1. Clean up the streets, vacant lots, and businesses. Get serious about trash removal. Look at Union City and Bayonne, much cleaner.

2. Foot patrols especially in the areas we want to attract new business to such as Ocean Ave, MLK, Westside, Pacific, Communipaw.

3. Enforce the Law. Give out citations for littering, not picking up dog poo, loitering, double parking, not stopping for peds in proper crosswalks. Stop warning, start ticketing.

4. Ease the permit process for small businesses, especially storefront type places. These are the people that will come here once the areas are clean and more secure and will immediately hire people. And guess what--they dont need abatements! Just make it quick and easy for them to get into business.

5. The whole "city process" should be streamlined, maybe have an office that takes the businessperson through the entire process and internally challenges the departments that become barriers. I can only imagine the challenges for a small biz trying to get all the zoning and permits and inspections etc to start up.

I think most or all of this is in the Fulop platform, so I hope we can move quickly. Bringing in 20 new businesses that hire 10 people each is much easier that trying to complete for one large employer, and much less risky from a failure perspective. I think Steve has the right idea to go after small biz since they have produced all the job growth in the US, while large companies continue to downsize and off-shore.

Bottom line--small biz are short on capital and time. Tax breaks are not all that helpful compared to up front savings and short time to open their doors. JC could give cost effective help to make it easy in the front end.

I am excited that the mayor wants to bring more tech jobs to JC. Mr. Mayor please also consider making JC more attractive to startups.

I hope Fulop does what he said he would do and not turn into a rat like Healy who campaign on ending tax abatements downtown and changed tunes at the first opportunity.

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I thought former mayor Bret Schundler was a reformer.

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More than just parks. This city's education is still horrid. We need to fix that first before adding any parks.

To attract more families, one thing we need is few more parks, especially in JSQ. I hope there is some progress wrt the embankment in downtown.

And on the seventh day, god said, 'let there be Fulop.' Jeez people, get a grip. Look, I voted for the guy, and wish him the best, but seriously, what do think is going to happen? He already appointed Lefrak and Silverman to his Real Estate/Redevelopment Team...the next time someone says the Silvermans "care" about Jersey City, I will forgo throwing up in my mouth, and simply throw up in yours. They're business men. They do what's good for them. If that also happens to be what's good for the people of Jersey City, so be it. But if screwing the little guy is going to help the Silverman's or Lefrak, dont fool yourself into thinking otherwise. Only time will tell, but I'm not so optimistic.

What if Fulop does exactly what he has represented during his campaign.

What if he decides to truly represent the the Jersey Citizens instead of the rich just continuing to amass greater fortunes through the blatant theft of valuable resources, i.e. location, water, giving away our sewerage (we actually pay more, and subsidize North Bergen homeowners) thanks to the last administration and the HCDO cronies. Whose jobs are already in place.

If he does represent the people, he will do what our other leaders have promised, but rejected when elected.

Fulop has already accomplished something we could not have imagined, although a small percentage of the voters came out, they were informed and committed to change.
Hopefully this will be irreversible.

We all need to pull together and hope that we finally have the reformer we have waited for over 100 years.

Good luck to Mr. Fulop, and all of us, we all deserve it.

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You know what, I can pretty much guarantee you're going to be disappointed in Fulop, because he won't walk on water for you. He'll make compromises, because that's how you govern, as opposed to heckle. But certain people will always see things either black or white, like the many people who either see Obama as a radical socialist or Bush III. I prefer to look at the entire win-loss rather than obsess about the losses and gloss over the wins. There will be losses to realpolitik, but I think good government will have many more wins under Fulop than Healy, and that's my standard. I don't compare any pol to a theoretical "perfect".

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Anyone can talk good. LOL!

Will he hold who ever gets these subsidies/abatements accountable???
-Will he require they hire a percentage of JC residents?
-Will he require them to spend some of the monies saved by actually investing in the city?
-Will he require that a certain percentage of workers live in JC?
-Will he require that some of these tech companies provide local programs/internships for local students?
-What are the safeguards that will be in place to prevent another Curt Schilling like fiasco?


Healy for the most part just gave away JC....and I don't have much hope for Fulop.....after all he has to pay off his supporters and backers....he is a politician like the rest of them.

How great to have a mayor who can say things like "There's a real opportunity on the tech front for co-location work spaces growing organically", and not sound as uncomfortable as Bloomberg when he's speaking spanish.

Try to imagine.....a city hall that actually reads it's email.

Good stuff mr Mayor!

Jersey City chases NY families, businesses

The 36-year-old former Wall Street trader who takes office July 1 is preparing an ad campaign and fresh subsidies to lure businesses and families from across the Hudson River. He wants to take on Brooklyn head-to-head for tech and neighborhoods.

BY ANNIE KARNI
Crains NY
JUNE 21, 2013

Jersey City, N.J., has set its sights on New York City families and businesses.

Jersey City, N.J., has a message for New York City: We're going to eat your lunch.

Former Wall Street trader Steven Fulop, who will be sworn in as mayor of Jersey City on July 1, is gearing up to launch an aggressive branding campaign and updated tax abatement program to lure New York City residents and businesses alike to New Jersey's second largest city.

He is vowing to "rebrand how we're perceived and to educate people about what's going on here."

The 36-year-old mayor elect, a former trader at Sanford C. Bernstein & Co., said he is determined to update the way New Yorkers perceive his city. "We're right across the river, but we still have that stigma," he said.

For a certain strata of New Yorkers, the trajectory is to decamp to Brooklyn from Manhattan after having kids and getting priced off the island. Mr. Fulop says Jersey City should be giving Brooklyn a run for its money. "I want to see someone who has outgrown Manhattan to look at Jersey City before they look at Brooklyn," he said.

Real estate experts say Mr. Fulop could have some success, noting that Queens neighborhoods like Long Island City, for example, have benefited from Brooklyn's rapidly rising rents.
"It's logical that markets like Jersey City would benefit from a more expensive Brooklyn," said Jonathan Miller, chief executive of the Miller Samuel real estate appraisal firm.

Jersey City's ad campaign is expected to begin this summer.
"You will start seeing advertising across the river to attract investments," Mr. Fulop said. "We need to be selling that price advantage versus Manhattan and Brooklyn, and I'm going to do it."

It's not just families he's after.

"We're a competitive alternative to having your office in New York," Mr. Fulop said. To burnish that option, he plans to restructure the city's tax abatement program to offer steeper incentives. His plan is to spur development in the Journal Square area and to "make the waterfront competitive with what's across the river." The tax abatements will be scaled back, away from the waterfront, he said.

Of course, this isn't the first time Jersey City has made a play for New York City's jobs. Construction on a 400,000-square-foot, 13-story building for the Depository Trust and Clearing Corp. began in March 2012, after having received subsidies worth more than $70 million. Ultimately, nearly 1,600 people will be relocated from Manhattan to Jersey City.

"We have thriving back office and operations for big banks and that will continue to grow," Mr. Fulop said. "But we haven't done the best job on the smaller tech companies. There's a real opportunity on the tech front for co-location work spaces growing organically."

http://www.crainsnewyork.com/article/ ... 621/REAL_ESTATE/130629973