I really believe that if everyone received a condensed letter from the federal government each year that itemized all the taxes (federal income taxes, state income taxes, payroll taxes, property taxes, etc.), they paid during the preceding year there would be a huge revolt in this country.

I heard the same thing. I didn't get up to look out the window but it was a very unique, disturbing sound.

When all you see are check cashing joints the free market is working fine. That's the services that the people want. If you think that that is a problem then your issue is really more about what causes a bunch of people to live in a set area who frequent check cashing joints.

What Fulop is doing with Investors Bank is really no different than giving tax abatement stop developers. There's nothing to be proud of regarding that. Same with this move.

Generally speaking the money should be housed in the bank that provides the best return on the deposits, not the bank that will do a politicians bidding.

You and Fulop are assuming that the residents will benefit from these new banking services, services that the residents could very well get in other ways if they wanted to. If these residents really wanted these banking services then a bank branch would come about in its own volition.

Bottom line is Fulop shouldn't really be so proud of this. It's sad that he is.

When you lend money to a bank by depositing funds into it you are always taking a risk that it can be lost by that bank. That's one of the reasons why they pay interest to the depositor. The inherent risk in depositing funds into a bank is highlighted by the existence of the FDIC.

Fulop is compounding the inherent risk in this situation by making the decision to deposit our taxpayer money into a bank not based on any risk/reward analysis of the bank but because he wants to gain political points. He wants a branch to open up in a neighborhood he prefers - a neighborhood that if it needed a bank branch at all it would have people living in it that would pay for the banking services thus attracting a branch being opened by some bank without any incentives coming from Fulop.

He has a fiduciary responsibility when it comes to our tax money and this decision by him goes against that responsibility.

And that fact that Robert Moses of all people did something similar is irrelevant. Two wrongs don't make a right. Neither one of them should have done it.

It's disturbing how proud Fulop is of this deal. Essentially he bribed a small bank to open up a branch in a certain area using millions of dollars of Jersey City taxpayer's money - our money, not his money. He's put our money at risk for his own personal political gain.

And he's thumping his chest about it.

Something's terribly wrong here.

You don't have to freeze the corporate tax break system to arrange for improved reporting regarding the system. You can fight for improved reporting regardless.

That'd be like asking to freeze the distributions of Medicaid or other welfare payments until we get improved reporting on how many illegal immigrants get the payments.

That would be just plain crazy.

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1000% correct. Apparently a lot of people are haters, they just like to hate on Dixon because they follow the tired mentality of hating on anything that, in their minds, has "a lot of money". In reality the hate stems from the particular individual being discriminatory in applying their personal standards of what's right or wrong.

It's called tough love. We are doing you a favor. If you take heed you'll be better off in the long run. Learn to look out for yourself in the future and do your due diligence instead of spinning your wheels blaming others in an effort to rectify this mistake of your past.

Waaa waa waaa!

Suck it up. Live and learn. Move on and make sure not to make the same mistakes again.

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Correctomundo!

http://www.wsj.com/articles/disaster- ... DDLENexttoWhatsNewsSecond



Disaster Plans for Oil Trains

Federal officials devise scenario involving a train explosion to prepare officials for the worst








Oil trains traverse Jersey City, N.J., where officials are concerned about the potential for a spill. ENLARGE

Oil trains traverse Jersey City, N.J., where officials are concerned about the potential for a spill. Photo: Joe Jackson/The Wall Street Journal
.

By
Russell Gold










April 13, 2015 7:54 p.m. ET
39 COMMENTS

Imagine a mile-long train transporting crude oil derailing on an elevated track in Jersey City, N.J., across the street from senior citizen housing and 2 miles from the mouth of the Holland Tunnel to Manhattan.

The oil ignites, creating an intense explosion and a 300-foot fireball. The blast kills 87 people right away, and sends 500 more to the hospital with serious injuries. More than a dozen buildings are destroyed. A plume of thick black smoke spreads north to New York?s Westchester County.

