Op-Ed: ‘MAGA Republicans didn’t cause Hoboken’s downward spiral, Bhalla Dems did’

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In an editorial, Hudson County Republican Committee Executive Director Pavel Sokolov takes aim at Hoboken Mayor Ravi Bhalla’s administration.

Instagram photo.

The brutal assault in Church Square Park a few weeks ago, was tragic, and unfortunately the culmination of failed leadership and policy from the Bhalla Administration.

For years now, a common refrain was the growing sense of danger and a rise in criminality in Hoboken, yet it took an abhorrent act of violence in broad daylight to elicit a response from Bhalla, albeit a few weeks later.

In his latest editorial Bhalla decries the rise in voters for President Trump throughout Hudson County, an increase of roughly 20%.

He fails to recognize that the very policies he champions are the direct cause of this shift, every day voters aren’t impressed with his faux record on civil rights, instead they are concerned about rising grocery prices, rising crime, and a marked increase in vagrancy.

It is beyond hypocritical to tout Hoboken as a “Welcoming City” yet demonizing a third of the electorate.

He blames the county administration for a lack of support yet doesn’t stop to think that a dirty campaign against Congressman Menendez’s father in Bhalla’s losing congressional primary probably wouldn’t endear the Hudson County Democratic Organization in helping Hoboken.

Furthermore, Bhalla’s administration claims to support affordability, but has consistently created new patronage positions in City Hall to reward former failed Team Bhalla candidates with director roles.

Even worse a slew of lawsuits, from political reprisal firings, to reneging on development deals have cost Hoboken taxpayers millions of dollars.

Even more damning are the consistent cuts to our non-profit organizations in Hoboken who work to remedy the mental health crises and support our children, especially those who are most needy.

These issues are endemic to Team Bhalla, Hoboken Democratic Party Chairman Joe Quintero, and Bhalla councilman was so unfazed by public commentary during Monday night’s public safety meeting that he fell asleep.

We need to hold our elected officials to a higher standard.

The Hoboken Republican Party, on the other hand has partnered with non-profits, organized charity events, and above all advocated for safety, low taxes, and a return to the quality of life we have grown to expect.

MAGA Republicans did not cause Hoboken’s downward spiral, BHALLA Democrats did. (Emily Jabbour, Joe Quintero, Jim Doyle, Phil Cohen)

Lets make Hoboken Safe Again.

Pavel Sokolov
Hudson County Republican Committee Executive Director
10+ Year Hoboken Resident


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17 COMMENTS

  1. If Ravi spent more time focusing on things he can control (crime, public safety, quality of life, affordability, etc) and less on things that he can’t (immigration, abortion, “equality” issues) Hoboken would be much better served, and likely so would he. But Hoboken was always just a stepping stone for Ravi and he prioritized his political career and his boys (Vijay, Allen, Freeman etc) over the needs of the city. Now that he’s wasted all his political capital, and millions of dollars from exploitable donors, he will have to settle for a demotion – the back row seat in NJ’s lower house.

  2. Republicans are so anti-crime that they…elected a convicted felon, who Solomon? found liable for sexual abuse, to be president. Any comment on that, Mr. Sokolov?

    • Yes, it’s obvious to everyone that it was open political persecution. Republicans didn’t elect Trump, independents and democrats did.

    • Convicted of what?? A felony conviction that is about to be overturned by the NY Appellate Division, judging by the oral arguments before the court. Democrats are full of crap. From the phony Russian Collusion case and many other scams. Just pathetic.

      • Some people still need to believe the Lawfare was something other than Stalinism moved west.

        All of these cases were legal garbage and Trump is not a convicted felon unless the court enters the verdict. Legally, Marchan can’t do it without exposing his reckless legal actions further with the immunity case determined above.

        The Marchan family however raked in millions using the case as a direct vehicle serving that purpose. As for the political aspects nationally, it was yet another backfire.

        This was anti-democratic and an outright abuse of the legal system.

    • You are repeating a lie. President-Elect Trump has never been found liable for rape. That is patently false. He has never been indicted, let alone convicted of that crime. You need to try reading. The civil case related to slander. You could not be more wrong, and you are actual guilty of LIBEL if you continue to repeat the lie. You have now been informed, so you are committing a civil crime each time you repeat it. You are welcome.

