Kelly: Unseasoned newcomers face mess of their own making in HackensackJune 28, 2014, 11:55 PM Last updated: Sunday, June 29, 2014, 9:34 AM
By MIKE KELLY
Record Columnist
The Record
A parking lot hardly seems like the setting for a fractious political fight.
But in Hackensack, where wrenching disputes now seem to erupt with numbing frequency, an acre-sized patch of asphalt behind the old Masonic Lodge just off Main Street symbolizes what can happen when an idealistic and inexperienced band of reformers ousts an entrenched political machine — and then has to learn how to govern.
“It’s been a bumpy road,” Mayor John Labrosse said in an interview.
That’s an understatement.
In the case of the parking lot, Labrosse, whose reformist slate grabbed control of Hackensack’s council last year in a dramatic election sweep that ended three decades of ironclad rule by the Zisa family, wanted to tear up the asphalt and build a park to spruce up the city’s business district.
But critics, lambasting the reformers as out of touch, said the money should be spent on a far more pressing need — filling potholes after the brutal winter. In the end, the pothole brigade won, and the park proposal was tabled.
While seemingly small, the dispute was a foreshadowing of far more brutalizing political battles to come. And as the reformers complete their first year in office this week, they find themselves confronting charges that they are too inexperienced to run a city of almost 44,000 residents and a $92.6 million municipal budget.
Small towns can teach many lessons about government and democracy. But what is taking place now in Hackensack is a fundamental story of how power is lost, gained and then reassembled — sometimes clumsily.
It is also a story without an ending, at least not yet.
(of course not - you have to go to
http://www.northjersey.com/news/kelly-unseasoned-newcomers-face-mess-of-their-own-making-in-hackensack-1.1043205?page=all to read the rest of it)
