Councilman-at-large Ravinder Bhalla was elected the new president of the Hoboken City Council at the body’s annual reorganization meeting this past Wednesday. Bhalla replaces Councilwoman Jennifer Giattino, and will reprises the role he previously served for the 2011 calendar year.
Bhalla was elected by a vote of 7 to 1, with Councilwoman Beth Mason (a political opponent of the Dawn Zimmer administration) in opposition and Councilwoman Theresa Castellano absent.
Councilman David Mello was chosen as vice president.
Also on Wednesday, the City Council made two crucial appointments to the Hoboken Zoning Board of Adjustment, which makes decisions about development projects that deviate from zoning guidelines.
Carol Marsh, a former councilwoman, and Michael DeFusco were reappointed to seats as regular Zoning Board members, where they will stay through 2018.
Though the City Council approved a 2.3 million square foot redevelopment plan for the Hoboken rail yards this past December and appears set to move on another for the Western Edge in the coming year, the Zoning Board remains the primary forum through which mid-sized and large developments in Hoboken’s hot real estate market are considered.
There was some controversy about the appointments.
Need more scrutiny, and diversity?
The City Council appointed Zoning Board members for much of its history, but the mayor controlled appointments from 1993 until 2010, after which time the City Council unanimously reclaimed their power. The corruption charges that took down Mayor Peter Cammarano in 2009 arose in part from promises he made to give preferential treatment to projects before the Zoning Board in exchange for campaign contributions.
Six years later, some City Council members remain strong advocates of exercising their oversight rather than letting candidates join without scrutiny. On Wednesday, the resolution to appoint Zoning Board members was almost tabled until the following meeting. Council members Mason, Mello, Tim Occhipinti, and Michael Russo said they wanted more time to consider the large volume of applications they had received for four open positions.
“I live here…because this is not Short Hills on the Hudson.”—Michael Evers
____________
Marsh was appointed with four votes in favor. But Councilmen Occhipinti, Russo, and Mello were opposed, with Mello saying that her type of viewpoint was already well represented on the board. Mason voted present.
DeFusco was appointed with an unusual vote spread: council members Cunningham, Giattino, Mason, Occhipinti, and Bhalla in favor, Doyle and Mello in opposition, and Russo voting present.
The reappointment of two current Zoning Board members seems likely to have disappointed resident Michael Evers, who spoke out at the meeting about a lack of diversity on Hoboken’s municipal land use boards. As a self-described “white guy who lives in a million dollar home,” Evers expressed concern that the Zoning and Planning Boards are allegedly made up almost exclusively of other affluent white property owners like him.
He pointed to the Zoning Board’s unwillingness to approve projects with an affordable housing component in recent years as evidence of an inherent bias among its current membership.
“That’s what happens when you have a Zoning Board that consists of people with one singular outlook,” he said.
Hoboken’s 2012 affordable housing ordinance mandates that 10 percent of units in new developments be affordable, but projects with 10 or fewer units are exempted.
Evers warned that a loss of affordable housing would hurt Hoboken in the long term. “I live here, and I think most of you live here, because this is not Short Hills on the Hudson,” he said. “This is a place where people from every walk of life know each other and you meet each other and it makes for a richer life for everybody.”
Over the last few years, the number of Latino and African-American individuals in the most powerful positions in the city has dwindled to almost none.
At the council’s next meeting, it will vote on two alternate members of the Zoning Board serving one year terms. Tiffanie Fisher, who served as an alternate in 2014, was nominated for one of the regular appointments this past Wednesday, but was unable to secure majority support.
Most of the recent controversial proposals before the Zoning Board have involved large mixed-use projects in the underdeveloped western side of Hoboken, which is still zoned restrictively for industrial use. While looming redevelopment plans may change some of that, Councilman Peter Cunningham indicated Wednesday that the City Council would be looking into potential changes to the zoning book itself this coming year.
Bhalla’s agenda
As council president, Ravi Bhalla will be responsible for leading council meetings, as well appointing his fellow council members to subcommittees. In the event of a vacancy in the office of mayor, Bhalla would statutorily be appointed to serve as acting mayor.
“I look forward to tackling issues large and small,” said Bhalla in a statement after his election, “from updating our local ordinance and regulations to allow car share services such as Uber to operate legally, to working with residents and City Hall to identify potholes to be filled or places to implement enhanced pedestrian safety measures.”
Among the goals Bhalla mentioned for his second stint as council president are keeping the property tax levy stable or reducing it in the 2015 municipal budget, advancing the Hoboken Yards, Western Edge, and North End redevelopment projects, and working to increase open space in the city.
After a panel of court-appointed commissioners assessed the Block 12 property in southwest Hoboken, the planned cornerstone of a new park, at a value $2.4 million higher than the city’s appraisal, Bhalla said he would appoint an ad hoc committee to deal with the issue.
Councilman James Doyle will take over for Bhalla as the council’s representative on the Hoboken Planning Board for 2015.
Of the five current council members allied with Mayor Dawn Zimmer, only David Mello and James Doyle, who was first elected in 2013, have not taken a turn as council president.
On Thursday, Mello said he was excited to become vice president, and would not consider seeking the council presidency unless he gets a new teaching job. He is currently a social studies teacher at a public middle school in the South Bronx.
Mello also mentioned hoping to continue his membership on the City Council’s two redevelopment-related committees, which would not be possible if he was council president. He said the North and South Community Development subcommittees are now doing as much work in a month as they once did in a year.
Holdover budget passed
Also on Wednesday, the City Council approved $38.5 million in temporary appropriations to fund the city government through the first quarter of 2015. The sum includes all current interest and debt service obligations, as well as funding for the Hoboken Parking Utility.
Although Hoboken operates on a calendar year fiscal cycle, the City typically does not approve a budget until the middle of the year—mid-June in 2014—necessitating temporary appropriations to keep the local government funded until a new budget is ready.
By state mandate, the temporary appropriations were calculated so as not to exceed an amount equal to 26.25 percent of last year’s municipal budget in total, excluding debt service. But Business Administrator Quentin Wiest explained that the temporary budget was not produced by simply giving each department exactly one quarter of its allotment in the previous year’s full budget.
Budget lines like snow removal are more fully funded in light of the season, said Wiest, while pensions received no funding because no payments are due in the first quarter of the year.
The temporary budget line for redevelopment in the first quarter of 2015 is equal to 48 percent of last year’s full budget line. Community Development Director Brandy Forbes said this frontloaded sum anticipated the appointment of a planner for the North End Rehabilitation Area, which Mayor Zimmer has sought since last summer. Additionally, said Forbes, the funds would be used to cover annual contracts with the city’s two redevelopment special counsels, Maraziti Falcon and McManimon Scotland & Baumann, for $85,000 and $45,000 respectively, which the City Council renewed on Wednesday.
On the same track
The City Council also unanimously passed a resolution expressing its strong opposition to a bi-state Port Authority reform panel’s recommendation that overnight PATH service be curtailed or eliminated altogether (see related story).
Bhalla said he would make opposing PATH cuts one of the goals of his tenure as council president. He questioned whether even the hypothetical discussion of PATH service cuts could harm the economic feasibility of the Hoboken Yards Redevelopment Plan approved in December, given that it is a consciously transit-oriented development, and asked that city redevelopment counsel Joseph Maraziti prepare a legal opinion on the issue.
Carlo Davis may be reached at cdavis@hudsonreporter.com.