The Jersey City Independent "

Editor’s note: In the coming months, we’ll be profiling some of Jersey City’s local media access hosts and producers in a series called “Meet the (Amateur) Media.” This story is the first; enjoy.

On a chilly, overcast day in December, I join Mia Scanga and her colleague as they drive past flower beds, headstones and a line of parked cars with people dressed in black pea coats. We ride through a circular path and park near one of Holy Name Cemetery’s enormous, boxy mausoleums. Emblazoned on top are big, block letters — “HAGUE” — and on the door of the mausoleum hung a single wreath.

“You’re going to be meeting Dennis Doran, who will take us on a small tour of the very famous Jersey City politicians,” Scanga begins exuberantly, in front of a video camera. She stands next to Doran in front of the mausoleum of Jersey City’s most infamous mayor, Frank Hague, taping an episode of Talking Politics, the television show she hosts and produces for air on Comcast’s public access channel.

To Scanga, the final resting place of former elected officials seems like the perfect setting for a show on Jersey City’s corrupt past. The segment is pertinent and timely as well, given the continued fallout from the summer’s federal corruption sweep that ensnared several Jersey City pols — busts that came as no surprise to her.

“It’s been going on for years,” she says. “It’s so easy for them to do it because it’s like they’re on automatic pilot.”

Scanga’s cynicism speaks to her longstanding absorption with local politics. She is known for her tenacity and resoluteness, stemming largely from the show, which she started in 2002. On Talking Politics, Scanga — as the program name suggests — deals with Jersey City politics, but the show is more than that. It often serves as a sort of citizen’s guide to local government, covering the role of the Hudson County clerk or the ins and outs of the municipal courts or the city’s zoning laws.

When Scanga meets a fellow activist in town working on a particular issue, her first thoughts often turn to her show, and she often extends an invitation for that person to appear with her. Once there, guests are usually just given the microphone and allowed to run with it. It’s part of Scanga’s decidedly laissez-faire approach to television production.

But when local candidates or elected officials come on, Scanga gets a bit more formal, rearranging the furniture in her dining room and setting up chairs to interview them. For one reason or another, some of them even appear visibly nervous.

“Overall, the way she approaches critical issues is in a fair — but also an aggressive — way,” says Ward E councilman Steven Fulop, who has appeared on Talking Politics three times. He says she’s an important fixture in the community who asks probing questions and has a probing mind.

“But here’s the thing — her aggressive nature, for some elected officials, [it] rubs them the wrong way,” he adds. “But the beauty of Mia Scanga is she doesn’t care. She doesn’t care what the opinions of the mayor, or the council member, or any government official, are [of her]. She doesn’t care about whether they think she’s a nice person.”

From Vandergrift to Jersey City

Scanga, who is reluctant to disclose her age (“I don’t need to blast it to the world”), has lived in Jersey City for over two decades. Petite with red highlights in her hair, she surmises her interest in local issues derives in part from her upbringing.

As the oldest child of immigrant parents who spoke little English, she became “accustomed to looking out” growing up in a small town outside of Pittsburgh called Vandergrift. While her father earned the family’s wage as a steelworker, her mother was a housewife. But due to language barriers, many of the family’s responsibilities — from speaking to school teachers to reading documents to getting her mother’s citizenship papers in order — were delegated to her.

“I think it had a lot to do with that, having come from an immigrant family and seeing how abusive the government has been,” she says.

After graduating from Penn State University, she eventually landed a job at a C.P.A. firm in Manhattan. She moved to Jersey City to cut down on her commuting time, bought a home in 1983 and later started to become active in civic life.

There was the Hudson Alliance for Rational Transportation (HART), which fought a proposal to run a highway through the Bergen Arches leading to the Holland Tunnel; there was the campaign against a tax abatement for the 43-story Millennium Towers; and there was the Jersey City Coalition for Fair Taxation, which formed in opposed to a property reevaluation.

Later, she launched a website, StopBretSchundler.com, with content on the then-mayor that seemed endless. One evening, a journalist from the New York Times came to her house to interview her. He plopped a high stack of papers down on her dining room table.

“Do you know what this is?” he asked.

It was her whole website, printed out. He had to ask her what it all said — he didn’t have enough time to read it because he had spent half the night printing it out.

In many of her civic pursuits, Scanga’s training in accounting has taught her to follow the numbers. When Schundler, who was then mayor, suggested alleviating the city’s $40 million budget gap by turning property tax debt into investment bonds and selling them to private investors, she was up in arms.

“I spent hundreds of hours on that,” she says. “I did all kinds of analyses.”

With data from the city’s tax assessor’s office, she composed missives and sent them, using computer software to allow for multiple faxes, to state assembly members and state senators.

“In the middle of night, I could hear in the next room, the faxes going through,” she says. “A few times I could hear ‘Hello?’ on the other end. And I would say, ‘Oh my god, I wonder who that is. Somebody must have changed their fax number.’” (Email made her life easier.)

The plan went through, and proved to be a disaster, never generating the money the city expected. The whole debacle ended with lawsuits between the city and the company put in charge of running the debt collection.

