Urbanization: Engineer has some concerns over proposed housing developments in Ridgewood
Monday February 25, 2013, 1:54 PM
BY LAURA HERZOG
STAFF WRITER
The Ridgewood News
If approved by the Ridgewood Planning Board, the four proposed multi-family housing developments for the Central Business District (CBD) may require the village to enhance sections of its sewage piping, officials said last week.
THINKSTOCK
Village employees have reviewed the sewage conveyance capacity and analyzed each of the four proposals, according to Village Engineer Chris Rutishauser. If the proposals go through, some modifications may be necessary to better accommodate sewage flow at one or more locations, but the situation still needs “to be more carefully examined,” he said.
“This is our initial look at it. We haven’t done any flow analysis,” he noted at last week’s Planning Board meeting. “We just have a few sections of pipes we need to approve. Right now |we have concerns in certain |sections.”
Most of the current pipes are around 80 to 90 years old, he said, and have “done remarkably well.” But after a first look, pipe relining or pipe bursting may be necessary near the Ridgewood Station development proposal, Rutishauser said.
1. Routine Care, Unforgettable Bills
When Sean Recchi, a 42-year-old from Lancaster, Ohio, was told last March that he had non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, his wife Stephanie knew she had to get him to MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. Stephanie’s father had been treated there 10 years earlier, and she and her family credited the doctors and nurses at MD Anderson with extending his life by at least eight years.
Because Stephanie and her husband had recently started their own small technology business, they were unable to buy comprehensive health insurance. For $469 a month, or about 20% of their income, they had been able to get only a policy that covered just $2,000 per day of any hospital costs. “We don’t take that kind of discount insurance,” said the woman at MD Anderson when Stephanie called to make an appointment for Sean.
Stephanie was then told by a billing clerk that the estimated cost of Sean’s visit — just to be examined for six days so a treatment plan could be devised — would be $48,900, due in advance. Stephanie got her mother to write her a check. “You do anything you can in a situation like that,” she says. The Recchis flew to Houston, leaving Stephanie’s mother to care for their two teenage children.
About a week later, Stephanie had to ask her mother for $35,000 more so Sean could begin the treatment the doctors had decided was urgent. His condition had worsened rapidly since he had arrived in Houston. He was “sweating and shaking with chills and pains,” Stephanie recalls. “He had a large mass in his chest that was … growing. He was panicked.”
Nonetheless, Sean was held for about 90 minutes in a reception area, she says, because the hospital could not confirm that the check had cleared. Sean was allowed to see the doctor only after he advanced MD Anderson $7,500 from his credit card. The hospital says there was nothing unusual about how Sean was kept waiting. According to MD Anderson communications manager Julie Penne, “Asking for advance payment for services is a common, if unfortunate, situation that confronts hospitals all over the United States.”
Sean Recchi
Sean Recchi
Diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma at age 42. Total cost, in advance, for Sean’s treatment plan and initial doses of chemotherapy: $83,900. Charges for blood and lab tests amounted to more than $15,000; with Medicare, they would have cost a few hundred dollars
The total cost, in advance, for Sean to get his treatment plan and initial doses of chemotherapy was $83,900.
Why?
The first of the 344 lines printed out across eight pages of his hospital bill — filled with indecipherable numerical codes and acronyms — seemed innocuous. But it set the tone for all that followed. It read, “1 ACETAMINOPHE TABS 325 MG.” The charge was only $1.50, but it was for a generic version of a Tylenol pill. You can buy 100 of them on Amazon for $1.49 even without a hospital’s purchasing power.
NJ Court tosses Ridgewood man’s lawsuit over cashless flight policy
Monday, February 25, 2013 Last updated: Monday February 25, 2013, 11:44 AM
BY ANTHONY CAMPISI
STATE HO– USE BUREAU
The Record
A Ridgewood man’s suit challenging the legality of Continental Airlines’ policy against accepting cash on flights runs afoul of federal law and must be thrown out, an appellate panel ruled Monday.
