Dear Editor:
I’d like to voice my opinion pertaining to some examples of how the current administration has proved its inabilities in coping with real issues that Jersey City faces. There was the horrible response to the calamitous super storm. Community Emergency Response Teams (C.E.R.T) is citizens who get specialized training by FEMA to assist professional emergency personnel during a crisis. I’m certified. Having lost power for only 24 hours, I was never contacted in any way. Jersey City has 400 strong that have C.E.R.T training. This number also includes city employees but no community teams were activated. They claim to have located only 15 C.E.R.T members to help out. On a test that’s a 3.75 percent. Time for a tutor. Even though I was not contacted by OEM I still managed to make my way Downtown to help fill four dumpsters with garbage in roughly two hours. I also provided shelter, heat and resources to friends in heavily hit areas. My family made available thousands of paper cups to Jersey City Sandy Recovery, warm and clean clothing and a good many rubber gloves and hair nets for food preparation.
You will not find my name amongst the 15 aforementioned but others like me played their part. The upcoming reevaluation is an animal all its own. To quote the New York Times, May 3, 1989 by Joseph F. Sullivan “those who have seen their annual tax bills grow to $9000 and $11,000 from $2,000 and $3,000 scoff at the idea that all properties can be assessed at true market value.” The piece goes on to talk about old timers getting slaughtered and people being afraid. Some saw their taxes hit $9,000 from $2,500. Another individual saw it climb to $11,000 from $3,180 only to have to pay retroactively dating back to January when the new values took effect. A whopping bill of $16,000. Fast forward 24 years. Imagine how inflated these figures can become. Crime is out of control. Some sections of Jersey City are like a mirror image of Camden. Some people can’t go out of their own house, like prisoners in their homes. I’ve never been one to point the finger, rather pull the thumb but I recognize that our own local government is a failure. I don’t buy the bogus cooked up statistics that say crime is down. What I do remember from stats 101 was the Bell Shaped curve. It shows that you can statistically tell the outcome of an event by using this method. A sample one can use is our most recent Jersey City elections. Mayoral hopeful, front runner and favorite Steven Fulop has won with 11 out of 11 candidates he has endorsed. These are eleven small samples you can analyze under the Bell shaped curve. In probability, it’s called the normal distribution. The parameter is the mean of expectation. The expectation is that Steve Fulop will win. The normal distribution is the most prominent probability distribution in statistics. Fulop’s direction is clear and the end result will come on May 14, 2013.
James Francis Waddleton,
Lifelong Resident