Council Report: Animal Control Redux, Sweetening an Abatement and More
By Jon Whiten • Jun 5th, 2009 • Category: Featured, News, Politics
This week’s council meeting saw a few fireworks and a few contentious votes over the course of a few hours. On the docket: Animal Control oversight, tax abatements, parking regulations and more.
In the two-plus months since Ward E councilman Steven Fulop first proposed creating an independent body to oversee the Animal Control division, the legislation has gone through several revisions.
The latest proposal, worked out between Fulop and the city’s law department after legal concerns were raised about the last draft, calls for creating an Animal Control Committee (downgraded from a commission) made up of 13 members for, initially, just one year. Yet the proposal still had a tough time even getting introduced by the City Council on Wednesday.
After city clerk Robert Byrne read all 15 first read ordinances into the record, City Council president Mariano Vega said he still had “some serious concerns” about the Animal Control ordinance and called on the council to withdraw it.
“I’m fairly confident in the director’s ability to self-correct,” he said, referring to Department of Health & Human Services director Harry Melendez, who is opposed to the ordinance. (In a letter to the council sent Wednesday, he asked members to defeat the legislation in order to let Animal Control perform “without interference and artificial barriers.”)
Vega also said he hadn’t had enough time to review the legislation; it was first presented it its final form to the council on Wednesday.
Fulop immediately counterpunched, saying he was “adamantly opposed to withdrawing this.”
He said that after Monday’s council caucus meeting, there was an agreement to go ahead and introduce the ordinance but that politics had interfered.
“I know that the mayor called people and actively lobbied them” to vote no, Fulop said. Still, he urged his colleagues to vote in favor: “please do the right thing.”
The council members then got to weigh in on what was clearly going to be a tight vote. Ward A councilman Michael Sottolano said he would vote to introduce, even though he still didn’t like much of the “overbearing” language in the legislation.
Ward B councilman Phil Kenny kept it short, voting no and saying to “bring it back at a later date.”
Ward C councilman Steve Lipski voted yes, saying that even though he hadn’t had much time to read the new ordinance, the two weeks between Wednesday and the next meeting would give him plenty of time to sort through it.
“This document is flawed,” Ward D’s Bill Gaughan said, adding that he had to support his director (Melendez) and vote against the ordinance.
Fulop was next up. He noted that there were still two weeks for council members to review the document if they felt there hadn’t been enough time. He voted in favor, and said that a no vote would send a clear message to the city’s residents — that they aren’t welcomed in the political process at all.
“At the end of the day, the public sees this for what it is,” he said, referring to his charge of Healy throwing his weight around.
“I resent that statement,” Gaughan blurted out, as Fulop quickly blurted back: “Fact!”
“The mayor did not call me. We did not speak about it,” Gaughan angrily said. “The council president and the mayor of Jersey City do not sway my vote.”
After a little more back and forth between the two councilmen, it was time for Ward F councilwoman Viola Richardson, who voted yes for introduction. At-Large Councilman Peter Brennan also voted yes, and fellow At-Large member Willie Flood quickly voted no.
With the tally at 5 yes votes and 3 no, the ordinance was in the clear. It would pass. Vega, last up to vote, cast his no vote, and the final tally ended at 5 votes to 4. The ordinance will be up for adoption and a public hearing in two weeks.
In 2006, the city gave a generous tax abatement to Fisher Development Associates for its 36-story Crystal Point luxury condo building to be built on 2nd Street right on the Hudson River. The developer was granted a 20-year abatement, and agreed to pay a service charge of 16 percent of annual gross revenue instead of property taxes.
Now Fisher is playing the poor card and asking for a better deal.
An attorney for the developer told the council members on Monday that only 24 units had sold (out of an eventual 269), despite a price cut of 30 percent.
“The developer is really losing his shirt,” the attorney told the council caucus, according to the Jersey Journal. “This is a question of survival or failure.”
Ordinance 09-078 will extend Fisher’s abatement an additional 10 years, and reduce the percentage of revenue paid by almost half (to 10 percent) for the first five years. During the second five years, Fisher will pay 12 percent, and for the remaining 20 years, the developer will pay the full 16 percent.
