New Jersey As Sin Tax

First they take our football teams, then they want to gouge us on tolls when we want to go root for the Giants:

This one will make you think twice about heading to New Jersey to shop, gamble, visit friends or sun on your favorite beach.

Do some quick math on New Jersey Gov. Jon Corzine’s proposed toll hikes on Garden State roads, and it gets ugly really fast. By 2022, just 14 years away, football fans could end up paying $27.92 roundtrip to take the New Jersey Turnpike to Exit 16W at Giants Stadium — and that’s not counting the toll on the Goethals Bridge.

Already slammed with recently passed toll increases on the Goethals and Bayonne bridges and the Outerbridge Crossing, Island motorists who regularly travel to New Jersey may find it a much harder pill to swallow if Corzine’s proposal to hike tolls on some of the state’s busiest roads every four years is passed into law.

Corzine announced last week a proposal to increase tolls 50 percent in 2010, 2014, 2018 and 2022 on the Garden State Parkway, New Jersey Turnpike and Atlantic City Expressway. Those increases, which would also affect a new toll on Route 440, would include inflation adjustments. Tolls would be increased every four years between 2022 and 2085 to reflect inflation.

“It’s ridiculous,” said Bernardo Mendez of New Springville, clad in a New York Giants jacket. Mendez makes regular trips to New Jersey to go bowling, shop and go to Giants games, but will reconsider doing so if the tolls spike as much as proposed. “For people with a lot of money, they don’t care, but for people working very hard just to survive, it’ll make it very hard. It will definitely have an impact on going to New Jersey as often as I used to.”

Other examples of 2022 tolls are even more egregious: A roundtrip on the Garden State Parkway to Point Pleasant Beach and back would be $15.60 and a trip to Atlantic City would be $28.74. Even the short jaunt on the Turnpike to IKEA or the Jersey Gardens mall — a destination for many Island shoppers — would cost $7.38.

See, That’s What Happens When You Turn Your Back On Your Party

As teen smoking goes decreases across the five boroughs, the rate in Republican stronghold Staten Island stays double the city average:

Higher taxes, graphic advertisements, and a crackdown on delis and bodegas are responsible for the plummeting smoking rate among city teens — but Staten Island youngsters are still puffing away at a pace almost double that of the rest of the city, data released yesterday shows.

Borough teens have the highest smoking rate in the entire city, with 14.7 percent of adolescents here smoking cigarettes, according to a report released by Mayor Michael Bloomberg and other city officials yesterday

Overall, only about 8.5 percent of city teens identified themselves as smokers in 2007.

“I’ve been smoking since I was 11; too much stress with the family,” said Hajredin Kari, 15, of the Park Hill section of Clifton, as he smoked a butt across the street from New Dorp High School yesterday afternoon. “This is the best thing. I just smoke two cigarettes one by one, and I’m money for the rest of the day.”

Michael Bloomberg, turning his back on Staten Island teens — wrong for Staten Island, wrong for America.

Because It’s Not Like There Aren’t About A Million Yahoos Walking Around In Yankees Gear In This Town Or Anything . . .

It’s kind of like looking for “a white van” — there are thousands of white vans out on the roads:

While other New Yorkers have been holding their heads in their hands over the steroid scandal enveloping past and present Bronx Bombers, [Benjamin] Soto wrongly spent a week in prison on Rikers Island — just for proudly wearing a Yankee jacket.

. . .

The Staten Island man’s odyssey began Nov. 10, when cops approached him with guns drawn as he walked home from his girlfriend’s house in Port Richmond.

“They were screaming, ‘Where’s the weapon? Where’s the stuff you stole? Where are the credit cards?'” he said.

“They threw me up against a fence, and I was asking, ‘What’s going on? What did I do? I don’t know what you’re talking about.'”

Turns out Soto, 35, loosely matched the description of one of three young men who had robbed a teen at knifepoint nearby. The victim told cops one of the men was wearing a Yankee jacket.

Two other men, Terence Ascensio, 17, Andre Glover, 18, were arrested separately.

Before Soto knew what was going on, he was handcuffed in front of his neighbors, hauled off to jail, arraigned on robbery charges and held in lieu of $25,000 bail — which as a YMCA custodian, he could not raise.

On That Strange And Isolated Island, The Natives Have Developed A Language All Their Own, Little Understood By Outsiders

Voo-da-la:

Sometimes after a long day off-island, you just want to catch the boat back to the Rock and head for Town, maybe do a little train crawl along the way.

Translation: Upon returning to Staten Island by ferry from a long day elsewhere, a person might want to stop at a few of the bars that flank the stations of the Staten Island Railway, en route to an evening in downtown Great Kills.

As befits a place that can take pride in its otherness and even in its relative isolation, Staten Island has evolved, if not exactly its own language, then certainly a lexicon of words and phrases that require explanation to off-islanders.

And a linguistic journey into the heart of Staten Island leads inexorably to the Talk of the Town Tavern, a train-station bar on Great Kills’s very smalltowny main street, where Statenisms flow nearly as freely as the $2 draft mugs.

. . .

Eugene Machules, a locksmith who was feeding dollars into the Talk of the Town’s jukebox, offered one more local neologism: “Voo-da-la.”

“You say that like when you make a great shot in basketball,” Mr. Machules said. “When you hit the home run, the best shot — the top of the pinnacle, that’s it. Or if you toast someone who’s passed away, you say ‘Voo-da-la.'”

Voo-da-la, Mr. Machules said, was the signature phrase of Monte Vandenburg, a longtime bartender at another Great Kills watering hole, the Swiss Chalet.

“He’d just turn and say ‘Voo-da-la,’ and nobody knew what the hell it meant,” Mr. Machules said.

Mr. Vandenburg died suddenly in September at the age of 46. It is not clear how long Voo-da-la will survive him.

Location Scout: Talk of the Town.

If Anything Can Cast A Pall Over A Funeral . . .

. . . it’s as situation like this:

As a throng of mourners converged on Staten Island yesterday to remember the life of one of the Fire Department’s “rising stars,” the specter of his murder seemed to loom over an already grim occasion.

In the morning chill, the crowd of firefighters, police, family and friends gathered around St. Charles R.C. Church in Oakwood watched with tearful eyes as the flag-draped casket of Supervising Fire Marshal Douglas Mercereau was pulled from a waiting hearse. But many of those in attendance — including about a dozen plainclothes police officers — also cast suspicious glances at his widow, Janet Redmond-Mercereau, the sole suspect in the slaying of the 38-year-old Oakwood man.

And while sobbing echoed inside the semicircular chapel, several of those in attendance noted that Mrs. Redmond-Mercereau sat dry-eyed and stonefaced as her husband was eulogized by his brother, Thomas; his boss, Supervising Fire Marshal Louis Garcia, and Monsignor Thomas Bergin, who’d been his principal at Monsignor Farrell High School.

“It made me uncomfortable,” said Westerleigh resident Fran Hogan, a friend of the Mercereau family who attended the funeral yesterday, in respect of the suspicions swirling around Mrs. Redmond-Mercereau.

“But this was about Doug, and we stayed focused on that. The family wanted to give him a respectable, dignified funeral, and we did that,” Ms. Hogan added.