| Since I first challenged a long-time incumbent and ran for City Council three years ago, you’ve always known me as someone who’s willing to stand up against the patronage system and entrenched politicians that typify the political establishment in New Jersey.
This is why I’m writing you today.
In June, Mayor Ravi Bhalla was censured by the NJ State Supreme Court for “unethical conduct” for failing to pay into his employee’s retirement account and being “nonchalant” about rectifying it for five years. That’s not just wrong, it’s heartless. To give some perspective on just how serious the Supreme Court decision is, Ravi was just one vote away from having his law license revoked. This comes on the heels of another scandal Mayor Bhalla caused when he broke a campaign promise and took a second job at a politically connected law firm.
And earlier this year, Hoboken paid $186k to settle two cases where Ravi Bhalla allegedly infringed on the first amendment rights of two residents who spoke out against him at City Council meetings.
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| But more recently, I uncovered that Hoboken taxpayers have unknowingly spent $10,000 over the past seven months funding the Mayor’s appeal of an ethics violation where he was reprimanded for voting on a business partner’s contract with the city. The City’s continued funding of his defense wouldn’t be an issue if Ravi Bhalla hadn’t lied to our city’s legal team, which directly led the city to enter into this folly in the first place. Instead of acknowledging his clear mistake, Mayor Bhalla instead has doubled down and ordered a city attorney to quietly defend him, without any transparency towards residents or the City Council.
How has our Mayor responded to these continued scandals? By lashing out at me for leading the charge to hold him accountable and trying to distract from his own problems by making false claims against me. |
A DISTRACTION FROM THE ISSUES
To distract from the mounting controversy, this week a close friend of the mayor’s Chief of Staff was sent to file a bogus ethics complaint against me. Their baseless allegation is that I am somehow benefiting a campaign donor by authoring an ordinance that helps homeowners affected by the city’s oppressive flood ordinance, access their backyards without arduous municipal bureaucracy. This is something that the Zoning Board has urged the City Council to consider every year since 2012, and after half a decade of recommendations, it was approved by an overwhelming 7-2 vote.
Updating our outdated zoning isn’t exactly a front-page issue, but it’s essential to keeping families in town and one of the main reasons I ran for City Council in the first place. Read more about how out of date zoning hurts residents and forces them out of town.
The fact of the matter is that the donation was from a well-respected restaurateur in my district, not a developer or special interest as the mayor sensationalized and it had absolutely nothing to do with my decision to take up the zoning issue. On the date of the contribution, the donor didn’t even own the property that he would later bring to the Planning Board. As soon as I became aware that this donor was submitting an application, I recused myself from that meeting to avoid any appearance of a conflict. There is absolutely no merit to the mayor’s lies against me and worse, his attempt to defame a Hoboken-based small business for petty political gain.
PUTTING POLICY FIRST
Over the past two weeks, I have had the chance to listen to more community feedback on this issue and I plan to re-introduce revised legislation next month with additional assurances that limit this to the smaller, family-friendly, homes most negatively impacted by the city’s flood ordinance. Much like the original ordinance, the revised will continue to maintain the 30 percent rear yard standard currently required, ensuring green space, light and air is preserved for all residents, while still allowing them to access their backyards. This is an opportunity to make a small but important change to the way our city treats homeowners, and I’m not backing down from it.
Ravi Bhalla might think that this political hit job, a gross misuse of his office and taxpayer resources, would silence me. He could not be more mistaken. He might also believe that he can scare Hoboken with wild accusations about donors and developers that don’t have a grain of truth to them. But I’m not going to stop fighting to hold his scandal-plagued administration accountable, or to keep moving our city forward. I know that Hoboken won’t fall for this kind of misdirection and that residents want the City Council to continue putting the needs of our city over the personal interests of the Mayor.
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Mike DeFusco
Hoboken City Councilman
P.S. Should you ever need anything, please email me at Mike4Hoboken@yahoo.com or call me at 646.372.4341. |
Official release:
Dear friends and neighbors:
I want to clarify some of the misinformation that has been distributed and published concerning the recent zoning ordinance I co-sponsored with Councilman DeFusco regarding Hoboken’s “Donuts.” Contrary to what our Mayor and two of my fellow council members are attempting to make you believe, I am fully committed to protecting Hoboken’s “Donuts.”
For those unaware, the Hoboken “Donut” is sacrosanct in Hoboken and frequently discussed and defended at planning and zoning board meetings. You can see them in the map below – they are the residential blocks that look like loops where the interior are the backyards of the homes on that block. Protecting the Hoboken “Donut” is something that has long been a position for most in Hoboken, myself included both when I was a commissioner on the Zoning Board and now as your Councilwoman.
Most often not publicly accessible, Hoboken “Donuts” are still considered part of our overall open space that dense communities like ours need. The encroachment of one property on its own rear yard clearly impacts the light and air of all the neighbors surrounding that property. But in addition to protecting our interior open spaces, we also need to allow access to it – both for safety and enjoyment. And such access has been limited in many instances due to our 2015 flood ordinance which some believe encourages teardowns of properties to add more economic square feet and/or requires the elevation of the lowest livable floor to a level that is often much higher than the grade of the rear yard and thus removing access to the rear yard from the living space.
The ordinance proposed by Councilman DeFusco and myself was meant to address these issues. It was meant to allow property owners to refurbish/rebuild their existing footprint, comply with our local flood ordinance, but not have to apply to a municipal board to have safe and enjoyable access to their rear yard while still working within the same width constraints afforded within our current zoning laws. That is it.
This is not by any stretch of the imagination a way “for developers to reap the benefits of larger units” as our Mayor would have you believe.
Here is some background and more detail behind what was proposed that I hope will give you more understanding behind why I supported this ordinance and asked my council colleagues to do as well.
On July 11th, the City Council, on second reading, passed an ordinance being referred to as B-40 which effectively expanded what could be excluded from lot coverage for purposes of exiting a property.
Prior to B-40, our zoning code already allowed for Fire Escapes so long as they did not extend into the yard beyond 54” (see § 196-24 D. (a)).
Additionally, in a 2015 ordinance sponsored by Councilmen Doyle and Russo, the code was updated to include, among other things, egress stairs extending from a rear deck from the first dwelling floor so long as they were no wider than 36” (see § 196-28.1 A (1-3)).
In B-40, we proposed that these effectively remain unchanged with the following exceptions that we felt gave more clarity, more relief to property owners negatively impacted by our flood ordinance, and in some cases improved protection of our Hoboken “Donut”:
- Added “Fire Escape” and “Rear Egress Stair” as defined terms that previously didn’t exist that both the same maximum width restrictions as in our current code, but actually reduces the width allowed without variance to anything more than minimum required.
- We also added clarifying language that said any Fire Escapes or Rear Egress Stairs wider than the minimum allowed size would in their entirety be added back into the lot coverage ratio – currently for fire escapes minimum code is 30” for single stairs and 50” for double stairs (vs. 54” allowed under our code).
- In both definitions, it was explicitly stated that “Under No Circumstances, Shall A Rear Egress Stair Be Used As Outdoor Living Space” which provides an enforcement mechanism that did not previously exist.
- For Rear Egress Stair, we inserted the ability to have a 3’x3’ landing so a homeowner didn’t have to build a much larger deck to gain access to the backyard
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