Hackensack Democrats try to claw way back into power

In June, Board of Education Attorney Richard Salkin conferred with Lynne Hurwitz, who runs the Hackensack Democratic Organization, which suffered a humiliating defeat in the 2013 City Council election. Salkin lost his second job as municipal prosecutor as a result.

Board of Education President Jason Nunnermacker is hoping to take back one City Council seat for the Democrats in a special November election, even though he was a member of the losing sate in 2013. The Record has done a poor job of exposing the partisan rancor that has dominated meetings for more than two years.

By VICTOR E. SASSON
EDITOR

Behind the facade of Hackensack's non-partisan City Council elections, the two major parties battle for the hearts and minds of an apathetic electorate.

Only 3,000 to 4,000 votes are cast in the May balloting every four years in a city with about 20,000 registered voters.

Now, the city's Democratic Organization is trying to claw its way back into power after its entire slate went down in defeat in 2013.

Zisaville

Bergen County Democrats were part of the political establishment that kept the Zisa family in power for decades, filling jobs with loyal party members and contributors.

In a message to Bergen Democrats, Lynne Hurwitz, head of city Democrats, is asking for financial support to elect Board of Education President Jason Nunnermacker to a vacant seat on the council.

Nunnermacker was part of the Open Government slate, allied with the Zisas, that lost the May 2013 election to reformers who ran under the banner of Citizens for Change.

Council critics

Since losing the election, Nunnermacker, former running mates and fellow board members have appeared at nearly every meeting to attack the reformers, including Councilwoman Rose Greenman, who resigned, setting up the special Nov. 3 election.

In her message, Hurwitz claims Nunnermacker "has dedicated himself to improving his hometown," but provides no specifics.

Other candidates on Nov. 3 are Richard L. Cerbo, the son of a former mayor; businessman Jason Some, who was appointed to fill Greenman's seat; and Deborah Keeling-Geddis, a teacher's assistant in the city schools.

Any of them have greater appeal than Nunnermacker, 38, an attorney some Democrats refer to as "a turkey."

Today's paper

Editor Martin Gottlieb again devotes most of Page 1 today to two of The Record's burned-out columnists (A-1).

Writing from Havana, Staff Writer Mike Kelly perpetuates media stereotypes of the Cuban Revolution.

But Kelly didn't find any political prisoners.

Instead, he focuses on pianist Angel Cabo, who left the island because he needed "more freedom to choose the songs he wanted to play" (A-7).

The Record's copy desk dusted off a photo over line the paper used the last time a pope visited the Caribbean's biggest island in 2012:

"Pope's visit raises curtain on Cuba"

After putting together this non-story, Kelly likely will go in search of Jo Ann Chesimard, a New Jersey fugitive and a central figure in many of his previous columns.

Christie's 'brand'

Meanwhile, it's hard to believe Gottlieb would allow Columnist Charles Stile to report Governor Christie is campaigning for president as a defender of the middle class without challenging the GOP bully in print (A-1).

Gottlieb and Stile are being irresponsible by not listing all of the programs and policies Christie has used in his war on the middle class in New Jersey, and his repeated veto of a tax surcharge on millionaires.

Stile's columns often are the print version of the sound bite that dominates TV news.

Christie is allowed to go unchallenged when he claims the middle class are "getting plowed over by Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton" -- exactly the opposite of their record.

Local news?

There are few municipal-news stories in Local today to tell readers how well or how poorly their towns are being run in return for all those property taxes they pay.

Except for the centerpiece on new immigrants, including a man who left Cuba nine years ago, the entire Local front today is devoted to Law & Order developments and settlement of a lawsuit against the Teaneck Public Library director (L-1).

Englewood schools

On L-3, no one asked the new superintendent in Englewood what he will do to integrate the elementary and middle schools.

Instead, Robert Kravitz was praised for his management and business skills, including starting a company that sold desserts to local restaurants.

Staff Writer Kim Lueddeke doesn't say where Kravitz lives, whether he has children and where he will send them to school.

Kravitz has been superintendent of the Englewood Cliffs district since 2012.

Sugar puzzle

Freelancer Julia Sexton warns readers that the chef at Grange in Westwood has given the New American menu "a sugary, pan-tropical spin."