  3. You seem to have forgotten that the Republican Party is now the party that celebrated fraudsters, sexual predators, and rapists. As a Republican, your feigned outrage and hollow words over “crime” when it happens in your backyard is laughable. Nearly every single elected Republican is involved in some form of deviancy, whether it be pedophilia or financial crimes. The guards don’t take lectures from the inmates and so your words are easily dismissed.

    • It’s not Republicans pushing sexualization of children in schools with instruction manuals drawn up for how little boys can perform oral sex on their older colleagues.

      It’s not Republicans who fielded a candidate who showered with his young daughter as retold in her own diary.

      It’s not Republicans backing trans surgery mutilation of children and taking those youngsters away from their parents to perform Mengele mutilation crimes on kids.

      It’s not Republicans crying for full term abortions nor funding Planned Parenthood’s slaughter of babies with hundreds of millions of dollars.

      That’s all the Democrat Party and we haven’t even touched on Hunter Biden’s laptop which was always real and covered up many including Pedo Peter (the name Hunter used for his father).

  4. Sure, we can all be lectured by President Harris.
    No one’s taking the hysterical crying serious anymore. Now let’s go through a list of all our Hudson County Dems who got locked up?

    • We are all perfectly safe at least through Christmas. Things could get rough with the Orange Menace returning. Alas, what will befall our beloved HudCo with Pam Bondi sending someone to thoroughly probe us?

  5. In 2009 Dawn Zimmer, was elected Mayor on a platform that was all about Hoboken. She talked about addressing flooding, creating more open space, ending transactional politics, patronage and other forms of gov’t corruption, reorganizing public safety to make the departments less top-heavy and put more cops on the street, smarter development driven by sound planning rather than campaign contributions from unions and developers, lowering municipal taxes that had just jumped by about 70% and making Hoboken’s streets safer for pedestrians and cyclists. Impressively, she delivered on all of that ambitious agenda.

    8 years later, Ravi Bhalla was elected on a platform of “standing up to Trump.” That made political sense because the election had been moved to November adding thousands of transient left leaning voters angry about Trump’s election who hadn’t participated in local elections in the past, and who were more likely to be swayed by partisanship than by local issues they didn’t follow.

    The strategy worked. Mayor Bhalla would not have been elected simply by running on the local issues Mayor Zimmer had run on both because so much of that agenda had already been achieved, and because the shock of Trump’s election was such a huge focus for so many Hoboken voters.

    I believe that Mayor Bhalla and his core political team are convinced that the combination of progressive virtue signalling and the “terror flier,” that, no matter who perpetrated it, reinforced the theme of Ravi standing up to Trump-like racists, were the magical secret sauces to that got him elected.

    As a result, Mayor Bhalla followed through on those of Mayor Zimmer’s initiatives that appealed to “progressive” voters, like building resiliency parks, increasing sustainability and adding bike lanes. But inconvenient anti-corruption and fiscal responsibility driven Zimmer policies were quickly tossed to the side. Development decisions as well as union contracts were once again influenced (an understatement) by the Mayor’s perceived political interests – including his obsession with using the mayoralty as a stepping stone to higher office. Indeed, if reports are true, he makes no secret of his desire to use the Assembly seat he will likely soon be seeking as a stepping stone to State Senate and eventually to his dream of being a Congressman.

    I no longer live in Hoboken and thus don’t even have a single vote in next November’s Hoboken mayoral election. But I hope all the candidates will recognize that the job of Mayor is not to virtue signal or carry the water for a right wing or left wing political agenda. I hope they will all acknowledge that using political power and public resources for the primary purpose of advancing one’s own ambition for higher office is as corrupt as using it in exchange for a bag of cash in a diner parking lot.

    The job is to serve the local interests of Hoboken residents, which means making Hoboken the safest and best place it can possibly be to live, work, play and raise a family while also once again rooting out the corrupt and fiscally irresponsible practices that plagued Hoboken for so long and have been reintroduced over the past seven years.

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