From my 9/8/2020 newsletter... the "Keep Scrolling – the Headlines over Hoboken edition"
In January 2018, our mayor announced Vision Zero as one of his key objectives in his inauguration speech. It took one and a half years to until August 2019 for him to actually launch the initiative via an Executive Order with plenty of media headlines and fanfare, timed just before the council elections to give him a campaign boost (you see, milestones work best politically when they are close to elections), From there the project inched forward until almost a year later, the mayor’s campaign manager, Vijay Chaudhuri (funded by taxpayers) who writes all of the mayor’s daily alerts and speeches, sent out a Nixle alert on July 29th announcing the new website and pedestrian safety survey as well as posting it on social media and sending a press statement that got all the local news outlets (HMAG, Hudson Reporter, Patch, et al) to cover the story.
And then crickets...
Forty one days and 32 daily news alerts since then covering a range of topics such as grants received to improve our fire houses, the push poll about masks and the managed results, and multiple recounts of the ongoing “quality of life” projects… yet not a chirp on or words of encouragement to respond to the pedestrian survey that was to close last Friday that is the critical first link between members of our community on this project. (The deadline was extended until yesterday and I have since requested to extend it to later this week).
Other than the Pandemic, pedestrian safety is one of the top issues in our city. It is what I and many of my City Council colleagues hear about most often. Vision Zero is the vehicle that we will use to bring our community together around pedestrian and street safety, collecting real, ground level input from our neighbors and then using this feedback to craft priority actions. These can range from street design to improved signage to enforcement to education to others. I am 100% all in for Vision Zero.
But is the mayor?
Seemingly no. It's the follow through that is required to make Vision Zero a success that is not the mayor's cup of tea. It never was. He told us before he ran for mayor the first time that he didn’t want to be mayor, that it was just a stepping stone to a higher, legislative role. This helps explain his desire for so many headlines.
You see if you are running for office, especially at a state or federal level, you need name recognition. I have heard that our mayor and his team have expressed his intent to the powers that be to run for Congress in 2022. To do so that means he will need name recognition for the additional 300,000 or so registered voters in the other 14 towns in our 8th Congressional District. And to get name recognition you need headlines and press conferences and media coverage. And to get headlines and press conferences and media coverage you need newsworthy stories and an experienced campaign manager who can market you to the media. The more national the issue, the more national the coverage. It's a lot of work.
Sometimes the headlines the mayor seeks and gets seemingly don't align with interests of Hoboken. For example, all the bad events that that mayor has sensationalized over the past two plus years in the tri-state and sometimes national news - from water main breaks to ‘con’ events to saying repeatedly we will be underwater in our lifetime and that our flooding in rain events cannot be fixed without $3 billion of investment. Are these the kind of news headlines we want for our city?
Shouldn't it be Hoboken over Headlines if you had to choose? Not the other way around?
I 100% admit that some of his headlines are good for Hoboken! When his campaign manager solicited coverage from CNN of Hoboken being the first to close at the onset of the pandemic, this was good coverage and one that helped raise the dialogue and actions on a critical issue. The multitude of self promotion references to this in subsequent nixle alerts, however got a little old...
Another good headline IMHO was when the mayor announced at a press conference on the steps of City Hall on April 25th 2018 that Hoboken would be the first city in NJ to have gender neutral bathrooms by June 1st, in time for the start of LGBTQ Pride Month. Unfortunately as of July 17th, after Pride Month had come and gone, it was discovered that the bathrooms had actually not yet been changed. It’s that darn follow through again that is so hard…Headlines over Hoboken.
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