“If you’re voting no, you’re voting to doom this project,” Gaughan said. Vega agreed, saying that the building would remain “unfinished and vacant” if the abatement wasn’t revised.
Still, several council members expressed concern over the open-endedness of the new agreement. Sottolano, Gaughan, Richardson and Brennan all said they’d like to include a clause to revisit the abatement in five years, when the market may have improved. In the end, though, seven of the council members voted in favor.
“In rough times, we have to bend a little bit,” Brennan said.
Fulop and Richardson disagreed, and voted against the ordinance.
The public sentiment on this issue — at least inside council chambers on Wednesday night — clearly sided with the council dissenters, as the two speakers who addressed the abatement restructuring both came out firmly against it.
Council gadfly and longtime abatement critic Yvonne Balcer called the move “economic discrimination.” She noted that the city can’t just give developers a helping hand when things are rough and not do the same for individual homeowners.
“The city is not in the business of being a personal banker for a developer,” she said. “It’s not our job to bail them out.”
Longtime resident John Seborowski echoed Balcer’s comments.
“[Homeowners] can’t sell their properties, but they don’t get abatements,” he said, adding that the developer’s poverty claim might just be a ploy.
“I don’t think these developers are as poor as we’re being led to believe,” he said.
He might be on to something: Fisher has contracted with top-flight public relations and marketing firms to help it sell the Crystal Point condos, a luxury to many developers (and certainly to almost all homeowners). The company also most likely sees healthy profits from what it calls its “distinguished portfolio” that includes “many millions of square feet of prime Manhattan and New Jersey office, retail and hotel space.”
The ordinance will be up for adoption and a public hearing in two weeks.
Parking Reform
An ordinance to alter several parking regulations was back on Wednesday, almost five months after it was last on the council agenda. The changes have been pushed by Fulop, who has made the Parking Authority’s practice of unfair and illegal booting a priority in the last year or so.
Under this ordinance, booting a vehicle would only be allowed when the owner has three outstanding parking tickets — not on the first offense, as too often happens around the city. (Everyone’s got a personal example of the booting problem, so I’ll share mine: The only two parking tickets this non-vehicle owner has ever received in the last five years both came with the boot.)
The ordinance also calls for the Parking Authority to refund the fee charged for the boot if the person is found not guilty in municipal court.
Residential zoned parking laws will change slightly as well. It calls to extend the amount of time the 2-hour parking limit in those zones is in effect, changing the end time from 5 to 7 pm (the start time of 8 am would remain the same). It also would allow any city resident to apply for a permit that would allow them to park in all of the city’s other permit zones for up to four hours during those times.
Lastly, the bill would enable the City Clerk to sell — from City Hall — the same one-day parking passes, at the same rate, that currently only the Parking Authority can sell from its Heights headquarters.
The bill was much less controversial this time around, with the only objection lodged coming from Vega, who said he’d been told it would amount to a “substantial amount of lost revenue.” He voted yes to introduce, but said the council needed to keep its eyes on the revenue issue.
But the revenue issue is a non-issue, according to Fulop.
“The only lost revenue is based on something the city was doing illegally,” he said.
Other First Reads
Besides the three mentioned above, 12 ordinances were introduced at Wednesday’s meeting, and one was withdrawn. (Read them in all their full-text glory here.)
Let’s start with the one that was withdrawn. Ordinance 09-079, a minor amendment to the Liberty Harbor North Redevelopment Plan, was taken off the table prior to the meeting.
* Ordinance 09-069 allows the city to issue $2 million in general improvement bonds or notes to finance the cost of “various fire department apparatus and equipment, including, but not limited to, a combination of pumper and ladder trucks.”
* Ordinance 09-070 amends the city’s Land Development ordinance to include an application procedure to review garbage and recycling management at all multi-family buildings.
* Ordinance 09-071 amends the Morris Canal Redevelopment Plan, permitting additional stories, regulating residential yard setbacks and height, and permitting ground-floor residential uses. The planning department says the amendments will “encourage the adaptive reuse of industrial buildings” and also create easier compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act.
