This weekend, PoliticsNJ gave Mayor Michael Wildes the Roger Chugh Award for "the most extensive online ego wall."  According to Wally Edge of PoliticsNJ:

His website includes photos of himself with celebrities like Christie Brinkley, Uma Thurman, Tony Bennett, Billy Joel -- and Alan Hevesi, who resigned his post as New York State Comptroller last December as part of a plea bargain with prosecutors after he plead guilty defrauding the New York state government.

For many, publicity hounds like Michael Wildes can be uncomfortably amusing, like a hard-to-watch scene from Curb Your Enthusiasm.  Scott Shields over at BlueJersey.com posted the following picture of Wildes presenting easy-listening "legend" Michael Bolton with a key to the city at a BergenPAC performance (speaking of which, we find it rather strange that Wildes would now start attacking BergenPAC as the seat of Assemblywoman Valerie Huttle's "political fortunes" when he's used the theater so often for his celebrity photo-ops.  But that's for another blog entry...)

True, it's hard not to enjoy our mayor's snazzy plaid suit, though we must admit we are a bit disappointed to see Mr. Bolton without his famed mullet.  Yet, all of Michael Wildes' publicity-seeking would be a whole lot funnier if it didn't hurt Englewood so much.

Some of you may recall back in December of 2003 when our newly elected mayor rushed to half-conscious firefighter Michael Sternesky's hospital bedside -- with a camera.  Fire Department employee Antoinette Galluzzo had this to say in a letter to the Suburbanite: 

[Michael Wildes] wasn't very sensitive when he visited an Englewood firefighter, who was seriously injured in a house fire in December 2003, at St. Barnabus Hospital.

He conveniently showed up in a fire department sweatshirt and he just happened to have a camera handy to take a photo which he
has printed in the newspapers a week later, while the firefighter was still recuperating and facing one of the most serious times of his life. (The Suburbanite, 3/3/04)

Not very sensitive indeed.

Galluzzo's letter concludes, "I am hoping that this is not the type of behavior we will endure with Michael Wildes as our mayor."  Unfortunately, after four years of Mayor Wildes, this is just the type of behavior that typifies Wildes' tenure in office.

It was also in 2003 that Wildes posed for photo ops while visiting substandard housing on James Street in Englewood. After Latino residents complained of overly aggressive safety inspections, Wildes convened a task force to look into the matter.  Yet, when publicity died down, Wildes seemingly lost interest in enforcing proper safety protocol.  

According to one of the advisors of the task force, Wilson David Bernal, chairman of public relations for the Hispanic-American Alliance:

"We never heard anything about this after it appeared in the media.  It clearly was a political thing, an opportunity to reach out to people, and not something he knew was going somewhere. I was skeptical from the beginning." ("Englewood, N.J., Housing Task Force in Limbo," The Bergen Record, 4/13/04)

In August of 2006, the Mayor again rushed to the scene for face time with cameras after a tragic fire killed three people living in the same James Street housing in the same substandard conditions he had seen three years previously.  Zoning officer Don Porrino, who was the city's construction official at the time, told The Bergen Record that Wildes' interference with safety inspections "made conducting searches less efficient."  According to Porrino:

"Look where we are today, two dead and one who might die.  I'm blaming the mayor."

This time, we are distressed to see Wildes once again join the grisly spectacle of ambulance chasers in the tragic fire that killed a Bronx man's entire family.  Wildes has volunteered to be the man's immigration lawyer and in doing so got some excellent press coverage and television time.  What happened to the nobility of the anonymous mitzvah?  We commend good deeds, but we are troubled that Wildes consistently uses tragedies to get a few seconds of camera time.

As the saying goes, where there's smoke, there's Wildes.