Week in Review: Mayor and Council Pass Municipal Budget, Fort Lee Loses Power

As expected, the Fort Lee Mayor and Council passed the 2011 municipal budget Thursday evening at its regular meeting.

The total anticipated amount to be raised by taxation was $57,609,950.92, and the total anticipated general appropriations for 2011 was $67,681,823.15, according to the budget as previously introduced. As Mayor Mark Sokolich had previously vowed, the municipal tax increase represents less than 1 percent.

Those numbers changed slightly Thursday when the council also approved an amendment to the budget that did two things: re-allocated $25,000 in 2011 state aid in light of the Governor’s state budget and inserted a $178,000 grant from FEMA for fire equipment that was awarded after the municipal budget was introduced. [Full Story]

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Power in Fort Lee was restored after the borough was hit by a major outage Wednesday morning, officials said.

Fort Lee lost power around 9 a.m. in widespread power outages reported across eastern Bergen County.  In a statement, Public Service Electric and Gas said 60,000 customers lost power after a transformer failed during "routine switching" at the Ridgefield Substation.

"This failure caused several 230,000-volt (230kV) transmission lines to trip out resulting in the shut down of the Ridgefield and Leonia Substations causing a wide-spread power outage that affected about 60,000 customers in Southern Bergen County. As of 10:11 a.m., all customers have been restored," according to the statement. [Full Story]

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Six candidates will be vying for three seats on the Fort Lee Board of Education in the April election, school officials have confirmed.

The terms of current board vice president Peter J. Suh, Michelle Stux-Ramirez and Joseph J. Surace are set to expire this year, and all three incumbents filed petitions to run in the April 27 election before Tuesday’s filing deadline, said district business administrator and board secretary Cheryl Balletto.

Also filing petitions to run for three-year terms on the school district’s governing body were Paul Umrichin, Tracy Mattei and Helen Yoon, Balletto confirmed. [Full Story]

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The realtor and exclusive broker for Fort Lee Towne Center says he hopes to replace the Fort Lee Borders, which is scheduled to close by the end of April as part of the chain's bankruptcy restructuring, with tenants “that are more relevant to the community,” reports NorthJersey.com.

That means possibly doctors’ offices and restaurants, says John Choi of Sandbox Realtors in the article, which quotes him as saying he is “getting lots of positive response.” [Full Story]

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Just because the Fort Lee High School winter sports season has ended doesn’t mean Patch’s sports coverage is over. After a story last Saturday on the Bridgemen high school baseball team taking to the field for the first time this year in spite of the cold, Patch also ran stories on Fort Lee’s two little leagues: the American League and the National League.

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On Sunday, 90-year-old Fort Lee poet Moira Bailis made what her longtime collaborator, publisher and friend David Messineo, publisher of Sensations Magazine, referred to as a “cameo appearance” at the Fort Lee Public Library for a poetry reading called "Moira Bailis at 90 - A Lifetime in Poetry.”

The event represented the public launch of two books, The Antidote to Prejudice and It Has To Do With Seeing, recently published by Rhode Island publisher The Poet's Press, collectively bringing together 98 percent of Bailis’s poetry in print for the first time. [Full Story] [Photo Gallery]

The week in review appears every Sunday on Fort Lee Patch.