Dear Editor:
Voting no on November 8 for ballot Public Question No. 2 is the only responsible use of your vote. For more than 25 years, Hoboken has been operating under rent control policies that a judge called “arbitrary, capricious and unconstitutional as applied.” The Council worked for 18 months on amendments that corrected problems with the rent leveling ordinance and administrative procedures, voting 9-0 to adopt those measures. Working with a contingency attorney who has exploited the gaps on the law and collected millions of dollars in settlements, so-called “tenant representatives’ attended 8 hearings, expressed their opinions and filed hundreds of pages to documents related to rent control. The Council took all of that into account before crafting a law that is fair and will save Hoboken hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in litigation. Yet this same group, bent on leaving open the opportunity for more litigation that typically results in landlords returning more rent to tenants than they collected from them in rent, has brought a Referendum to reverse the long over-due work of the Council. Voting no means restoring a fair balance of interests between tenants and landlords. Voting no means protecting the single family, condominium and small building owners who are still here – those who have not already lost their retirements because of the unconscionable greed of lawyers who manipulated the law for their own advantage.
Byron Herald