Readers get more crime news, doubts about rail tunnels

Euclid Avenue is a two-way street in Hackensack's Fairmount section that forks into one-way streets before Summit Avenue -- Euclid Avenue North, right, and Euclid Avenue South. A long story on Euclid Avenue in The Record on Thursday devotes only a couple of paragraphs to the street itself.

Since at least 2007, the owner of 177 Euclid Ave. has defied all attempts by city inspectors to get him to repair his front steps.

By VICTOR E. SASSON
EDITOR

Readers find more local news on the front page of The Record today and Thursday, but much of it is the same old sensational crime and court coverage.

Check out the tortured first paragraph of today's lead story on squatters in the Englewood home of a veteran (A-1).

And why is Editor Martin Gottlieb wasting all this space on a proposal to curb smoking in public housing (A-1)?

The story questioning how new Hudson River tunnels will be financed is another in a long line of anti-mass transit pieces in a daily paper that relies heavily on ad revenue from car dealers and automakers  (A-1).

Transportation reporter Christopher Maag also covered a news conference urging extension of NJ Transit's light rail to downtown Englewood, and the hospital and medical center (L-3).

But The Record has a history of writing anti-light rail stories, and slanted its coverage to support Tenafly's decision to reject the project.

Getting nauseous

In today's 3-star review of Jack's Cafe in Westwood, just the description of the desserts sampled by sugar-obsessed Restaurant Reviewer Elisa Ung is making me nauseous (BL-16).

Seafood lovers who don't eat meat or poultry apparently are out of luck unless they want a lobster roll padded with cheaper langoustine tails ($20). 

A corner house for sale on Euclid Avenue in Hackensack.

Awful headline

The lead Page 1 headline on Thursday -- "Hard drive a clue to GWB defense -- flummoxed readers.

The word "drive" had nothing to do with driving or the George Washington Bridge.

The "hard drive" was a reference to a "computer hard drive," but readers didn't know that until they actually read the first paragraph, defeating the purpose of the headline to tell the story at a glance.

Local news

In Thursday's Local, The Record reported the swearing in of Deborah Keeling-Geddis as a Hackensack city councilwoman two days earlier.

By focusing on Route 17 traffic jams, Road Warrior John Cichowski is, like the editors, in denial about the growing crisis throughout North Jersey, and the need for more mass transit (Thursday's L-1).

Euclid Avenue 

Thursday's Better Living cover story on Euclid Avenue in Hackensack's Fairmount section is typical of the superficial local reporting the paper is known for.

Freelancer Jeffrey Page devotes most of his Name-Dropper column to Euclid, the Greek mathematician who is called the father of geometry.

To outsiders, the Euclid in Euclid Avenue is hard to pronounce and even harder to spell. 

The street is under the flight paths of Newark and Teterboro airports, and aircraft noise is a major quality of life concern.

Page calls Euclid "a wide, quiet street."

The Fairmount section was named after a park of the same name in Philadelphia, and many of the trees in the neighborhood came from that city, as reflected in street names:

Poplar Avenue, Elm Avenue, Pine Street, Cedar Avenue and so forth.

Even when Christie is traveling, his many failures haunt us

After burying us in thousands of words about a blizzard that never materialized, The Record hasn't reported on the challenges this week's snowfall poses for drivers and pedestrians. At Englewood Hospital and Medical Center, parking was especially tight around noon on Wednesday, but one visitor in an all-wheel-drive Toyota SUV wasn't going to be denied, above and below.

By VICTOR E. SASSON
EDITOR

Governor Christie's three-day trip to London helped take the focus off of his many failures at home.

This morning, WNYC radio -- not The Record of Woodland Park -- reported "less than 5 percent of the 8,000 New Jersey Sandy victims eligible for aid through the state's largest grant program have received funding to finish rebuilding their homes."

True, The Record's columnists have been fretting over how New Jersey is going to extend the state fund for road, bridge and rail improvements.

But the editors haven't blasted Christie for bringing the crisis to a head by refusing to raise the gasoline tax, which is the second-lowest in the nation.

And an editorial today focuses instead on ethical questions raised by the corporate group that pays for Christie's foreign travels in pursuit of the GOP presidential nomination (A-8).

Tracking Christie

WNYC is the New Jersey and New York Public Radio Station that started "The Christie Tracker" to tell listeners where the GOP bully is hanging his proverbial hat.

Today, for a change, Christie is in New Jersey, where he is scheduled to meet with the Canadian premier.

But the Web page also lists Bridgegate costs of $9,965,449.89 as of Dec. 9, 2014 -- $7.2 million of that racked up by the Governor's Office.

See: The Christie Tracker

Property taxes

The Record often uses the front page to promote Christie's White House ambitions, but buries the governor's excuses for why New Jersey is so screwed up since he took office in 2010.

Today, an e-mail from a Christie spokesman blames steep increases in troubled Atlantic City for why the average property tax bill in New Jersey went up by 2.16 percent in 2014 despite the 2 percent cap enacted in 2010 (A-4).

When is the last time The Record reported Christie actually promised to lower property taxes when he ran for governor in 2009?

A pedestrian struggling to cross the uncleared corner of Euclid Avenue and Main Street in Hackensack on Wednesday morning. A few blocks away, a snowbank continued to block the bus stop on Anderson Street, between River and Main streets.

