Winter's walking and driving challenges bore editors

It's snowing again on Euclid Avenue in Hackensack.

By VICTOR E. SASSON
Editor

An elderly or overweight pedestrian trying to climb over a slippery snow bank blocking a crosswalk isn't very dramatic.

And no one at The Record seems to have noticed how many drivers are challenging each other for the right of way on streets narrowed by uncleared snow.

Walking and driving have been a challenge since Thursday's nor'easter dumped 12 inches to 16 inches of snow and rain on the region.

Newsroom napping

But in the Woodland Park newsroom, drowsy editors order photographers to wow them with images of collapsed buildings and a smash-and-grab jewelry heist in Paramus, splashing them all over Page 1 and the Local front today.

In Teaneck and Englewood today, Orthodox Jews were forced to walk in the street to and from services or carry their small children over snow blocking crosswalks.

On Dean Street through downtown Englewood, congested with traffic in the best of times, snow narrowed the normal two lanes, prompting drivers to fight for the right of way.

Non-profit burden

Another front-page story today quotes Ridgewood Mayor Paul Aronsohn expressing concern The Valley Hospital, a non-profit, might try to have off-site properties it is buying declared tax exempt (A-1 and A-7).

Hackensack residents aren't holding their breath for their mayor, John Labrosse, to express concern over the hundreds of millions of dollars in tax-exempt property owned by the non-profit Hackensack University Medical Center, which also happens to be his employer.

The significant shift in the tax burden to residents and businesses stung again on Feb. 10, when 1st-quarter property taxes were due in Hackensack.

But residents who wrote big property tax checks don't get much in return when it comes to snow removal, and many find city plows undoing all the work of clearing driveways.

Hackensack news

Today's Page 1 photo of a roof collapse in Hackensack shows three city firefighters standing 40 feet or 50 feet away from the building and looking at it, yet the caption says they are "checking a vacant Passaic Street building."

On the Local front today, the big Hackensack news isn't the poor job of snow removal or property owners who never cleared their sidewalks.

Instead, we get another story about honest James Brady, the formerly homeless man who is still waiting for the welfare bureaucracy to restore his monthly cash benefit (L-1).

Hackensack DPW can't cope with mild storm

On Sunday morning, more than 24 hours after the snow stopped falling, Euclid Avenue, between Main and Linden streets, was still covered with the slippery white stuff. The Hackensack Department of Public Works apparently was hoping strong sunlight and higher temperatures would take care of the mess.

On Main Street, people had to climb over snow to board NJ Transit buses.

Snow also covered the pavement where Prospect Avenue meets Passaic Street.

Hackensack residents were thankful they didn't have to weather the full force of Friday's nor'easter, knowing how poorly the city's Department of Public Works does on clearing streets after major snowstorms.

Even after this mild snowstorm, the city's Department of Public Works plows missed a lot.

Early Sunday afternoon, I was driving behind a DPW dump truck filled with snow, and the driver never lowered his plow on the snow-covered block of Euclid Avenue, between Linden and Main streets, that other plows hadn't bothered to clear.

In decades of coverage, The Record's local news editors have never rated Hackensack and other municipalities on how well they do in cleaning up after snowstorms -- from plowing streets to clearing crosswalks and bus stops to enforcing ordinances on shoveling snow off of sidewalks.

That likely is one reason town officials have been able to shirk the duty they owe to provide safe streets and sidewalks for drivers and pedestrians.

Trickle-down Christie bares his fangs

Image via Wikipedia

Governor Christie's harsh budget plan shares the front page with flooding in The Record of Woodland Park today. We have more to worry about from the governor's concessions to wealthy small-business owners and rich families like the Borgs than we do from Mother Nature.

The headline on Staff Writer Charles Stile's Page 1 column calls us "guinea pigs" in the Republican's trickle-down experiment, which recalls the disastrous outcome of Ronald Reagan's similar sleight-of-hand decades ago. (Photo: President Ronald Reagan.)


On A-4, the story on Christie's proposal to end Bergen County's Sunday shopping ban makes no mention of The Record's financial and editorial support the last time shopping centers tried to repeal blue laws.


The A-18 editorial seems to have been edited by Publisher Stephen A. Borg and doesn't condemn the governor for refusing to raise the gasoline tax and reinstate the "millionaire's tax" during this unprecedented fiscal crisis.

Coverage of the weekend nor'easter, especially in Local, seems adequate today, but there is little here on how the region's routine was severely disrupted, even for those who escaped flooded basements, power outages or trees crashing down on their homes.

In Business, Your Money's Worth Columnist Kevin DeMarrais has more on shrinking packages at supermarkets. Don't you wonder why there is so little coverage of food shopping in the food pages?

Although Restaurant Reviewer Elisa Ung is on leave, she continues to be the voice of wealthy restaurant owners. Couldn't all that space in Better Living today on how restaurants use menus to market meals be better devoted to helping restaurant goers during the recession?

Lots of numbers don't tell the story

 Image via Wikipedia

About the best thing you can say about coverage of the nor'easter in The Record of Woodland Park today is that Staff Writer Charles Stile rekindled the fire of his early columns by noting Governor Christie's lack of visibility during state residents' time of need.

Still, I thought his Page 1 piece handled Christie too gently.


As for the rest of the coverage -- on the front page, inside and taking up almost all of Local -- it doesn't have the sweep of a storm that affected virtually everyone and one everyone still is talking about nearly three days later. Just listing a lot of numbers doesn't tell the human story.

Mike Kelly, the columnist, wasted his and readers' time by going to PSE&G's "war room." Stories on several towns are in Local, but there is virtually nothing about the impact on Hackensack.


That schools were closed by power outages is only part of the story. What about office buildings? Did doctors cancel appointments? Did lawyers give their paralegals a few days off? What about restaurants and supermarkets?