Monday Morning News Roundup

By • Jun 29th, 2009 • Category: Blog

- Mayor Healy is apparently worried about the plan afoot — pushed by the City Council — to have the Parking Authority refund everyone who has been illegally booted since January 2005. Healy says “we should be cautious with reimbursements for past errors,” while Parking Authority director Mary Spinello tells the Journal that booting records from before this year aren’t available. We’re not sure what’s happened to these records, but here’s hoping Spinello can get someone looking for those ASAP. The city could be on the hook to people wronged by the Parking Authority for nearly $1 million. While we acknowledge that’s no easy outlay for the cash-strapped municipality, we hope it will do the right thing and send a message of responsiveness to its residents by going through with this refund.

- The Insider leaves most of the inside baseball at home this week and actually talks policy. Bully for him. He says that Jersey City will be one of the cities most impacted by Thursday’s state Supreme Court Ruling that ended the practice of municipalities demanding open space in order to get the rights to build a project: “What the court ruling does is effectively close the door on shifting the financial burden of providing recreational amenities from the taxpayers to those damn ‘they should give back to the community’ developers.”

- A 28-year-old man was beaten then shot to death early Sunday morning in Ward F.

- A Jersey City cop was arrested last week for taking money from livery drivers, then looking the other way when they operated illegally.

- In better cop news, the Jersey City Police Department’s most-decorated cop ever has retired.

- The Bergen Record reports that the peregrine falcon, which had been completely wiped out east of the Mississippi River by the early 1960s because of the pesticide DDT, is making a strong recovery in urban areas in New Jersey. Of course, the (locally) legendary peregrine falcon cam has been watching one of the birds that lives on a Jersey City highrise for two years.

- NEWS FLASH: Michael Jackson died. DOUBLE NEWS FLASH: When people who create cultural products die, there is an increased demand for those products.

In statewide news:

- Gov. Corzine is expected to sign the state budget today.

- Some expect the state’s paid family leave law, which goes into effect on Wednesday, will be not used that much right now because of the recession.

- Gas station and body shop owners who perform motor vehicle inspections are angry about being forced by the state to buy $8,000 worth of emissions-testing equipment to continue performing inspections.

- Up to 90 percent of North Jersey’s bat population was killed off over the winter by an unusual fungus that has been associated with the deaths of more than a million bats in nine states. The mass deaths could affect humans as well.

- The recession hasn’t been the biggest problem for tourism-related businesses at the Jersey Shore this year; instead, the rainy and cool weather has been keeping folks away.

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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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  • http://YAHOO OPAL

    I think Jersey City Councilman and other government officials should look into the Jesry City Campus tuition charges. They are charging miscellaneous fees, and double fee on things and programs that don’t exist. They charged me for orientation that was not held. They keep charging transcript fees for transcipt I paid for to be transfered to them. I transfered over a year ago and they still have transcript fee included in bill. When thye are asked about these various fees, they only give you the run around. They tell you the different departments to go to, those deparmtents will send you back to the orignal, they do this until you become frustrated and quit. I want someone to launch an investigation into this and have them held accountable for cheating students out of millions of their hard earned money.