This fictional?but, experts say, plausible?scenario was developed by the Federal Emergency Management Agency in one of the first efforts by the U.S. government to map out what an oil-train accident might look like in an urban area. Agency officials unveiled it as part of an exercise last month to help local firefighters and emergency workers prepare for the kind of crude-by-rail accident that until now has occurred mostly in rural locations.

?Our job is to design scenarios that push us to the limit, and very often push us to the point of failure so that we can identify where we need to improve,? said FEMA spokesman Rafael Lemaitre. He said a second planning exercise is scheduled in June in a suburban area of Wisconsin.



ENLARGE


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Jersey City?s mayor, Steven Fulop, said the drill showed participants that they need to improve regional communication to cope with an oil-train accident.

?It would be a catastrophic situation for any urban area and Jersey City is one of the most densely populated areas in the entire country,? he said.

Railroad records show that about 20 oil trains a week pass through the county that contains Jersey City, and Mr. Fulop said the trains use the elevated track studied in the FEMA exercise. Even more trains hauling crude pass through other cities, including Chicago, Philadelphia and Minneapolis.

Rail shipments of oil have expanded to almost 374 million barrels last year from 20 million barrels in 2010, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. Although low crude prices and safety issues have recently led to small declines in such traffic, trains carrying volatile oil from North Dakota and the Rocky Mountains continue to rumble toward refiners on the East, West and Gulf Coasts.

Several oil-train derailments have produced huge fireballs, including two in March in rural Illinois and Ontario. In 2013, a train carrying North Dakota crude derailed late at night in Lac-Megantic, Quebec, killing 47 people.



Edgardo Correa, of Jersey City, N.J., beneath railroad tracks that pass by his home. ENLARGE

Edgardo Correa, of Jersey City, N.J., beneath railroad tracks that pass by his home. Photo: Joe Jackson/The Wall Street Journal
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Regulators worry more about a serious accident in a densely populated area. ?The derailment scenario FEMA developed is a very real possibility and a very real concern,? said Susan Lagana, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Department of Transportation. She said her agency was considering emergency orders to address such risks.

Firefighters at the FEMA workshop in Jersey City discussed the difficulty of battling a crude-oil fire, which can be explosive and hard to extinguish. One problem: limited supplies of the special foam required to smother the flames.

Jordan Zaretsky, a fire battalion chief in nearby Teaneck, N.J., who attended the presentation, said the scale of such an accident was sobering. ?This isn?t a structural fire that we can knock down in an hour or two,? he said. ?This is something we?d be dealing with for days.?

Ideas discussed at the workshop included devising a system to allow local officials to know when an oil train was passing through, developing public-service messages to tell residents what to do in case of a derailment and providing more firefighters with specialized training.

There have been many calls for changes to how crude oil is handled on the railroads, including new speed limits for trains and requirements to treat the crude oil to make it less volatile.

Earlier this month, the chairman of the National Transportation Safety Board urged the rail industry and federal regulators to move more swiftly to replace existing tank cars with ones that would better resist rupturing and fire.

A spokesman for the American Petroleum Institute, a trade group for oil producers, said the companies are committed to ?greater efforts to prevent derailments through track maintenance and repair, upgrades to the tank car fleet, and giving first responders the knowledge and tools they need.?

The Association of American Railroads recognizes that ?more has to be done to further advance the safe movement of this product,? a spokesman said.

FEMA chose for the location of the derailment scenario a stretch of track adjacent to the New Jersey Turnpike and about a mile from downtown Jersey City. One side of the track is industrial and includes an electric substation. The other side is residential.

Edgardo Correa, a 59-year-old retired sanitation worker, lives in a house close to the tracks in Jersey City. He said he was aware that trains full of crude pass by his home. ?It?s an alarming thing,? he said.

?Joe Jackson contributed to this article.

Write to Russell Gold at russell.gold@wsj.com

If you believe sales taxes don't effect consumer behavior then get rid of this ridiculous discounted 3.5% sales tax rate in Jersey City. Increase to the full 7% that is normally charged in the rest of the state. Because apparently, by your logic, neither the current reduced rate nor an increase to the normal rate will have any effect on people's shopping habits.

