What do Hackensack residents get for their high taxes?

Hackensack gives property tax payers a 10-day grace period, so 1st-quarter payments are due on Wednesday. When is the last time you saw a story -- any story -- about local property taxes in The Record of Woodland Park?

By VICTOR E. SASSON
EDITOR

If you live in Hackensack, Teaneck, Englewood, Ridgewood or another community with a tax-exempt hospital, you are paying more for such services as police protection and garbage collection.

In fact, residents are subsidizing the non-profit medical complexes, and in Hackensack, that means the city is powerless to collect more than $10 million on $257 million in tax-exempt property.

And Hackensack residents also are saddled with tax-exempt property owned by Bergen County, Fairleigh Dickinson University, Eastwick College and others.

All of them add to the disproportionate financial burden carried by residential and commercial property owners -- higher taxes that have been totally ignored by the local editors at The Record of Woodland Park.

At the same time, it's unclear what, if anything, those non-profits have returned to the city in lieu of taxes.

$4.5M payment

On Jan. 26, the Hackensack City Council voted to approve a settlement of claims, "some going back decades," that requires Hackensack University Medical Center to pay $4.5 million over three years.

The agreement also includes "which properties owned by HUMC and/or affiliated entities shall remain taxable."

HUMC also will pay $200,000 annually for pedestrian-bridge air rights on Atlantic and Second streets dating to December 2009, officials said.

City services

I've lived in Hackensack since 2007, and I'm pretty happy with police and fire protection, and other city services, with the exception of sloppy snow plowing, which endangers drivers and pedestrians.

Street paving also seems to be hit and miss, with some blocks showing rough patches after being neglected for more than 30 years.

And the city's free-spending Board of Education has been a thorn in taxpayers' sides, operating this year on a $106 million budget that exceeds the city's own.

My school taxes are 44.13% of my total property tax bill.

Police report

In a year-end report, Hackensack police said they issued 6,981 moving violations, but I still see stop-sign runners almost every day, especially at Euclid Avenue and the railroad tracks, where there are four stop signs.

The report listed 2,048 accidents, two fatal, and 465 "hit & run."

"Both burglaries and robberies in 2014 and 2015 were reported to be the lowest in past 30 years," the report stated.

"The Police Department worked closely" with the [tax-exempt] county homeless shelter on South River Street "in addressing the concerns of the homeless."

The report was silent on whether HUMC has agreed to provide medical staff who could help police cut down on the large number of trips transporting homeless people from the shelter to the hospital's emergency room -- another story The Record has ignored.

Hackensack news?

Staff Writer Todd South didn't cover the Jan. 26 City Council meeting in Hackensack or the two meetings before that.

South, who has been promoted to the Bergen County government beat from his Hackensack duties, today reports on a regional high school poetry contest (L-1).

In today's thin Local section, you'll find municipal news from East Rutherford, Rutherford, Leonia, Waldwick and Rockleigh, but nothing from Hackensack.

A brief on L-3 today must make the 535 residents of Rockleigh feel really safe, and speaks volumes about how North Jersey is poorly served by the home-rule system of local government.

The borough's Fire Department has only two fire engines, so the council "is exploring" an agreement to "borrow" a vehicle in an emergency.

Staff Writer Marc Lightdale doesn't shed any light on whether the vehicle would be another firetruck.

Page 1

Editor Deirdre Sykes and Managing Editor Dan Sforza have been in their new positions for only 10 days, but their front-pages have been uniformly disappointing.

Today's is dominated by politics and sports -- again.

Sykes and Sforza still can't shake their old roles as local assignment editors who did their best to screw readers searching for news of their town.

Does anybody still read Columnist Charles Stile's almost daily assessment of Governor Christie's doomed campaign for the GOP presidential nomination (A-1)?

The CNN Poll of Polls is reporting Christie will be the choice of only 5% of New Hampshire Republican primary voters or seventh in the field of eight -- just above Dr. Ben Carson's 3%.

HUMC, other hospitals finally address what ails taxpayers

A Joseph M. Sanzari Inc. company vehicle in Hackesnack, where the Children's Hospital at Hackesnack University Medical Center bears the name of the construction magnate.

By VICTOR E. SASSON
EDITOR

As Hackensack University Medical Center gobbled up the neighborhood around it, the property tax burden on every resident of the city grew heavier.

As a non-profit, hundreds of millions of dollars in HUMC property is tax-exempt, shifting the burden to home and business owners.

Today's front-page story in The Record on property tax deals with non-profit hospitals only mentions HUMC in passing.

Perfect together?

The newspaper and the hospital have a long relationship, including the years Jennifer A. Borg sat on the hospital board, and HUMC advertising appeared regularly on NorthJersey.com.

Borg is general counsel of North Jersey Media Group, publisher of The Record, which was headquartered in Hackensack for more than 110 years.

She is the older sister of Publisher Stephen A. Borg and daughter of NJMG Chairman Malcolm A. Borg.

The Record's coverage of HUMC expansion in its residential neighborhood was far less extensive than later coverage of The Valley Hospital's building plans. 

That was the case even though the Ridgewood hospital would be building within its existing campus.

In Hackensack, HUMC took a lot of residential property, including a Prospect Avenue home that housed a famous jazz studio where Thelonious Monk recorded "Hackensack" in 1954.

In recent years, the hospital has ignored Hackensack Police Director Mike Mordaga, who asked for the assignment of medical staff to the county shelter on South River Street to eliminate police having to take so many homeless people to the emergency room at city expense.

Neglected story

Since I moved to Hackensack in 2007, today's story may be only the first or second in The Record to discuss the burden on property tax payers of the hospital's non-profit status.

And there hasn't been any mention of two other huge Hackensack non-profits, Bergen County and Fairleigh Dickinson University, that aggravate the problem.

Nor has the Woodland Park daily reported on residents who have called on city officials to negotiate with the non-profits for regular payments or services in lieu of taxes.