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« on: January 27, 2019, 03:33:29 PM »
When I got The Record home delivered, I used to put the Sports section into the recycling without ever reading it. So, all of this exhaustive review of typos and so forth seems like another waste of space.
The real horror about The Record and Hackensack Chronicle, both gutted by Gannett, is that they are a parody of a local daily and weekly newspaper. The Chronicle no longer has its own staff and merely reprints stories from The Record or The Wretched, as many say.
The Friday, Jan. 25, Hackensack Chronicle carries not a single word about the special school election 3 days earlier, when voters overwhelmingly rejected a $170 million school construction and renovation proposal that would have triggered a 30-year tax hike of $308 to $650 and more a year. Instead, the weekly carried a front page tribute to Harold Bloom, a former Hackensack High School principal who died at 89.
Even though the election was held and decided 3 days earlier, the second page carries a story reporting a judge ordered a change in the wording of the ballot proposal, which didn't state the tax hike would be yearly for 30 years. And on Page 8, a long letter reacts to Mayor John Labrosse opposing the proposal, which was reported on Page 1 of the Jan. 11 Chronicle. The long, long letter was signed by Ellen O'Reilly of Hackensack (whoever she is), and it's the only letter in the paper.
The Record and Hackensack Chronicle have never as far as I know explored an issue that incenses property tax payers in Hackensack, namely the impact of so-called non-profits such as Hackensack University Medical Center on the taxes you and I pay. They include Bergen County, Fairleigh Dickinson University, the Bergen County Academy, Eastwick College and so forth.
The front page of the Dec. 28 Chronicle reported HUMC will be building a 43,500-square-foot utility plant, and I also saw a story -- I'm not sure where -- reporting the hospital is building a 300,000 square foot medical tower. If both of those are tax-exempt, as is most of the rest of the complex that ate Hackensack and spit it out long ago, that will only shift the tax burden further onto homeowners and small business owners. The hospital pays its CEO about $3 million a year and takes in money hand over fist, so how can it legitimately claim to be non-profit?
Sadly, the City Council will not sue HUMC and take the case all the way up to the state Supreme Court, thus establishing a precedent that will bind all non-profit hospitals to start paying their fair share of property taxes. In Hackensack, that would be about $19 million a year, not including the new utility and patient projects on the way.
Instead, the council announced last year how proud officials are of a new 6-year agreement that will see the hospital pay $4 million a year in "host community fees." Months after that agreement was announced, council members could not say whether some of the money will be used to pave some of the crummy potholed streets drivers find all over the city.
City officials also are getting the shaft from Bergen County, which has dragged its feet on paving parts of Prospect and Summit avenues that are in terrible shape or installing turn lanes on Passaic Street, in both directions at Summit Avenue, a choke point for traffic. One city council member said the city couldn't "force" the county to take part of the properties on each side of Passaic to create the turn lanes on the narrow, two-lane street, which dates to the Revolutionary War.
The Chronicle is such a piece of Gannett crap that the front page story on Dec. 7, 2018, was about a dog that was allegedly missing for 9 months before it was found. And it wasn't even a Hackensack dog; "Zina" escaped from her River Vale home; she was found in Hackensack. Page 2 reported that renovations at the Lido Restaurant in Hackensack were being delayed.
On Nov. 16, a story about a new commuter shuttle in Hackensack was buried inside while Page 1 of the Chronicle (or maybe "Hackensack Chronic Pain") reported the body of a man, 39, who tried to swim across the Hackensack River on Nov. 4, was recovered on Nov. 6. By the way, a free shuttle runs from the city's bus terminal to its two train stations, the county complex and the "local hospital," presumably a reference to the mammoth HUMC complex. The "Hackensack Transit Connector" is being paid for by the Federal Transit Administration, North Jersey Transportation Authority and Bergen County; I'd like to see more such giving back to the city by non-profits.
Meanwhile, an editorial in the same Nov. 16 Chronicle notes the Trump administration is denying funding for a 10-mile extension of the misnamed Hudson-Bergen Light Rail into Bergen County, terminating at Englewood Hospital.
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