After 20-plus years, columnist can't hack it

A noisy private business jet takes off or lands at Teterboro Airport and flies over Hackensack every few minutes most mornings, afternoons and evenings. They are driving some residents crazy, but imagine what it's like to live next to the airport, a favorite of the 1%.

Columnist Mike Kelly is back on Page 1 of The Record today, asking the rhetorical questions that allow him to avoid directly criticizing Rutgers officials over the Mike Rice affair.

Questions are Kelly's specialty, but without them, his columns are nothing more than news stories, stringing together quotes from such sources as lawmakers, and state and university officials.

Columnists are supposed to have voices and strong points of view -- damn the attribution -- not ask questions, such as this one in his second paragraph today:

"Why did so many allegedly smart academics seem so clueless to the significance of the coach's abuse and what they needed to do about it."

I need some caffeine.

Editor Marty Gottlieb runs two columns about Rutgers on the front page, and a news story inside -- the fifth day in a row of over-the-top coverage that leaves most readers searching for some other news.

Dissing Hackensack

The Page 1 story on towns holding April school elections makes no mention of Hackensack, where officials censored public questions at a recent forum for candidates and where a school board member is running for a seat in the May 14 City Council election.

In today's Local, the big Hackensack news apparently is the first report about the March 22 closing of a wing at the Fanny M. Hillers School, but the story assumes all 45,000 residents of the city know where it is (L-3).

Second look

On Sunday's Business front, Your Money's Worth Columnist Kevin DeMarrais praised Whole Foods Market's decision to list genetically modified ingredients on labels, and made a rare mention of organic food -- more than 30 years after the chain was founded (B-1).

Travel Editor Jill Schensul completely ignored the American Littoral Society in her Sunday cover story on volunteers flocking to restore the Jersey shore after Superstorm Sandy (T-1). 

The ALS is based in Highlands.

More deeply flawed reporting in Local

An ambulance from Hackensack University Medical Center, whose repeated expansions have forever changed life in its Hackensack neighborhood, and not for the better. The non-profit hospital doesn't pay taxes on an estimated $130 million in property.

On the front of today's Local news section in The Record, the first major Hackensack story since March 22 and the Road Warrior column both contain major errors.

If past practice is any guide, readers shouldn't expect to see corrections published on Monday's A-2.

Today's L-1 story on attorney Richard Malagiere and the controversial Bergen Passaic Long-Term Acute Care Hospital almost halves the height of the rejected building.

Given the bitter, 3-year battle between Prospect Avenue residents and the developer, reporting that the hospital would be 10 stories -- and not 19 stories or the originally proposed 24 stories -- is simply irresponsible, and only rubs salt in residents' wounds.

Dissing Hackensack

Hackensack readers are accustomed to being ignored by head Assignment Editor Deirdre Sykes and her deputy, Dan Sforza.

But they continue to wonder why The Record pays a six-figure salary to Production Editor Liz Houlton, whose sleep-deprived copy editors and proof readers keep on missing major errors passed onto them by Sykes and Sforza.  

The story on LTACH, as the hospital plan is known, quotes only two of the 11 candidates in the upcoming City Council election in reference to Malagiere, a Zisa family ally who is the former zoning board attorney.

Zisaville pays well

Malagiere has received more than $1.2 million in legal fees from Hackensack and the Bergen County freeholders in the past three years.

The story also quotes City Attorney Joseph C. Zisa Jr. as defending the retention of Malagiere on the LTACH case at $125 an hour to fight the developer's appeal.

Zisa, cousin of disgraced former Police Chief Ken "I Am The Law" Zisa, appears to see his role as facilitating the payment of hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees to a small fraternity of lawyers, including Malagiere.

Say it ain't so, Joe

In the nearly 11 months since Ken Zisa was convicted, The Record has never questioned why Joseph Zisa still is the city attorney.

Throw the bum out, says City Council candidate Victor E. Sasson, editor of Eye on The Record. 

Another bum

Staff Writer John Cichowski has made so many major errors in The Road Warrior column, he has totally lost any credibility.

Today, his response to a question from Hackensack reader James Pepe about "anonymous reporting of litterers" is not only flip (L-6), but completely ignores the right to swear out a citizen's complaint, as I did when I saw a woman throw a lit cigarette butt out of her car in Teaneck.