Of course sales taxes effect people's purchase decisions. Duh. Or at least the decisions of smart people.

TwoBootsJC - I couldn't have said it better myself. You hit the mail right on the head. There are so many things wrong with this ordinance I wouldn't know where to begin. But you encapsulate just about all the problems perfectly in your post.

If you are moving the furniture you shouldn't need to supply a certificate of insurance since you are doing it yourself. If you were to pay a moving service to move your items for you then providing a certificate of insurance from the moving company is appropriate. If you are the owner of the condo that you are moving into then any damage you might cause to the building when you move in should be covered by either your homeowner insurance policy or the condo association's insurance policy or perhaps both.

Aaron,

Just letting you know I completely agree with your argument. I'm going to make it a point to not get my food from the so called "farmers market" vendors and instead eat at your establishment. Your risk taking should be rewarded more than the farmers market vendors' johnny-come-lately business practices.

Ahhh I see. Do you know what the specific Cafe 125 benefit is? For my company it is the annual life insurance premium that it pays on my behalf for the life insurance coverage that all employees get.

I went back into my tax records for 2013 and compared the NYS taxable income vs. the NJ taxable income. Our NJ taxable salaries were higher for the following 3 pre-tax deductions from our salaries:

Pre-tax Medical Flexible Spending Account (FSA) contributions
Pre-tax commuting cost contributions (Wageworks)
Pre-tax medical insurance premium payments

For filing your NJ state taxes NJ includes the above contributions as part of your taxable salary. You then can deduct your FSA contributions and medical insurance premium payments as part of your NJ state itemized deductions along with your mortgage interest and property taxes and so forth.

Our 401k contributions were treated equally by NJ and NY so that did not factor into the difference.

Both my wife and I have been living in jersey city and working in NYC for many years. My employer has always given me one W-2. But my wife always got two W-2's. She would get a "normal" w-2 that stated her federal income and NYS income. It would also show the NYS income taxes withheld. Then she would get another W-2 that showed NJ state wages and zero nj taxes withheld. The nj state wages were always a little bit higher than the NY w-2 because the state of nj does not include certain contributions my wife was making as "pre-tax" contributions. So she has to pay nj taxes on those contributions. I forget which contributions those are but it might have been pretax contributions for commuting costs (Wage Works) or something like that.

It seems to me the second w-2 is simply to inform the recipient that your taxable income in nj is slightly different than your taxable income in NY. That's it. It doesn't mean you are going to be "double taxed" or anything silly like that.

I bought a dozen Cannolis on Saturday and thought they were delicious.

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I second 210 9th St.

Brand new apartments with great construction materials having been used.

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They might. They might not. They might appreciate the increased property value derived from not living adjacent to a chemical soaked dry cleaning establishment. Or they might not. It's all just speculation. One thing that's certain is that commercial establishments change all of the time.

If the residents near the restaurant can tolerate the racket coming from the kids that go to the school across the street from the restaurant then the dull drone of outdoor dining should be a cake walk.

The only reason Manhattan means anything to me is because that is where my employer is located. That is the only reason I have a connection to NYC. If my employer moved to Connecticut I wouldn't miss NYC at all. There are plenty of communities in the Tri-state area where their only connection to NYC is that it is where their residents work. Those communities have no interest in being called the 6th Boro. And neither should JC.

I moved to JC to NYC specifically because it was NOT like NYC. I'd rather not have some stupid nickname that suggests it is. Actually I'd rather not have some stupid nickname at all.

This practice of putting nicknames on neighborhoods has been way overused by insecure people who are simply ashamed of where they currently live. They should get some balls and be proud of the where they reside. This "6th boro" moniker just screams either inferiority complex or superiority complex (depending upon your motives). Either way it's indicative of having a problem with being who you are.

Better late than never.

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That's just pure speculation. In any event, one thing that is certain is that those Jews, Italians, Poles, etc., would at least be able to run academic circles around the current day thugs at Dickinson.

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Wow wee!! Millions more have health insurance that they are still not paying for!!! Fuckin' great.