Blogger's campaign helped change Hackensack

Limon Fine Food Marketplace on Main Street is a mere shell, symbolizing the failure of the Upper Main Alliance to revive the downtown shopping district in Hackensack. The public-private partnership was formed in 2004, when Jack Zisa was mayor of "Zisaville." Zisa served 16 years as mayor, a powerful argument for term limits.

The alliance does have a shiny pickup truck marked "SUPERVISOR." Of what? Around 2:30 on Monday afternoon, there was little foot traffic on Main Street, and some of the people were homeless or appeared deranged.

This morning, Victor E. Sasson drove over the same roughly patched streets he brought to the attention of voters during a 3-month campaign for City Council in Hackensack.

Sasson used potholes and the city's failure to pave his street since 1979 to dramatize how property taxes continue to rise and city services decline in "Zisaville."

When the campaign ended this week, street paving and most other quality of life issues in Sasson's platform had become part of the promises made to voters by the 10 other candidates in the race.

And city officials appeared to be making some of the changes Sasson sought on behalf of himself and other property tax payers.

Last, not least 

Sasson finished last on Tuesday, with 344 votes, but his consolation prize is the victory of the 5-member Citizens for Change slate, headed by incumbent John Labrosse.

Best of all, the Coalition for Open Government, a quintet of mental lightweights and Zisa allies, was defeated, signaling that decades of corrupt rule in Hackensack will soon end (see Page 1 of The Record today).

Although 344 seems like a small number, those vote could have swung the election to other candidates.
 

John Labrosse, right, speaking to supporters on Tuesday night at the Elks Lodge on Linden Street in Hackensack.

 
LTACH and you

The victory of the Labrosse slate also repudiated the strategy of the Prospect Avenue Coaltion to organize residents around a single issue, and to hell with the rest of Hackensack.

Hundreds of high-rise residents attended forums with the candidates, and grilled them on their positions regarding a 19-story Long-Term Acute Care Hospital (LTACH) proposed for a small parcel between Prospect and Summit avenues, near Golf Place. 

The developer is appealing the city zoning board's 5-0 decision to reject the plan, and the coaltion wanted to make sure City Attorney Joseph C. Zisa Jr. and former zoning board attorney Richard Malagiere would continue to fight against LTACH in Superior Court.

Key members of the coalition even urged Prospect Avenue residents to split their vote and elect a City Council with three Zisa allies and two members of Citizens for Change -- in other words, maintain the status quo.

Labrosse and his running mates had said they would cut loose Joe Zisa and Malagiere, as did Sasson.

Such a 3-2 council would be great for the coalition -- because the attorneys would be able to continue fighting LTACH and lining their pockets with legal fees at taxpayers' expense -- but terrible for the rest of the city. 

Inside the voting booth. Victor E. Sasson appeared to be hurt by his ballot position -- last. He was told it is state law to list candidates in one column, in contrast to from left to right as on ballots used in the general election. That law doesn't favor independents.

Taxing officials

Sasson and Citizens for Change didn't coordinate their campaigns, but their positions complemented each other as they made voters aware of a 65% hike in property taxes amid declining services.

Kathy Canestrino, the Labrosse running-mate elected on her second try, hammered away at the $6 million in legal fees the city paid in 3 years, all of it generated by the legal problems of Ken "I Am The Law" Zisa, the former state Assemblyman and convicted ex-police chief.

A select group of lawyers got rich suing or defending Zisa, who was sentenced to 5 years in prison, but who remains free pending the appeal of his conviction a year ago for official corruption and insurance fraud.

And Sasson told voters Hackensack is a tax-poor city, deprived of tens of millions of dollars, because of the tax-exempt status of Hackensack University Medical Center, Fairleigh Dickinson University and Bergen County.

Sasson urged HUMC and the others to give back to the city in lieu of property taxes.

Change has started

He didn't have to get elected to see that process begin.

Mike Mordaga took over on Feb. 4 as the city's first civilian police director, and went to work on problems ranging from street crime to moving violations by drivers to all the time his officers spend driving the homeless to the HUMC emergency room.

Mordaga paired county sheriff's officers with city cops in cruisers, and sent them out to stop crime and improve the quality of life by having residents feel safe walking the streets.

He's also asked the county police for assistance.

And Mordaga ordered a crackdown on such moving violations as speeding and blowing through stop signs.

Finally, he asked HUMC to staff a room at the county shelter on South River Street -- where three free meals a day keep the homeless in Hackensack -- to cut down on his officers' trips to the emergency room.

Sasson's lawn signs may come in handy in the next campaign.

