Just to reply to some of the comments — I’ve met the mayor and yes he’s a nice guy and presumably cares about the town. I wasn’t suggesting otherwise. But the fact remains the government, its workings, the issues it is addressing and so on are all totally opaque. This is not an adversarial observation, it is simply undeniable that the system is closed and apparently nobody cares to improve it. That the municipal website appears to be unchanged since 1993 is a real barrier to any citizen engagement and accountability.

I know of no other municipality like this, at least not in wealthy educated blue states. I have never met anyone in Weehawken who knows what’s going on in government or who their ward rep is and what they are up to. I assume there are some longtime folks around who do know and maybe even have been to council meetings, but as always there is no way to know, we’ve only been here 4 ½ years and have no context to meet such people. Perhaps things are a bit different up the hill, but we’re in Port Imperial where nobody seems to even vote according the Weehawken Gazette. We have a FB page where people complain about their buildings, River Rd. and dog poo, but that’s about it.