One dish, Floribbean Shrimp, is made with spiced rum and pineapple cream sauce ($12).

The delicate flavor of the shellfish, Sexton explains, "struggled to be heard in all that sugar" (BL-16).

Yet, one of the two dishes she recommends in the 2-star review is creme brulee "whose warm crust of caramelized sugar yielded with a pleasing crack."

Sexton is no better than Elisa Ung, the dessert-obsessed chief restaurant critic.

With both, the legions of diabetic readers also are struggling to be heard.

New poll on Christie suggests he may very well be history

On a brisk morning in Paramus, the outside temperature of 10 degrees was tolerable, but the biting wind chill wasn't.

By VICTOR E. SASSON
EDITOR

A new poll on Governor Christie's record low "favorability" rating could be just the excuse Editor Marty Gottlieb, Columnist Charles Stile and Staff Writer Melissa Hayes need to take their swelled heads out of their oversized anuses.

Typical of how The Record plays anti-Christie stories, the poll on the GOP bully being viewed "unfavorably" by a majority of New Jersey voters -- for the first time since early 2010 -- is on A-3 today.

Precious space on Page 1 is reserved for yet another in a endless series of speculative stories on how one of Christie's policies will affect his White House dreams (A-1).

Meanwhile, the Woodland Park daily has taken little notice of how the Garden State has become choked with weeds since Christie's ascendancy.

Port Atrocity

Thanks to the governors of New Jersey and New York, patronage, cronyism, conflicts of interest and favorable treatment have been hallmarks of the Port Authority for decades (A-1 today and Thursday).

But The Record's editors have spent little time reporting the bi-state agency's only response to increasing traffic congestion at the Hudson River crossings has been to raise tolls, not to expand mass transit.

$541 v. $460,000

Two 20-year-old Paterson women facing robbery and related charges for allegedly shoplifting $541 from Lord & Taylor in Paramus could face jail time (L-2).

So, it's strange that former Ridgewood employee Thomas Rica was given probation for his systematic theft of $460,000 in parking-meter revenue.

Today's L-1 story on Rica's non-custodial sentence and how his thievery went undetected for so long is likely the first time since the crime came to light last year The Record has bothered to ask village residents for their reaction.

Reporters and their assignment editors are much more comfortable calling up so-called experts, consultants, prosecutors, lawyers, poll directors and just about anybody else except readers and other North Jersey residents.

That certainly has been the case since Christie took office and started waging war against the middle and working classes.

No editing

Staff Writer Chris Harris, who has been covering the Rica case from the outset, apparently gets no editing.

How else to explain Harris calling Rica's methodical theft of quarters a "crime wave" (L-1).

Also, Harris reports Rica stole "more than a million quarters," but an editorial puts the loot at "almost 1.9 million quarters" (A-8).

The story and editorial also can't agree on whether the original theft was $460,000 (story) or almost $472,000 (editorial).

Hackensack news

A story on Aldi seeking to build a supermarket at 480 Main St. in Hackensack, on the site of a vacant Sears appliance store, is good news to nearby apartment residents who now rely on the grocery section of Target, which doesn't offer meat or fresh fish (L-1).

Another story on the Local front today, about residents opposing a four-story apartment building near downtown Leonia, includes a map (L-1).

But what's the point of running a map, beyond filling space, if Broad Avenue, Leonia's main drag, isn't labeled?

Indoor picnic

I wonder whether freelance Restaurant Reviewer Julia Sexton will ever realize the artery clogging lobster poached in butter, foie gras pate and creme brulee she sampled at Picnic on the Square have long been out of fashion with the older readers who make up the bulk of her audience (BL-14)?

Instead, she says the 34-seat Ridgewood restaurant, the second from Executive Chef Christine Nunn, is inappropriate for "thrifty diners."

I read the review before glancing at the byline and realizing Sexton seems to be channeling The Record's chief restaurant critic, Elisa Ung.

There is no discussion of salads or low-mercury fish or whether the kitchen is willing to prepare food without butter and heavy cream.

And I'm puzzled by Sexton finding " a large pile of arugula, avocado and mango" under a carpaccio of bluefin tuna "superfluous." 

That sounds delicious, and I wonder if Picnic serves another raw fish, such as fluke, which isn't overly exploited and has far lower levels of harmful mercury.

