you sound for all the world like a desperate current officeholder sweating their re-election chances. You uncivilly bad mouth our esteemed former Councilwoman Bernadette Walsh as if she were a current candidate vying to replace you on the Council. (We should be so lucky. You should keep your powder dry if in fact you anticipate facing her as a future electoral opponent!) You further hypocritically introduce party politics into your discussion regarding Ms. Walsh, as if she ever allowed her already well-known political affiliation to affect the way she conducted herself as a (successful) candidate for Ridgewood council, or as a (successful) sitting Councilwoman. (Which, of course, she never did, having full and complete respect for the clear strictures imposed by the Faulkner Act.) Finally, you blithely and coldly use the word ‘failed’ when discussing Ms. Walsh’s bid for a county-wide position. This is a transparently malicious bid to paint her as some kind of sad sack candidate, a characterization no right-thinking Ridgewood resident who knows her at all would ever accept, particularly coming from an individual clearly clutching at so many straws to defend an incumbent who was himself a ‘failed candidate’ for US Congress. Would do us all a favor and slink back into the humble roadside hole you came out of, Mr. Mudslinger?
2. Statement of Compliance with the Open Public Meeting Act
MAYOR: “Adequate notice of this meeting has been provided by a posting on the bulletin board in Village hall, by mail to the Ridgewood News, The Record, and by submission to all persons entitled to same as provided by law of a schedule including the date and time of this meeting.”
3. Roll Call – Village Clerk
4. Flag Salute and Moment of Silence
5. Public Comments (Not to exceed 5 minutes per person)
6. Discussion Items
a. Review of Departmental/Utility/Other Accounts Budgets
Your editorial (“Sinking feeling is settling in,” March 13, page A6) prompted me to telephone the village’s 24-hour “pothole hotline” to report several very bone-jarring potholes on South Irving Street in the vicinity of Cedar Avenue and Arden Court.
Within one hour of placing the call, I observed a two-person crew from the village’s Streets Division working feverishly and skillfully to fill each of the potholes that I had reported.
Thanks are in order to the management and worker bees of the Streets Division for having moved so quickly and professionally to address a report of serious, and potentially hazardous, roadway impediments.
This is a fine example of how quickly the wheels of municipal government can turn if a customer focused action plan is developed, implemented, and assigned to knowledgeable and highly motivated employees.
Deputy Mayor Albert Pucciarelli has scheduled a CBD Panel Discussion for March 18, 2015 from 7:30PM to 9:00PM; with an “open mike” from 7:30 to 8:00PM. It will be held at Christ Episcopal Church located at the corner of Franklin venue and Cottage Place. The discussion will focus on Parking with a panel comprised of Paul Vagianos, Charles Di Marco, Janet Fricke and Paul Aronsohn.
Ridgewood Village Council amends residency rules for hiring
MARCH 17, 2015 LAST UPDATED: TUESDAY, MARCH 17, 2015, 10:42 AM
BY MARK KRULISH
STAFF WRITER |
THE RIDGEWOOD NEWS
After a lengthy discussion during a work session earlier this month, the Village Council introduced an ordinance last Wednesday amending residency requirements to indicate that all civilian classified titles in Civil Service will be opened to the entire state with the exception of police and fire department public safety titles.
A previous ordinance, which gave preference to Bergen County residents, followed by residents from contiguous counties and then state residents, was adopted unanimously on Aug. 13, 2014, according to the minutes of that night’s meeting. However, this was deemed impermissible by the New Jersey Civil Service Commission and was sent back for revisions.
The new ordinance, which was introduced by a 3-2 vote, would open those jobs to residents from anywhere in New Jersey without a tier system.
During discussion on March 4, Councilman Michael Sedon acknowledged that he voted in favor of removing the residency requirement in August, which he said was “a mistake.” He stated his belief that hiring residents from the village puts them ahead of those from outside of Ridgewood.
The Passing for Bill Clark
Pastor Marc’s Lenten Devotional Day Twenty-One:
West Side Presbyterian Church
This past Saturday, a wonderful human being Bill Clark died after nearly five years battling cancer. Bill leaves behind his wife, two sons, mother and brother, and many others who loved him dearly. Bill died too young. He had yet to turn 60 years old and had so much life ahead of him. We will celebrate his life and grieve his death tomorrow at West Side Presbyterian Church (2pm in the sanctuary). People will come from all parts of Bill’s life to share stories, to give and receive comfort, and to find strength in community and in their faith in God.
