Emily Jabbour

Nonpartisan

Implement a financial penalty for commercial property owners who leave vacancies on Washington Street for extended periods of time, creating the sense of blighted storefronts.

Welcome More Local Small Business: Dedicate resources across Constituent Services and the Hoboken Business Alliance to provide a “welcome wagon” style kit that can be provided to residents who wish to open a small business with guidance, recommendations, and points of contact for technical questions.

Hoboken READY Initiative: Empower residents to be ready for emergency situations by developing action plan guides that provide clear instructions on how to handle various emergency scenarios.

Ensure adequate lighting and police presence in public parks to deter nighttime criminal activity.

Overhaul and Simplify the City website: Continue the engagement with to do a complete overhaul of the City website and improve functionality. In addition, improve the user interfaces that are critical to the Recreation and Transportation Departments, and integrate improvements in technology to better match resident needs with online services.

Strengthen and expand community policing efforts to include youth engagement officers, neighborhood liaisons, and after-school outreach efforts to build trust and visibility.

Create a program to aggressively identify unregistered rental units by using software to automatically compare publicly available listings (e.g. Zillow, Redfin, etc) against the Rent Control Office’s registry.

Enhance communications from public safety teams so that all residents receive timely, accurate information during an emergency - expand sharing of information across all social media platforms (not just X).

Provide Local Governance 101 Education to better inform residents on how local government works and how they can advocate for issues that they care about.

Define an unconscionable rent increase as 10% to allow a more systematic and consistent application of the prohibition against such increases, which protects all renters in Hoboken (not just those in rent-controlled units).

Codify the minimum amount of reserves/surplus needed to ensure the City can maintain its strong financial rating. It is imperative that the city maintain a sufficient surplus to keep the AA credit rating.

Develop tenant education programs to ensure renters are aware of resources and policies that protect them, such as the existing Tenant Advocate. All materials should be made available in multiple languages to ensure accessibility for all tenants.

Increase the mandatory affordable units in large new developments from 10% to 15%, matching the current policy in New York City.

Operationalize @EmilyJabbour: Re-allocate a communications staff person to the Office of Constituent Services to monitor public communications (e.g., routinely scrape common social media sites for issues) to be more proactive and employ a stronger social media strategy that goes beyond sharing current events.

Design and implement a Right to Counsel program that provides free legal services to tenants, encompassing both eviction defense and proactive legal actions against landlords in violation of local law.

Streamline Permitting: Work with the Hoboken Business Alliance to do a full audit of the process a new business must go through to open in Hoboken and streamline that.

Establish an online dashboard of performance data based on City Departments that can be shared with the public quarterly in order to demonstrate how tax dollars are spent on programs.

Expand Hotel Tax Benefit from Short-term Rentals: Explore the benefits of setting up a process to both register and tax short-term rental units via platforms like AirBnb so that the city can apply hotel taxes that would be paid for by the visitors, not the property owners (estimated benefit of 200-300K annually).

Introduce strategic monitoring and reporting from notification systems to inform residents of updates that address persistent issues such as water main leaks/breakages, inspection of the waterfront bulkhead, and aging infrastructure.

Consolidate all emergency telecommunications operations into a single state-of-the-art facility to strengthen coordination and reliability among police, fire, Office of Emergency Management (OEC), Emergency Medical Services (EMS), and 911 telecommunications. Current operations are currently across four different locations, preventing such coordination.

Tackle the threat posed to pedestrians by Ebikes by working with food delivery apps and using geofencing technology to identify and penalize drivers who repeatedly endanger others by riding on the sidewalk or against traffic.