Kelly: Hackensack candidates took on political machine one door at a timeSunday May 19, 2013, 10:46 PM
By MIKE KELLY
RECORD COLUMNIST
As she knocked on doors in the final days of her successful campaign to unseat Hackensack’s powerful Zisa family political machine, council candidate Kathleen Canestrino says she made a startling discovery.
Yes, voters were clearly upset with the Zisas’ ruling style, which critics have lambasted as self-indulgent, insular and, in recent years, a magnet for numerous expensive lawsuits, many of them filed by police officers who claimed they were forced to mix politics with law enforcement. The criticism grew even more pronounced last year when former Police Chief Ken Zisa, a major Democratic power broker, was convicted of official misconduct and insurance fraud.
But Canestrino found that voters harbored a far more basic complaint, one that she said played a crucial role in last week’s stunning defeat of the five-member Zisa-backed council slate. In voters’ minds, the Zisa machine couldn’t fill the potholes or pick up the garbage.
“It was the No. 1 complaint,” Canestrino said.
Political machines are not complicated. They build power by doling out favors and jobs to loyalists and getting more voters to the polls on Election Day than their opponents. But the most successful machine-run governments also retain power because they efficiently deliver basic municipal services to ordinary people.
This is how the Zisas ultimately failed. The family dynasty, whose bare-knuckle control of Hackensack over more than four decades earned the city the nickname “Zisaville,” was finally tripped up by a stunning inability to fill potholes or haul the garbage away before it started to stink too much.
“When I knocked on doors, I would ask people if they were happy,” said Canestrino. “If they said no, I would then ask what made them unhappy. And more often than not, they pointed to the potholes in the street or talked about the garbage.”
The message has not been lost on Canestrino.
Once the members of her Citizens for Change slate take their seats on the council, she said, a priority will be to pass a resolution to have the garbage picked up more than once a week. She also said her slate wants to appoint neighborhood representatives or ward leaders to keep tabs on potholes.
Thom Ammirato, the Citizens for Change campaign manager, said the group did not have enough money for professional polling during the campaign. So he said Canestrino and other candidates developed a strategy of informally asking voters what bothered them.
“We were just listening for feedback,” Ammirato said.
But what they heard was somewhat surprising, he said. Besides potholes and garbage pickup, he said voters also listed flooding and basic street sweeping as common concerns.
In the future, Canestrino said, her slate wants to find a way to pay attention to basic needs of residents.
“We want to listen to people,” Canestrino said.
It’s a noble goal, one that even the Zisa family embraced when it first emerged as a major political force in Hackensack in 1969, the year Frank Zisa became deputy mayor. His brother Joe became city attorney a year later.
“But over time they just got drunk with power,” said Jon Gilmore, a former president of the city’s African-American Civic Association and a Zisa critic. “They just got caught up with themselves. They were in their own bubble.”
Such was the growing perception anyway.
In 1977, Frank became mayor and Joe was named a municipal judge. In 1989, Frank’s son Jack became mayor, a position he would hold for the next 16 years. During that time, Jack, an insurance broker, appointed his brother Ken as police chief and another brother, Frank, as deputy chief. A cousin, Joe, was named city attorney in 2005.
Ken Zisa, who was forced out as police chief amid his legal troubles, also served as a state assemblyman and emerged as a power broker within the Bergen County Democratic Organization. Meanwhile, his older brother Jack became a powerful force in Bergen’s Republican Party.
The Zisas developed a formidable coalition. They gave key municipal jobs to friends and relatives. They also shaped campaign tickets for the city’s non-partisan elections that represented a variety of political viewpoints and racial and ethnic backgrounds. And with the help of one of North Jersey’s most experienced political operatives, Lynne Hurwitz, they regularly brought together a solid block of votes on Election Day.
But what seemed like a recipe for continued political success slowly began to crumble over the last decade.
Moribund downtown
One of the most notable and embarrassing problems was the city’s Main Street. While business districts in other economically and ethnically diverse towns — Englewood, Montclair and Morristown, for example — bustled with new businesses, Hackensack’s seemed mired in failure. A once-thriving regional hub of stores and offices had become a mix of empty storefronts, discount outlets and fast-food cafés that were mostly deserted after 5 p.m. each day.
Developers blamed the Zisas for not having the vision to put together a master plan to attract new investors while also catering to the needs of longtime business owners.
“They’ve made it impossible to want to develop in this community,” said Michael Monaghan, a lawyer who owns nearly an entire block of Main Street property and has fought the Zisas for years in a series of lawsuits.
“If you didn’t play the game,” Monaghan said, “you didn’t get the results.”
City Manager Stephen Lo Iacono said he believes Hackensack finally has a solid plan to redevelop Main Street. But critics say the new plan is at least a decade too late and that Hackensack is now several steps behind other towns in terms of its economic development.
Lo Iacono says his city’s “future is bright.” But he acknowledged that the process of restoring life to downtown Hackensack may take another “seven, nine or 10 years.”
Lo Iacono said he may not be around to see the changes in Hackensack — if they come. He said the new council may dismiss him because of his ties to the Zisas.
“I wouldn’t be surprised if they wanted to make a change,” Lo Iacono said, adding that he has not heard anything definite yet. None of the five newly elected council members would say whether they intend to fire Lo Iacono or anyone else.
Another Main Street property owner and former Zisa ally, Richard Gelber, said he became a vocal critic of the political machine when the city government did little to help him attract new renters. Gelber said five of his 13 commercial properties are empty. One storefront has not been rented in nearly seven years, he said.
“Believe me, the Zisa day is over in Hackensack,” Gelber said.
That may be wishful thinking.
The Zisa machine, whose council slate ironically ran under the “Open Government” banner, still controls the city’s Board of Education — and, as a result, directs the hiring of teachers and other employees in the public schools. Also the Zisas still have considerable influence among Hackensack’s roughly 15,000 registered Democratic voters and are regularly courted by statewide and even national candidates.
Still, last week’s election clearly was a turning point. Just how sharp a turn the city is taking remains to be seen.
None of the dominant figures in the Zisa family — Jack, Ken, Frank or Joe — commented on the council elections. Hurwitz, who is the city’s Democratic municipal chairwoman as well as a Zisa adviser, did not return several phone messages.
Reached by phone at his law office, another key Zisa ally, Richard Salkin, the city prosecutor and school board attorney, offered only this clipped, terse response: “There has been an election. The voters have spoken. I wish the new council the best. That’s all I’m going to give you.”
Meanwhile, Canestrino and her slate promise to give Hackensack a more transparent government, free of the kind of nepotism that was a hallmark of the Zisa era.
But while Canestrino was elated with her slate’s victory, she said she understands the pitfalls that can trip up any political group that gains power. All she had to do was look back to when the Zisas grabbed control of Hackensack.
“People start out well-intentioned,” Canestrino said. “What happens when you are in office for that long, you build up this network and it’s just too easy to become self-invested in the process.”
Running for office taught her a lesson, however, that she hopes she does not forget.
“You see things differently through other people’s eyes,” she said.
Email: kellym@northjersey.com