When I met with his family this past week to plan the Memorial Service, I was touched by the stories they shared, particularly his tenderness and devotion as a son, husband, and father. At one point I asked his sons, “Was there anything your father shared with you this past week that you will treasure?” After some silence, one son answered, “There’s nothing our dad could have said this week that he hadn’t already taught us by being the person he was.” Those words brought tears to my eyes as I was touched by their affection and gratitude for their dad.
This experience has remained with me this week. I’m grieving Bill’s death as many people are, but I’m also challenged again to be the kind of father who will be remembered with similar affection and gratitude. This Lent, we’ve been reflecting on what it means to be a church. What if our primary role was to help shape one another as human beings? What if we helped each other live into the fullness of our God-given humanity? What if we encouraged and supported each other in being the best sons, husbands, and fathers (as well as daughters, wives, and mothers) we can be? Imagine if we looked around at church and saw people who inspired us to grow and stretch in humility and compassion, in whom we saw a special light of life, and with whom we wanted to partner in being a “little Christ” (the literal translation of “Christian”) in the world.
Taxpayers on hook to fund portion of signs for CBD businesses
March 14,2015
Boyd Loving
Ridgewood NJ, As a result of Village Council approval of Resolution 15-90, Village taxpayers are now on the hook to pay a portion of the expenses associated with installing new “Wayfinding” signs in the Village’s Central Business District (CBD). The “Wayfinding signs are intended to direct pedestrians to businesses located on side streets off of East Ridgewood Avenue in the CBD.
Estimated construction expenses to be paid by taxpayers for additional poles to hold the signs are between $6K – $9K.
Village of Ridgewood employees will also be responsible for the installation of each new sign. Taxpayers will be reimbursed $25 per installed sign by the Ridgewood Chamber of Commerce (including reimbursement for previously installed signs). The Chamber collects an annual “maintenance fee” from each sign owner, as well as a fee for the signs themselves. 36 signs have been sold to date, this according to the Chamber’s president, Paul Vagianos.
No explanation was offered to the public as to why taxpayers needed to provide funding if installation and annual maintenance fees are being collected by the Chamber. Nor was any explanation offered as to why a private contractor could not be hired to install the signs (as is done in Montclair).
Additionally, no review of the sign project was undertaken by the Historic Preservation Commission nor the Planning Board, and questions regarding ownership of the signs as it pertains to liability insurance coverage in the event of an injury caused by a sign defect were left unanswered (during the Council meeting at which the resolution was passed).
Here’s the full text of Resolution 15-90:
Res. No. 15-90
RESOLUTION NO. 15-90
WHEREAS, the Village of Ridgewood Chamber of Commerce continues to strive to enhance the public’s knowledge of the various stores on the side streets in the Central Business District by means of the installation of”wayfinding” signs at various intersections; and
WHEREAS, each proposed wayfinding sign, identifing the various businesses, would be a plaque no larger than approximately 6 to 8 inches tall and no more than 24 inches in length affixed to a pole at the approved intersection locations, with no more than 8 plaques per designated pole or no more than 4 plaques per PSE&G decorative streetlight pole location, while maintaining a vertical clearance of 84 inches from the sidewalk; and
WHEREAS, the Chamber is seeking approval for additional locations for designated poles for wayfinding signs, in accordance with the location sketch presented to the Village Council.
NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED, by the Village Council of the Village of Ridgewood that it approves the installation of wayfinding signs at the various locations along East Ridgewood Avenue, in the Central Business District, to direct patrons to the various businesses on the listed side streets; and
BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED, that the Village Council agrees to install the concrete bases for the new designated poles for no more than 4 locations, have the Village Traffic and Signal Division install the designated poles on the new bases for no more than 4 locations; have the Traffic and Signal Division install new sign plates for a $25.00 per plaque fee paid by the Chamber of Commerce; have the Traffic and Signal Division perform an annual sign plaque maintenance which would remove any invalid sign plaques for a $25.00 per plaque fee to be paid for by the Chamber of Commerce; and
BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED, that the Ridgewood Chamber of Commerce agrees that they will purchase the designated poles in the color black, without a globe, matching the existing PSE&G decorative streetlight poles for the wayfinding signs; agrees to have installed no more than 8 sign plaques on designated poles, and no more than 4 sign plaques on PSE&G decorative streetlight poles; and
NOW, THEREFORE, BE IT FINALLY RESOLVED, that the Village Council of the Village of Ridgewood agrees to authorize the Village Manager to approve any subsequent locations for wayfinding signs in the Central Business District, upon review and approval by the Village’s Engineering Division and Public Safety Departments.
