Reader says be careful what you wish for with changes to the building department
Change in leadership ,while many readers ecco this sentiment : Be honest, has any one who has ever dealt with him ever dealt with someone who is more ill-suited for his job? It is unbelievable that we allow this pale imitation of building inspector to hold the wealth and safety of the Village in his hands. I think that might be part of the reason that Valley and the apartment project developers figure that they can get away with what they want.
One reader points out ,The reason this municipality looks as good as it does from a conformity to zoning regulations/building code standpoint is because Tony Merlino gives a damn about his work.
Some may view him as a nitpicker who works too slow, but that is exactly the kind of guy I want watching what’s being built and who is building it.
Mark my words, if we replace Tony with someone who just rubber stamps anything put in front of him/her, this place will look like shit in a few years.
Federal judge rules U.S. no-fly list violates Constitution
BY DAN WHITCOMB
Tue Jun 24, 2014 3:58pm EDT
(Reuters) – The U.S. government’s no-fly list banning people accused of links to terrorism from commercial flights violates their constitutional rights because it gives them no meaningful way to contest that decision, a federal judge ruled on Tuesday.
U.S. District Judge Anna Brown, ruling on a lawsuit filed in federal court in Oregon by 13 Muslim Americans who were branded with the no-fly status, ordered the government to come up with new procedures that allow people on the no-fly list to challenge that designation.
“The court concludes international travel is not a mere convenience or luxury in this modern world. Indeed, for many international travel is a necessary aspect of liberties sacred to members of a free society,” Brown wrote in her 65-page ruling.
“Accordingly, on this record the court concludes plaintiffs inclusion on the no-fly list constitutes a significant deprivation of their liberty interests in international travel,” Brown said.
The decision hands a major victory to the 13 plaintiffs – four of them veterans of the U.S. military – who deny they have links to terrorism and say they only learned of their no-fly status when they arrived at an airport and were blocked from boarding a flight.
Christie signs arbitration cap on raises for police, firefighter unions
JUNE 24, 2014, 9:56 AM LAST UPDATED: TUESDAY, JUNE 24, 2014, 5:16 PM BY MICHAEL LINHORST STATE HO– USE BUREAU THE RECORD
A cap on raises police and firefighter unions can get in certain contract disputes is now law – again.
The 2-percent limit on raises first became law in 2010 as part of the state’s effort to limit the growth of property taxes. The law expired this year at the end of March.
After weeks of negotiation, a bipartisan bill extending the cap emerged earlier this month. Governor Christie signed it at a ceremony outside the State House today, surrounded by top Democratic and Republican legislative leaders.
“The arbitration cap has worked,” Christie said, citing a slower growth in property taxes in recent years.
“We’re continuing what we started and renewing the bipartisan arbitration cap, which is going to continue to rein in the cost of government and stem the property tax crisis on behalf of New Jersey’s overburdened taxpayers,” said Christie, a Republican.
The cap prevents police or fire unions that settle contract disputes in interest arbitration from winning raises of more than 2 percent. The new law extends that cap until the end of 2017.
The bill passed unanimously in the Assembly and Senate earlier this month
“Great opinion piece in USA TODAY about how unnecessary regulation and government overreach destroys jobs, raises unemployment and hurts your ability to get better goods and services for a decent price. The author, Glenn Harlan Reynolds, uses taxis as an example, but you can apply this scenario to virtually every U.S. industry.” Rep Scott Garrett
Ride-share services benefit consumers, but the taxi commission doesn’t want to give us a good deal.
The regulatory knives are out for Uber and Lyft, two ride-sharing services that make life easier for consumers and provide employment opportunities in a stagnant economy. Why are regulatorsunhappy? Basically, because these new services offer insufficient opportunity for graft.