* Ordinance 09-072 gives permission to Toll Brothers’ subsidiaries that own 10 Provost Street, 143 Bay Street and 332-350 Marin Boulevard to do necessary work for their redevelopment that falls in the public right of way. Specifically, these plans include the construction of the 26,000 square foot public plaza, the construction of a stairway that will lead from the public plaza into the theater to be built on-site, and the installation of a storm drainage pipe under the plaza.
* Ordinance 09-073 renews a lease with Verizon for property at 71 Madison Ave. The city uses the property to provide parking spaces for nearby police and fire departments. The city will pay $9,600 for each month of the five-year lease, for a total of $576,000. The lease begins July 1.
* Ordinance 09-074 approves a 20-year tax abatement to the developer of the former municipal building at 325 Palisade Ave. in the Heights. The development is slated to have 21 market-rate residential units and parking for 14 automobiles. The developer will pay an estimated $39,290 per year for the first ten years and $47,148 per year for the second ten years in lieu of paying property taxes. Since there is no on-site affordable housing being included in the project, the developer will also have to pay $34,973 into the city’s Affordable Housing Trust Fund ($1500 per unit plus $1.50 per square foot). The city expects the project to create 10 construction jobs and three permanent jobs.
* Ordinance 09-077 dedicates Randolph Avenue between Carteret and Claremont Avenues as Rev. John Dupree, Sr. Drive. Dupree, who died in February, was involved with New Hope Baptist Church on Bergen Avenue and was a founder of the Randolph Avenue C&C Block Association.
* Ordinance 09-080 creates 12 new reserved parking spaces for the disabled around the city.
* Ordinance 09-081 dedicates the intersection of Van Horne Street and Bramhall Avenue in Lafayette as Ethel Mae Haynes Way. Haynes, a longtime employee of the Jersey City Medical Center and an active presence in the community, died last October.
* Ordinance 09-082 dedicates the intersection of Hutton Street and Sanford Place in the Heights as Terry Monaghan Way. Monaghan purchased a tavern at that intersection in 1974 and ran it with his family until he died.
Second Reads
Of the five second read ordinances, only three were passed on Wednesday, although there was little controversy over the two that weren’t. Ordinance 09-065, which clears out a portion of Ludlow Street to make way for the expansion of PS #20 and improvement of Ralph Taylor Park, will be carried over to the next council meeting because not all property owners within 200 feet were notified of the plans.
Ordinance 09-068, which allows the city to issue $24 million in bonds or notes in order to purchase land that will house the new Jersey City Incinerator Authority and Department of Public Works buildings, was tabled after the public hearing — the city will take the request to the Local Finance Board next week to get that body’s approval. In a related move, business administrator Brian O’Reilly noted that a separate resolution, passed unanimously later in the meeting, cancelled $24.7 million worth of unrealized bonds that had been approved but never acted on. He noted that this will keep the city’s debt load more manageable (and more attractive to creditors).
The other three ordinances passed with little fanfare; you can read about them here.
Odds & Ends
* The council voted to register with the four-month old Sustainable Jersey program, which is a certification and incentive program for municipalities that aim to go green and become sustainable cities. The city can become certified by taking any number of actions that are weighted by a point system. Once a city gets to 100 points, it becomes eligible for the grants and resources the program has to offer. Mayor Healy’s special assistant David Donnelly will be Jersey City’s liaison to the program.
* You may remember that we reported a few weeks back that the state Treasury Department had made a mistake with regard to Urban Enterprise Zone (UEZ) funds and it was aiming to take $40 million back from the state’s UEZ communities ($4.9 million from Jersey City). Well, the UEZ Mayor’s Commission, which Mayor Healy is part of, is none too pleased by the state’s action, and it plans to begin legal proceedings against the state to recoup the money. The council endorsed the legal action this week.
* The city has received federal money to acquire and/or rehab foreclosed and abandoned properties in the city; on Wednesday the city contracted with the nonprofit Jersey City Episcopal Community Development Corporation (JCECDC) to provide this service. The work will be done in four target areas in three of the city’s wards. In Ward A, the target area is Van Nostrand Avenue between Kennedy Boulevard and Ocean Avenue. In Ward B, it is Lexington Avenue between Kennedy Boulevard and West Side Avenue. Ward F has three target areas: Jewett Avenue between Monticello and Summit Avenues; and a broad area “generally within the boundaries of Garfield Avenue, Ocean Avenue, Bergen Avenue, Kennedy Boulevard and Martin Luther King Drive, from Communipaw Avenue to Armstrong Avenue.”