On Cedar Lane in Teaneck on Wednesday, I saw two police officers on duty where traffic was funneled into one lane, but neither was directing traffic.

Potholes and more

Road Warrior John Cichowski has been so busy chasing phantom cracks in bridge supporting columns, he's completely oblivious to all of the potholes that have appeared on streets and highways such as Route 4.

On top of the potholes, last summer's utility work in Hackensack and other towns left crudely patched trenches that produce a rough ride for motorists, including a stretch of River Street in front of The Record's old headquarters.

Our bankrupt state, towns can't fix potholes

All of the pothole photos on today's post were taken on Tuesday on one block of Euclid Avenue in Hackensack, above and below. Drivers who took the George Washington Bridge exit for the Palisades Interstate Parkway on Tuesday encountered a minefield of potholes between the bridge and Exit 1 in Englewood Cliffs that were so numerous, they could not steer around them.

By VICTOR E. SASSON
Editor

Our state and our towns appear to be so broke they cannot afford to fix potholes -- nasty reminders of the bitter winter we barely survived.

After a flurry of columns and stories, The Record has been ignoring the increasing number of potholes and the rising chorus of curses from drivers, as well as the lack of repairs.

Up close and personal on Euclid Avenue in Hackensack.

The front page today carries another story on the state's severe financial problems under Governor Christie, the GOP bully who refuses to raise taxes on millionaires and throws away hundreds of millions more on tax breaks for wealthy business owners (A-1).

Christie also has refused to raise the low gasoline tax, which could revive the bankrupt Transportation Trust Fund, which is used to repair potholes on Route 4, Route 17 and other state highways.

Zisa Family Memorial Potholes on Euclid Avenue in Hackensack, above and below. Members of the current City Council argue they can't afford fix streets because of all of the financial problems caused by the former administration, allied with the Zisas, who ruled Hackensack for decades. Those problems range from millions of dollars lost because bills were never sent out to many more millions of dollars spent to defend and settle lawsuits against Ken Zisa, the former police chief who was convicted of official misconduct and insurance fraud.

Today's paper

President Obama says 7.1 million Americans signed up for health coverage, and that "doesn't include enrollments through 14 state exchanges or people who started the process and weren't able to finish because of technical problems," according to today's Page 1 story.

"The Affordable Health Care Act is here to stay," Obama said.

Let's hope The Record's negative coverage isn't here to stay.

The Woodland Park daily and its medical writers virtually ignored any success stories, including reporting on people who saved money by signing up for federal health care.

The federal program is expected to lower health-care costs, as well as depress the profits of the insurance companies who have donated millions of dollars to the GOP's disinformation and repeal campaign.

Exploding cars

Readers who remember exploding Ford Pintos and Crown Victoria Police Interceptors or Toyota vehicles that accelerated out of control aren't surprised by today's front-page report on cost-cutting at General Motors that killed at least 13 people (A-1).

On A-2 today, the editors correct two of the many reporting, grammatical and other screw-ups that appeared in the paper recently.

Bridgegate costs

A story on A-3 reports state officials don't know how much they will be billed for the self-serving whitewash Governor Christie commissioned to clear him of wrongdoing in the George Washington Bridge lane closures.

Last week, news stories and columns put the damage to taxpayers at $1 million or more. What were they based on?

Christie was skewered on the Bridgegate scandal and his weight at a 90th-birthday roast of Brendan Byrne, a former governor (A-3). 

Of course, as with anything involving Christie, the joke is really on middle-class taxpayers, especially those who gave him a second term in November.

Local news?

On the Local front, an accident photo carries a caption that is unusually complete, including the name of a driver killed by a tractor-trailer on the New Jersey Turnpike (L-1).

But Deputy Assignment Editor Dan Sforza continues to rely too heavily on police and court news to flesh out his thin local-news report.

He still hasn't answered a nagging question on the mind of residents:

Why is no one fixing thousands of annoying and dangerous potholes? 

Paving Euclid Avenue with good intentions

Drivers would be foolhardy to go more than 20 mph over this frequently patched stretch of Euclid Avenue in Hackensack, above. The first crew I've seen plugging potholes in my neighborhood appeared this morning at Clinton Place and Linden Street, below, but the two men didn't do any repairs to that pockmarked block of Euclid, between Grand Avenue and Clarendon Place.

 

At last week's City Council meeting, City Manager Stephen Lo Iacono said crews were working six days a week to repair a rash of potholes left behind by winter.

Did they lose their maps of the city?

As of today, Euclid Avenue has barely been touched, but I did see repairs to Grand Avenue, in front of Fairmount School, ater its potholes rated a mention in The Record's Road Warrior column.

Dead wood

You can't say much about today's paper when just about the only must-read is a gee-whiz story about a golfer who was killed by a falling tree after he went looking for a lost ball on private property (A-1).

The story doesn't tell you much about the luckless golfer except his name, age and hometown.

But both the victim and homeowner have Korean names, and the golfer breathed his last in Alpine, one of the wealthiest communities in the United States.

Editor Marty Gottlieb leads today's paper with more endless blah, blah, blah about Rutgers University (A-1).

Today's thin Local news section has two Teaneck stories on L-1, but nothing from Hackensack, suggesting no resident left the house over the weekend.