Services like Uber and Lyft disrupt the current regulatory environment. I have the Uber app on my phone. If I need a car in areas where Uber operates, it looks up where I am using GPS, matches me with participating drivers nearby, and in my experience gets me a Town Car in just a few minutes. It’s the comfort of a limo service, with the convenience of a taxicab. I get a better service, the driver gets a job, but now there’s competition for those entrenched companies.
In most cities, traditional taxi services are regulated by some sort of taxi commission. Similarly, limo services — the ones that provide the black Town Cars favored by big shots (and used by many Uber drivers) — are regulated by some sort of livery office. The rules strictly forbid the two sectors of the market from competing with one another. And, generally, entry is limited so that neither faces too much competition in general. In holding down competition, these regulators act on behalf of the entities they supposedly regulate for the benefit of consumers.
They do this because consumers typically pay very little attention to taxi and limo regulations while the regulated industries, unsurprisingly, pay very close attention. They express their gratitude in a variety of ways, some legal, and the regulators in turn look after the interests of the regulated. Consumer well-being is a far less significant concern.
Bell, Booker and Candle By Post Editorial Board June 22, 2014 | 7:55pm
Sen. Cory Booker has everything going for him in his re-election race against former Reagan speechwriter Jeff Bell.
Booker has a war chest of $2.9 million, against a mere $76,000 for Bell. Booker is a Democratic incumbent running in a mostly blue state where Democratic voters outnumber Republicans by 700,000. And according to a recent Rassmussen poll, 39 percent of New Jerseyans don’t even know who the heck Jeff Bell is.
All Bell has going for him is his conviction, which is that government is making it harder for working people to support their families.
In short, he’s a free-market, traditional values, pro-immigration conservative who thinks its high time someone took this message to the people of New Jersey.
So here’s the question: Despite all Booker’s advantages, why does the latest poll show his support at under 50 percent?
Rassmussen’s recent survey of likely voters puts Booker’s support at 48 percent, against 35 percent for Bell. That’s a 13 percentage-point difference, which is the same percentage who say they are undecided.
Bell, of course, remains a long shot in a state that hasn’t elected a Republican to the US Senate since 1972. Ironically, the Republican who won that seat was Clifford Case, the man Bell beat in the Republican primary back in 1978 — only to lose to Democrat Bill Bradley in the general election.
In election battle for Bergen executive, ‘style’ becomes key argument
Democratic Freeholder James Tedesco said Monday he will use vetoes and lawsuits more sparingly if elected Bergen County executive, while accusing his rival, Republican incumbent Kathleen Donovan, of “not being able to compromise and work together” during her first term. (Ensslin/The Bergen Record)
Author and Chef Christine Nunn to open Picnic on the Square in Ridgewood
June 24,2014
the staff of the Ridgewood
Ridgewood NJ, According to Bergen food blog Boozy Burbs, Christine Nunn is bringing her new restaurant Picnic back to Bergen County. The new restaurant called “Picnic on the Square,” will be located at 26 Wilsey Square.
Nunn closed the restaurant’s Fair Lawn location in January of 2013 and has since written a cookbook called the The Preppy Cookbook and taken over as the executive chef at Grange in Westwood.
Nunn a sommelier will offer diners a French-inspired menu when the restaurant opens, likely later this summer.
Health care costs have risen to $23,215 a year for the typical family of four that gets insurance through work, according to a new report from Milliman Inc., Seattle-based consultants and actuaries.
Although employers pay the largest portion of that health tab at 58 percent (or $13,520) per year, an increasing share of costs has shifted to workers and their families, the Milliman report notes. Workers pay health costs through payroll deductions ($5,908 annually) and out-of-pocket expenses ($3,787).
Health policy analyst Edmund Haislmaier says employees actually end up paying all of the costs because their health plans cut into cash wages.
“If that money wasn’t spent on the employee’s health plan, it would be available for higher wages or more retirement savings,” Haislmaier, asenior research fellow with The Heritage Foundation, told The Foundry.
