Saturday Morning News Roundup

By • Feb 28th, 2009 • Category: Blog

- As money from the federal economic stimulus package began trickling into NJ this week, the Jersey City Housing Authority said it will use its $7.8 million as “triage,” including avoiding layoffs for 5 percent of its workforce. The city is also slated to get about $2.7 million for homelessness prevention and $1.7 million for community development.

- The Insider profiles mayoral candidate Dan Levin in today’s Journal — sort of. The piece is lacking in substance but not in scare quotes like “yuppie” and “creative.” Levin does lay out the philosophy behind his run and talks briefly about education, crime and development. For a more in-depth look at what drives Levin and his at-large candidates Andrew Hubsch and Emilio De Lia, check out our article that ran last month.

- Cops have released a photo of the man who was beaten by several teenagers earlier this week to help identify him. He remains in a coma at JC Medical Center. You can read a description of him here and see a photo here.

- Two Motor Vehicle Commission workers at the Jersey City location have been charged with selling driver’s licenses to illegal immigrants.

- Kamila Cason was sentenced to 40 years in prison yesterday for setting a June 2005 building fire that claimed the life of a young boy and injured his mother and brother.

-NY Waterway is refunding pre-purchased tickets to people who have lost their jobs. People who have purchased multi-trip tickets, such as a 10-trip, a 40-trip or monthly tickets are eligible. Refunds will only be granted to people who present an original receipt for their ticket purchase and a letter of termination verifying the job loss.

- Provident Financial Services Inc., the parent company of Provident Bank, says that Paul M. Pantozzi will retire after 16 years as CEO on Sept. 1, but stay on as chairman.

- Jersey City fire director Armando Roman will be president of this year’s Puerto Rican Day Parade and Festival.

- Joshua Casquejo is the winner of The Jersey Journal’s 50th annual Hudson County Spelling Bee.

In statewide news:

- NJ and five other states are suing to overturn a last-minute Bush administration regulation that allows hospital employees to refuse to give emergency contraceptives to rape survivors who request them if the employees believe it violates their conscience, and Rep. Steve Rothman is co-sponsoring legislation to overturn the rule.

- NJ has entered into a multi-state settlement with Coke, Nestle and Beverage Partners Worldwide that resolves questionable claims about the green tea drink Enviga, which was marketed by the companies as a tool to burn extra calories to lose weight.

- North Hudson Regional Fire and Rescue will appeal a ruling that bars it from hiring firefighters until a lawsuit demanding the department’s residency requirement be relaxed is resolved. The suit was brought by the NAACP to provide racial balance to the department, which has two blacks among its 323 employees.

- A woman fired as a Union County engineer is entitled to collect unemployment while training for another job, a state appeals court ruled yesterday.

- Bergen County officials and union leaders are in the early stages of discussing the possibility of unpaid furloughs for county workers to avoid eliminating jobs.

- The New York Times looks at NJ’s small-time wrestling circuit.

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is the founding editor of the Jersey City Independent; he now works for a public-policy nonprofit in Trenton.
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  • Alb

    On the one hand: I love the Jersey Journal and hope it survives.

    On the other hand:

    The Jersey Journal really does nothing whatsoever to build circulation or win friends east of Journal Square.

    Even when the Journal had a bigger budget, it never made any effort to cover businesses other than real estate developers or art galleries and restaurants on a regular basis, even in a boosterish way.

    The Journal has never really covered what goes on in individual schools on a regular basis, even in a boosterish way.

    The Jersey Journal has also been pretty mean to Fulop.

    But when Fulop got into what I think was a wrong-headed argument with the residents of Portside (in Paulus Hook) about a little squib of dead-end road that they’d been using as a park for a long time, the Journal didn’t even use that as a chance to continue its vendetta against Fulop and appeal to the potential affluent Jersey Journal readers in Portside. Instead, the Journal editorial writer went out of his/her way to slam the Portside residents — who, whatever the merits of their argument, simply wanted a safe place where their kids could learn to ride bikes.

    Now, this Torres profile of Levin is sort of nice, but I get the sense that the Journal is going to end up trashing Levin. And I think that anyone who’s a parent who’s put a child on a swing in Hamilton Park has met Levin. You’d think that, just out of a mere self-interested sense of wanting to get a few dozen Hamilton Park-area parents to cough up for Journal subscriptions, the Journal would want Levin to turn out to be a serious, entertaining mayoral candidate. But, instead, the Journal will probably go out of its way to smash his candidacy dead.

  • Jon Whiten

    Agreed on the first point for sure, Alb. As I’ve said a number of times in the last few weeks, though in some ways we “compete” with the Journal we have clearly different missions, and I really hope they can continue publishing.

    As for the Torres profile, it was sort of “nice” the first time I read it. But the second time I read it I found it really disingenuous. I mean, here’s someone who, as editorial page editor of the paper, is constantly complaining about corruption and city politics and hackery. And then when someone comes along who does *not* embody that — whether or not he has a “chance” of winning — Torres gives him a series of backhanded compliments.

    And what’s with him pretending for the sake of narrative that the Brownstone meeting was the first time he’d ever seen Dan Levin? (“My first impression – I could not help it – was that I was meeting George Costanza.”) Right — because Torres has *never* seen Levin at the hundreds of city meetings each year. It just puts Levin further into the candidate ghetto, in my opinion, and minimizes the fact that this guy really cares about what happens in the city and in city gov’t.

    The rest of the piece is boilerplate Torres/O’Melia hating on downtown — with the wine, the art galleries, the “creative” and the “yuppie.”