One month after the Journal Square Restoration Corp. laid off its staff, the organization is still struggling with its top priority: keeping Journal Square clean.
Created in 1996, the Journal Square Restoration Corporation is one of the city’s Special Improvement Districts (SID). SIDs allow clusters of small businesses in various commercial pockets to pay a fee to the SID that will go back to empower, improve, and secure the area. Once they submit their annual budget, the city’s Economic Development Corporation, which oversees SIDs, will match that money with varying amounts of state funds.
But a mounting debt and shaky relationship with the EDC has left the Journal Square organization in the red as it struggles to resurface at ground level. Without the necessary cleaning crew, ground level has been piled up with litter.
City agencies such as the Jersey City Incinerator Authority have stepped in for the moment and offered a hand. Also, the non-profit organization Ready, Willing and Able, which assists former convicts and drug-addiction patients, has employed its residents to help in the clean-up efforts. Ward C Councilman Steve Lipski said he has been receiving fewer complaints about the area during the weekday, but still sees a dramatic increase of garbage on the ground over the weekends when no one is cleaning the square.
Because of the Journal Square SID’s $485,000 debt and shaky relationship with the EDC, the organization has not been able to rectify its financial woes.
“Vouchers were not being paid since 1998,” Lipski said. “They started accruing debt from there.” The SID submits vouchers to the EDC each year to back up its budget.
Stan Eason, spokesperson for the mayor, said that the administration is currently reviewing those past vouchers. He said some of the vouchers, which are supposed to pertain only to activities directly affiliated with operating the Journal Square Restoration Corp., appeared to be fraudulent. Out of the $500,000 in vouchers submitted going back to 1998, he said that the administration is likely to approve $280,000.
However, the EDC can not release matching funds unless the Journal Square SID submits a new budget for review. In the past, the budget has averaged $1.4 million, the largest SID budget in the city.
But the failure to submit a new budget is suspect, city officials said. According to City Clerk Robert Byrne, the overdue budget was brought to the attention of Brian Coleman, president of the Journal Square Restoration Corp., in October. At the City Council’s caucus meeting on Monday, Byrne said he was told it was a “strategic delay,” and alluded to the possibility that it was intended to break up a union that was forming. In February, the Journal Square Restoration Corp. laid off 38 of its employees.
After several weeks of garbage piling up, though, the city administration released enough funds to hire some back. Coleman did not return several phone calls to The Hudson Reporter.
For now, the JCIA has taken the brunt of the workload. According to at-large Councilman Mariano Vega, who is the chairman of the EDC, the Journal Square Restoration Corp. had refused city services in the past. He said that he hopes the organization will now start using some city services so that the cost of running the organization does not exceed what it can afford.
“Some help is better than no help,” Vega said. But he recognized that a place as a busy as Journal Square, where roughly 40,000 people travel through each day during the week, needs additional help as well.
In addition, Mayor Glenn D. Cunningham is also working on a plan to have non-violent prisoners conduct a supervising cleaning during the week.