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Jersey City Municipal Council
Ron Leir

City Council Hears Tale of Seven-Minute Delay in 911 Call Response

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Members Also Address Housing Authority Labor Complaints and Vote to Withhold Pay to Covid Test Vendor

 

At Thursday’s City Council meeting, council intern Aleyna Kilic testified about a recent call to the city’s 911 operators that went unacknowledged for seven minutes.

Kilic, who works for Councilman-at-Large Daniel Rivera, said she and a friend went to the Pershing Field ice rink on Sunday, Feb. 6, to skate where, she said, they and others were attacked by an intruder. “My friend got the brunt of it,” she said.

Problems with Jersey City’s 911 system have previously been reported.

As the incident unfolded, Kilic said she tried twice to reach someone at 911, to no avail. “I let it ring six seconds and I got no answer,” she recalled. “I called again, this time for seven seconds with same result.”

A co-worker at the rink also called, Kilic said, “and she let it ring … 32 seconds — twice,” but no one answered, she said. “All the while, my friend was getting attacked,” Kilic added.

Kilic said that seven minutes later she got a call from a non-emergency number asking “if she had an emergency.” By that time, she said, the incident was over, and the ambulance had taken her wounded friend to the hospital where he was diagnosed with a concussion.

“I just wanted to bring this to the council’s attention,” Kilic said. “There needs to be some accountability and I think [Public Safety] Director [James] Shea needs to speak out about it because I know this is not a single incident. This [non-response by 9-1-1] has happened to countless numbers of Jersey City residents in the past year…. Seven minutes can mean life or death for someone….”

Acting City Business Administrator John Metro said the city’s 911 call logs can be checked to see what, if any, calls came in to the system during the times specified and how they were handled. Whether or not any type of corrective action is needed would be Shea’s decision, he said.

Ward C Councilman Richard Boggiano, a retired Jersey City police officer whose ward includes Pershing Field, assured Kilic that a police report had been filed on the incident.

The council also heard complaints about strained labor-management relations involving the Jersey City Housing Authority and union employees.  A delegation of the JCHA Employees Association voiced gripes about low wages, short-staffing and poor working conditions.

Union vice president Zaheer Aziz said that employees who have worked on-site all through the pandemic are being offered a 2.2% a year pay hike over three years while two high-level managers who continue to work from home are getting raises of $35,000 and $29,000, respectively.

Aziz said the JCHA is making it tough for both workers and the 7,000 on-site residents by providing minimal staffing and materials to handle repairs to apartments. “We have no electrician, no sewer cleaner and only one carpenter,” he said.

Union employee Telissa Dowling told the council the JCHA is no longer rated a “high-performing housing authority,” probably the result of what appears to be the JCHA’s policy of “forcing [employees] to take early retirement” and allowing apartments to fall into disrepair so that they can be transferred to private management ownership, thereby putting the availability of the city’s affordable housing stock “at peril.”

The union urged the council to investigate how the JCHA is using its budget.  In response, Metro said the authority’s budgets “go through a rigorous federal audit,” the results of which “can impact its future funding.”

Several council members assured the union its plea wouldn’t be ignored.

As part of a continuing labor dispute between the developers of a residential tower at 70 Columbus Dr. and Service Employees International Union 32B, union porter Wilian Argueta spoke to protest the firing of a co-worker for speaking out against “bad working conditions.” Union representatives have pressed their complaints at prior council meetings.

In other business, a council majority turned aside a request by Bespoke Health LLC, of New York, for payment of an “emergency contract award” of $2.5 million “to provide Covid-19 tests to Jersey City residents as part of the city’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic” during a five-week period in January.

Ward D Councilman Yousef Saleh said that, despite repeated requests by the council, “We haven’t seen an itemized list of expenditures by the company….I’m going to draw a red line here….I want to see how many tests have been given to account for [the money sought].”

Agreed, said Ward E Councilman James Solomon, adding, “We’ve asked for a breakdown of costs for months and haven’t seen anything.”

But the council, by majority vote, did approve a payment of $77,000 to McKesson Medical Surgical, of Fairfield, for the purchase and delivery of Covid test kits for the Department of Public Safety. The tests were purchased due to the rise of Covid cases and were for a combination Covid and the flu. A resolution backup sheet said: “Because of the emergency, time did not permit obtaining of formal quotes and [the city] OEM (Office of Emergency Management) secured [a] vendor that could ship Covid tests immediately.”

