Municipal snow-clearing crews do their usual sloppy job, but editors just shrug

At Main and Mercer streets in downtown Hackensack, an uncleared corner and crosswalk endangers pedestrians.

In front of the YMCA in Hackensack, an uncleared bus stop -- one of many along Main Street and other streets -- means commuters and others have to climb on top of a snow bank to enter the bus.

On Euclid Avenue in Hackensack's Fairmount section, city trucks didn't plow to the curb, meaning homeowners who cleared their driveways had to do the job a second time after another plow came by and blockaded them in, below.

Having to do my driveway twice is especially annoying in view of the high property taxes I pay. Later today, I drove to Englewood, and found East Forest Avenue was literally a sheet of ice, and a municipal plow was just salting the street.

-- HACKENSACK, N.J.

By VICTOR E. SASSON
EDITOR

If you're a homeowner, pedestrian or ride the bus to work, you won't find anything in The Record today on how Thursday's big snowstorm affected you.

On Page 1, Road Warrior John Cichowski looks back once again, as he does every winter, at the 1996 death of Michael Eastman after a chunk of ice crashed through his windshield on Route 17 in Paramus (1A and 4A).

The Local front offers readers "some scenes from the winter storm," mostly from reporters who went to diners and interviewed cops and EMS workers or others who spoke to merchants who opened their businesses despite the storm (1L and 3L). 

Editors in Woodland Park sent reporters to only seven of the 90 or so towns in the paper's circulation area.

Still, as in every major storm in the last 30 years, not a single reporter was assigned to gauge how well or how poorly municipal and county crews in North Jersey did in clearing streets, corners, crosswalks and bus stops.

And absolutely no attention is ever paid to whether homeowners and merchants clear snow from sidewalks.

Hysterical Trump

President Trump is positively apoplectic over the refusal of a federal appeals court to reinstate his travel, immigration and refugee ban targeting Muslims, sending the case to the U.S. Supreme Court (1A).

Minutes after the ruling was released, Trump tweeted, "SEE YOU IN COURT, THE SECURITY OF OUR NATION IS AT STAKE!" 

Another USA Today story in the paper notes, "According to a recent Cato Institute report, out of more than 3 million refugees admitted to the U.S. from 1975 to 2015, three committed terrorist acts that killed Americans.

"They were Cuban refugees in the 1970s" (6A).

Editorial board

Today's editorial commending Trump for promising "to invest heavily in infrastructure projects" makes you wonder what the editorial board is smoking (10A).

Neither the president or any member of the administration have released any details or named projects, but that hasn't stopped The Record from speculating.

Opposite the editorial is a long, two-line Opinion Page headline that contains an extra word:

"A new reason for foreigners to start avoid

using Microsoft, Google and Facebook"

Food crawl

Readers accustomed to seeing a weekly restaurant review photo on the Better Living cover are in for diabetic shock today -- a "food crawl" of chocolate shops (1BL, 10 BL and 11BL).