In Hackensack, a vote for the underdog is a vote for reform

Independent Hackensack City Council candidate Victor E. Sasson is urging the Borg family to offer 20 acres along River Street, including The Record's old headquarters, above, to the developer of a controversial Long-Term Acute Care Hospital proposed for a small parcel on Prospect Avenue or to the city for the site of a community center and public pool.

 

Hackensack residents won't find any news of their city in The Record today, but they'll have a lot of questions for the outgoing mayor and other City Council members after reading a story in the Local section.

The borough of Ridgefield is voting on Tuesday to decide whether officials should spend $550,000 initially toward the construction of a $15 million civic center (L-3).

Hackensack doesn't have anything like a $15 million civic center or even a public pool.

The City Council in "Zisaville" has raised property taxes 65%, but can't afford to pave streets.

And the council, along with City Attorney Joseph C.  Zisa Jr., squandered $6 million in legal fees on all of the civil and criminal cases sparked by his cousin, Ken Zisa, the former state Assemblyman and convicted ex-police chief.

Independent candidate Victor E. Sasson (Line 11) is urging residents to get out and vote for reform. He is considered an underdog.

Five members of the Citizens for Change slate also stand for reform (Lines 1-5).

But Coalition for Open Government candidates can be counted on to perpetuate the Zisa family's politics of greed (Lines 6-10). 

The Hudson Street building with the private law offices of Hackensack City Attorney Joseph C. Zisa Jr. is available for lease, according to a sign in a first-floor window.

One-track mind

Today's Page 1 story on NJ Transit's failure to safeguard hundreds of train cars and engines from Superstorm Sandy was coordinated with WNYC-FM, the National Public Radio station, which aired the first of two parts this morning. 

The station identified Staff Writer Karen Rouse as "a senior reporter at The Bergen Record," and credited her with breaking the story of NJ Transit's expensive screw-up.

There was no mention of how The Record's coverage of mass transit before Sandy hit on Oct. 29, 2012, consisted of sending a reporter to meetings of NJ Transit and the New Jersey Turnpike Authority.

Nor that the editors never assign Rouse, Road Warrior John Cichowski or any other reporter to ride buses and trains, and report on them from the commuters' point of view. 

Dissing Hackensack

WNYC-FM also aired a story on Tuesday's municipal election in Jersey City, but turned down a request from Sasson for coverage of the crucial Hackensack contest.

Sasson and other City Council hopefuls appeared at forums held in four high-rises and two churches, but the Johnson Public Library refused to hold a candidates' night.

And the Teaneck League of Women Voters, which also covers Hackensack, told Sasson that as an independent candidate, he could not ask the group to moderate a debate.

The polls in Hackensack are open from 6 a.m. to 8 p.m. Tuesday.
 

A street named after Sarah Palin?

Image by dsearls via Flickr

A Leonia street in 1927. There is no Palin Boulevard in town, despite what The Record says.

The news copy desk appears to be long past being embarrassed by inaccurate headlines, typos, errors and the ungrammatical writing it misses or introduces into stories published in The Record of Woodland Park. Many errors are never acknowledged or corrected the next day. 

With Editors Francis Scandale and Deirdre Sykes desperately scrambling to find just about anything to fill space, there seems to be no time to set the record straight.

Take a look at that non-fatal, accident-of-the-day photo on the front of Sykes' Local section today, the one where a woman trashed her new car, which, according to the caption, flipped and ended up leaning against a pole in Leonia.

The caption, written by a news copy editor, says the accident occurred at Fort Lee Road and Palin Boulevard -- as in GOP heroine Sarah Palin. But there is no Palin Boulevard in that stubbornly Democratic town -- it's Paulin Boulevard.

It gets even worse

But there's something more egregious on that same page. 

Has Staff Writer Matthew Van Dusen, who covers Ridgefield, started flacking for the mayor?