The council also approved the 2022 Jackson Hill Main Street Special Improvement District assessment roll and budget and adopted a resolution paying tribute to the memory of Ioanis Ioakimidis, a Greek immigrant who, with his spouse Stella Stefanidou, owned and operated Stella’s Pizzeria on Grove Street for more than 45 years. The couple  had also been active members of St. Demetrios Greek Orthodox Church.

 

 

 

 

Jersey City police car
Jersey City Times Staff

Police Make Arrest in January Bergen-Lafayette Killing

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Authorities announced an arrest this morning in the fatal January shooting of Raheem Bostick in Bergen-Lafayette.

According to the Hudson County Prosecutor’s office, Nysheed Gleaton, 32, of Bayonne, was arrested early this morning by the Wallington Police Department and charged with Bostick’s January 23 killing.

Bostick was gunned near 32 Belmont Avenue in broad daylight as terrified residents looked on.

Gleaton has been charged with Murder, Possession of a Weapon for an Unlawful Purpose, and Unlawful Possession of a Weapon. At the time of his arrest, Gleaton had a handgun in his possession. 

The Prosecutor’s Office Homicide Unit and the Jersey City Police Department are continuing to investigate the shooting.  

Bostick’s killing was Jersey City’s first homicide of the year. There have been two confirmed homicides since that time.

Nationally, homicides have surged during the pandemic, with several cities experiencing near record increases.

 

Dickinson High School Jersey City 16x9
Andrea Crowley-Hughes

Impact of Remote Classes on Jersey City Students Laid Bare by Test Results

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Jersey City Board of Education trustees at Thursday’s board meeting heard the results of a state-mandated test that had been administered to measure students’ learning needs after 18 months of virtual classes. They also heard  recommendations on how to teach about Black history year-round.

Assistant Superintendent for Curriculum and Instruction Ellen Ruane presented on the test, called the “Start Strong Assessments,” which had been given in October. The exams were taken by fourth through 10th graders in English Language Arts; fourth through eighth graders in math; students who’d taken Algebra I and II and geometry; and sixth, ninth and twelfth graders in science.

“It was a short test that showed the learning that happened or didn’t happen during virtual learning,” Ruane said.

The tests served as New Jersey’s federally required general assessment for the 2020–2021 academic year since the state assessment for 2021 was canceled due to the pandemic. All students were expected to take the tests, except newly-arrived English Language Learners and students with cognitive disabilities who qualified for the Dynamic Learning Maps assessment.

According to a state Department of Education memo to districts, the tests were intentionally brief to maximize instructional time. “There were no open-ended questions for math. There was no writing when it came to the ELA portion,” Ruane said.

The assessments categorize results into three performance levels: Strong Support May Be Needed, Some Support May Be Needed, and Less Support May Be Needed.

In the district, 14,246 students completed 29,419 tests or roughly two tests per student. 16,317 tests — or more than half —indicated “strong support” is needed; 7,159 tests indicated “less support” was needed; and 5,943 indicated “some support” is needed.

Students were shown to need the most support in fourth-grade English Language Arts and fifth-grade math.

“We realized that this was the first time fourth graders took a test; before this they were never tested on a standardized test,” Ruane said.

Data from the assessment was broken down into no fewer than 10 demographics: “American Indian or Alaska Native,” “Asian,” “Black or African American,” “Hispanic or Latino,” “Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander” “Two or More Races,” “White,” “English Language Learners,” “Students with Disabilities,” and the “Economically Disadvantaged.”

Asian students had the highest rate of students requiring “some or less support,” while students with disabilities had the lowest rate of students requiring “some or less support.”

The results revealed that “strong support” is needed in math for 89.4% of students with disabilities, 82.3% of English Language Learners, 80.6% of Black students, 73.8% of Hispanic students, and 72.2% of economically disadvantaged students, and 54.4% of white students.

In English Language Arts, results show “strong support” is needed in 87.8% of students with disabilities, 85.3% of English Language Learners, 74.8% of Black students, 67.9% of Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander students, 63.3% of economically disadvantaged students,  65.8% of Hispanic or Latino students, and 36.6% of white students..

