'Victories': This is how Mayor Andre Sayegh describes the state of Paterson

PATERSON — In a rare open-air address on the state of the city, Mayor Andre Sayegh stood beneath cloudy skies at Hinchliffe Stadium on Thursday morning and offered his audience a sunny depiction of Paterson on the rise.

The speech represented a consolidation of information that Sayegh previously dispensed at the scores of press conferences he held during the past year.

What did Sayegh say?

The mayor highlighted park improvements and new ballfields, programs designed to combat addiction and poverty, and road repaving he said would smooth pothole-ridden streets.

A portion of Sayegh’s speech focused on the numerous new construction projects that have sprouted on long-dormant properties, buildings that Sayegh’s critics say have worsened the quality of life in Paterson without boosting the city’s current tax base because of abatements given to developers.

In discussing Paterson’s violent crime reduction in 2023, Sayegh cited statistics for the first three months of the year, the period before the mayor was blindsided by the attorney general's takeover of the troubled Paterson Police Department.

The mayor picked as the setting for his speech the national landmark stadium rebuilt under his administration, an achievement Sayegh boasts about again and again, regardless of criticism from his political rivals who say the Hinchliffe project has benefited outsiders more than Paterson residents.

About 100 people attended the speech — more than half of them were local government employees. The audience sat in rows of folding chairs that spilled into the football field’s southern end zone.

Sayegh used the new video scoreboard at Hinchliffe to show slides illustrating his speech. As the mayor spoke, the new stadium sound system sent his words reverberating off the far walls of the ballpark, creating an echo effect like the way the late baseball announcer Bob Sheppard’s voice bounced around the old Yankee Stadium for generations.

“There’s so many victories ahead for this city,” Sayegh said near the conclusion of his 40-minute speech.

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What did other officials say?

Sitting in the front row at the event was Sayegh’s longtime adversary, current City Council President Alex Mendez. Sayegh many times has called Mendez a criminal, citing the councilman’s pending election fraud indictment, his purchase of a Range Rover with a stolen vehicle title, and the recycling violations issued by a city inspector.

But Sayegh and Mendez have engaged in some sort of détente in recent months, working more and more cooperatively on various initiatives. Mendez continued that trend on Thursday with praise for the mayor’s speech.

“He was right on point,” Mendez said.

Councilman Michael Jackson, Paterson’s other councilman indicted in the attorney general's election fraud case, was not so kind in assessing Sayegh’s oration.

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“It was a lot of fluff,” said Jackson, the mayor’s most outspoken critic. “He highlighted all these great deeds he did without any accountability. How do the residents benefit from what he’s done? I’m still waiting to hear that.”

Three council members who have become Sayegh’s legislative allies — Ruby Cotton, Shahin Khalique and Luis Velez — said the mayor did a good job presenting his administration’s initiatives from the past five years.

Anyone who attended the speech hoping to hear Sayegh highlight a project he hasn’t talked about before would have been disappointed. But the mayor did give updates on initiatives already in the works. He said there would be a community meeting on Oct. 10 about a proposed new city recreation center, that the long-awaiting resurfacing of River Street would start before the end of 2023, and that the new Paterson Great Falls National Historical Park riverwalk would be completed by next June.

The finished riverwalk, Sayegh said, may be the setting for next year’s state-of-the-city speech.

Joe Malinconico is editor of Paterson Press. Email: editor@patersonpress.com

This article originally appeared on NorthJersey.com: Paterson NJ: Mayor Andre Sayegh gives 2023 state of city