Gottlieb bats only .500 on Page 1

A medical building at 5 Summit Ave. is in the running for the ugliest structure in Hackensack, above and below, especially after the ground-floor garage was declared unsafe and fenced off. A resident of Thompson Street complains valet parking attendants take up spaces on the block and endanger children. Now, the garage is being demolished.

The entrance and small lobby are in the middle section, above. The building is crammed into the corner of Summit Avenue and Essex Street, near Hackensack University Medical Center.

The building is open during "regular hrs.," according to a sign on the fence blocking access to the parking garage on the Summit Avenue side.

Marty Gottlieb, the New York Times veteran who took over The Record's newsroom more than a year ago, continues to disappoint with his selection of stories for the Sunday paper, and his mindless obsession with sports. 

Today, two out of four front-page stories don't belong anywhere near Page 1.

The best pieces are staff written -- John C. Ensslin's account of the events leading up to the suicide of the son of Freeholder David Ganz, and Scott Fallon's report on a move to cap pollution at Ford Motor Co.'s dumping ground in Ringwood. 

Not much else

The rest of today's paper is disappointing.

On the front of Local, Road Warrior John Cichowski continues to stray far afield from his commuting beat with a column on the Yellow Dot, a bird that targets the cars of seniors with a shower of droppings (L-1).

A story about the Englewood school board race has Hackensack residents wondering what happened to coverage of the city's school election (L-1).

Half a loaf

On the Better Living cover, is this the first story about the high-quality hot- and cold-food bars at Whole Foods Market since the Paramus store opened four years ago (BL-1)?

On the Opinion front, Mike Kelly asks three rhetorical questions in his first paragraph, completely turning readers off (O-1).


In more than 20 years of writing a column, Kelly still does not get that readers are looking for him to go out on a limb and express strong opinions, not to ask questions.

Second look

Head Assignment Editor Deirdre Sykes and her deputy, Dan Sforza, continue to fall flat on their faces in their struggle to find enough local news.

In Saturday's thin paper, the local-news editors and their minions needed a Dean's List (L-2) and three long wire-service obituaries to fill the Local section (L-5 and L-6).

Is Lynne Hurwitz backing Hackensack slate?

Who really holds the keys to Hackensack City Hall?

 
Around City Hall, the Hackensack Coalition for Open Government -- 5 candidates in the non-partisan May  14 City Council election -- is known as the "Lynne Hurwitz slate."

So, who is Hurwitz? Well, she is 74 and lives in Hackensack.

But you won't find any additional clues in The Record's coverage of the campaign, which hasn't mentioned Hurwitz.

For that, you'll have to do an Internet search for comments about her: 



From Carol H on the Web site
of Blue Jersey, Sept. 12, 2007

I had to laugh when I read that Lynne Hurwitz, the Municipal Democratic Chair of Hackensack, felt intimidated by a bunch of rank and file Bergen County Committee Democrats who are tired of being ignored and their activist friends from Democracy for America and NJ for Democracy:

"Those opposed to the planned suit will be able to register their vote when the county committee meets. Or, said Hackensack Democratic Chairwoman Lynne Hurwitz, they could find time to schedule a private, diplomatic meeting with [Joseph] Ferriero.

"I've never known him not to want to sit down and discuss things," Hurwitz said. "The desire to bring it out on the street only tells me that they want a raucous confrontation and to embarrass the party."

But lets dig deeper, shall we?  Who exactly is Ms. Hurwitz and what job does she have at the county level?  She is Bergen County Deputy Chief of Staff. So, she is basically Ferriero's Karl Rove in the Bergen County Government.  And I wonder if she has family working for Bergen County as well......  Why, yes she does!  Husband Howie is Executive Director of the Northwest Bergen County Utilities Authority - a group that handles collective bargaining contracts with the employees union.

Combined, Lynne and Howie make over six figures and are involved in who to hire in Bergen County and what to pay them.  Now, if I was Chris Christie trying to figure out just exactly how all those Democratic County Committee Municipal Chairs wind up with County jobs, I might decide to ask Ms. Hurwitz a few questions.  But I'm not, so I'll leave my little thought experiment here.
carolh :: Lynne Hurwitz - Woman of Many Talents

Responding to criticism, Carol H said:

I did not attack Ms. Hurwitz.  I simply pointed out that she is clearly a political ally of Joe Ferriero and that she and her husband hold powerful positions in Bergen County Government - positions for influencing the hiring other Bergen County Employees.  If I wanted to be mean I really could have pointed out that she also worked for Ken Zisa when he was in the Assembly, and that she has very close ties to Bob Torricelli.  But I didn't do that, did I?