Sexton, who is the restaurant critic for Westchester magazine, visited Picnic three times for the 2.5-star review, and took at least one guest.

That's a ton of money for North Jersey Media Group to spend for such an uninformative report to readers.

Speeding trucker paralyzes region and editors shrug

Clues on this directional sign can tell you the town in which the intersection is located. The signs can be found all over New Jersey.

By VICTOR E. SASSON
EDITOR

For at least the past decade, The Record's editors have ignored speeding, tailgating and other aggressive drivers, and a dramatic decline in enforcement, especially on highways.

On Thursday morning, hours after a speeding trucker slammed into another tractor-trailer on the George Washington Bridge -- killing himself and paralyzing the region's traffic-- the clueless editors published a column on drowsy drivers. 

Today, even with more than 20 hours to work on the story of the 2 a.m. crash, the front-page map by Staff Artist R.L. Rebach looks like it was put together by a 4-year-old (A-1).

No New Jersey town is shown, not even Fort Lee, where officials coping with the resulting jams on Thursday could be forgiven for thinking Governor Christie was up to more of his dirty tricks.

But on the other side of the Hudson, the map shows the words "NEW YORK" and "New York City" stacked on top of one another.

Did anyone proof Page 1, the most important page in the paper? Where was six-figure Production Editor Liz Houlton, in bed?

Fat cats

The story on Christie's latest appearance on the "Tonight Show" is way back on A-9, where it belongs.

Should Alfred P. Doblin, editor of the Editorial Page, recuse himself when an important public policy issue affects his boss, Publisher Stephen A. Borg?

Fuhggetaboutit.

Today -- as the state's fiscal morass deepens, no thanks to Christie -- an editorial dismisses a senator's proposal to tax residents who make $350,000 a year or more (A-18).

Winging it

The clueless Road Warrior continues to make it up as he goes along, coining a strange acronym for NJ Transit ("NJT") and calling NY Waterway just "Waterway" (L-6).

In his Page 1 column on Thursday, Staff Writer John Cichowski, the confused reporter who writes the so-called commuting column, also "reported that a 2005 study showed that 18- to 19-year-olds were more likely to drive drowsy than other age groups," according to the Facebook page for Road Warrior Bloopers. 

"The study actually reported that 18- to 29-year-olds were more likely to drive drowsy than other age groups."

Hey, that's only 10 years off. Maybe, he should get points and a bonus for trying to get it right.

That wasn't the only problem in the overlong column, which was padded with lots of stuff having nothing to do with drowsy driving. See:


 Road Warrior can't help making readers drowsy


Cold shoulder

In Better Living today, freelancer Julia Sexton pans the bistro fare served at Patisserie Florent in downtown Englewood.

Sexton brought a "shelf -temperature" bottle of white wine to the casual eatery, apparently expecting a bucket of ice to chill it, and in her data box, made a point of complaining none was available (BL-18).

At the end, a note informs readers "Elisa Ung's reviews will return Friday," but not whether she is having her stomach stapled or her coronary arteries cleared.

Hackensack deserves better than this

Prospect Avenue and Golf Place in Hackensack as the sun set on Wednesday. High-rise residents are engaged in a bitter fight with a wealthy developer who wants to build a 19-story, long-term, acute-care hospital nearby -- in a residential neighborhood outside the city's hospital zone.

By VICTOR E. SASSON
EDITOR

On Friday, The Record ran a poorly edited brief on Hackensack's proposed budget, and buried it inside Local (L-6) -- in contrast to a full-blown story on Teaneck's spending plan on the front of the local-news section two days earlier.

And even though the May 14 Hackensack City Council election is the most important in decades, the Woodland Park daily has written a grand total of only three stories so far, and has denied equal time to a former staffer, independent candidate Victor E. Sasson, editor of Eye on The Record.

Hackensack deserves better than this -- unless head Assignment Editor Deirdre Sykes and her deputy, Dan Sforza, want to preserve City Hall's patronage system and control of the city by cronies of the Zisa family.

Today's paper

Residents of Hackensack and other communities assaulted by noise from private jets at Teterboro Airport are disappointed to see the airport's control tower spared from closing as a result of federal budget cuts (A-1 and A-5).

A correction on A-2 notes Production Editor Liz Houlton and her snoring copy editors missed the misspelling of a word used in the North Jersey Spelling Bee.

