H.I.T.S.: HEARD IN THE STREET. . .
While on the way to the Mayor's town hall meeting last night, I happened down Kenyon Avenue -- looking spiffy thanks to the Council's commitment and Star Of The Sea's hard work -- and ran into a neighborhood activist out working on the lawn. Seems they have an issue. Actually, two.
The first is that the block association has suspicions an illegal rooming house is being run on the block. The second is they are having a devil of a time getting the Administration's attention. Seems after many calls and emails, they finally got a meeting with several City Hall types and their Council reps. Residents vent. Officials promise. No one gets back to them. So what's the status? No one knows. Among those present and not getting back to the residents, per my contact: Jenny Wenson Maier and Nagy Sileem...
...Speaking of Mr. Sileem, you did notice in yesterday's Ledger that he was elected president of the Hillside board of education, did you not? Hillside is just like Plainfield, only more so...
...But back to the issue of illegal rooming houses. What ever happened to the 'Safe Homes' initiative, under which Jocelyn Pringley was to lead her -- augmented -- troops in clamping down on overcrowdingand the accompanying safety issues by absentee landlords ? Seems to have vanished into thin air.
Which is more than you can say about Jocelyn. She is not vanishing anywhere, as Nagy Sileem has found out. Not only that, word has it she is waging bureaucratic guerilla warfare, the way the colonists would take potshots at the British and then melt into the woods.
...Word in the street is that the Mayor is close to naming a new Director of Administration and Finance, to fill the position left vacant when Norton Bonaparte
CATCH-ALL: Monday's CLIPPINGS pointed to two stories about the mess with the Schools Construction Corp. -- the Courier's "Officials to probe accelerated reviews of school sites" and the Bergen Record's "Safety didn't come first in hunt for N.J. school sites" -- with the editorial question "Is this the program that was to hasten putting a school at Muhlenberg?" which some readers though meant I was implying there were environmental issues with the proposal for a school on the Muhlenberg site. Not at all.
It was the 'expedited' part of the story that caught my eye. What had been proposed for the Muhlenberg site was making it a 'demonstration' project, which would have included expedited reviews as well as a general loosening of the restrictions on bidding and contracts. It was this latter which has led to so much abuse and put the SCC in the crosshairs of investigators. And that, I think, is the embarrassment from which the gods chose to spare us. At least this time...
...Lastly, I took a drubbing from Mrs. G. over the mention in Monday's TW3 that the young man running an East End drug operation [link to Ledger story] lived next door to a prominent citizen. Did I fail to mention that this is also down the street from former Councilman Bob Ferraro and around the corner from the Democratic City Committee's 2-5 female rep? Sorry. The point is that drugs and guns are in some of our nicest neighborhoods, and not just -- as many people assume -- "where poor people live." Question is, what's being done about it?
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