Michael W. Rosen filed sued the airline after a January 2010 flight from Hawaii to Newark after he tried to buy a $3 headset and a $5 cocktail and pay with cash but was denied under the policy, which Continental instituted in 2009 to address accounting and security concerns.
EYEWITNESS: Menendez, Donor Brunched at Diner Mile from Teterboro Airport on Easter 2012
HACKENSACK, N.J, — A local citizen who lives near Teterboro airport in northern New Jersey said he saw Democratic Sen. Bob Menendez and his friend Democratic Party mega-donor Dr. Salomon Melgen brunching together on Easter Sunday in 2012.
The citizen, who is active in local politics and a regular patron of the restaurant, told Breitbart News he saw Menendez and Melgen dining together at Arena Diner between shortly before noon and 12:15 p.m. on Easter Sunday last year, April 8, 2012. That is the timeframe in which Melgen’s plane refueled at Teterboro before flying directly to the Dominican Republic.
Menendez and his staff have denied he was on any flights on Melgen’s plane outside of three flights in 2010. If he was on this flight, as it appears he was, it means he will have misled the American people. This new eyewitness evidence solidifies previous reports that Menendez was likely on that flight.
The source had previously recognized Menendez, and shown a photograph of Melgen at a meeting inside the diner with this reporter, he said: “Yes, that’s him. Undeniably.”
Public Interest Wanes After Third Manufactured Crisis… President Obama Faces ‘Cliff Fatigue’ in Latest Budget Fight
ANALYSIS By RICK KLEIN
Hundreds of thousands of jobs are at risk. Delays await at airports. Padlocks are ready at national parks.
The nation will suffer greater risk of wildfires, workplace deaths, and even surprise weather events, if government predictions are to be believed. Our entire military readiness and superiority are at risk.
What if nobody cares?
President Obama sure does. He’s making the case, aggressively and comprehensively, that the automatic spending cuts set to go into effect at the end of the month will have a devastating impact, both on the economy and on essential government services.
“They will slow our economy. They will eliminate good jobs. They will leave many families who are already stretched to the limit scrambling to figure out what to do,” the president said Saturday in his weekly radio address.
But there are few signs to suggest the public is listening. A poll out late last week found that barely one in four Americans said they’d heard much about the automatic spending cuts — known unhelpfully for public-comprehension purposes as “sequestration” — and four in 10 said they were comfortable with the cuts going into effect.
“Here’s yet another deadline, and everyone’s telling us everything will be destroyed if we go past it,” said Michael Dimock, director of the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, which conducted the poll. “It’s very hard to get the same sense of urgency for a third time in a row, just two months after the last one.”
Photo credit: Boyd A. Loving Village Parks Department Truck Takes Out Utility Pole on North Maple Avenue
February 25,2013
Boyd A. Loving
4:33 PM
Ridgewood NJ , A hydraulic boom on a Village owned truck driven by a Parks Department employee swung from its cradled position and collided with a utility pole on North Maple Avenue near Mastin Place on Tuesday afternoon.
Photo credit: Boyd A. Loving
Ridgewood Police Department patrol units closed North Maple Avenue in both directions between Linwood Avenue and Mastin Place while crews from PSE&G worked to first stabilize, then replace the pole. No electrical service interruptions were observed in the area. Ridgewood Fire Department personnel also assisted at the scene. There were no injuries reported by any Village or PSE&G employees.
A bit Late : Wall Street warns Christie to avoid election-year budget moves
By Salvador Rizzo/The Star-Ledger
on February 24, 2013 at 12:10 PM, updated February 24, 2013 at 6:08 PM
Editors Note : We had to laugh when we saw this article , its funny Wall Street never seemed to warn James Florio , Christine Todd Whitman, Jim McGreevey, and Jon Corzine for getting us into this mess . Nor have they warned about all the irresponsible spending and behavior in New Jersey’s Assemble and Senate . So where have the Wall Street wizards been the last 30 years?