The full report also includes some data about specific schools.

Ruane said administrators and instructors are using the data in various ways to offer the needed support, including an extended-day learning program known as G.R.A.S.P and a Teachers on Call virtual program.

According to the report, principals had difficulty implementing remedial programs during the pandemic due to “[low] student participation, staff shortages, lack of substitute teachers, quarantined students, and rising COVID cases,” Ruane noted.

She also told listeners the test results are “not predictive” of how students will perform on the 2022 New Jersey Student Learning Assessment.

Black History in Education

Dr. Lillie Johnson Edwards, Professor Emerita of History and African-American Studies at Drew University in Madison, NJ, gave a presentation on ways to teach about the accomplishments by African Americans in the building and development of America.

Johnson Edwards served on New Jersey’s Amistad Commission and co-authored the 2021 Amistad Bill, which requires public schools to include instruction on the accomplishments and contributions of African Americans to American society. The bill gives specificity to that directive, Johnson Edwards said, without limiting teachers’ authority in the classroom.

As an example, Johnson Edwards urged the board to take a deeper look into commonly taught milestones of the Civil Rights movement.

“We don’t talk about Rosa Parks as creating the organization that actually became the Montgomery bus boycott by defending black women from rape … by those who assaulted them. Rosa Parks, then, is not only an activist, she actually is an organizer. We don’t typically frame her that way,” said Johnson Edwards.

Johnson Edwards said she appeals to school districts to “encourage your teachers, support your teachers, fund your teachers,” rather than rely on consultants.

“I think the heart of it is the educators in the classroom. You can bring in facilitators and consultants to work with them. But the work really is the work of the teacher in the classroom,” she said.

The professor also noted, “One of the problems we know sometimes happens in the classroom is that African Americans may appear in a lesson here and there and then disappear.”

Johnson Edwards called on the board to make a public commitment to integrating African-American achievement throughout the curriculum via a resolution or other public statement.

In acknowledgement, Acting Superintendent of Schools Norma Fernandez said, “We have done some work, but as with everything in life, there’s always more room to grow.“

Pitbull
Aaron Morrill

Police Respond to Report of Shots Fired and Discover Friendly Pitbull

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A report of shots fired in Bergen-Lafayette had an unexpected ending this afternoon when instead of shooters police encountered a friendly pitbull.

At approximately 1:30 p.m., police were called to 170 Lafayette St. on a report that two shots had been fired through the wall of an apartment at that address.

The Emergency Services Unit was brought in to investigate. According to a radio report, upon entry to the empty apartment police found a “docile” pitbull.

 

Photo by LaCellia Pruitt on Unsplash

P.E. Pinkman
Tris McCall

P.E. Pinkman’s Pandemic Chronicle at Saint Peter’s Fine Arts Gallery

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In confinement, people tend to count the moments. Prisoners mark tallies on the wall, hospitalized patients maintain running lists of daily medications, diarists scribble records in notebooks, penitents recite their morning and evening prayers. It’s a way of gaining some small bit of control over the ceaseless progression of the hours: logging as an assertive act, and a protest against the erosive power of isolation.

Visual artists log their lives, too. On Kawara, for instance, painted the date, every day, for years, in strokes of uniform white paint on small rectangular canvases. Plainfield artist P.E. Pinkman isn’t quite as monomaniacal as that. But the pandemic has provoked feelings of extreme destabilization and alienation in just about everybody, and Pinkman is no exception. “100 Days of a Pandemic,” a chronicle of loneliness and disintegration, peppered with occasional violent outbursts, is the centerpiece of “Seeing Someone Else Is Seeing Yourself,” his solo show at the Fine Arts Gallery at Saint Peter’s University (Mac Mahon Student Center, 47 Glenwood Ave.)

Curator Beatrice Mady has hung the series of images on the Gallery’s big wall: different versions of Pinkman’s face, one after another, scribbled with crayon, haloed with pencil, smeared with charcoal and pomegranate juice, tortured by too-happy Murakami flowers, divided, blown apart. Pinkman made one to represent each of his hundred days of isolation, and there’s a pretty good chance you’ll identify with the obsessiveness, the blurriness, the desperate need to flee coupled with the sure knowledge that no matter how fast you run, you’ll never escape yourself.