The lead story on L-1 is a thinly disguised trial balloon lofted by Mayor Anthony R. Suarez, who incurred hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees in winning an acquittal on federal bribery conspiracy charges in October. The first paragraph notes, "Victory didn't come cheap." The story continues:

"Now the question is, Who will pay his legal bills?"

But the only one who appears to be asking the question is Van Dusen, who couldn't find anything else about Ridgefield to report. There's not a word of comment from the mayor himself. 

It sounds like Suarez doesn't have the balls to propose, at a public meeting, getting reimbursed by the borough's insurer, so he has Van Dusen write a story to throw out the possibility taxpayers are going to get stuck for legal bills from Michael Critchley -- one of the best criminal defense attorneys money can buy.

Animal news

Sykes, the head assignment editor, couldn't come up with enough local news to fill the section today, so she runs another story about harness racing on L-1. That story and others about the Meadowlands belong in the A-section, but she's so desperate, she'll run anything that fills all that space her clueless minions leave empty.

L-3 today is filled not with municipal news, but with police and fire news, plus news about the police in Hackensack, where Staff Writer Monsy Alvarado is chronicling every burp, hiccup, fart and hacking cough of the disciplinary hearings for cops who sued suspended Police Chief Ken Zisa. 

The harness racing story on L-1 isn't the only animal news today. The bottom of the front page is filled with reporting about the first day of the black bear hunt after a five-year moratorium.

The story gives the weight of the biggest bear killed -- 661 pounds -- much like the signs giving the weight of a fighting bull entering the ring in Mexico City -- another venue for brutalizing animals. One hunter is even quoted as saying he is going to barbecue bear meat.

In view of how little Food Editor Susan Leigh Sherrill contributes to the Better Living section, readers will have to satisfy themselves with this morsel of "food news."

You call this local news, Deirdre?

Half of the Local news section today is covered with a story and photos of a new spiritual center at Ramapo College in Mahwah -- the latest example of what head Assignment Editor Deirdre "F.U. Hackensack" Sykes uses as filler to replace local news her staff doesn't file. 


Gee-whiz, would you look at that wild design. But it's not open to the public, so readers in Hackensack, Teaneck, Englewood and lots of other towns Sykes ignores can't even go there and pray for better coverage of what local officials are doing or not doing.

This has been going on for a couple of years now, and one could argue the lack of scrutiny can lead to what we have seen on the front page of The Record of Woodland Park the past two days: another federal trial of a petty potentate who runs one of Bergen County's 70 towns. Why is this on Page 1?

Haven't we read this story a hundred times before? 

Ridgefield Mayor Anthony R. Suarez meets with a developer at a restaurant, when the former knows he should be meeting the developer nowhere else but in town hall. 

Even when it's a great Turkish place like Beyti Kabob, that's one strike against the mayor.

Today, we get a report on the informant's testimony, envelopes stuffed with cash, the go-between or bag man, transfers of money in a parking lot and protestations of innocence. 

How routine, how predictable, how boring. 

Doesn't Editor Francis Scandale realize he's been working in New Jersey for nearly a decade or does he still talk about what he did in Denver, what he did at Reuters?

How about a story on how the home-rule system fosters corruption? 

Hey, Desk Warrior John Cichowski, when is the last time you noticed the weather? Today, his L-1 column, which is supposed to explore all aspects of commuting, is about the dangers of driving with flip-flops.

What would The Record do if it couldn't fill its columns with wire service stories or contributions from The Star-Ledger and Daily News? Unfortunately, they dilute the paper's local flavor.

You can see that today on the front of Business (L-7), where the major story is about foreigners buying Miami real estate for cash (they sound like money launderers), and inside Better Living, where the major "food" story on F-2 is about a globe-trotting wine maker from France, not one of New Jersey's wineries.


Does Publisher Greedy Stevie Borg even read the paper? 

Or does he make the short hop from his Tenafly mansion to the Englewood wine bar he and his big sister have invested in, sip an old Bordeaux and tell himself how great life is?