TRENTON — When Gov. Chris Christie rolls out his new budget on Tuesday, Wall Street will be watching closely — and is warning that any false moves or election-year gimmicks could trigger more downgrades of New Jersey’s credit rating.
Analysts at Fitch Ratings, Moody’s and Standard & Poor’s have all recently drawn their lines in the sand, telling the governor to steer clear of budgeting tricks that would lower costs in the short term by kicking the can down the road.
For example, skimping on the state’s pension contribution — which is set to rise from $1.1 billion in the current budget year to nearly $1.7 billion in the next — would upset all three agencies and could set off downgrades, the agencies say.
So would borrowing more money, relying heavily on one-shot sources of revenue, and failing to close a budget shortfall that reached $473 million at the end of January, among other concerns.
“What we’re looking for is a really strong economic rebound, combined with efforts at the state level to achieve a structurally balanced budget,” said John Sugden, an S&P credit analyst.
Bergen, Passaic writers join book drive for Paterson children
Sunday, February 24, 2013
BY KARA YORIO
STAFF WRITER
The Record
No one understands the power of books better than a writer.
“Books enlighten, they entertain, they change lives,” said best-selling author and Ridgewood resident Harlan Coben. “They open up whole new worlds.”
Coben was looking around his house Friday for children’s books that he planned to take — with copies of his young adult novels “Shelter” and “Seconds Away” — to the Ridgewood Public Library to contribute to The Big Book Drive.
“This is a no-brainer,” Coben said about participating in the book-donation campaign by the Paterson library system and The Record and Herald News, with the Ridgewood and Fair Lawn public libraries, to collect books for Paterson children to take home.
Books will be distributed to children and families at the grand opening of a new Paterson library branch in April. The Northside library branch was destroyed during Tropical Storm Irene in August 2011. Thousands of books have already been donated.
On Friday, other writers with North Jersey connections joined Coben in describing the life-changing — even lifesaving — force within a good book.
Tiger Team : The Financial Advisory Committee has serious concerns that Ridgewood is on an unsustainable fiscal path
The Financial Advisory Committee has serious concerns that Ridgewood is on an unsustainable fiscal path. The EAC report from 1991 provides some historical perspective.In 1980, the portion of Ridgewood property taxes related to the Village budget was $5,526,000. In 2011, 31 years later, it was $32,065,472…more than a 480% increase or a compound annual growth rate of over 5.8%.Similarly, the Village budget grew over 410% from $8,707,000 to $44,484,000 during the same period.Importantly, taxes have grown at a significantly faster rate than the budget. In 1991, the EAC observed that both of these figures had increased over the previous decade much faster than the rate of inflation. The same is true from 2001 through 2011. The EAC noted that the second most important driver of the budget and property tax increases was Debt Service (due to a large amount of variable rate debt at high rates in the 1980s) andthe “largest single budgetary growth item has been Salaries, Wages & Benefits”, adding that this item
“represented 46.6%” of the total Village expenditure growth in 10 years. To this point they went on to say “There may have been a time, a decade ago or more (1960s -1970s), when municipal employees were paid less than comparable workers in the private sector…In those days, we presume many municipal employees accepted modest pay for job security. The intervening decade of the 1980s has seen the closing of the private vs. public wage gap. A continuation of a mentality thatsupports ‘catch up’ employee compensation and benefit type agreements is no longer reasonable or warranted.”
The EAC made several recommendations including, the necessity of “thorough re-evaluation of existing salary step scales” and a “thorough re-evaluation of existing benefit packages.” Their opinion was that Village labor costs are the single most important fiscal responsibility of the Village Council, and the development of a long-range labor relations and compensation strategy was needed. Interestingly, they observed that collective bargaining agreements were being negotiated against more skilled professional union negotiators, “without clear, comprehensive objectives and a long – range strategy—that is, the Village’s approach was ‘ad hoc’ in character.” Although these observations were made 21 years ago, they are the same observations that our committee is making today , with regard to employee compensation and benefits.