Sometimes Pinkman takes refuge in sheer drawing pleasure, mimicking the styles of artists he admires; sometimes he tilts the face, like a listing balloon with a slow helium leak; and sometimes he lets it drop to the bottom of the frame like something thrown into a tank. He superimposes messages over his broad forehead and beneath his pointed chin, and these often speak to his anger and his immersion in inescapable popular culture and the endless news cycle. There’s little chance you won’t remember that 2020 feeling: an election bearing down, and viral particles afloat outside a sealed window, and indoors, everything coming unstitched.

Queerness is a major subtheme of “Seeing Someone Else Is Seeing Yourself,” and the show stands as a reminder that quarantine was particularly hard on those of us who rely on community support and identification in order to keep us whole.  Yet in “100 Days of a Pandemic” sexual identity dissolves under the pressure of the ennui and constant, nebulous peril of the global health crisis. If Pinkman’s face looks drawn and rail-thin, constantly on the verge of evaporating, well, didn’t you feel like that, too?  On the verge of a better spring (fingers crossed), it’s possible to view Pinkman’s pandemic drawings as a document of a terrible time in our lives that we might, very provisionally and very carefully, call history. The show, and the student center, will be open to the public during Jersey City Friday: March 4, from 6 p.m. until 8 p.m.; masks are, naturally, required.

 

Jersey City police car
Aaron Morrill

Update: Victim in Yesterday’s Pedestrian Crash Identified as 67 Year-Old Woman

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Authorities announced this morning that the pedestrian injured in yesterday’s incident at John F. Kennedy Boulevard and Montgomery Street was a 67-year-old woman.

According to the report, the Hudson County Regional Collision Investigation Unit determined that the woman was struck as she crossed the street between two stopped vehicles. The rear vehicle accelerated and struck her. The accident occurred at approximately 1:48 p.m.

The woman suffered “a serious injury to a lower extremity.”

The driver of the vehicle that struck the woman remained at the scene. The injured woman was taken by Emergency Medical Services to Jersey City Medical Center.

As of Thursday morning, she is in stable condition. 

The Hudson County Regional Collision Investigation Unit and the Jersey City Police Department are actively investigating this incident. Anyone with information is asked to contact the Office of the Hudson County Prosecutor at 201-915-1345 or to leave an anonymous tip here. All information will be kept confidential. 

 

Jersey City Council Chambers
Ron Leir

Parking, Via and Trash Bills Dominate Tuesday’s Council Caucus

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At Tuesday’s Jersey City Municipal Council caucus meeting, council members vented frustration about public parking in the Heights, poor service offered by the Via transit shuttle, and incorrect billings of residents by the Municipal Utilities Authority.

But they were silent on what, if anything, they’d do about a proposed pay raise for themselves or whether they’d ratify changes to a contentious redevelopment plan to convert an industrial site to luxury apartments next to Berry Lane Park.  Both items are listed for consideration at the Feb. 24 council meeting.

At the caucus, Ward D Councilman Yousef Saleh griped that many of his constituents have continued to struggle finding overnight parking along the Central Avenue corridor ever since the city Parking Authority, an arm of the city Public Safety Department, converted a public metered lot to reserved parking for Authority employees and police vehicles.

Saleh said the Authority closed off the lot to the public and removed meters from 26 public parking spaces. “It boggles my mind how [the Parking Authority] could willy-nilly change the lot without getting our approval,” he said.

Meanwhile, he added, the lot has become a safety hazard for area residents, with homeless individuals setting up “camps” there. A fight between two homeless men ended with a killing on the Cambridge Avenue side of the lot in July 2021.

He said residents also have to compete with seven to 10 U.S. postal trucks taking up curbside spots around the perimeter area of the Parking Authority on Central Avenue. At one time, he said, the trucks parked in an adjacent lot of a fast-food eatery; now they are back on the street.

John Metro, acting city business administrator, said he’d research the matter.

On another transit-related front, several members of the governing body questioned the quality of service being delivered by Via Jersey City, the on-demand intra-city shuttle van that has been offered to local residents, workers and visitors in partnership with the city since late September 2019.

Ward F Councilman Frank Gilmore said he’s gotten reports of extended wait times for pickups and of Via vans sitting idle while parked in lots in the city’s isolated Caven Point section—presumably as a staging area.

