Dear Editor:
In 2009, West New York homeowners, with the exception of 4,000+ waterfront condo owners, experienced a quarterly tax raise of at least 41 percent. The anger and frustration of many affected taxpayers was evidenced by the overflow crowd of many hundreds of town residents at a March 2009 Board of Commissioners meeting.
At the meeting, a Power Point presentation was offered as the administration’s answer to how West New York had arrived at such a financial predicament. Blame was laid at the feet of a prior administration’s mismanagement, according to a Channel 7 ABC 11p.m. news report that evening.
Both Mayor Vega and Commissioner Ricardi were in the last two administrations, including Mayor DeFino and Mayor Sires, who has been a congressman since 2006. Like Vega and Ricardi, Commissioner Lange had also been in the Sires Administration since 1995.
I had two sit-down meetings with Mayor Vega. He said he was misquoted in the ABC report, stating that he meant to blame former Town CFO Daren Maloney for the town’s plight. While, he does blame Maloney in a March 1, 2009 New York Times article, claiming Maloney kept the commissioners in the dark about the town’s mounting debt, the same article says that Mr. McConnell, the current town business administrator, pointed to the millions of dollars on debt that the town simply rolled over, year after year.
Mayor Vega’s campaign proudly displays signs proclaiming ‘Lower Taxes, Honest Government” The loud arrogance of that slogan is deafening. The taxes went up 41 percent between the 2nd and 3rd quarter of FY 2009, but the mayor’s reelection team thinks that because Vega increased the 4th quarter FY 2009 rate over the 2nd quarter rate by 22 percent, but slickly phrased it as a 19 percent cut from the 3rd quarter tax bill, that thoughtless homeowners will not know the difference!
The 800 pound gorilla in the election is the 30-year tax abatement for over 4,000 units that Vega, Lange, and Ricardi authorized to Roseland, Hovnanian, and other developers, and to the condo owners that now live there, starting in 1996. While this was Sires’ vision, Vega, Lange, and Ricardi rubberstamped it. Lange purchased a waterfront condo for $395,000 in 1997 (with the 30 year tax abatement that he voted for) and sold it 10 years later for $830,000. A Google search of “A Programmatic Examination of Municipal Tax Abatements” will reveal an eye-opening scholarly 27 page report on the subject by State Comptroller A. Matthew Boxer. Given Vega’s scapegoating of Maloney and his failure to accept his own culpability in voting for unnecessary abatements, his administration should not be elected. Vote column B on May 10.
Patrick Cullen