As the previous chart illustrates, the total compound annual growth rate of Village property taxes over the past ten years (2001–2011) was over 4.8%. The portion of this related to the Village budget grew at a compound annual rate of over 5.6%, almost unchanged from the rate over the past three decades.If we do nothing to alter the course of the Village ’s finances, the average property tax bill in Ridgewood is on track to increase over 60% from $15,606 to $25,035 in the next 9 years, based on the growth rate since 2001.
The committee believes that the overall efficiency and effectiveness of the Village can and must be improved and that Village management must make this and the reduction of municipal expenditures its primary objectives, with the ultimate goal of stabilizing property taxes and reducing them over time. What our committee fou nd was startling. The Village Council must implement bold structural policies that dramatically improve fiscal awareness, transparency, accountability and sustainability on a permanent basis across all departments throughout the Village. As the EAC also concluded, over many years Village management has made overly generous promises on compensation, pensions and healthcare.Taxpayers have tolerated these promises
.
This appears to have fostered a belief among many Village employees ,some in Village management and union leadership that Ridgewood taxpayers will always pay the resulting tax increases. In 2010, the Village was forced to implement emergency lay offs to address financial shortfalls, affecting 10% of its workforce. In our meetings with Village management, it was noted that contractual union policies led to the dismissal of some of the Village’s most
productive young employees and retention of many senior employees , who werehighly compensated
.
Without significant annual property tax increases, Ridgewood cannot meet its future liabilities and will likely be forced to enact further lay-offs, despite its pledges to the contrary . Under the status quo, we believe that it will be impossible to avoid a reduction in the Village service we enjoy today. In recent years, the Ridgewood News has documented the beginnings of the erosion in our quality of life on several occasions.The Village’s multi-year collective bargaining agreements drive growth in expenditures on wages, pensions and healthcare far in excess of the 2% annual property tax cap enacted in 2010. In fact, pension & healthcare benefits for Village workers are exempt from the 2% cap. Property taxes related to the Village
budget have actually risen by a compound annual rate of more than 5.6% a year since 2001. The following chart details the primary budget categories. Ridgewood’s top three municipal budget expenses- Public Safety, Insurance (Health, Workman’s Comp & Other) and Pension & Social Security have increased at a compound annual rate of 6.0% since 2001. This compares with overall Village budget growth of 4.0%, and an annualized inflation rate (CPI) of only 2.47%. In the 2011 adopted budget, these three costs were $22,586,882 constituting 50.8% of total Village expenditures.
The previous chart clearly shows most of the growth coming from Pension & Social Security and Insurance.These two budget categories have combined to grow at an astounding compound annual rate of 10.8% since 2001. Further, 10 years ago, Pension & Social Security ranked as the 8th larges t budget category at only 3% of the total budget. In just 10 years, it has exploded by 441%(over 5X) to become the 3rd largest category at 11%. At the projected pace, Pension & Social Security will become the 2nd largest budget category in 2013 and will surpass Public Safety by almost 12% to become the largest budget item in 2018, at over $16,000,000 . The growth of Pension & Social Security is a function of many variables, including the number of employees, the current compensation structures, the number of retirees, the ability of the pension system to achieve its investment return objectives, the percentage of salary granted in pension benefits and the pensionable portion of compensation, to name a few. However, the ability of the Village Council to control this growth is extremely limited and is most effectively addressed through changes to the employee compensation structure, limiting pensionable compensation and developing a long-term staffing strategy.