Health care costs for Americans continue to rise, but the overall annual rate of increase for a family of four is at its lowest since Milliman began calculating costs in 2002. In almost every year for the past 10, the growth rate for family health spending has slowed, the report says.
“That’s because of what’s going on in the way employers and families buy health care and how health care is delivered,” Haislmaier said. “It’s not just fluctuations in the economy or new laws and regulations.”
So far, Milliman finds, “emerging reforms” required by the Affordable Care Act, or Obamacare, have had little direct impact on the cost of care for the typical family of four “because this family tends to be insured through large group plans.”
The report points to a combination of factors, some of which increase health spending, such as specialty drugs, while others decrease health spending, such as cost control measures taken by providers.
However, Obamacare’s upcoming tax on “Cadillac” plans (valued at $27,500 or more for a family of four) will prompt employers to scale back those large group plans to avoid penalties, the report notes.
Valley supporters continue to attack this blog and the the “mean spirited anonymous posters ” for their utter failure to aggrandize them selfs with an over sized monstrosity .
The Ridgewood Planning Board summed it up best ,“The impacts from this amendment are detrimental to the community,” end of story.
We are told the failure of this plan had nothing to do with the fact that it was ill advised, ill planned, and poorly executed .
And that Valley and its supporters behaved behaved like a bunch of spoiled 2 year old brats with their ,gimme gimme gimme attitude .
Valley in it unlimited arrogance even when as far as to demand the Village comply with their business plan. Apparently that included destroying the character of the Village.
Valley supporters even went as far as to purchase anonymous IP’s from hacker and spammer sites so as to attack residents on this blog I remind you of all the “thats what happens when you buy cheap houses near a hospital” posts .
And while we would love to take al the credit , for blocking the ill suited expansion , groups like CRR did most of the heavy lifting .
The fact that a $100 million dollar hospital could not get this done says far more about management and strategy than anonymous posts .
Unlike the sports people who love send derogatory emails to peoples employers or the schools system that picks on your kids if you speak out of line , the Ridgewood blog has not engaged in any of this “COWARDLY” behavior.
Posters can remain anonymous to protect them selves from unscrupulous bullies , like the RBSA , BOE and Valley Hospital .
Mandates lead to call for new school administrators in Ridgewood
JUNE 23, 2014 LAST UPDATED: MONDAY, JUNE 23, 2014, 1:52 PM BY LAURA HERZOG STAFF WRITER
The Board of Education (BOE) recently renewed discussions on whether the district should add two more administrative positions next school year.
The move is part of the superintendent’s three-year plan, which was announced last year, to ultimately replace seven administrative positions that were cut in 2010, when the district lost all its state aid and had to make big budget cuts.
The new positions would help lighten the load facing the district’s overworked administrative staff, argued Superintendent Daniel Fishbein. The schools chief first proposed the new positions, a science supervisor and a special education supervisor, at a BOE meeting in May.
But some BOE trustees, especially Jim Morgan, had doubts about the superintendent’s proposal, because it would add fixed costs of around $300,000 to the already strained, and rising, budget. Morgan also questioned the necessity of adding administrative positions, because the district is already operating effectively.
BOE Vice President Vince Loncto and trustee Christina Krauss also expressed reservations at the time. BOE trustee Michele Lenhard was absent for the discussion, and BOE President Sheila Brogan expressed support for the new positions.
In light of the opposition facing him, Fishbein came prepared at a June 2 meeting with a data-based argument in favor of the positions. He quantified the workload of administrators, and provided trustees with a list of other districts similar to Ridgewood with larger administrative staffs.
