Bayonne Mayor Jimmy Davis offered his 2025 State of the City address. He said, “Before we begin, I just want to express my deepest gratitude to all of you for allowing me the privilege and honor of serving as the Mayor of this incredible city for the last ten plus years.  Growing up in Bergen Point, I would have never dreamed that I would be able to dedicate nearly 40 years of my life to the city I love so much as both a police officer and as a three term Mayor.  I am blessed to have had the opportunity to do so.”

Mayor Davis continued, “When we began this journey together back in 2014, our city was completely different.  The industries that the City of Bayonne had been built around began leaving in the late 1980s. By 2014, industrial Bayonne was just a shell of its former self. And over the course of those three decades, the tax burden shifted slowly but surely from industrial properties to residential properties, The loss of tax revenue from the industrial properties caused the City of Bayonne to have a structural annual deficit that was a little over 25 million dollars in 2014. Previous administrations dealt with the structural deficit by generating revenue from the sale of city assets.  You may remember the City selling a large and very valuable portion of the Military Ocean Terminal to the Port Authority and also selling future revenue from our water and sewer utilities in order to generate one-time infusions of cash designed to keep our city solvent on a near-term basis. But none of these one-time cash infusions solved the problem, they only papered over the problem on a year-to-year basis. If you are burning your furniture to heat your house because your heating system is broken, that only works until you have no more furniture to burn, and it does absolutely nothing to fix the real problem, which is a broken heating system.  That is essentially what the City of Bayonne had been doing for the better part of 20 years.”

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