Last month Bob Cotter, the planning director of the Jersey City Redevelopment Agency, publicly feuded with the opinion staff of the Jersey Journal over an October 22nd editorial which criticized both his agency and Mayor Jeremiah Healy for a recently unveiled initiative to revitalize Journal Square over the course of the next decade.

The paper criticized the vision, whose far-reaching plans involve a new trolley system, an extension of the light rail, and a new skyscraper atop the current Journal Square PATH station, as “blurry” and “unbelievable,” further noting that the unveiling “smells of the kind of Xanadou development that is occuring in the Meadowlands,” and advising the city to “take lessons from how Hoboken has been developing its riverbank – with people and quality of life a priority.”

Not to be out-bloviated, the planning director shot back at the paper the next day in a press release published on the JCRA’s web site. Picking up on the paper’s themes of scent and vision, he responded by questioning the duration of time since the staff’s most-recent checkups for vision and, somewhat mysteriously–and perhaps sinisterly–their hearing. He continued his assault by praising the city and its planning board for the city’s rapid growth and “internationally acclaimed renaissance.”

Lastly, Cotter advised all citizens doubting the progress of the city to ride the light rail to the waterfront and “stop and have coffee at Starbucks, then watch the seniors doing Tai Chi in the little gem that is Town Square.”

Jersey City residents were not available for comment because they were too busy commuting to Manhattan, but one eager PATH rider noted that the Long Slip pedestrian bridge, which once completed will connect Newport with the Hoboken light rail station, will be a welcome addition to the waterfront in the spring of 2009.

Jersey Journal: pushing ‘vision’ much too hard
Bob Cotter, Jersey City Planning Director Responds to Jersey Journal Editorial