In the height of her involvement, she attended meetings, one after another. There were calls she had made to state, even federal authorities, to appeal to them. Then there were the calls she received from concerned citizens who identified themselves, and even a few people in hushed tones contacting her from phone booths. They would ask, “Hey, Mia, did you hear about this?” or “Hey, Mia, have you looked into the recreation fund?”

Sometimes she would get calls that she thought were petty grievances, but on other occasions, something would hit a chord and she would attend a city council meeting, with a calculator in tow. As an accountant, she tallied up. Once, outside a City Council meeting, when she sounded off about sidewalk improvements to Jersey Avenue, city engineer Cheryl Allen-Munley, who was so incensed by Scanga, slugged her in the face.

Taking Activism to the Air

It was only natural that when Scanga was approached about the show, she liked the idea. She hosted, and informed the six or so folks eager to work on the show that they would get no compensation but would get their name in the show credits. Instead, they would in fact have to front some of their own money.

That whittled the group down to three. Of those remaining, Bob Duval, an attorney who practices unemployment law, got behind the camera, and Yvonne Balcer, a parochial school teacher, helped produce and host. (Balcer has gone on to host one of her own shows on public access called “Speak NJ.”) As novices, they learned as they went.

“It was a sharp learning curve,” Scanga says, as they maneuvered through editing software, and then bought equipment of their own.

One of the very first shows would turn out to be the most memorable. She had the opportunity to use a high-tech studio facility complete with three cameras and a control room at the Hudson County School of Technology, where a show volunteer was working part-time.

Scanga was moderating a discussion with Hudson County freeholders Maurice Fitzgibbons, Russell Pascale, and Thomas Murphy, who were critical of North Bergen mayor Nicholas Sacco and his allies. When she arrived with the pols and her crew, they were told to hand over their driver’s licenses to security. One guard insisted that he sit in on the session right behind Scanga while they shot. During the taping, he held out his cell phone in the air while someone on the other end listened in.

The conversation turned to officials who hold several posts — double-dippers as they are known in the Garden State — and, in particular, to Sacco, who was then — and still is — a mayor, a state senator and a school administrator. That’s about when the commotion began, she remembers.

Scanga heard the security guard behind her, in a low voice say, “Yep, yep,” into the cell phone. A few minutes later, there were loud murmurs coming from outside the door. I can’t handle this noise, Scanga thought to herself. Then she realized they were coming for her.

“It was like something out of the Gestapo,” she recalls.

The knocks came, and Scanga, who was sitting right next to the entrance, blocked the door with all of her strength and continued filming. “I only have two minutes, what are you talking about?” she said exasperated through the door, telling them they couldn’t come in. They were yelling back.

Finally, after a few moments of this standoff, Duval looked up from behind the camera, and finally said, “It’s over, Mia.” She let go of the door, and several men, members of the North Bergen Police, the sheriff’s office, and school security — fifteen in all — rushed in.

Fitzgibbons tried to tame the situation, saying “I’m a freeholder …,” but one of the men cut him off. “Oh, shut up,” he said.

The men seized the videotape, said the group was trespassing, and threatened to arrest them.

“That’s our tape,” Scanga said. “I want the tape; this is a free country.”

She eventually did get the recording back, and, of course, aired it. The incident made the headlines, with the Bergen Record declaring: “RAID ON HUDSON TV STUDIO CAUSES POLITICAL FUROR.”

Slowing Down but Not Giving Up

Though she has slowed down on new programming and hasn’t been following the Healy administration as closely, she says she has no plans to quit soon.

And for all of her battles, Scanga is demure. It’s not about personal grudges or vendettas against city officials (“All that stuff is history”) or the political party you’re affiliated with.

“You have someone like myself, or Yvonne [Balcer], and people say, you must have had a city job. ‘No, I’ve never had one,’ I tell them. I’ve never had a city job and they would never hire me,” she says with a chuckle. “I probably wouldn’t last anyway because I would want to do the right thing.”

Back at Holy Name Cemetery, as we descend upon the next site on the tour, a taciturn security guard approaches.

“You can’t film in here, you have to get permission,” he says.

“He got permission,” Scanga says, looking over at Doran.

“From who?”

Doran says he spoke with someone last week in the office.

“You have to speak to Don in the office. You need to get permission from the Archdiocese. This is private property.”

“It’s only a public access TV show,” Scanga offers.

The security guard just shakes his head.

“Alright, OK,” Scanga says, upbeat as she turns to walk back to her car.

After visiting the office, she comes out holding a piece of paper.

“He handed me a write-up that said there’s no filming allowed, to preserve the dignity of the dead,” she says as she folds it and tucks it into her purse. “And I said, ‘Frank Hague would have loved that we are still talking about him.’”

As we circle the cemetery, Scanga pulls out the camera to get B-roll shots of three headstones through the passenger seat window.

“You know the age-old proverb,” Duval says from the driver’s seat. “It is better to ask for forgiveness than permission.”

Talking Politics airs on Comcast Channel 51 on Mondays at 9:30 p.m., Wednesdays at 8:30 p.m. & Thursdays at 7:30 p.m. You can find out more about the show at the Talking Politics website.

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