The current size and growth rate of the top three categories require that all three be addressed in a coordinated manner. If these three items continue to grow at their current rate (Insurance at 99% and Pension & Social Security at 441%) , the required funding for them will grow to $54,319,000 in 10 years (see chart below), which would require massive tax increases over the adopted 2011 Village budget. In fact, Pension & Social Security costs are on pace to be almost $26.9MM by 2021, which is equivalent to over 60% of the 2011 budget. These three items together are projected to be 122% of the entire 2011 budget by 2021.
In simple terms, by 2021, future Village Councils and Village Managers will have less flexibility for discretionary spending. From a property taxpayer’s perspective, the annual increases in our property taxes will not go to improve the quality of life and services for residents. Instead they will be required to fund mandated salary and benefit obligations.
Village employees are not to blame for the generous agreements between Village management and union negotiators. However, since the global financial crisis in 2008, few private sector employees have seen rising salaries. In fact, many Village residents have experienced decreasing incomes, or worse, have lost their jobs and/or homes. We have reached a critical juncture. If we don’t make significant changes to the terms in uture collective bargaining agreements, our property taxes will continue to spiral beyond residents’ ability to afford them, with no improvement in our financial condition or Village services.
A significant number of Village employees are nearing retirement age in the next two years. Several collective bargaining agreements are a lso expiring through 2014/15. The path forward is clear. Taxpayers must insist on union concessions in future collective bargaining agreements. Hard choices are required and the Village Council must have the political will to make them.
Report of the Finance Advisory Committee
https://mods.ridgewoodnj.net/pdf/manager/2013FinancialAdvisoryReportFINAL.pdf
Bob Menendez at the Ridgewood REORG photo by Boyd Loving
Long-time escort confirms Senator Bob Menendez paid her for sex
A professional escort who travels the East Coast seeing clients in cities from Miami to Boston has identified a photo of Senator Bob Menendez as a man who paid her for sex. The woman, in her late 30s, told The Daily Caller prior to seeing Menendez’s photo that she had been paid to provide sexual favors to several U.S. senators, including a New Jersey Democrat and other politicians who are no longer living.
The escort, who earns money having sex with men in upscale hotel rooms, said during an in-person interview that many of her wealthy and powerful customers use pseudonyms when arranging for her services, and when meeting her in person.
New Jersey Hospital Association Expands Bundled Payment Pilot Program
Written by Heather Linder | February 21, 2013
The New Jersey Hospital Association is in the process of expanding its pilot program for “gainsharing,” a system that aligns Medicare payments to help hospitals and physicians work together, according to Healthcare Finance News.
Hospitals and physicians who were part of NJHA’s program were allowed to share in any savings if they successfully reduced costs and met federal quality standards, according to the report. CentraState Medical Center in Freehold attested to saving $2.2 million over three years.
Why in the World Are We All Keynesians Again? The Flimsy Case for Stimulus Spending
By Andrew T. Young
February 14, 2013
The U.S. federal government responded to the financial crisis and recession that began in 2007–08 with unprecedented fiscal stimulus. Passed in February of 2009, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) came with a price tag of $831 billion. Yet the economy has not returned to a path of robust economic growth and unemployment has stubbornly remained high; only in September of 2012 did it dip (barely) below 8 percent. This has not stopped the Obama administration from pushing for further fiscal stimulus.
Whether or not fiscal spending stimulus is effective hinges critically on the size of the spending multiplier, which is dependent on several factors. In particular, if individuals anticipate the future tax liabilities associated with deficit spending and/or are “crowded out” by the deficit spending, then the multiplier is likely to be less than one; that is, each dollar of stimulus increases total spending in the economy by less than one dollar. Ultimately, whether the government spending multiplier is less than or greater than one is an empirical question.
While no one seriously debates the long-run costs associated with exploding public debt, the evidence suggesting significant short-run benefits of stimulus spending is weak. Studies suggesting that stimulus spending is effective assume that current economic activity does not affect fiscal policy. This assumption is questionable and, most important, the studies’ results are very sensitive to it.
