Message from Mayor Bhalla:
"I'm thrilled to announce today that Hoboken will receive $1 million from the State Department of Transportation for important transportation related projects! This is a significant upgrade from previous years, and the $1 million will be invested directly in our City through important pedestrian safety initiatives, road repair, and other projects. Governor Murphy and I spoke several times after our elections about the importance of investing in our transportation infrastructure in Hoboken, and I thank him and his staff for recognizing this need and allocating $1 million for our City."
I would hope that the specific projects funded by this grant are broken out and made public. While a million dollars is a large sum of money it can easily get lost in a hundred million dollar plus City budget.
ReplyDeleteHudson County also needs to step up and address the long neglected repairs to it's roads and find ways to increase it's funding of projects in Hoboken to balance out the highly disproportionate percentage of taxes we are accessed compared with other municipalities.
Jen would have gotten $2.
DeleteYeah, Monopoly money.
Deletemore than twice as much as last year, i believe. hmm, how are the crybabies gonna spin that as a negative? i'm sure petulant little MDF is busy concocting some pretzel logic as we speak. or maybe tiff, she's good with numbers.
ReplyDeleteThe reason we got more money was because of the 23 cent gas tax and renewal of the TTF, which was Governor Christie's doing. The state had $160M to dole out instead of $80M, so Hoboken got twice as much. Ravi can take a victory lap on this but he, and Gov. Murphy, had nothing to do with the increase in transportation funding.
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DeleteChristie and Zimmer actually. In order for a city to get grant money, you need to fill out a grant application. So yes, the increased taxes helps. But you get nothing if you don't fill out the paperwork and Zimmer did. And if you notice, the proportionate share Hoboken got relative to other cities far outweighs the average both on a population basis and mile of road basis. Someone did a damn fine job getting that money for Hoboken.
DeleteEddyE- I have both 2017 and 2018 transportation award lists, and yes in general, across the board the grant amounts were higher. But not uniformly so. Some got a little more, some got a lot more. As Da Ojo Rojo stated, Hoboken did very well for a Mile Square city-- we are 1/10 the size of Jersey City and our grant was 1/2 of theirs. Murphy spent November 8 (day after his election) in Hoboken touring Hoboken Terminal with Mayor Bhalla, sending the message that 'help' was on the way.
DeleteI definitely suspect Murphy made sure Hoboken got a bigger slice of the pie than Christie would have offered the city. So credit all around.
Delete1. Zimmer for doing the grant applications
2. Christie for making the pie bigger
3. Bhalla for being on good terms with the administration
4. the administration for being kind to us
5. 33 towns for not filling out the grant applications - so they got $0
6. the voters in making sure a Republican was not elected as mayor or someone else equally objectionable to Murphy. As I said earlier, Jen would have gotten the city $2.
We love the $1M in money. thx Guv! But let's be real for a second and admit $1M doesn't actually buy you much nowadays. 3BR condo with parking? Spread that out over 1 sq mile and it doesn't go very far. what are the City's actual needs in terms of overdue sidewalk and road repair? $10M? $20M? when is the next piece of waterfront set to fall into the river? what will that cost? Thx for the cool mill., but seriously folks it is chump change in today's era of chronic infrastructure decay...
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