Sasson's street will be paved in the fall, the city manager said recently.

And the city no longer sends a noisy truck to collect his garbage and recyclables before 6 a.m., giving his family and neighbors some sorely needed peace and quiet.

The hard sell of crime news

Image by aftab. via Flickr

The Record of Woodland Park published four editions in a row with front pages dominated by crime or police news.

This crime-against-readers spree began on Friday, Sept. 17, with nearly three-quarters of A-1 covered by the arrests of 53 people in a Korean-American inspired bank-fraud ring, and ended, weakly, on Monday, Sept. 20, with an inane Mike Kelly piece about speeding enforcement in Mahwah, accompanied by that idiotic, unflattering photo of the columnist. 

Is he laughing, leering or sneering? That sheepish grin matches so well with his sheepish columns, where he always seeks refuge in cop-out questions, rather than forcefully stating his opinion. The speeding column is no exception.

"The police in Mahwah are enforcing the law. This is a good thing, isn't it?" he writes lamely in his last two sentences after wandering all over the landscape in the column, including a discussion of acne-treatment ads on a speed-trap Web site. What a cowardly journalist. Who is this reporter's assignment editor, passing along this crap time and again?


There was no Hackensack, Teaneck or Englewood news in Monday's paper, but the front of Better Living regaled readers with a long story about a Ridgewood cheese shop, where a "recent deal" was an item selling for $25.99 a pound.

The front page on Sunday, Sept. 19, was dominated by a story on the spread of heroin to suburban teens -- a reprise of the blanket condemnation of Paterson as a drug bazaar that an investigative team produced several years ago. That story, championed by Francis Scandale, the editor, and Deirdre Sykes, the head assignment editor, included a user-friendly map showing readers exactly where they could buy the hard stuff.

In view of the editorial decisions Scandale and Sykes have been making for years, you'd think they were on something themselves.


The lead A-1 story this past Sunday was a rare appearance of Staff Writer Jean Rimbach's byline over a report on a serial killer's confession to a 1967 slaying in Little Ferry. The killer "quietly pleaded guilty last month" -- newspaper code for Bergen County Courthouse reporter Kibret Markos completely blowing it by missing this big story.


In Sunday's Local section, Hackensack and many other towns continue to be ignored, while precious space is devoted to a story on Leonia seeking bids on solar panels for the DPW building and municipal pool. Wow. That's real news.


In Better Living, Elisa Ung, who returned recently from maternity leave, reports on fine-dining with infants. Let's hope her poor son doesn't choke on a piece of cheesecake shoved down his throat by the dessert-obsessed restaurant reviewer.


The paper on Saturday, Sept. 18, leads with a plot against the pope's life, but there is little else of interest in the thin paper.


In Local on Friday, Sept. 17, Hackensack reporter Monsy Alvarado weighs in with an upbeat, first-anniversary story on the county homeless shelter, which is next to the county jail. 

She omits any mention of whether shelter residents are still wandering into the nearby Hudson Street neighborhood -- the source of many complaints after the building opened.

'Ageism' determines news coverage

The Record today is a prime example of how "ageism" may determine what news is covered by the former Hackensack daily.

The front page is filled with a truck-car safety crackdown under the scary headline, "Drivers beware." But a far more troubling phenomenon is on Page L-1, where a story reports that a 77-year-old man woke up from a coma four days after ramming his car into a building.

In recent years, the paper has carried numerous individual stories, like this one, about elderly drivers hitting stores, other cars, even pedestrians, sometimes with fatal results. But The Record has never written a series of articles on the challenges facing older drivers and whether driver re-training or other state or private programs are available to help them.

Another example of apparent ageism is the newspaper's devotion in recent years to covering autism, giving hundreds of hours of staff time to articles that often run on Page 1. But has The Record made a similar effort in covering Alzheimer's disease?

The second big story on Page 1 today reports how conservatives are pinning their hopes to radically remake government on Governor-elect Chris Christie. "He has ... to be prepared to close government," one former mayor says. Close government? Is there some reason The Record didn't report this story before the election.

The Local section continues its boycott of municipal news from highly diverse Teaneck, Englewood and Hackensack. An annual story about white suburban high school students spending the night in boxes to get a firsthand look at homelessness doesn't explain why the newspaper has missed the apparent completion of a new homeless shelter in Hackensack, next to the county jail.

Better Living today has the usual single recipe for vegetarians to represent food coverage in a Monday paper, but there's also an item about a free pie-tasting in charming Chester. I wonder if restaurant reviewer Elisa Ung -- who has made no secret of her affection for dessert -- will claim her share?