Office of Mayor Dawn Zimmer announces:
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Mayor Zimmer Introduces Budget With Municipal Tax Rate Cut
** Includes Funding for Redesign of Washington Street and Sinatra Drive **
Yesterday’s statistical revelation of a second year of improvement in Hoboken from the weekend debauchery elicited typical reaction from the usual quarters. As residents on the whole heaved a sigh of relief, others mourned the loss of the parade and some bars and eateries joined them moaning the parade should be brought back. The disconnect in reality should end with the second year of a parade-less lepercon bar crawl proving Hoboken holding a weekend parade is akin to giving crack to a crack addict. But this is Hoboken and as one councilwoman famously said excusing excess, “Hoboken is special.” The City’s tallies from the weekend Leprecon event are in and there’s a strong downward trend in the number of compiled issues compared to last year and dramatically so from two years ago with the St. Patrick’s Day Parade. Mayor Dawn Zimmer issued the following statement on the changes in the past two years: =&0=&In the weekend paper, Councilman Ravi Bhalla dismantled a series of fabrications put forward by Councilwoman Beth Mason over months surrounding the legal appointment of Jim Doyle to the City Council. Making clear the victory in Hudson County Superior Court should have ended the manufactured lawsuit over the swing seat on the council, Bhalla squarely shows it’s Mason and her allies who refuse to stop suing the people of Hoboken and have filed another appeal to the NJ Appellate Court. It’s only one powerful correction made with the basis for the seat’s election, available in November. Of course Beth Mason knows this, but it has the sting of both truth and accuracy. It’s the day after and the questions being asked among residents is what more Hoboken can do to make the markedly downscale Lepercon event more manageable. Like the year before, it’s expected the overall impact on the City is reduced and a marked improvement from the years prior when the Parade was a dog whistle up and down the Eastern seaboard, a Hoboken mardi gras was in effect. There’s no longer tens of thousands swamping the city from one end to another but the downtown area saw heavy traffic, if somewhat smaller crowds than last year.  Put it in the, “It seemed like a good idea at the time” category: It could be worse but the Lerpercon hours are winding down. Crossing fingers no one gets hurt tonight. Patch says arrests now at seven. Last year’s total came in at 18 and the previous year with the parade saw almost three dozen. Patch also writes ambulance calls are down this year too. 25 calls as of early evening in comparison to the far higher 64 last year with most involving intoxication.  Today’s bar crawl deemed Leprecon is going off smoothly with a sizable reduction in crowds and resulting crowd control from two years ago. Hoboken Public Safety was in scramble mode then with both police and fire flying around from one incident after another in a whack-a-mole attempt to keep a semblance of order.
Service calls at this time are down substantially from last year, where an improvement from the prior year was significant. One commenter noted the smaller numbers didn’t mean bad behavior was eliminated saying people were urinating out windows and destroying landscape among other well known problems from past years.  The Live Blog on Hoboken’s Leprecon will start tomorrow March 2, 2013 at 8:00am. If you want to have your comment immediately approved use Twitter with the hash tag #HobokenLeprecon. There will be a delay if you comment directly as the editor will be out and about gathering photos and info. If you would like to share photos with TheBoken please email theboken@gmail.com and let us know your preference on attribution (your name or nickname) as well as the location any other details you might want to share.
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A letter by Jaimie Cryan complaining about the loss of the parade for the second year is making the rounds just hours before the Leper-con invasion, the mardi gras nihilist remnant from the Hoboken St. Patrick’s Day Parade. This is the second letter getting fairly wide circulation of late and there’s not even an imperceptible furor being generated from the wider Hoboken public. Most residents in the mile square are quietly satisfied if not soberly gleeful not having their home and neighborhood turned into 48 hours of frat party mayhem suffering public spectacles, property damage and being held hostage in their own homes. |