February 13,2017
the staff of the Ridgewood blog
Ridgewood Nj, seems the attempts by the council to reconfigure parking have been met with new calls for “Garagezilla” .
In a recent NJ.com article on struggling downtowns Englewood was mentioned for having over 2000 parking spaces available, including a 345 space garage, many new, upscale downtown housing developments, and still stores are closing. The fact is the retail landscape has changed and it has nothing to do with the lack of parking or limited foot traffic/customer availability.
While in Ridgewood many allies of the former mayor Paul Aronsohn are using any attempt at incrementally adjusting parking allocations to promote a massive parking garage. Aronsohns supporters in the Ridgewood Financial Advisory Committee or FAC continue to use the eerily familiar tactics they used on Mayor Killion and Village Manager Ken Gabbert , blaming all cost increases on the new Village Council.
Remember the Financial Advisory Committee was created by the mayor Aronsohn solely as a breeding ground for future council members willing to live in his shadow. The fact remains that in order for the Financial Advisory Committee to be an effective part of the Village governance the following criteria must be met:
Publish clear and realistic by-laws
Post agenda’s of all meetings
Post minutes of all meetings promptly
All members must sign Financial disclosure forms
All members must sign NDA’s or non-disclosure forms
These are professional standards that are used and commonly accepted everywhere in the world. If they are not met in Ridgewood the committee must be closed done otherwise the Village will continue to leave itself open to lawsuits.
There has been a noticeable increase repeat critical comments on the Ridgewood blog mirroring the same lines over and over. The same lines once used against Mayor Killion and Kenn Gabbert are now used against the current mayor and Village council.
“My friend went to park at one of the lots that require an app and was unable to download so couldn’t use the lot. She said the lot was mostly empty and also that there was a fee to use the app. I think the VC made these parking rules so complicated now people are just staying away. I’m not aware that merchants supported this plan. I think the new VC came in with ideas of how to “fix” parking and this is the result. I’m sure merchants would rather have seen a parking garage. Good luck. I stay out of downtown altogether now.”
To bad this poster forgot to mention the “parking app ” was the brainchild of the Aronsohn administration and Former village Manager Roberta Sonenfeld.
“The poster does have a decent point about commuters getting screwed by the vocal, anti-development, municipal-election voting majority in Ridgewood who control the Council agenda. Commuters are too busy to care much despite the fact the Council screws them at every turn, i.e. $250 annual increase to $1000 for a commuter parking space which was moved further away from Ridgewood station after the pass was paid for last Dec. Thanks VoR!”
While complaints about the overpriced commuter parking seem valid blaming the current council for the insane property taxes is a recurrent theme,“So go on blaming Aronsohn for the continued inability of this Council to come up with a viable solution for the commuters who pay the bulk of property taxes in Ridgewood. As 12:43 noted, if Ridgewood is no longer attractive to commuters as a place to raise their families (due to high property taxes versus declining schools despite a $100mn annual BOE budget, etc) then property values fall. As potential revenue sources like Valley leave, those who remain will have to just pay more to cover for the excessively expensive contracts the Village and BOE have agreed to with the public sector unions we contract with. Commuters and taxpayers getting screwed, a declining CBD, and a school system that no longer ranks highly in the nation are all facts”
Again,not sure what the Village Council has to do with the Ridgewood Board of Education, and all the residents voting for constant tax increases ie full day kindergarten and turf fields?
Other comments ecco the same shots taken against Killion ,“What proposals does the new Counxil have James? Rebuild Schedler (no conflicts of interest there, right?). Raise taxes to pay the police even more (again no conflicts, wink, wink)? Are we still studying traffic flow? Where’s the Valley PILOT? What’s the plan to renew the CBD? Commuter parking? How do we replace the potential tax revenues from Valley? Do we need such big, expensive police & fire depts if Valley is leaving in 3 years? Even you know the Village is in decline James, while Summit, Tenafly, Scarsdale and Greenwich all see the increase in their property values outpace ours. Why is that?”
This comment is so full of misinformation it ended up in our spam folder.
It all gets summed over and over by the following comments , The poster does have a decent point about commuters getting screwed by the vocal, anti-development, municipal-election voting majority in Ridgewood who control the Council agenda. Commuters are too busy to care much despite the fact the Council screws them at every turn, i.e. $250 annual increase to $1000 for a commuter parking space which was moved further away from Ridgewood station after the pass was paid for last Dec. Thanks VoR!
Anotherwords if we built the garagezilla and massive high-density housing all problems would be solved …. right that’s the ticket oy vey.
How long are you going to blame the former council and VM? The new council has been in long enough to make changes so why haven’t they? Garage was a missed opportunity but it will never happen now so I don’t know why opponents are even worried about it. You won.
Financial Advisory Committee needs to be handed its walking papers asap.
I did not vote for the FAC. They are full pf themselves.
Get rid of the FAC, or just clean house. Start over.
The only thing Aronsohn-Pucciarelli-Hauck managed to accomplish was stopping the freebie newspapers from being thrown into my driveway. They were total losers.
WE have a lot more to do in order to undo the damage caused by Aronson. he should long be remembered as a blight on the Village. And like the pollution at the Village auto shop we are just getting around to clean up, it will be a while before his misdeeds are cleansed.
But, that being said, I agree with the comment that the current village council needs to get moving. There was a burst of initial activity, but now its not so clear what they are doing.
Contamination at the Village Garage was well known to the purchasers who rushed to beat the Village in buying the land–hoping to make a substantial profit when they then sold it to the Village. They own it. It should be their responsibility for cleaning it up before selling it to the Village at a handsome profit. Is the Village going to subtract the cost of cleanup from the eventual purchase price? Or are we paying a premium to purchase the land and then must add cleanup costs to that? The lawyer groups were in such a rush to buy–why aren’t they being forced to do the cleanup? A homeowner with a leaking oil tank can’t just pass that cost on to the buyer, so why are we cleaning up land we don’t own?