New Hackensack reporter isn't asking hard questions

At first blush, a proposal to change Hackensack's form of government, hold City Council elections every two years and allow residents to vote on repealing ordinances belongs in the toilet.

By VICTOR E. SASSON
EDITOR

Buried in the Local section of The Record today is a long story on changing Hackensack's form of government that raises a lot of unanswered questions.

Staff Writer Todd South reports opponents of the mayor and other City Council members -- calling themselves Hackensack Citizens for Good Government -- are seeking 4,000 signatures on a petition to get their proposal on the ballot (L-3).

South, the new Hackensack reporter, says "defenders of the current administration charge that the group is linked to the government that was swept out of office in May 2013 and is trying to take back the City Council."

He said, she said

But nowhere does South ask Ray Dressler, identified as spokesman for the new group, if that is true, and whether he and others are allied with the Zisa family, local Democratic Party chairwoman Lynne Hurwitz and members of the Zisa-backed school board.

In fact, the Zisas and Hurwitz aren't even mentioned in the story.

'Zisaville'

The Zisa family ruled Hackensack for decades, and former Police Chief Ken "I Am The Law" Zisa is under house arrest as he appeals his 2012 conviction and 5-year prison sentence for official corruption and insurance fraud.

Under the Zisas, the city was referred to derisively as "Zisaville," and the Borg family's North Jersey Media Group abandoned Hackensack, taking its flagship paper with it and speeding the decline of Main Street.

'The committee'

South, the reporter, refers to Hackensack Citizens for Good Government as "the petition committee," and identifies its members as Dressler, Frank Rodriguez, Pargellan McCall, Ralph Rivera, Clara Krejsa and Rachel Velez.

But the story doesn't identify them further or say whether they are affiliated with a political party, an important detail given the group's proposal to return to partisan elections.

A Facebook page for Raymond Dressler says he lives in Hackensack. Dressler is the construction official in Mahwah, the same job he once had in Franklin Lakes.

City Democrat 

Another member of the group, Pargellan McCall, was appointed chairwoman of the Hackensack Housing Authority in 2004, when the Zisa family was in power, and is a former school board member.

She also is a Democratic committeewoman, suggesting that many of the most vocal opponents of the City Council are members of the party thrown out of power in 2013.

Clara Krejsa is listed in the story as another member of the group, and a Web site called Spokeo Inc. lists a Clara A. Krejsa, 77, of Hackensack, and actually shows a satellite photo of her home on Mary Street, near Route 80.

The group plans to gather signatures today at the Hackensack Street Festival on Main Street.

New reporter

South has covered at least two contentious meetings of the Hackensack City Council, and he failed in those instances to identify critics as being affiliated with the Zisa-backed school board, including two members who ran unsuccessfully in the 2013 City Council election.

The reporter previously worked in Tennessee, and doesn't seem to understand the ruthlessness of Jersey politics.

The worst kind of reporter to assign to Hackensack --where political factions are out for blood -- is one who doesn't bother digging for critics' real motivation.

That's especially the case at The Record, where the lazy, incompetent local assignment editors have been out to lunch for several years when it comes to Hackensack, the paper's home for more than 110 years. 

Today's paper

Page A-2 lists two more embarrassing corrections of stories that appeared in the Local section, which should be renamed the Loco section for saying Bogota Mayor Tito Jackson is running for re-election.

He is running to keep the job he was appointed to last November.

On the Local front, a story on a turnpike crash in Ridgefield Park that killed a tractor-trailer driver lacks even basic information on what caused a Jeep driver to lose control and hit a barrier (L-1).

Was the driver speeding, did a tire blow or did something on the vehicle break? 

And there is not a word on the resulting traffic backups, which were reported on TV news as stretching back to where the truck and car lanes merge in Newark.

For the third day in a row, the Local editors fill their columns with a single car crash photo and caption with no information on the cause (L-3).

There are more than 10 stories or photos in today's Local section with police, court and other Law & Order news, and even one story about the police.