From a Web site
called Find the Data: 

Lynne B. Hurwitz was born in 1938 and retired from Bergen County on 01/11 with a retirement cause of Service. The Pension is funded by PERS - Public Employee Retirement System as a Member benefit type. 

The Salary used for the pension calculation is $97,047.6 with a monthly pension payment of $2,499.7, which is 17% higher than the average for all New Jersey State Pensions.

From PolitickerNJ,
April 30, 2010

Also worth watching is how Hackensack Democrats transitions out of the Zisa scandal.  Zisa’s brother is the Deputy Police Chief, his cousin is the City Attorney, and another brother was the longtime mayor.  The Hackensack Democratic Municipal Chair is Lynne Hurwitz, a longtime Zisa ally who now serves as Deputy Chief of Staff to Bergen County Executive Dennis C. McNerney.  Bergen County Freeholder Tomas Padilla, who is not seeking re-election, is a Hackensack police captain with exceptionally close ties to the Zisa family.

From a column in The Record,

June 30, 2012

She is a 73-year-old grandmother who says her “style is to help people.” Her critics call her a fierce, no-holds-barred power broker and key strategist behind Hackensack’s former police chief, Ken Zisa, and his family’s political machine.

See previous post on The Record's

Hackensack coverage

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

   

The Borgs and LTACH: Perfect together

Teaneck police stopped the driver of this Porsche on Main Street in Hackensack, in front of the Sears Auto Center, on Wednesday. Two other Teaneck police cars responded, below. As for traffic stops in Hackensack, they are not that common, and drivers seem to speed and roll through stop signs with abandon. This morning, a young woman in a Toyota Corolla crossed the double-yellow lines to pass my car on Spring Valley Avenue near the Maywood border.

 

By VICTOR E. SASSON
EDITOR

At a forum in a Prospect Avenue high-rise on Wednesday night, all 11 candidates for Hackensack City Council pledged to stop a developer who is fighting a zoning-board decision that rejected his plan for a 19-story hospital.

The long-term, acute-care center -- known as Bergen Passaic LTACH -- would be built between Prospect and Summit avenues, near Golf Place, outside the city's hospital zone.

A coalition of Prospect Avenue residents fought the plan for about three years before the zoning board decided the matter in January 2012.

In a basement meeting room at The Whitehall luxury co-op, independent candidate Victor E. Sasson, editor of Eye on The Record, was seated between his opponents -- two 5-member slates that call themselves Hackensack Citizens for Change and Hackensack Coalition for Open Government.

Sasson felt like he was being asked to part the Dead Sea.

Where was The Record?

No reporter for The Record covered the forum, the first of four planned at Prospect Avenue high-rises near the proposed site, which is zoned residential.

Citing the tax-exempt status of Hackensack University Medical Center, Sasson said there is no way of knowing whether developer Richard Peneles would apply for non-profit status after his hospital was built and stop paying property taxes.

Go to the river

An appropriate place for such a hospital is the 20-acre River Street parcel owned by the Borg family's North Jersey Media Group, publisher of  The Record, which abandoned Hackenack in 2009.

The property has become an eyesore. Now, wire is being stripped from the four-story building in anticipation of its demolition.

Sasson urges Pineles and the Borg family to get together and work out a land and money swap that would pave the way for construction of LTACH in a commercial zone with access to highways.

Because NJMG's land is in a flood zone, LTACH could take the form of a dry docked hospital ship -- with parking below decks -- and be dubbed Borg's Ark. 

Then, when the next Sandy hits, LTACH would be able to ride out the storm.

Another appropriate place for the 19-story hospital is also on River Street, at Kansas Street, land occupied by Costco Wholesale, which is rumored to be leaving Hackensack in about a year.

Today's paper

Superstorm Sandy unleashed unprecedented coverage of the Jersey shore, as two stories on today's front page show.

Now, head Assignment Editor Deirdre Sykes and her deputy, Dan Sforza, have an excuse for not covering Hackensack and many other towns.

Paramus officials seem blind to the possibility that merchants who allow their sign lights to burn after 11 p.m. are contributing to public safety and deterring burglaries (A-1).

Big local news

Readers will find major Hackensack news on L-2, where a photo shows a street-light and solar-panel pole that was knocked down by a bus in front of police headquarters.    

The photo caption says only the pole fell "on State Street."

Was the NJ Transit driver cited? Readers have no clue.