To the Editor:
I continue to read the many ways in which Mayor Jimmy Davis is leading Bayonne in the right direction. Is there room for complaints? Sure. There always will be. I think the same people who were complaining 40 years ago are still complaining about something. That helps no one.
It took hard work to place Mayor Davis and his council in office and that included recruiting at least 40 of my friends, neighbors and tenant advocates to volunteer as campaign workers. We trusted him enough to guide the City of Bayonne; thus I feel that we ought to trust his judgments. The local papers continue to report dramatic changes being made in the city, the most recent of which is the “Beautify Bayonne” campaign, a wholly volunteer effort which is fully supported by the mayor and the city council and partially necessitated by our new neighbors who came to Bayonne as a result of vacancy decontrol.
I now ask you to join me in trusting the mayor’s stance on rent control.
A question will be asked of you regarding the re-establishment of rent control. The mayor pledged to re-establish rent control in his campaign materials and during his inauguration speech he stated that “Rent control is a must for this city.”
Prior to 2011, we had a fully operating rent-control program in Bayonne. It had been in place for 40 years. It was then replaced with a vacancy-decontrol program, the goal of which was to decontrol every apartment in the city protected by the law. Since then, examples of people being harassed out of their apartments for the financial gain of out-of-town landlords have run rampant through newspapers and television. I am intimately familiar with the background of these stories and many more.
The facts are clear that when groups such as “Preserve Your Neighborhoods” an Edison-based lobbying group which mailed Bayonne citizens pictures taken in another city that this is done in an attempt to use fear as a reason to support vacancy decontrol. They also advertised that taxes would be reduced as a result of vacancy decontrol. Allow me to ask, how much have your property taxes been reduced as a result of this debacle? This group has not been part of any Bayonne-based effort since that time at least not to my knowledge. One of the reasons Bayonne has not heard from that group is that they were attempting unsuccessfully to pull the same type of shenanigans in Hoboken.
We at the Bayonne Tenants Organization were very supportive of the teachers receiving a fair contract and were happy to see Mayor Davis be able to accomplish this feat. We remind the parents, teachers, and staff that we are all in this together.
I urge you to go to the polls on November 4 and be sure to vote yes to Question #1 to re-establish rent control in the City of Bayonne and not become the only city in Hudson County that does not extend this benefit to its citizenry.
ED GILLIGAN
Chair, Bayonne Tenants Organization