For three decades, if the City of Bayonne had something to tell its residents, Joe Ryan wrote it. Ryan, the city's public information officer since January 1996, will retire on December 1, the city announced this month. By the city's count he has written about 7,500 press releases and website announcements and roughly 4,500 proclamations in that time.

Five mayors and nine councils

Ryan has served under five elected mayors, two interim mayors and one acting mayor, and alongside nine sets of City Council members. Mayor Leonard P. Kiczek appointed him in 1996 as a provisional civil servant. In 1998 Ryan asked to sit the state civil service exam so his job could become permanent. The test he was given turned out to be mostly about health topics rather than public information work. He passed it anyway, and he was made permanent in his title that year.

What crossed his desk

The list of stories he announced reads like a short history of the city. It includes visits by Bill Clinton and Vladimir Putin tied to Bayonne's September 11th memorial, Hurricanes Sandy and Ida, the COVID pandemic, the closing of the Military Ocean Terminal at Bayonne, and the groundbreaking for 1888 Studios.

The way the news traveled changed underneath him. Ryan started out dropping off press releases in person, moved to faxing them and then to email. For most of his career, Bayonne residents got their local news from the Bayonne Community News and the Jersey Journal. Both papers are gone now, and the city's own web pages have become one of the main places residents read about their town.

Census counts and history work

Ryan was the city's liaison with the U.S. Census Bureau for the 2000, 2010 and 2020 counts, and the city notes that Bayonne's population rose in each of those censuses after falling in every count from 1940 through 1990. He has also staffed the Bayonne Historic Preservation Commission and for many years co-chaired the city's annual Holocaust remembrance program, where he met several survivors who came to speak.

A Bayonne education

Ryan went to St. Vincent DePaul Grammar School in Bayonne, which closed in 2008, then St. Peter's Prep in Jersey City. At Georgetown University he earned a Bachelor of Science in Foreign Service, followed by a master's degree and a Ph.D. in Government. Before joining the city, he spent 1989 to 1995 as a research scholar at Freedom House in New York, working on its annual survey of freedom around the world.

What comes next

Retirement from City Hall is not retirement from the classroom. Ryan will keep teaching political science at St. Francis College, where he has been a senior adjunct lecturer since 2014. He has said he is thinking about writing a play about municipal government, and he plans to travel with his wife, Nuala, who recently retired as the art teacher at Our Lady of Czestochowa School in Jersey City.

Residents who want to follow city news after he leaves can sign up for notifications on the City of Bayonne's website.

Sources