Reader says legally-imposed hiring preference for qualified local residents was NEVER ON THE AGENDA.
Unfortunately for you, you’ve just highlighted perhaps the best reason why Councilwoman Knudsen need never have concerned herself with any potential conflict-of-interest: Potentially eliminating the RPD’s and the RFD’s legally-imposed hiring preference for qualified local residents was NEVER ON THE AGENDA.
Other items relating to village hiring practices for other municipal jobs may have been up for discussion, but never the local hiring practices relating to police or firemen. (And certainly nothing on the agenda necessitated closing the session.)
This is also why it is so clearly a red herring for anyone to bring up her relationship to the test-takers. They are not even candidates for any of the positions or categories of positions being looked at by the VC for potential changes in the law relating to hiring practices!
What do we care about what relationship the test-takers have or don’t have with Councilwoman Knudsen? What’s the relevance?
Reader says Nobody cares whether RPD or RFD test-takers have any relationship with a current member of the Village Council or not.
Nobody cares whether RPD or RFD test-takers have any relationship with a current member of the Village Council or not. Yet you won’t stop talking about it. It has no relevance to the topic at hand. Your continued harping on it seems to show that you are trying to sow general confusion or to deflect attention from the topic immediately at hand (namely: non-police and non-firefighter municipal hiring practices in Ridgewood). Is this not the textbook definition of a red herring? If so, can we please be forgiven for ignoring it?
A municipality that flouts or ignores the law in question for 25 years MUST BE consistently failing deliberately to give priority to qualified candidates who actually live within its borders. Thus, its hiring practices are literally out of control and must be amended immediately.
Most qualified potential candidates who are also local residents are likely to be unaware of the law operating in their favor because the management of the municipality has itself forgotten about its requirements. That’s a heck of a lot of ignorance, institutional and otherwise. The likelihood of such collective ignorance and lack of management control producing many, many violations of the law in question over a twenty-five year period is objectively high.
More particularly, the municipality in question will be extremely lucky if one or more such violations did not occur within the one, two, three, six-year period (whatever it happens to be) specified by the statute of limitations (i.e., the recent past) such that the hiring decision(s) is either currently subject to being ‘undone’ as a result of a well-pled lawsuit, or will be held to have triggered liability for money damages awardable to the plaintiff behind the suit.
You are asking someone to simply name for you any and all Ridgewood residents in the past twenty-five years who were qualified and applied for a position with the village and were improperly turned down in favor of respective out-of-town applicants.
With all due respect, and at least in this forum, this is a preposterous demand. If you are curious about the potential scope of the village’s liability for current and past violations of the hiring practices law in question, you should conduct your own investigation. Pounding your fists at the insufficiency of a collection of comments on a local blog accomplishes nothing and, frankly, makes you look like a fish out of water (or worse).
OTOH, Nobody here ultimately wishes anyone ill. The issues and good governance are what count, and your time was not wasted if you would just try to broaden your perspective to include more than just the political, or the tactical.
Ridgewood settles resident’s sewage ‘blowback’ case for almost $22,000
MARCH 11, 2015, 9:59 PM LAST UPDATED: WEDNESDAY, MARCH 11, 2015, 10:04 PM
BY CHRIS HARRIS
STAFF WRITER |
THE RECORD
RIDGEWOOD NJ— The village has agreed to pay $21,920 to settle a resident’s claim for repairs to her finished basement that flooded when the municipality cleared its sewer lines last September.
The settlement was approved Wednesday night by Mayor and Council.
Resident Jill Feeney said she reached out to village officials soon after discovering the carpet in her basement was soggy and stank.
“It literally smelled like the men’s room at Penn Station on a hot day,” Feeney said Wednesday, noting one foot of sewage-contaminated water was forced up through the drain in her basement’s sink by the village’s work.
As village crews worked to unclog a sewer line next to her Stevens Avenue home in September, Feeney said a pocket of pressurized air formed within a nearby sewer line — the pipe leading to her basement’s sink. The air escaped through the sink, and the contaminated water followed, tainting everything it touched.
Plumbers refer to this rare phenomenon as “blowback.”
N.J. has no policy on officials’ use of personal emails nearly a year after call for a ban
MARCH 11, 2015, 11:32 PM LAST UPDATED: WEDNESDAY, MARCH 11, 2015, 11:45 PM
BY MELISSA HAYES
STATE HO– USE BUREAU |
THE RECORD
Nearly a year before revelations that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton used her personal email account for official business, the Christie administration was chastised because members of its own staff communicated through private emails. And that criticism came not from Governor Christie’s political foes, but from lawyers hired by his team to investigate the burgeoning George Washington Bridge lane-closing scandal.
