Mike Lenz addressed the blogosphere on NJ.com's Hoboken Forum this week http://www.nj.com/forums/hoboken. See post #14455.Mike Lenz on the root causes of Hoboken's Budget Mess:
1) For the past 15 years Hoboken has kept taxes close to stable, while allowing spending to rise and rise.
2) Mayor Russo covered the growing gap by selling off city assets (916 Garden, the water utility etc.)
3) Tony Soares, Roberts and many others saw the folly in this and by 2001 were ready to run a fusion ticket committed to fiscal sanity.
4) After they won, Carol Marsh and Soares continued to fight for what they ran on, while Roberts morphed into a worse version of Russo.
5) Dave's problem was he was out of "surplus" assets, so he needed to resort to sham sales, like the sale-leaseback of the municipal garage, to keep alive the fiction that the city was on sound fiscal footing.
6) By 2007 there was nothing left to borrow against so the city just stopped paying its bills, to the tune of $10 million.
7) The council led by Cunningham and often supported by several of Zimmer, Mason and the Russo cousins tried to cut of the money faucet.
8) Finally, in May, Dick England admitted in response to my question that they'ed overspent the legal budget by $10 million.
9) At that point, there was no way for the council to pass a legal budget, they refused to apply for a waiver to ratify -- after the fact -- the illegal overspending, the state came in, and the rest was history. ◦
