Representatives of the Mexican Consulate came to Bayonne City Hall from Tuesday to Friday last week to provide services to Mexican-Americans and Mexican nationals. The consulate is in Manhattan but brings service to surrounding areas on a regular basis. This year’s political climate surrounding immigration makes getting proper documentation more important than ever to Bayonne’s substantial Mexican population. It’s also much more convenient than traveling to Manhattan, especially with a family. Bayonne City Councilman-at-Large Juan Perez helped facilitate the consulate coming to Bayonne, along with Rubin Arana of the Bayonne Hispanic Association. Click here for more.
The City Council passed a new kind of PILOT (payment in lieu of taxes) at Wednesday’s council meeting, 4-1, allocating five percent of PILOT payments to the Bayonne School District over the program’s 25-year lifespan. The City has never passed a PILOT of this nature, as developers contributing to schools are not statutorily required to do so. Many school districts in cities undergoing real estate development are underfunded, and receive little help from real estate development, due to PILOT programs not statutorily required to make payments to schools. Thirty-first District Assemblyman Nicholas Chiaravalloti has been working to make PILOT arrangements like Bayonne’s commonplace in NJ, introducing legislation to the NJ State Assembly last week to make every PILOT program in the state pay 5 percent to school districts. Click here for more.
Suraj Kaufman, owner of the Sneaker Room store in Bayonne, has joined a group that helps make sandwiches for people living in homeless shelters. On a cold Saturday afternoon, the windows of Bambino Chef at 213 Newark Ave. in Jersey City steamed up as more than two dozen kids from downtown Jersey City stood around two very long tables making sandwiches. Rene Safarova-Gonzalez, the owner, opened the store about five years ago in what she thought was an upscale neighborhood, only to find that in some cases, the rich lived side by side with a fair share of homeless people. Her business offers cooking classes for kids. But since opening her doors, she discovered that there is a social component to her classes she did not anticipate – teaching kids who are relatively well off to help the less fortunate. Click here for more.