* As part of its plan to transfer the state Green Acres designation for the remaining four acres of the Reservoir #3, the city is applying to the state to remove Green Acres restrictions from one small parcel of McGinley Square Park (northeast corner of Montgomery Street and Bergen Avenue). The parcel they hope to change is the vacant building at the southern tip of the park, which the city hopes to put up for public auction “so that it may be used as a bank or other productive use.”
* The city authorized an application for a $40,000 grant from the state to help it prepare a Development Transfer Ordinance, supplementing the $90,000 it received from the Smart Growth Future 2008 grant. The city is hoping to come up with a plan for the Transfer of Development Rights (TDR), a planning concept used to help preserve historic structures and manage growth. According to Eastern Michigan University’s Urban and Regional Planning Program, TDR programs “allow owners of buildings in zoning districts where more intense develop ment is permitted to sell that development potential to owners of other sites.” Similar ordinances have been deemed to be successful in Philadelphia, San Francisco and other cities.
* The city council passed a resolution congratulating President Obama for nominating Judge Sonia Sotomayor as a Supreme Court Justice and urging Congress to “swiftly confirm her nomination.” The resolution is part of a broader effort being undertaken by legal groups as a show of support for the nominee. Jersey City resident and attorney Marcos Vigil spoke before the council on Wednesday to urge them to adopt the resolution.
* The council passed a resolution urging the FCC to extend — again — the date when it will convert from analog to digital TV signals. The council wants the FCC to push it back from June 13 to October 13. The original transition date was February 17. Kenny said the extra time was necessary “to better educate our senior population.”
* Two councilmen received new aides yesterday. Khemraj Ramchal was appointed as aide to Ward B councilman Phil Kenny, who said Ramchal was the “first Guyanese council aide in Jersey City.” Ramchal, who had several supporters in the audience, thanked Hudson County freeholder Bill O’Dea for helping him along and said he was thankful for the new job with Kenny. “I will try my best to work with him to serve the people in Ward B,” he said. A new aide was also appointed to Fulop, albeit to less fanfare. Fulop’s new council aide is Pam Andes, one of the founders of the block-watch group Downtown Jersey City Watch. She replaces Althea Bernheim, who stepped down.
* Through two separate resolutions, the JCPD aims to increase its stock of bulletproof vests. One resolution authorizes a grant application to the state’s 2009 Body Armor Replacement Fund, with the total amount to be determined based on how much money the state has for the program. The other resolution authorizes an application to a federal Justice Department program that reimburses police departments for 50 percent of the cost of bulletproof vest purchases.
* The JCPD was also authorized to apply for a $5,000 grant from the Wal-Mart Foundation to purchase equipment to enhance its DWI checkpoints and “promote education and wellness.”
* The city settled a lawsuit with Fireman’s Fund Insurance Company for policies the company had issued to the city at chromium-contaminated sites. The city will receive $850,000 as a result of the settlement.
* The city authorized the acceptance of a $20,575 grant from the state Department of Community Affairs for the childhood lead poisoning and prevention program.
* The city’s Division of Architecture has apparently been having some problems with its HVAC unit in the past few months, with the unit leaking and having airflow problems. The city had to declare the situation an emergency in order to bypass the usual bidding process and get the problem fixed ASAP; it did so last night and awarded the $16,819 contract to replace the rooftop unit to Amber Air of Rahway.
What else are we buying?
The council approved the following purchases on Wednesday:
* $667,684 in emergency generators.
* $625,784 in modular furniture for the city’s new public safety communications center.
* $360,000 for one year’s worth of auditing of the city’s financial statements and federal and state grant programs, as required by state law.
* 102,816 for Cisco Digital Voice equipment (and its installation) in the city’s new public safety communications center.
* $24,205 in Cisco Network Equipment for the IT department’s microwave WAN network.
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Jon Whiten is the editor and co-publisher of the Jersey City Independent and NEW magazine.
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