The lawyers called for the administration to impose an immediate ban on the practice. After all, the most notorious email to emerge from the GWB scandal — the “Time for some traffic problems in Fort Lee” message that a deputy chief of staff sent to a Port Authority official — was written on her private email account.
Yet just shy of 12 months after the lawyers’ recommendation, which was contained in the so-called Mastro report on the lane closings, the state has yet to change its written policies on the use of such email accounts. In fact, the current policy on “electronic mail/messages” is silent when it comes to public workers doing state business on private email.
MARCH 11, 2015, 11:59 AM LAST UPDATED: WEDNESDAY, MARCH 11, 2015, 12:10 PM
BY CHRIS HARRIS
STAFF WRITER |
THE RECORD
RIDGEWOOD – A councilwoman with three sons in line for village police jobs claims several officials broke the law last month by meeting behind closed doors to discuss changes to Ridgewood’s residency requirement.
“This belonged in open session,” Councilwoman Susan Knudsen insisted at a recent council meeting, noting no specific village employee’s position was discussed during the closed-door meeting, but rather a policy relating to Ridgewood’s hiring practices.
“We did not follow the law,” Knudsen said. “That’s not an allegation, it’s a fact.”
But Village Attorney Matthew Rogers maintains officials acted appropriately, saying “the topic under discussion” by the council that evening “fit into the exceptions” outlined in the Open Public Meetings Act.
The village’s labor attorney also concluded the council did not violate the law.
“Generally, at the time the decision was made, it is my understanding there was reason to believe such discussions could impact upon the terms and conditions of employment of specific prospective employees or employee groups,” said Beth Hinsdale-Piller.
Readers voice concern over weakening of residency requirements
I think they are looking to hire more Hudson county partisan people to work in Ridgewood by ditching the residency rules.
The previous Village Manager is referred to as a “carpet bagger,” but yet this VC plans to do away with the residency requirement for all employees except police & fire? Do as we say and not as we do.
While other readers insist , ” We should be hiring for police & fire from the surrounding communities Paramus, Glen Rock, Midland Park, Waldwick and Ho-Ho-Kus, as well as Ridgewood. This would give the Village access to a wider pool of applicants and might stop us from hiring a majority of legacy candidates.”
The Mayor wrote in a PolitickerNJ Editorial on 03/04/11 , “my Party has largely stood on the sidelines as union workers were vilified and scapegoated. Silent and passive, many Democrats did nothing as others attacked the very people at the center of our Party. No defense. No counteroffensive. No nothing. During the past year’s great debate over worker’s rights and responsibilities, the Democrats – by and large – refused to show up.”
The Mayor received massive campaign contributions from unions :
Paul Aronsohn (D)Political Action Committee Total ContributedTeamsters Union $10,000.00 Intl Brotherhood of Electrical Workers $10,000.00 United Auto Workers $6,500.00 Carpenters & Joiners Union $5,000.00 American Fedn of St/Cnty/Munic Employees $5,000.00 National Air Traffic Controllers Assn $5,000.00 Sheet Metal Workers Union $5,000.00 Laborers Union $3,500.00 AFL-CIO $2,661.00 American Federation of Teachers $2,500.00 Operating Engineers Local 825 $2,500.00 Plumbers/Pipefitters Union Local 475 $1,000.00 Service Employees International Union $1,000.00 Plumbers/Pipefitters Union Local 274 $1,000.00 Plumbers/Pipefitters Union Local 9 $500.00
March 5, 2015 Last updated: Thursday, March 5, 2015, 3:01 PM
By Mark Krulish
Staff Writer |
The Ridgewood News
Ridgewood officials gathered at Village Hall last Saturday morning for a discussion between department heads and the governing body about some details of the municipal budget, including the needs of various departments and anticipated spending.
The seven-hour roundtable meeting was a departure in style from previous years and talks centered on the Department of Public Works, the Building Department, Health Department, Parks and Recreation, Fire Department, Police Department, Engineering and Human Resources, along with a closing discussion on the capital budgets.
Village Manager Roberta Sonenfeld said one of the goals for the meeting was to present the best numbers possible, but there would not be any indication of the final figures or tax impact to residents until closer to budget introduction.
Sonenfeld noted that some increases in spending were attributed to the need for repairs to an aging infrastructure and upgrading the village’s technology.