Ward A Councilwoman Denise Ridley said Greenville residents have complained to her that pickups they thought had been arranged had been erroneously canceled by the company, causing confusion and requiring them to wait even longer to receive service.

Barkha Patel, the city’s senior transportation planner, responded that the average wait time “has been hovering at around 20 minutes” rather than the 15 minutes Via had projected when it designed the program for Jersey City.

She said the company had lost drivers due to the pandemic but that it intends to hire more to make up the deficit, particularly since rider demand has escalated.

“We’re seeing 12,000 to 13,000 riders per week” on average, Patel said. She also noted, “There shouldn’t be more than a few vans” parked in Caven Point during peak hours.

Council members peppered John Folk, fiscal officer for the city’s Municipal Utilities Authority, with questions about whether homeowners could expect refunds for added sewerage service fees on their water bills.

Folk said that, as of 2021, property owners have been billed for this service on the basis of a rate formula keyed to household water usage. Problems developed, he said, because the MUA didn’t have a breakdown of the city’s housing stock in terms of number of residential units per household, which, he said contributed to faulty billings.

A single-family homeowner can expect to pay an annual fee of $150—or $12.50 per month—for solid waste service, and with each additional household unit, the fee is adjusted upward, Folk said. He indicated homeowners can expect the agency to adjust their bills going forward according to whether they had overpaid or underpaid.

Ward B Councilwoman Mira Prinz-Arey recommended that the MUA post on its website a detailed explanation of the billing issue and/or include that explanation with the next batch of water bills it mails to property owners.

The city’s handling of Covid-19 testing drew criticism from Ward E Councilman James Solomon, who questioned a $2 million bill submitted by Bespoke Health LLC, the New York-based firm hired to help direct the city’s response to the pandemic.

The council is being asked to authorize an “emergency contract award” to Bespoke for rapid Covid-19 testing of residents during a 13-week period. A city Health and Human Services Department representative explained that “massive delays in testing and long lines [at local testing sites]” had prompted the city to seek to hire Bespoke for this “emergency response.”

Solomon said that, despite numerous requests, the council has yet to receive a breakdown of costs for all of Bespoke’s billings.

“What is going on? Why don’t we put this [service] out to bid?” he asked.

Solomon was referring also to a $15 million contract the city awarded Bespoke last month to administer Covid-19 vaccinations.

Metro told the council his office has received more detailed billing information from Bespoke but that it’s close to 100 pages. “We’re just going through it for possible redactions” before sharing the contents with the council, Metro said.

In other matters, the council heard Public Safety Director James Shea give a ringing endorsement of two security-related expenditures, one for $185,000 for a 5-day tactical, incident-response exercise and de-escalation program run by Tomahawk Defense LLC, of Nashville, Tenn.; and another for $31,212 to Zistos Corp., of Holbrook, N.Y., for cameras equipped with telescoping rods that can view under doors or around corners.

Shea said the Tomahawk training program, which the city has used for the past eight years, has proved its worth many times over as evidenced, for example, last weekend when police and emergency personnel “handled by textbook” an emotionally disturbed person who tried to harm himself and also burn down a building.

“We’re very happy with the [training] results and how it’s improved our officers’ performance,” he said.

According to Shea, the specialized cameras also helped officers respond well to a situation six months ago in which a man had barricaded himself in a building trying to harm others.

Grid Developments Jersey City
Aaron Morrill

Despite Affordability Crisis, New Report is Bullish on Jersey City Development

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A new report paints a bullish picture of real estate development in Jersey City. According to its author, Grid Real Estate LLC, real estate has bounced back with a vengeance from its Covid-19-induced nadir on “Black Thursday” of 2020 when stock markets suffered their greatest single-day percentage fall since the 1987 stock market crash.

What a difference two years and a vaccine make. “The second year of the pandemic saw rents rebound rapidly and demand surge across the board,” says the report.

What is powering Jersey City’s hot market? Grid points to “explosive” metro New York population growth, Jersey City’s access to New York City, a “vibrant” development community, Jersey City’s nightlife and dining options, its creative community, and its pro-growth zoning.

