Ridgewood is starting to look like NYC in the 1970’s. Out of control spending, rogue employees and elected officials, failing education system and lack of maintenance in the town.
NYC cut police officers and firefighters also in a effort to cut spending. The results of that remains in the minds of those who had to travel to NYC to work during those frightening years. Crime rose 60% in just 2 years. Burned buildings were everywhere. Even today the city still hasn’t recovered from the population loss from those years. It took a good 15 years and federal help for the city to control its spending. They realized the problem lied in poor spending habits, non-working employees and outside political influences.
Im not saying Ridgewood is going be as bad as NYC was, but it could very well be a smaller version of it. Do the residents a favor, instead of cutting essential services such as Police, Fire, EMS, Sanitation and other quality of life services, look at things that we either don’t need or need to cut back on. Example: Rear yard garbage pickup. We also need to stop several projects that we CANT afford. Example: Parking Garage, Bank Ban. I would much rather have a second firehouse instead, i like my house not charred.
If you look at how the finical collapse of NYC started, you will see a smaller but similar problem that Ridgewood has today. But lets not make the same mistakes they made when stabilizing the budget.
