Citizens of Hoboken:
We are in deep trouble. Hoboken is being systematically transformed for a new and transient population. Our quality of life is being destroyed. Many have been driven out of town. This “urban renewal” serves the financial interests of developers and City officials who feed parasitically upon this new population who can pay high rents, mortgages, and taxes, but who are politically impotent because their hearts are in the suburbs.
Structures are enlarged to house this new population, blocking off our light and air. Huge redevelopment projects, some massively tax abated, wall off our waterfront and clog our streets with traffic, creating noise, parking problems, air pollution.
Instead of putting the brakes on development, the city builds to accommodate thousands of new cars. New roads are being planned to invite these cars into our crowded space and garages built to house them. Elderly citizens were driven from their homes to make way for one garage. Another automated garage at 916 Garden will cause major traffic jams and inflict noise and pollution on that neighborhood day and night.
Citizens attend “public hearings” to protest each outrageous new project. Nobody’s listening. For example, the Zoning Board is not supposed to give variances that result in harm to the public. And yet variances are granted that result in neighbors having their windows bricked over! If that is not harm, then what is? Such sham “public hearings” only distract us while our world is destroyed. We have no say in the matter.
Now the election is upon us. The candidates are Russo, architect of eight years of decline, and Roberts, who until recently was Russo’s ally, voting for every abuse that Russo brought forward. And I see those same citizens who so rightly protested new development projects line up behind these candidates, hoping to influence them, condemning themselves to four more years of irreversible damage.
Since 1981, I have worked to stop the abuses of over-development. I have worked on seven referendum drives, which gave the people of Hoboken a direct democratic voice on such issues as waterfront development and rent control. Our efforts have done some good: many of our residents are able to live here only because we have stopped their rent control protections from being abolished.
But much of our work has been nefariously undone. For example, the Port Authority (PA) waterfront project that we protested and got on the ballot was defeated twice by the voters, only to have the NJ State government abolish our right to future referendums on such projects. Then Russo sold us out when he became mayor, overturning the will of the people as expressed in two referendum elections by pushing through a PA deal that was worse than any rejected by the voters. Now the PA owns our waterfront property, and Hoboken’s taxpayers will ultimately pay millions per year of the PA project’s taxes. And Councilman Roberts helped Russo do it.
Twenty years of hard work has taught me that petitions and protests will not save us. We must have true representation in the government or we will continue to have our world sold out from under us. Russo and Roberts are the problem, not the answer.
Our only hope is to immediately form a Hoboken Citizen’s Union to gain citizen representation in government and to prevent further damage to Hoboken’s environment. This Union should immediately establish a policy platform, and choose candidates for City Council and Mayor to implement that platform. We must gather 244 signatures by March 15 to get these candidates on the ballot. We must campaign to communicate our platform to the voters, so they know clearly what our candidates stand for.
If you want to help to establish a Union to give us all a voice that can be heard, please contact me immediately. It is not too late if we act now. The campaign will help us to efficiently focus our organizing efforts. We will gain strength and momentum because we will be the alternative that the citizens have been waiting for.
What do you think?
Daniel Tumpson