PATERSON - Mayor Jeff Jones walks through his second floor City Hall digs, which right now are barren as Paterson transitions from eight years of Joey Torres to the nascent stages of the Jones era.

Men in hospital scrubs paint the walls, and to hear Jones tell it as he heads for the street, this won't be the only house-cleaning.

State elected officials, lawyers, consultants, party Rolodex bigwigs who shop their high-priced wares from town to town: the mayor says he's putting all of them on notice.

"We've had community unemployment for far too long," says the mayor, who was sworn in to his first term earlier this month.

With a pivotal election in New Jersey’s most populous county, has Gov. Chris Christie torpedoed a prime opportunity for the GOP?

The Bergen County Executive race approaches and Democrats are rallying behind incumbent Dennis McNerney, and why not? The governor has supplied every bullet point for a campaign mailer bonanza: meddling with the sacrosanct Blue Laws, pitting the Meadowlands against Atlantic City, imposing the Film Tax, and recalibrating post-Abbott school funding. None of these played well in Bergen, to say the least.

Assembly Democrats denounced the Film Tax yesterday for chasing off “Law and Order:Special Victims Unit” that shot mainly in neighboring North Bergen and brought, according to the officials, $55 million in annual revenue to the area.

"The governor had no problem [this week] announcing that he was looking for extra money to create jobs, yet just a month ago, the state was so strapped for cash that he had to put 200 people out of work," said Assemblyman Vincent Prieto (D-Hudson), who represents North Bergen.

Between now and November, the Dems will do their best to make the connection for the voters between Christie's proposals and Kathleen Donovan, a four-term Bergen County clerk, who is making her third run at the executive seat.

NEWARK - Onlookers convinced Mayor Cory Booker would get the city's most animated earful in the South Ward instead witnessed a relatively subdued slam of his proposed municipal utilities authority (MUA) tonight when Booker traveled to that fifth of the city where he has traditionally been weakest.