Today is Election Day in New Jersey. Here in Jersey City and next door in Hoboken, we not only have a governor’s race and state assembly races, but also local elections for mayor, municipal council, county sheriff, and the board of education. Mayors and city councillors have substantial influence on issues within our focus areas. Will more of our streets be redesigned to keep our city’s most vulnerable residents safe or will progress be undone, with an increase traffic-related deaths and injuries? Will our city keep growing to accommodate demand to live here, or will more people be displaced by housing pressures? Will future growth come with more congestion due to increases in parking and cars, or will we grow in a way that brings relief from traffic due to increased options for retail and services within walking and biking distance? Will our streets can become corridors for efficient public transit or will they remain traffic-choked arterials unable to accommodate inevitable growth?

For some local races, we have issued endorsements. See our voter guides/endorsements for Jersey City mayor here, Hoboken mayor here, and Jersey City municipal council here.

After we issued these endorsements, a candidate reached out to us asking to complete our questionnaire and apply for our endorsement. We politely declined the offer, because we have decided our endorsements are final. To be clear, we have already issued all the endorsements that we were going to issue in this race. Going forward, we will not be issuing any more endorsements or positions on candidates in this cycle.

Many of the local races in Jersey City may come down to a runoff on December 2. In many of those runoffs, it may be that no candidate that we endorsed is still in contention. In all cases, we encourage runoff voters to read candidates’ answers to our questionnaires.

Also keep in mind that while the focus of Better Blocks is limited to urban vitality issues, the race for mayor encompasses a much wider range of factors and issues. Especially for the mayoral races, there has been substantial media coverage of the candidates in local media, and we encourage readers to inform themselves before voting.

Our endorsements were:

Jersey City Ward A: Denise Ridley (Team Solomon)

Jersey City Ward C: Tom Zuppa (Team O’Dea)

Jersey City Ward D: Patrick Ambrossi (Team Ali)

Jersey City Ward E: Eleana Little (Team Solomon)

Jersey City at-large: Kristen Zadroga-Hart, Daniel Rivera (Team O’Dea)

Jersey City Mayor: Bill O’Dea