We have a five-person council who are all independent thinkers, are polite, considerate, and they don’t interrupt each other at meetings. They are actually prepared for meetings (well, Susan and Mike always were, but now they are joined by three more who are equally informed and have done their homework). Now more nonsense like we used to have with Albert pontificating about anything and everything just to hear himself speak, and Gwenn reading from her ipad something that someone else wrote, and Paul furiously texting with Paul Vaggianos (yes, we witnessed this many times) during meetings and then giving us the doe-in-the-headlights look while saying “transparency, transparency, transparency.”
This new Council has been in place just since July 1, but so far they have accomplished volumes including that they:
1. are going to lengthen the time for public comments.
2. are respectful of members of the public who come to speak
3. overturned the much-hated Ordinance 3066
4. stopped the ridiculous Van Neste proposal
5. are going to prevent puppy-mill and kitten-mill animals from being sold in Ridgewood
6. are looking at many (and reasonable) ways to improve and increase the parking
7. are saving the Schedler House
8. will be putting grant money (hopefully) towards remediating Kings Pond
9. will be repealing the illegal ordinance that tried to prevent people from videotaping public meetings (put in place because hot-headed Aronsohn got caught getting nasty at an HPC meeting)
10. have hired a new Planning Board attorney (ok, so the VC didn’t do this, but it is yet another wonderful new development)
11. will be lowering the overkill lighting at Habernickel Park to be consistent with other parks and in response to the neighbors’ legitimate concerns about this ridiculous flood lighting
12. discovered that the extraordinarily cumbersome and confusing leaf collection process that Roberta put in place was based, in part, on a 7-day rule that has not been effective for a couple of years. So now they are putting a smooth and simple leaf collection schedule up and we can stop hearing about “no leaf left behind.”
13. will be revising the prohibition of parking on Pomander Walk, which is discriminatory and was put in place to serve Gwenn’s friends on that street.
