The Ridge Nightfly

How galling it must be for a liberal paper like the Star Ledger to have to lobby in favor of union give-backs?

The Dems in Bernards seem so bereft of material that once they get beyond talking about the Millington Quarry they have to recycle the bad ideas of others before them.

There is the jitney bus idea (which made no financial sense when gas was $1.50 a gallon, let alone $3.50) and they now see building sidewalks as a cure for global warming.

From their website:

• Improve pedestrian access to Lyons train station and provide bike lockers.

This is code for building sidewalks on people’s front yards. There was a major debate 2 years ago about more sidewalks heading towards the Lyons train station, with property owners not affected in favor and property owners affected opposed. The township opted to go with private property rights rather than a vague argument for public safety and saved tens of thousands of dollars and hundreds of square feet of grass in the process. Now the Dems want to revive this to hypothetically stimulate more use of public transit?

Beware of any politician who bases their plans on what people should do instead of what they will do.

• Construct a park-and-ride lot near the interchange of King George Rd with I78 for express buses to New York.

More paving by the supposedly “green” Democrats! What’s a few hundred thousand dollars for a hair-brained scheme if we look good doing it?

And what express buses? See next item.

• Work with NJ Transit to improve train schedules.

The terminals at Hoboken and Penn Station are maxed out. Aside from NJ Transit not really caring about the needs of riders on one of its smallest branch lines, no more trains can be scheduled until such time as another multi-billion dollar trans-Hudson rail tunnel becomes a reality, say around 2020. Since when does NJ Transit or Lakeland make a business decision based on global warming?

Again, our local Dems live in a fantasy world where neither economics or physics work the way they do for the rest of us.

• Set up a circulating bus system to serve important locations, like Lyons Mall and train station, Ridge High School, downtown Basking Ridge and library, YMCA, Hills Highland Center, William Annin School, and Dewy Meadow.  Routes and schedules will be designed to help commuters, students with after-school activities, and others who can’t drive or don’t want to.  The system will collect rider fees, generate advertising revenue, and be financially self sufficient.

Presto. The Dems declare it will be “financially self-sufficient” so it must be true.

In fact, it won’t be. Buses cost money. Gas costs money. Insurance costs money. Drivers cost money. The entire system would be under the regulation of the state Department of Transportation. Oh, yes… Conforming with state mandates costs a lot of money.

How many buses? How many drivers? How many stops? How much would we have to charge per rider for the system to break even? How many potential riders would we have at each price point? Where is the Dem cost analysis? It doesn’t exist. They assume it’s a good idea, so it must be.

Next time: you need to pay for my sewers.

The NJ state pension plan has taken a complete and total bath on a $200 million investment it made in Lehman Brothers stock.

They bought it at $28 a share and sold it at $.22 - $.32.

The fire sale disposal of shares in the financial company means the state lost $115.5 million on a $200 million Lehman stake in less than four months, sales results revealed by the Investment Division Thursday indicate.

Note: they didn’t buy it years ago, when it was still a reputable stock. They bought it in June, when it was already sliding.

So far this year the pension fund has lost $5 billion on a total asset of $78 billion.

The state intends to sue Lehman Brothers.

Sue who? The company is in bankruptcy.

And you know who will be making up for their mistake: the taxpayers, via increases in their municipal contributions to the fund, contributions the towns have to raise through increases in property taxes.

Your tax dollars at work. The state legislature returns from its 12-week vacation.

“All the oxygen’s being taken by the presidential and the senatorial and congressional elections,” said Senate Majority Leader Stephen Sweeney (D-Gloucester).

“I don’t think we’re going to be all that busy,” predicted Assembly Minority Leader Alex DeCroce (R-Morris).

Debt is at an all-time high. COAH rules threaten the fiscal integrity of small town New Jersey. Corrupt politicians are being indicted left and right. Eminent domain is being used for illegal seizures of property for the benefit of connected real estate developers. Our income tax dollars have been hijacked and given to corrupt inner city school systems. The state is running out of potable water. State pensions are now being funded by local budgets. The Transportation Fund is broke. The governor wants to ram mandatory pre-school into an education system that is already forcing thousands to flee confiscatory property taxes for schools. The state Department of Environmental Protection is too under-manned and under-funded to do its job. The state fund for preserving parks and farmland is exhausted.

“I don’t think we’re going to be all that busy…”

The state wants to privatize its public television network — NJN — by converting it to a non-profit. This will free it up from state bidding rules and other bureaucratic trappings that cost the taxpayers millions in waste. Plus, it gets the state out of the TV business: something it shouldn’t do in the first place.

Of course, NJN employees are currently state workers and enjoy the perqs and pensions of state workers. They aren’t happy to go into the private sector and, as CWA union members, they are in a position to throw their weight around. Expect a sweetheart deal to be cut, possibly by Corzine’s ex-sweetheart, Carla Katz.

The other issue is that NJN has the rights to a certain segment of the digital spectrum as well as a sheaf of broadcast licenses: finite resources doled out by the FCC in a competitive environment. E.g., they are worth a ton of money. As TV content moves to cable and fiber optic, broadcast spectrum can be sold off to companies that want it for wireless phone and Internet services and broadcast licenses are valuable to any number of entities.

That is supposedly what the state is doing, but they are doing it — surprise — behind closed doors. And, don’t forget, non-profits are exempted from competitive bidding.

So what could actually be a successful, money-raising privatization of a public asset will undoubtedly be wasted in union give-backs and special interest deals worked out in private. The taxpayers will be the last to benefit.

Both Governor Corzine and State Democratic Party Chairman Joe Cryan have stated that Bergen County Democratic Chairman Joe Ferriero should resign. Finally.