Republicans dropped a hammer on IRS Commissioner John Koskinen during a testy hearing covering the disappearance of emails tied to the agency’s tea party targeting scandal
‘We have a problem with you, and you have a problem maintaining your credibility’: House Republicans slam IRS commissioner as they subpoena a White House lawyer in ‘missing emails’ case
IRS Commissioner John Koskinen testified Monday in a rare evening hearing, just days after being called a liar in another House proceeding He defended the IRS against insinuations that it covered up a political targeting scheme by burying inconvenient emails Republicans say he lied in March when he promised to deliver copies of ‘all’ of former official Lois Lerner’s communications even though he knew of a 2011 computer crash that destroyed 28 months’ worth Koskinen couldn’t explain why a six-month ‘disaster recovery’ backup wasn’t tapped to restore her emails after the computer crash He complained that it would take $10 to $30 million to upgrade IRS computers to retain all its emails and documents; the agency paid $89 million in bonuses last year and has an $1.8 billion IT budget House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa subpoenaed White House attorney Jennifer O’Connor on Monday to testify Tuesday morning O’Connor, former counsel to the then-acting IRS commissioner, was invited to testify but the White House Counsel’s office refused to let her appear
By DAVID MARTOSKO, U.S. POLITICAL EDITOR
PUBLISHED: 17:36 EST, 23 June 2014 | UPDATED: 02:30 EST, 24 June 2014
Republicans dropped a hammer on IRS Commissioner John Koskinen during a testy hearing covering the disappearance of emails tied to the agency’s tea party targeting scandal.
The emails, covering the period January 2009 to April 2011, belonged to embattled former official Lois Lerner and could shed light on whether an expansive scheme to single out conservative groups for special scrutiny was guided by members of Congress or administration officials outside the IRS.
‘The committee requested all of Lois Lerner’s emails over a year ago,’ said House Oversight Committee Chairman Rep. Darrell Issa. ‘And we subpoenaed the emails in August 2013 and again in February 2014. … You worked to cover up the fact they were missing and only came forward to fess up on a Friday afternoon after you had been caught red-handed.’
‘You personally did not cause the targeting,’ he told Koskinen, referring to the tea party scandal. ‘You personally did not destroy the emails. But by your actions and your deception, you now own this scandal.’
‘We have a problem with you,’ Issa sniped at the front end of a three-hour, 36-minute ordeal, ‘and you have a problem maintaining your credibility.’
The US has actually been cooling since the Thirties, the hottest decade on record
By Christopher Booker 4:04PM BST 21 Jun 2014
When future generations try to understand how the world got carried away around the end of the 20th century by the panic over global warming, few things will amaze them more than the part played in stoking up the scare by the fiddling of official temperature data. There was already much evidence of this seven years ago, when I was writing my history of the scare, The Real Global Warming Disaster. But now another damning example has been uncovered by Steven Goddard’s US blog Real Science, showing how shamelessly manipulated has been one of the world’s most influential climate records, the graph of US surface temperature records published by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
Goddard shows how, in recent years, NOAA’s US Historical Climatology Network (USHCN) has been “adjusting” its record by replacing real temperatures with data “fabricated” by computer models. The effect of this has been to downgrade earlier temperatures and to exaggerate those from recent decades, to give the impression that the Earth has been warming up much more than is justified by the actual data. In several posts headed “Data tampering at USHCN/GISS”, Goddard compares the currently published temperature graphs with those based only on temperatures measured at the time. These show that the US has actually been cooling since the Thirties, the hottest decade on record; whereas the latest graph, nearly half of it based on “fabricated” data, shows it to have been warming at a rate equivalent to more than 3 degrees centigrade per century.
When I first began examining the global-warming scare, I found nothing more puzzling than the way officially approved scientists kept on being shown to have finagled their data, as in that ludicrous “hockey stick” graph, pretending to prove that the world had suddenly become much hotter than at any time in 1,000 years. Any theory needing to rely so consistently on fudging the evidence, I concluded, must be looked on not as science at all, but as simply a rather alarming case study in the aberrations of group psychology.
2014 Parade Theme,The Star Spangled Banner, 1814 – 2014
Displayed at Schoolhouse Museum
The Ridgewood Fourth of July Celebration Committee is proud to announce their theme for the 2014 celebration. The theme will be “The Star Spangled Banner, 1814 – 2014”. The Ridgewood Fourth of July Celebration Committee will sponsor its annual celebration on Friday, July 4, 2014.
