ZAK - Add to this Poll "CLOSE THE COMMUNITY SCHOOL" - this is a real wast of money - .... ADD THAT IDEA TO THE POLL.....

@Just Facts The Community School is under the jurisdiction of the Board of Education.

I'm not even sure that Zak lives here. WE need to stand up. Goto the next Mayor and Council show and be heard!

Towns tend to loose money in high density development.

It's bonded for decades 800,000+ a year.

Forgive my ignorance, but how much did the Community Center cost?

Mike,

About 12M. Bonded over 30 years at roughly 800K to 1M per year. That's why I keep saying it ain't getting closed. Factor that cost and the fact that an outside company wouldn't be able to profit off it.

Chris, that is confusing to me. Keep it open, pay a full staff, pay utilities and no income is generated. If it's shut, there are no salaries and no utilities or other assiciated fees.

Mike,
That is not the case. The staff still needs to be employed. They would just move to the Muni. building. I don't believe FL took on any extra positions as a result of the Rec Center. Even if you closed the place, utilities still need to be paid. You can't let the building go into disrepair. Climate control would be needed to prevent all sorts of environmental issues. So far, it's been close, close, close. And then what? What do you do with it? Rent it? Lease it?

Chris,
Close it, cut our loses and learn an very expensive lesson.
Continuing to throw money at it is not a solution. There is no "then what." That will be the end of an embarrassing chapter for the Fair Lawn council.

Mike,

Close it and do what with it? They're not throwing money at it, it's funded from the genaral fund. After debt service, what do you think we're paying for its upkeep? You can't include salaries. They were there before the center went up. You can't just let it lay there. It will cost more money down the road when it becomes an environmental hazard. Most, and I mean greater than 95% of the costs will remain if it were to be vacated. Close it? Fine. Then what do you do with it??????

Yes, they should start from themselves.

Make the suggestion at the next meeting

Bellair, you took the words out of my mouth. I was going to write the same thing. Its a joke that Dept heads are making close to a hundred thousand and maybe more to work m-f with every frickin holiday. How does this make sense? At least twice a year my kids go to school while the boro hall and DPW are off. 1 Is Martin Luther King Day, and I believe also Columbas day, Veterans day, and election day. These people are making morer money than our cops who are out there 24/7 7 days a week, and they have the balls to lay off 4 new cops.I guess the crime rate, traffic accidents and medical emergency went down. I posted on here 6 months ago that once a new council would hire more cops. The problem is they did, without out any regaurd to the 4 they laid off. 3 Veterans thay were in Iraq and afghaniston and 1 who's father was a cop here for many years and just retied as a SGT/DET. Where is the loyalty?

Zak is starting to demonstrate that he will not challenge the folks who feed him the information. It's much easier to be their parrot.

@alex I specified in the article where I got the choices and also asked for suggestions.

That is why you were not elected. You can't simply attack the over payment of these employees without specific examples. Start with the Superintendent of Schools, Bruce Watson who makes more than the governor of our state, a whopping $225,000+

Governor Christie has addressed this situation by placing caps on the salaries of superintendents. I believe that the maximum permitted salary is $175,000

Brent, I'm aware, I used Bruce since he has the largest salary. We have six figure gym teachers too.

Do you realize that we are one of the few towns in the area that have single pickups for most of the year and alternating recycling pickups? It's looks to be the only area where we don't try to be like every other town. D or R, we've seem to adopt the "try to keep in line with other towns" philosophy. So, Fair Lawn is a great town because.......... We're just like every other one??? That's a great selling point <sarc>. Like when the Planning Board was trying to compare River Road to Ridgewood's downtown years back. Ummm, yeah... Ok.. Clueless...

In the other article I asked how much it costs for our current setup. Perhaps they could look into what is done in other towns in which there is a really large garbage container - issued by the town - but designed to be lifted by an arm that comes out of the truck - lifting the container over and into the truck. Might cut down on man power. However, if FL owns the current trucks - this would probably be cost prohibitive.

Hey there!! Do you want to put out FLHS athletic trainer out of their 90K dollar job?

@Jenne Closing the senior center was included in the poll (although not reducing funding to it). I should have included the minibus also. That was an oversight. But like I said, there are a seemingly limitless number of areas where cuts could be made if people are willing to sacrifice services. Creating a poll that includes every single possibility isn't really feasible. The point of the poll was more to get an idea where people felt they'd be most willing to sacrifice some services, if it came to that, and to generate some more nuanced responses from residents via the comment thread. I'll be bringing all of the suggestions to the manager/council and see where they take it from there.

Fair Lawn's ins company is picking up half of the settlement. They are laying out the whole settlement up front. We will pay them back our half over 3 years.

