Spending PA toll money on mass transit is a good thing

Commuters inching up the ramp to the George Washington Bridge to reach New Jersey on Friday night are a testament to the metropolitan area's broken mass-transit system. A so-called expose in The Record today seems to question hundreds of millions in Port Authority toll dollars that were spent to improve train service between New Jersey and New York.

By VICTOR E. SASSON
EDITOR

I applaud the investigative work by Staff Writer Shawn Boburg on Page 1 of The Record today, but is the misleading three-deck headline supposed to be shocking or ignite calls for reform?

"Millions in

tolls spent

on the arts"

Actually, since 2000, hundreds of millions in Port Authority toll money wasn't spent on the arts at all, according to the story (A-4).

"The largest single expenditure by New York over that time ... ($128 million) went to Pennsylvania Station," where thousands of commuters board NJ Transit trains for home.

"New Jersey's largest single payment came in 2001, when James McGreevey was governor -- $250 million for new rail cars for [the same] NJ Transit, the state's mass transit agency" (A-4).

Boburg doesn't menton it, but the Port Authority's "mission" includes running the PATH commuter train system and operating a reverse commuter-bus lane into the Lincoln Tunnel.

The bistate agency should be criticized for expanding neither, but The Record and Boburg haven't bothered to report that story.

Farewell Genesis

Is there any reason the front page today doesn't carry a photo of Genesis Rincon, 12, in her coffin?

The number of suspects in her fatal shooting is now up to three, and their pictures are bigger than the one of her inside the casket cover at her Paterson wake (A-1).

Amateurish reporting

A related puff piece about Harley Breite, lawyer for Genesis shooting suspect Jhymiere Moore, is a real puzzle (A-6).

The freelance writer is Todd South, a reporter who covers the courts and four other beats for the Times Free Press of Chattanooga, Tenn.

Why is he writing a story about a Wayne lawyer, and what's this nonsense in the lead about Breite "vowing not to bow to the public furor" over the fatal shooting of Genesis?

South makes Breite sound like a godsend for murder defendants and others, but all of the clients mentioned in the story were convicted, and the lawyer even lost a state Assembly primary election (A-6).

South calls Breite "flamboyant" and "media savvy," apparently unaware he is one of the reporters the lawyer has played for a sucker.

Fashion report

The lead paragraph is poorly edited and includes the phrases "pony-tailed" and "pony-tail-wearing" just a few words apart. Hey, we get it.

South also mentions another irrelevant detail, that Breite "wore wide lapels on his blue pinstripe suit."

How does Editor Marty Gottlieb, who had a stellar career at The New York Times, allow this kind of low-quality journalism to run in The Record?

Local yokels

There is a lot of gee-whiz news in Local today -- from a Glen Rock man who suffered minor shark bites to a school bus fire in Englewood (L-1) -- but the section again has too much Law & Order content.

Paterson Mayor Joey Torres held an "inaugural ball" on Wednesday night, according to an L-2 story, the same day the official appeared at a press conference to announce the arrest of a suspect in the shooting of Genesis.

Not even rampant gun violence in Silk City can stop Torres from raising money.

The lead story on L-1 reports LG is threatening to pull out of Englewood Cliffs and take with it a plan to scar the Palisades with a $300 million, 143-foot-high headquarters.

Good riddance, I say.