A photo with the story leading Local shows a suspect's heavily damaged car at Englewood police headquarters, but the caption states the vehicle "blocked an entrance to an elementary school after he allegedly went on  a drunken-driving rampage" (L-1).

Legalized theft

Friday is sentencing day at the Bergen County Courthouse in Hackensack -- one of the busiest in the state -- but readers are being asked to believe the sentencing of a woman for stealing money from a Hackensack lawyer was the only thing worthy of a story today (L-1).

On the other hand, given the $6 million in legal fees Hackensack has had to shell out in cases involving its disgraced former police chief, Ken "I Am The Law" Zisa, this is a rare instance where a lawyer isn't doing the stealing.

City Attorney Joseph C. Zisa Jr. -- the ex-chief's cousin -- and the City Council recently pushed through an additional $500,000 to pay for legal bills racked up by two police officers who were acquitted of criminal charges in one of those cases.

During the afternoon rush hour on Friday, commuters on the Garden State Parkway encountered delays of up to 30 minutes on the northbound roadway, above. The Record's transportation coverage continues to ignore overburdened roads and packed buses and trains.

$10.95 for bread?

The Record has put readers on a starvation diet with another half-page restaurant review from Julia Sexton, the critic for Westchester Magazine (BL-18 on Friday).

Does Sexton live in North Jersey? Is she a pal of Food Editor Susan Leigh Sherrill? Why is she writing restaurant reviews in the absence of Staff Writer Elisa Ung?

And why bother with Diwani, a mediocre Indian restaurant in Ridgewood that charges $10.95 for a bread sampler?

Follow me on Twitter/@vsasson

   

More scintillating infrastructure news

A sculpture by J. Seward Johnson at Hackensack University Medical Center in Hackensack was modeled after one of The Record's local-news editors.

Only an engineer could love the front page of The Record today, dominated as it is by the demolition of a Route 3 bridge and much hand-wringing over a tight turn for tractor-trailers in Little Falls (A-1).

But there's more on the front of Local, where the Road Warrior column again gives voice to complainers, whiners and crackpots who seem to have suddenly discovered North Jersey's antiquated road system (L-1).

Along with duplication, inefficiency and high property taxes, our home-rule system has saddled us with dangerous railroad crossings and narrow local roads that haven't been updated much since the 1960s.

You'd think the brilliant journalists at the Woodland Park daily would have called for wider, safer roads a couple of decades ago. But you'd be wrong.

Humoring morons

Instead, transportation writers like Cichowski, desperate to fill space, humor every moron behind the wheel who sends in a bitchy e-mail about traffic congestion or roads with too many intersections or whatever -- no matter how exaggerated or inaccurate.

Years after the lack of mass transit gave us traffic congestion of nightmarish proportions, the only staffer who writes consistently about trains and buses is Editorial Page Editor Alfred P. Doblin.

That's because he takes them, as is evident from his column today on the reopened Hoboken Terminal (A-13).

But even Doblin has written more about mass transit since Superstorm Sandy hit on Oct. 29 than in all the years before -- no surprise at a car-centric newspaper that relies so heavily on advertising revenue from automobile dealers.


Another correction


On A-2 today, a correction acknowledges that Editor Liz Houlton's copy editors missed a major error in a graphic that appeared on Thursday's front page.

On L-3 today, a photo caption stated incorrectly that "a flapping billboard halted traffic on Route 17 south," when, in fact, the loose vinyl billboard prompted police to close the road. 

Local yokels

The Local section contains Teaneck news (L-1), but head Assignment Editor Deirdre Sykes and her deputy, Dan Sforza, couldn't find anything to report about Hackensack.

Mile-long menu

In Better Living, the centerfold restaurant review makes a fusion restaurant in Wyckoff called Aoyama sound awful (BL-14 and 15).

Readers wonder why the paper didn't just run a few paragraphs of warning.

Fans of Wondee's, Lotus Cafe, So Gong Dong and other places with Thai, Chinese or Korean menus got a belly laugh from co-owner Helena Hsue, who said, apparently with a straight face, "It's impossible to stay open with one Asian cuisine."

Readers also wonder why the review was written by Julia Sexton, a restaurant critic for Westchester Magazine.