I wrote down her license-plate number and make of car, drove to police headquarters and asked that a summons be issued to the car owner.

I was notified of a court date and showed up, as did the woman who littered.

The judge didn't fine her, because he said I couldn't positively identify her as the driver, but he did lecture her about the fire danger of throwing a lit cigarette butt out of her car window.

Any driver or pedestian can use the same procedure to have a summons sworn out against someone who litters, passes a stop sign or red light, or doesn't yield to them in a crosswalk.  

See previous posts on mass transit 

and Hackensack City Council campaign 

Further adventures in mass transit

On Exchange Place in Jersey City, near the PATH station, is a powerful memorial to thousands of Poles who died of starvation in Siberia in 1939, and to the more than 15,000 Polish soldiers, intellectuals and others massacred in 1940 by invading Soviet troops in Katyn, Poland.

The down escalator at the Exchange Place station.

The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey took over the Trans-Hudson lines in 1962, but the bi-state agency apparently has never expanded its reach, despite increasing traffic congestion in the region, thus denying drivers an escape from increasingly higher tolls.

Commuters who use the stairs on the right to reach the street at PATH's World Trade Center stop in Manhattan don't need a gym membership.

The Port Authority is using toll revenue to help build the new World Trade Center, whose completion is behind schedule and millions of dollars over budget.

The luggage racks on the upper level of double-decker rail cars used by the Long Island Rail Road, above, and NJ Transit are too low,  and even daily commuters hit their heads hard on them. When I stood up, my baseball cap brushed the ceiling of the car.

You won't find much mass-transit news in The Record:

The Road Warrior is fixated on potholes, tinted windshields and other driving trivia, and the other transportation reporter continues to file hundreds of column inches on Superstorm Sandy damage to rail cars and locomotives.

You'd think the Borgs have conspired with North Jersey car dealers, including those lining Hackesnack's Tin Alley, to keep news of packed trains and buses, and choking traffic congestion, out of the paper.

The payoff: Hundreds of thousands of dollars in advertising revenue from automobile dealers.

The message to readers is clear: Get in your car at every opportunity, and floor it. 

City Council candidate refines campaign platform

Private jets landing or taking off from Teterboro Airport shatter the peace and quiet once enjoyed by homeowners and high-rise residents of Hackensack.

Victor E. Sasson of Hackensack, the only independent candidate in the May 14 City Council election, has refined his campaign platform.

Sasson also is the only candidate who pledges to give back one-quarter of his $10,400 council salary, if he is elected.

VOTE FOR PEACE AND QUIET
VOTE AGAINST THE MACHINE
SPLIT YOUR VOTE FOR
THE FUTURE OF HACKENSACK

Victor E. Sasson, a former newspaper reporter who is running as an independent in the May 14 City Council election, is asking for your vote. I am running on a quality of life platform that seeks to rein in property tax increases and improve city services.

The election is the most important in decades. My name will appear at the bottom of a column of 10 other candidates -- symbolizing how I will get to the bottom of things. You can vote for me and 4 other candidates.

If elected, I will:

• End the patronage mill at City Hall.

• Cut the city budget by $2 million and maintain services.

• Sell up to 15 cars now being driven home by city employees.

• Work with Teterboro Airport to reduce aircraft noise.

• Get Hackensack to purchase more efficient vehicles.

• Start collection of garbage and recyclables after 6:30 a.m.

• Ban commercial landscaping work on Sundays.

• Get police to crack down on speeders, stop-sign violators and loud motorcycles.

• Encourage the city to undertake a major program to repave streets. Have turn lanes installed on Passaic Street, at Summit Avenue, and at other traffic bottlenecks.

• Encourage the non-profit Hackensack University Medical Center to pay more to the city in lieu of taxes.

• Stop a 19-story, long-term, acute-care hospital from going up between Prospect and Summit avenues, near Golf Place.

• Improve the food at Hackensack High School, and encourage administrators to plant vegetable gardens at all of the schools to fight the obesity epidemic.

• Encourage the City Council to deliver a property tax cut to residents by passing along some of the additional tax revenue from major building projects, and gasoline and electricity savings.

• Call me with suggestions or if you need a ride to the polls: 201-488-3012.

• Follow me on Twitter/@vsasson

• Read my blogs:

• Eye on The Record

• Do You Really Know What You’re Eating?