The purpose of the Ridgewood Fourth of July Celebration is to celebrate the USA and its history and to honor American Patriots of all times. For 2014, we would like to focus on our national anthem, The Star Spangled Banner. We will celebrate the people and events involved with creating this important American song.
The purpose of the Ridgewood Fourth of July Celebration is to celebrate the USA and its history and to honor American Patriots of all times. For 2014, we would like to focus on our national anthem, The Star Spangled Banner. We will celebrate the people and eventsinvolved with creating this important American song.
The Ridgewood Fourth of July Celebration is organized by the Ridgewood Fourth of July Celebration, Inc., an all-volunteer community group. All aspects of this annual Celebration including fireworks, bands, evening performers, insurance, and police and fire personnel are funded by voluntary contributions from businesses and individuals.
This year we’re excited to announce that The Ridgewood Historical Society in their Schoolhouse Museum has a copy on display of a beautiful Currier and Ives print entitled “The Star Spangles Banner”. Lady Liberty crowned with an American crest bears the American flag as she points forward to victory. The fires of the battle burn in the distance– presumably the defense of Fort McHenry by American forces during the British attack on September 13, 1814 (in the War of 1812) that inspired Francis Scott Key to write The Star Spangled Banner. Several phrases from the song The Star Spangled Banner serve as the title printed in the lower margin: “O! long may it wave,/ O’er the land of the free,And the home of the brave.”
Part of the mission of the Ridgewood Historical Society, which operates the Schoolhouse Museum, is to design exhibits using artifacts that tell the stories about ou history, culture, and the lives of ordinary people from Ridgewood and the surrounding celebrates New Jersey’s 350th and liberty. Highlighted in this exhibit is the museum’s collection of U.S. flags, a fitting complement to this years’ July 4th festivities.
The Schoolhouse Museum located at 650 E. Glen Ave, Ridgewood, is open this summer on Thursdays and Saturdays from 1 to 3 and Sundays 2 to 4. through the 20th century. The current exhibit, A Community’s Journey, anniversary using the themes of diversity, innovation,and liberty. Highlighted in this exhibit is the museum’s collection of U.S. flags, a fitting complement to this years’ July 4th festivities.
The Schoolhouse Museum located at 650 E. Glen Ave, Ridgewood, is open this summer on Thursdays and Saturdays from 1 to 3 and Sundays 2 to 4.
Commuters flex muscles with their own NJ Transit poll
Two weeks ago, when an NJ Transit Raritan Valley Line train broke down in a key junction with the busy Northeast Corridor line, an ad-hoc commuter group — Delayed on NJ Transit — launched its own survey to measure the agency’s service.
The bigger story is how commuters have turned a Twitter feed, which re-posted commuters’ comments and delay information, into an organization that is documenting problems and conducting a survey to gather data and demand action.
The brainchild of Matt Walters and Mike Tucker, Delayed on NJ Transit now has a Facebook group, in addition to the Twitter feed, and has launched, what Tucker called, a more commuter-oriented survey than the NJ Transit quarterly Scorecard survey, which is geared toward measuring customer satisfaction or dissatisfaction.
The Delayed on NJ Transit survey, which is being conducted until June 30, can be taken at tinyurl.com/lndr49h.
NJ Transit officials declined to comment about the Delayed on NJ Transit survey, but defended their survey, saying it is one tool the agency uses to listen to customers, in addition to holding “we’re listening” forums with management.
Stuart Rabner Enabler of statewide economic failure reappointed as Chief justice of the New Jersey Supreme Court
The state Senate this week overwhelmingly officially re-upped the appointment of the chief justice of the New Jersey Supreme Court despite the protests of some Republicans in the senate, including state Sen. Joe Kyrillos (R-13), who characterized Rabner as an enabler of statewide economic failure. (Politicker Staff)
