An old Hudson County political adage states that if you can’t get out the votes, you can dig them up. Since before Jersey City Mayor Frank “I’m the boss” Hague ruled the county early in this century, people accused local politicians of using dead people’s names for voting. While such abuses went on elsewhere in the country during the 19th century, Hudson County was stigmatized as the capital of such practices – well into the 20th century.
With the county thick with institutions – hospitals, a jail and other facilities once located at Laurel Hill in Secaucus – it seemed like a perfect farm for voting fraud. More than once, Secaucus politicians have accused Democrats of milking the Meadowview Hospital crowd. In fact, in 1993, court rulings called for a special election there because of apparent irregularities in the absentee ballots that came out of the geriatric ward at Meadowview.
The county’s political use of Meadowview Hospital campus took an even more insidious turn in 1995 when then-County Robert Janiszewski privatized operations there, causing the layoff of hundreds of county workers and a state investigation concerning several deaths of seniors at the facility. Janiszewski was running for re-election that year and had vowed to downsize the county’s workforce. This move, of course, came to haunt the county later, when report after report showed the facility’s new operator, Progressive Healthcare, went bankrupt, owing not just Hudson County a bundle of cash, but its workers and other creditors too.
The politics of Meadowview Hospital’s facilities also led to Janiszewski’s guilty plea for extortion earlier this year for payments he demanded for awarding contracts to the hospital’s psychiatric wing.
But the county has been remarkably silent in regards to the possible moving of a county graveyard near Laurel Hill Park, even though this site is part of a five-acre sale to the New Jersey Turnpike Authority. The $6 million price tag for the land has been used in part to balance this year’s county budget, the rest of which will be spread across the next two years to help balance those budgets too.
As the Turnpike Authority struggles to meet court mandates for the proper treatment of the dead at the one-time county graveyard – at a possible cost of an additional $4 million – the county counts its cash and moves on, unmoved by the fact that it was county neglect that allowed the graveyard to vanish between weeds. Hudson County, which seemed to lose track of records of who was buried there, had once built a temporary jail on top of a part of the graveyard.
To the Turnpike Authority, who purchased the property for a new exit to service the soon-to-be-opened train station in Secaucus, there is no state lemon law to protect them against unseen defects in the land they purchased, and no state agency, apparently, that will hold the county accountable for the proper burial of former citizens. The Turnpike, however, should not be pitied since the state agency constructed a bridge over the site in the 1950s when it first constructed the Turnpike’s western spur. Yet if county officials still needed the vote of its former citizens, the graves would have seen better upkeep.
Atlantic City won’t be the same
Except for one reported tiff between Jersey City Spokesperson Stan Eason and Jersey City Deputy Mayor Gene Drayton, all the excitement of the former years seemed to drain from this year’s League of Municipalities Convention in Atlantic City this year.
This seems partly due to Janiszewski’s guilty plea for extortion and the indictment of Freeholder Nidia Davila-Colon. People from Hudson County who used to hang out at the Bally’s main barroom seemed less enthusiastic this year. Over the last two decades, you could have walked into that bar any year and found the same people sitting or standing at the same spots. Janiszewski – as one local politician noted recently – would be standing to one side, his eyeglasses halfway down his nose, a clipboard under one arm, and a drink in the other hand.
“You could find nearly everybody there,” one source said. “This year there was a lot of business conducted [elsewhere] for a change.”
Secaucus Mayor Dennis Elwell said he went to several workshops while at the convention, particularly those dealing with redevelopment.
Newly elected Guttenberg Councilwoman Jennifer Credidio, whom this column mistakenly called Joanne Martin two weeks ago, said the experience was good.
“It was really nice to see people that I had worked with through the legislature – I haven’t seen most of them since January,” she said. “The support and good wishes, especially from the elected women, were amazing. Plus I got in some bonding time with my soon-to-be colleagues, always a good thing.”
No one busted for being drunk
Unlike in past years, when the convention was an excuse to party, no public officials were arrested for public drunkenness.
Hoboken Councilman Chris Campos, Former Union City Mayor Rudy Garcia, and Hoboken Councilman Rubin Ramos, Jr. – a trio of young politicos secretly labeled “the new Hudson County Rat Pack” – prowled the convention. Several times, the hotel paged “Robert Janiszewski,” a joke some attendees attributed to Freeholder Bill O’Dea.
Gov. Jim McGreevey made a one-day visit to the convention.
The center of attention this year was a party held by attorney Kenneth McPherson of the politically connected Waters-McPherson of Secaucus.
“Everybody that was anybody in Hudson County was there,” another source said.
This included visits from Hudson County Executive Tom DeGise and Jersey City Mayor Glenn Cunningham. “It was wall-to-wall political power,” another source said.
Starkly missing from the crowd were the once all-too familiar faces of what one source called “The Janiszewski crowd.”
While there, DeGise and his chief of staff, Jersey City Councilman Bill Gaughan enjoyed a game of golf.
The court rules against Hartnett – again
An apparent attempt to secure a majority on the Hudson County Schools of Technology Board by appointing two new members went afoul this week when Superior Court Judge Arthur D’Italia ruled that County Executive Bernard Hartnett had failed to get approval from the Board of Freeholders.
The ruling, however, has wider implications since very few of the former seven members of the school board had received freeholder approval under Janiszewski. Freeholder Chairman Sal Vega, who also sits on that board as a liaison for the freeholders, is expected to ask for every member’s resignation. Some will be reappointed later. Some won’t be.
A curious fact in the case, however, involves John Lacy, the attorney that represented Hartnett. The two new members Hartnett appointed pushed through Lacy’s appointment as the board’s attorney before the court ruling voided their positions.