Bill Gaughan

Jersey City Councilman Steve Fulop turned in enough signatures yesterday to put a pair of ethics reform referendums on the ballot in November, a move that may be seen as the opening salvo in his potential 2009 mayoral campaign.

If the signatures are confirmed by the City Clerk and the initiatives are passed by the voters, Jersey City - which for over a century has been infamous for political corruption, backroom deals and cronyism-- would have some of the strictest ethics measures in the state. 

Seriously. 

One of the initiatives would ban City Council members from accepting more than one public salary or pension.  The other would bar officials from giving out no-bid contracts to vendors who made campaign contributions within a year of the contract's start date.

Bret Schundler, the Mayor of Jersey City from 1992 to 2001, hasn't decided if he'll run again next year.
Shortly after moving to Jersey City in 1985, a 26-year-old Bret Schundler ascended the escalator at the Grove Street PATH station and found a group of men drinking beer and playing craps.

"It was incredible to me that they could be doing that in plain view in that public a place and not worry about it," said Schundler, who had left off working on Democratic political campaigns to take up a career in finance.  "But the police back then didn't think that was enough of a serious crime to worry about."

Witnessing that kind of scene helped inspire the beginning of an extraordinarily unlikely political career.  Seven years later, Schundler, who had undergone an ideological transformation into a conservative Republican, went on to be elected mayor of a heavily Democratic city.

Almost eight years after leaving office and going on to run two unsuccessful bids for governor, Schundler now says that he's witnessing a throwback the machine politics that he worked so hard to change - the same type of policies that he thinks brought Jersey City to the brink of bankruptcy in the early 1990s, when the city led the state in job losses and 22% of residents defaulted on their property taxes.