Ferriero was indicted this week on Federal corruption charges after an investigation that had the Feds going through his office whie he was off having a last hurrah at the Democrat Convention. The state Dems tried to draw a difference between corrupt elected officials like Sharpe James or Mims Hackett and guys like Ferriero, who is merely an appointed party official, but they eventually realized that to the public it was one and the same.

Last week Corzine described himself as so tough on corruption that his own party was asking him to back off. However, the Ferriero bust, like almost every other indictment of ranking state officials, was by the US Attorney’s office. State Attorney General Anne Milgram was not involved.

Not content to come up with bad ideas of their own, the Democrats in Bernards are expropriating failed ideas from other people.

In 2002, a then-committeeman, Al LiCata, was pounding the drum for a jitney bus service in Bernards. From his bully pulpit on the dais he put forward argument after argument, none of which made financial sense or followed the social trends in the community. He failed to generate a shred of support.

Now, 6 years later, Bill Allen and his running mate have resurrected the same idea, with a veneer of environmentalism.

…we’ve spent a lot of time talking about shuttle buses. The trick to making a shuttle bus cost effective is to get the right density of ridership and schedule. We clearly don’t want to add any cost to the township for this. Previous studies have suggested paying for the service with adverstising and/or a usage fee.

Trick, indeed. In 2002 no amount of spreadsheet jiggering worked out. In 2008 gas prices have doubled (shuttle bus diesel has more than doubled) and township employee costs have sky-rocketed as the Democrats in Trenton have passed on the costs of their pension pandering to the local government. The former is theoretically reversible, the latter is not. Oh, and let’s not call it a tax, let’s call it a fee.

No realistic analysis exists to show that Bernards residents are willing to give up their cars and their time flexibility in favor of waiting on a street corner for a jitney. (If they were they’d live in an upscale urban area like Montclair.) These are people who in many cases drive their kids to school despite bus service paid for by their taxes. Global warming? They may talk about it while idling their engines in the school line.

Finally, as we all know, Dems love Big Government. There is nothing Bill and MiniBill would love more than to be up on the dais pontificating about mass transit and saving the planet, while micro-managing a jitney program that costs the taxpayers money and puts the town into further regulation by state agencies.

Next time: Property rights be damned.

Now it gets interesting. The Bernards Democrats have a working website for Bill Allen and MiniBill, here. Given the Democrat tendency for foot-in-mouth disease, we should get some specifics to chew on.

And we do.

Here, Allen goes back to his favorite bug-a-boo, the Millington Quarry. Allen and his supporters are blaming their GOP opponents for somehow being “responsible” for the fill currently coming in to the Quarry. In fact, in 2005 Allen was the #1 proponent of forcing the Quarry to adhere to the township 2:1 slope ordinance during Quarry hearings before the Planning Board. (Neither candidate Pavlini nor Carpenter were on the township government at that point.) He put forward some scheme to mine one area of the pit to fill in the other, a physical impossibility as a solution for creating a developable site.

Then we can add affordable housing into the mix. The local Democrats are trying their best to distance themselves from the Trenton mandates on COAH housing, but they can’t help but get entangled. Allen wants to put high density multi-family housing in the Quarry.

I have recommended, and still do recommend that residential development on the quarry land be multifamily. Current zoning will permit roughly 35-40 single family houses on the land. For illustration consider the substitution of 70-80 market-priced townhouses like those in Amherst Mews in The Hills.

These will have about the same overall value as the single family units and provide about the same profit opportunity for the developer. They will be clustered and consume a small fraction of the available land on the south slope. The land not used for building can become part of a public park that will also include the lake and the hillsides west, north, and east of the lake.

Allen buys into the now-discredited myth that townhouses don’t generate school children. In fact, they do, as demonstrated in The HIlls.

Allen also has been going on for years about the town purchasing a large portion of the Quarry pit as a park, with the deepest portion filled up as a “lake”. Putting aside for a moment what kind of park we’d have at the bottom of a 180 acre hole in the ground, the lake presents a separate set of problems. It has no natural in-flow or out-flow. It would exist strictly through rain fall and the run-off from surrounding land in the pit, full of sediment and lawn chemicals. It would require expensive water quality measures and aeration equipment forever. What sane municipal official would assume that responsibility?

Finally, let’s return to COAH. 70-80 townhouses would generate a COAH obligation of 20 units. Where? ANd how many school kids would they generate?

As with every Democrat suggestion, the tax implications are massive and, of course, ignored.

Next time: the jitney bus to Nowhere.

Bob Braun, the widows ‘n’ whiners columnist for the Star Ledger, shows just how desperate the liberal media can be when it gets going. Braun searched out and located the two members of the NJ Republican delegation to the recent convention who were not 100% enthusiastic about the V-P candidate. He quoted them in today’s column, ignoring the majority view.

A few days ago he sought out the wisdom of a “big money” GOP contributor who anonymously told Braun that he thought Palin was a bad choice. No names, no proof. Then he alleged that GOP state chair Tom Wilson was running into criticism when Wilson touted Palin as a good choice. Again: no names, no proof.

Braun can’t get it through his head that not everyone agrees with his bleeding heart liberalism. More to the point, the Star Ledger is going through a financial crises that may put it — and Braun — out of business. Braun better get his licks in now.

Congressman Rob Andrews stated last spring, when he ran in the Democrat US Senate primary against Frank Lautenberg “he would not run for the House seat he’s held since winning a November 1990 special election”. So instead he put his wife up for the job, with the blessings of South Jersey political kingpin George Norcross.

Well, Andrews lost to Lautenberg, and now he wants his Congressional seat back. Evidently, thanks again to Norcross, he’ll get it. Forget the general election. Republicans haven’t held that seat since 1972.