Ridgewood Mayor’s Corner: On the agenda for the new year
Friday January 4, 2013, 12:57 PM
The Ridgewood News
Welcome to a new year and to my first Mayor’s Corner of 2013.
In 2012, I started this column in The Ridgewood News to open a window onto the work of the Village Council and to enhance our responsiveness to residents’ concerns, questions and suggestions. I hope it’s been working.
Council agenda
The council will meet three times in January – Jan. 9, 16 and 30. We will address several important topics, including the budget, shade tree policy and parking (downtown and at the high school).
All residents are encouraged to share their views on these and other issues – by speaking at any of our meetings, writing to us through email, calling us by phone, or even stopping us on the street.
New Year’s priorities (in alphabetical order)
In 2012, we began work on a range of priority issues. In 2013, we need to bring them to resolution, or at least make meaningful progress on them:
Budget: Private sector salaries continue to drop or remain stagnant, while the cost of government continues to rise. This is an unsustainable business model. We therefore need to fix the Village budget, bringing public salaries in line with private reality and looking for ways to do government differently.
To that end, I have asked several Ridgewood residents to volunteer their time and expertise to help us be more effective and more cost efficient. They plan to share their preliminary findings with us in early January, thus informing a much-needed conversation that began last fall. Going forward, we will continue to make the budget more transparent and more accessible to all residents.
Flood Mitigation: Under the leadership of Village Engineer Chris Rutishauser and his team, we made important progress last year with respect to flood mitigation, cleaning out some of the Ho-Ho-Kus Brook and Saddle River. We will keep this issue in our focus, because the “100 year” floods seem to happen almost annually.
sounds good mr mayor and council.
so we all would think you will start with the police dept, then the fire dept’s. because they are the highest pay dept’s in the village. and do we or don’t need a paid fire dept.
other big towns don’t have it. and if we do keep it then don’t cry about the price it is.
and it’s big money. from what we see is that those dept’s are at full staff, and other dept’s are down to record low level in workers in 100,years. and it’s hurting the village.
why is the street dept down to 6 workers from 25, and parks dept down to 4 from 10. shade tree down to 2 from 6 , this is not good for the village. those dept’s have a lot of work to do in keeping up on what needs to be done. are we going to start to put plows on the front of police s u v,s like out west. it looks like that may happen , unless the village starts putting on some workers. thanks miss closllin
The police dept is not at full staff retirements, firings, and overall attrition has cut pd levels from 51 or 52 in the 90’s to 40 or so now.. Regionalization is not the answer it did not work on long island. Larger department are often times less efficent than smaller one. We should be expanding public safety not downsizing. Just look at current events.