Some of Grid’s analysis won’t come as news to anyone who takes the time to notice the buildings sprouting up around the city. Between 2016 and 2022, “the growth … of Journal Square, West Side and Lafayette [was] dramatic” says the report. “The amount of development activity in all three neighborhoods was significant enough for the Division of Planning to publish separate development maps for all three neighborhoods.”

Said Grid founder and former executive director of the Jersey City Redevelopment Agency Bob Antonicello,”All three of these new growth centers are linked to transit, either light rail or PATH. But they also are benefitting from national trends.”

2022 Grid Realty Development Map

2022 Grid Realty Development Map

Grid acknowledges that the growth has come at a cost. “Unfortunately, this has not been good news for affordable rental units. According to the Harvard Joint Center for Rental Housing, lower-income households still struggle to cover their rents, even with rental assistance provided by the CARES Act … affordable housing continues to plague the city, and the pandemic has only exacerbated that problem. The spreading gentrification will only increase the affordable housing problems going forward.”

The upward pressure on rents was borne out by a recent study showing that the average Jersey City renter pays $1,612 a month compared to $1,129 nationally. The burden is particularly acute in a city where fully 71 percent of residents are renters. Overall, in Jersey City the cost of the ten most common household bills is 36.5 percent higher than the national average.

Despite the challenges, Grid takes a glass-half-full view. “We view the recovery of our cities and suburban communities as an exciting period to rethink, renew, and rebuild our communities.”  Whether affordable housing advocates and community activists would agree is another matter.

 

 

Weeding Out
Jim Testa

Stoned Comedians Take the Stage in Gameshow This Weekend

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A gaggle of comics take the stage.  Most of them are stoned; one is sober. Can you find the straight one?

That’s the premise of Weeding Out The Stoned, a game show from Jersey City-based comedian Alex Grubard that celebrates recreational cannabis.  Developed at a comedy festival in Philadelphia in 2015, Grubard has taken the concept nationwide and brings the laugh-packed show to Sip Studios on Saturday, February 26.

Dubbed “The Game Show of Sobriety Tests,” Weeding Out The Stoned has sold out shows at WFMU’s Monty Hall and at Asylum in New York City as well as at venues in Philadelphia, Denver, Portland, and other cities. Grubard will take the show on the road for a nine-city national tour in April.

“It began in Philadelphia as a part of a festival called “Five Dollar Comedy Week,” explained Grubard. “That consisted of 30 brand-new shows with elements of stand up, sketch comedy, and improv. I pitched Weeding Out The Stoned, and God, they accepted it. It was a big hit right away.”

Although Grubard considers himself a stand up comic, he turned to emceeing and promoting his own concepts to supplement his income. “I had already been experimenting with game shows; I had done a cursing game show with swear words that was called ‘Curses,’ and that was fun,” he said. “I did a political-themed one that was like a political campaign within an hour, from campaign ads to concession speeches. Stuff like that was fun, and then Weeding Out The Stoned just started selling tickets.”  

New Jersey’s implementation of legalized cannabis use has been delayed—again—but Grubard said it never entered into his calculations to begin with. “We don’t even consider it,” he said. “It will happen when it happens.” Until then, his contestants consume their preferred substances offstage.

Grubard said he found the Sip Studio space near Journal Square through a friend, and although it was designed as a soundstage for independent filmmakers, it’s also used as an event space for everything from art shows to screenings to events like his. “It’s perfect for what we do,” he said. “We didn’t want to just do this in a bar like a comedy open mic; we wanted a nice space where the audience could sit down and really get into the show.”

At a Weeding Out The Stoned show, a group of comedians come on stage; all but one is high. Grubard plays the “detective” who administers sobriety tests, asks questions, and plays mind games with the contestants. The audience plays along, eliminating the comics who are high until finally unmasking the sober one. 

The pandemic hit the comedy world harder than other forms of live entertainment, Grubard noted. “I think comedy usually trails music in almost everything,” he said. “So, by the time comedy started livestreaming, music had been already been doing it a while. Same for moving shows outdoors. We did outdoor comedy shows, but it took some time to get venues to buy into the idea. So, it’s great we can do this in front of an audience indoors again.”

Weeding Out The Stoned will take place at Sip Studios (140 Sip Avenue, Jersey City) on Saturday, Feb. 26.  Tickets for the 9 p.m. show are $20 and available at eventbrite.com.