Good info to have MWS, thanks for including. I don't think it impacts the fact that towns need to be much more careful of who they bring on their payrolls. Once you hire someone, with these draconian civil service rules, it's almost impossible to get rid of them regardless of how bad a worker they might be. In the case of Sgt Messina, the town is now responsible for over a quarter million dollar payout as well as certain increases to their ins. premium, all because they hired an unprofessional guy that simply wanted to hit the lawsuit lotto. He got a nice payday indeed, but not enough to live off of the rest of his life. I for one, as someone running/owning a couple of companies, would never consider hiring someone who had this in his past. There are simply some people out there that want to grab whatever money they can regardless of whether it's right or deserved. They have no issue suing their employers or anyone else they think has deep pockets. There was a time when people had more pride than suing with little cause simply to make money. Many of the current generation like Messina don't feel that sense of pride unfortunately.

@alex Yes, if you'd like I can do that

Unfairlawn.wordpress.com is a bit old, but it lists over 100 people making 100k.

That is old. A lot of those names are FLPD. They also may contain OT as well. Some of the BOE people are retired.

It doesn't stop at the town level. On the county level we have our Deputy Mayor Trawinski at $180K also making more than the governor and our mayor who works as a press secretary for a politician making $130K. Together they make more than the salaries allotted for every person at Rec Center combined, plus another $10K. We're being told to cannibalize each other while those at the top keep walking away with more and more. Why?

I would be for ending county government. its duplicate, wasteful and hinders towns from cooperating with each other. Look what they did to Teterboro, they had two other towns doing the policing, the county stepped in, kicked out the other towns and charged Teterboro more!

TP,

Do you ever offer an alternative?

The county functions should be split between the towns and the state. I feel like we may have had this conversation before. Here are the benefits:

- 64 departments/divisions, gone.
- 2,200+ over paid position (1 in 4 over 100k/year), gone.
- $150,000,000 in salaries (not including benefits) off our backs.
- Almost $60,000,000 in debt service would work itself out of existence.
- $500,000,000 aka 1/2 BILLION Dollars, no longer taxed.
- Board of Chosen Freeholders, County Exec, Board Clerk, Counsel to Board, County Administrator, Admin & Finance, Public Works ALL ELIMINATED

The state could take over the functions of Human Services, Health Services, County Police, County Clerk and County Surrogate

And we can return the Sheriff, parks and planning to the municipalities.

We wouldn't be the first state, not even in the north east, Connecticut, Massachusetts and Rhode Island don't have counties. It would empower local towns to work together without fear of permanently losing control to the county like we saw with policing in Teterboro.

You may want to double check Mass. That sounds wrong. Not sure about Conn. Agree about RI. Most States use a county Sheriff for law enforcement. I don't think your numbers are right.

Chris you are right in part about Massachusetts, they have a hybrid model. They did away with most of their counties and use a city government model instead. I wanted to simply highlight that three levels of elected government under the Federal system was not the only way.

My sources on dollar amounts are a bit low since they are about 2 years old. I sourced them from the county's website http://www.co.bergen.nj.us The problem has actually gotten worse.

I am curious, if it were a ballot initiative today, would you vote to create a Bergen county government?

Today? That would depend on what the push for a new branch of government would be needed for. If we had got along without it for all these years, I would have to say no. The problem I see is that the towns and county government in NJ are so intertwined with each other. Pulling them apart now would require the election of a majority with the same ideology to break it up. The R's have a majority now at the County level and they can't seem to agree from within. So, it would take the finger of God to eliminate the county government. Although, I think, if they all benefited from it politically, the Democrats could probably get it done. That's usually a "one boss, many puppets" style of governing.

It would only take an act of the Legislature signed by the Governor. The county was created by an act of the state government and can be ended just the same.

@Bellairberdan, the salaries of the rec deptartment costs more than $210,000 a year. The Super and his assistant make about that much alone.

180 + 130 = 310
In Thomas Paine's own words on March 10, 2012: "As for the Ganz Mahal aka Wreck Center, what a textbook example of council mismanagement, present membership included. I sincerely hope they address the hemeraging, that building wastes over $300,000 in salaries alone"

You're not admitting all your stats are bull are you? Or are you just trying to use the old Republican lie that the littlest guy makes all the money?

Posting while tired maybe a bad idea, I am in London this week so it was really late, I had intended to include a few more words. I want to thank you for finding and quoting my previous comment.

The Super makes $120k, the assistant makes just under $100k, the actual cost of employing the rec department is well over $310,000 it gets worse when you add everyone's non-cash compensation (ie health benefits). Then we give money to All Sports (and others) which actually run the programs and collect additional money from Fair Lawn parents.

BellairBerdan its real easy to fall into rooting for your team, D in your case, R in my case, but intelligent people try to stand with the truth and common sense. While others may have challenged your intellect, based on what you write on this site, I believe you to be sincere and rational. When evaluating information, don't question the source, question the veracity. Would you challenge Peluso and Swain if they were the "double dippers"? If you can't honestly answer yes, you should rethink your position. It's that sort of us vs them that has skyrocketed our taxes.

@Alex - Whose salaries would you like to know? I received a list of the top 25 salaried employees today.