cherry blossoms in Branch Brook Park in Newark on Saturday, when hundreds of families, including many Asian-Americans, enjoyed a chilly spring day amid the annual natural splendor.

Branch Brook Lake is stocked with trout.

Driving to Newark on the Garden State Parkway on Saturday, I set my cruise control to 60 mph, and as usual, nearly every other car passed me, exceeding the 55 mph speed limit by 10, 20, even 30 mph.

Drivers raced one another, tailgating the car in front, or weaved in and out of slower traffic. 
 
But the scariest moments came when I looked in my rear-view mirror and saw a speeding car racing  toward my rear bumper, only to swerve into the next lane at the last moment.

On Friday evening, I saw two near collisions on both the turnpike and parkway as speeding drivers dove for the center lane at the same time. 

These experiences reminded me of a message I saw one day on an overhead sign near Exit 129 of the parkway: "66% of all accidents involve speeding."

Slow journalism

Speeding also is the cause of most red-light violations, but why do readers of The Record read so little about the problem or the apparent lack of enforcement that emboldens these violators?

The reason is clear: Since late 2003, Road Warrior John Cichowski has been stuck in the slow journalism lane: on lines at the MVC or measuring potholes or fielding complaints about E-ZPass.

Today's column is about one man's experience with getting his 2005 minivan inspected (L-1). How irrelevant can you get?

Out of steam

Cichowski long ago ran out of ideas for his column, which is supposed to appear three times a week, and he refuses to cover mass transit, though his mission is to report about commuting problems.

He now relies almost exclusively on e-mails from complaining drivers who get high from seeing their names in print, as well as studies, reports and other boring statistics that he often can't report accurately. 

The only way he can produce so much copy, it seems, is to devote as many columns as possible to odd circumstances that have no meaning to the vast majority of readers.

Burned-out staffers

Today's front page is dominated by news of the Boston marathon bombing suspect and victims, including a column by another burned-out Record columnist, Mike Kelly, that no one will read.

In head Assignment Editor Deirdre Sykes' Local section, the only Hackensack news today is a reprint from Friday's edition of the weekly Hackensack Chronicle.

Police Director Mike Mordaga is proposing to hire Class II Special Law Enforcement Officers to supplement regular police officers, who are represented by a union (L-3).

City property tax payers would welcome those officers, who will be paid $15 to $20 an hour and receive no benefits, but who will carry guns and get the same training as regular cops.

Injuries have knocked out some of the 114 officers in the department, Mordaga said last week.

Another thin paper

Today's thin Sunday edition includes a Better Living section with no meaningful food coverage, and a Business section with a cover story on a small business in Bellevue, Wash.

Now, that's "local news." 

Hackensack police director makes sweeping changes

Hackensack Police Director Mike Mordaga, who took over on Feb. 4, has launched initiatives to improve residents' quality of life.

Does anybody envy Hackensack Police Director Mike Mordaga, who is trying to resuscitate the reputation of a department that was virtually destroyed by Ken "I Am The Law" Zisa, the disgraced former police chief and state Assemblyman?

Since he took over on Feb. 4, Mordaga has moved to make big changes -- from requiring more formal police uniforms with hats to boosting crime patrols to coping with all of the homeless drawn by free meals at the Bergen County shelter on South River Street.

The highly decorated Mordaga rose from beat cop to detective, and ran the Hackensack Police Department's investigative division before leaving in 2002 to become chief of detectives at the Bergen County Prosecutor's Office.

In the 5 years he was there, seizures of money, cars and other ill-gotten gain from suspects totaled about $26 million, far above the level of previous foreitures, Mordaga said.

Fighting crime

In Hackensack, he is pairing a county sheriff's officer with a city policeman in a police cruiser, and sending them out on patrol to fight crime, including street robberies.

"Residents shoud be able to walk on the street without fear," Mordaga said.

Mordaga noted his officers are spending a lot of time driving homeless people to the emergency room at Hackensack University Medical Center, and he would like to see the hospital assign staff to a room at the homeless shelter.

He also needs more police cars, and wonders why the tax-exempt HUMC can't donate a couple of them to the department in lieu of property taxes. 

Welcome crackdown

Mordaga also is attacking numerous moving violations by drivers in Hackensack, noting the department issued a couple of hundred more summonses this March than it did in March 2012.  

Victor E. Sasson, editor of Eye on The Record, met with Mordaga late this morning at police headquarters on State Street.  

It's unclear why the changes he discussed haven't been reported in The Record.

Gottlieb bombs again

Editor Marty Gottlieb should have given the biggest play on Page 1 today to a move by Bergen County freeholders to water down the county's pay-to-play law, not the bombing in Boston (A-1).

The Mike Kelly column about the placing of "flowers and teddy bears" in memory of an 8-year-old boy killed by the terrorist bombing sounds exactly like the one he wrote after the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre in Connecticut (A-1).


Dissing Hackensack 


Head Assignment Editor Deirdre Sykes ordered follow-ups to Tuesday's school board elections in Englewood and Secaucus (L-1 and L-3), but nothing more about Hackensack's contest.

In Secaucus, two losing incumbents complained they were defeated by the Hudson County "political machine."

But no one asked the losing Hackensack incumbent and her two running mates, who also were defeated,  to characterize the victory of three puppets whose strings are pulled by Lynne Hurwitz, queen of the city's Democratic Party and mistress of machine politics in Hackensack.

However, Sykes made sure to find room for another filler photo of yet another tractor-trailer on its side (L-3).

More free advertising

In Better Living, a lavish cover story by Food Editor Susan Leigh Sherrill continues the paper's promotional coverage of chefs and restaurant owners, ignoring the dark side of dining out (BL-1).

Saru Jayaraman, author of "Appetite for Profit," has called the National Restaurant Association "the other NRA," referring to the millions of dollars spent to lobby Congress and keep the federal minimum wage for tipped workers at $2.13 an hour.

That has set up one of the biggest scams going: Putting the onus on customers to tip well and elevate servers to a living wage.
  
Related articles

• Editors cook up Hackensack crisis
• Hackensack is behind rank-and-file cops
• More patchy Hackensack reporting