Jennifer Morrill

June 5, 2008 - 3:17pm

Undecided about running for mayor, Schundler says Jersey City is on the wrong track

Bret Schundler, the Mayor of Jersey City from 1992 to 2001, hasn't decided if he'll run again next year.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.

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