The July 18 2011 Issue of City Hall by City Hall News

VINCENT ALVAREZ, below, wants to revive the Central Labor Council (Page 8), colleges vie for a NEW YORK CITY TECH CAMPUS (Page 4)

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Manhattan Media 79 Madison Avenue, 16th Floor New York, NY 10016

Vol. 5, No. 13

July 18, 2011

and RICHARD BUERY, above, has big plans for the Children's Aid Society (Page 23).

Special Section: How New York is falling behind at getting around pg. 13 Andrew Schwartz/Joey Carolino

Political Astrology

comes to taking a stand, but he is politically savvy, and when he sees which way the wind blows, he sets his sails accordingly. But in his next term, adapting to the changing political landscape will become a challenge.

Famed prognosticator Cheryl Lee Terry takes a look at what’s in the stars for New York City politics BY CHERYL LEE TERRY

Jerry Miller

UPFRONT

a garrulous Sagittarian, but his stabilizing, prodding Taurus moon makes him one of the most careful smooth talkers in the Senate. His astrological chart indicates he is not comfortable with dramatic change, and he may stay under the radar when it

Cheryl Lee Terry is an astrologer and numerologist whose work has appeared in publications including Esquire, Elle, and the New York Post. Her past political predictions have included accurate outcomes for the 2000 and 2004 presidential races. Her work can be found at www.astrologyandbeyond.com.

Don’t cry for former Rep. Anthony Weiner, born an earthy Virgo: Irresponsible Uranus and three tell-all eclipses may have shattered his political aspirations in June. But both the stars and numbers show that financially he will continue to ride in style. $1,480,850 Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s $1,430,638 astrological and numerological charts suggest he is ready to move A breakdown of who got the most and the least pork in the City Council. $1,235,464 out of the political arena. Freedom $1,116,581 calls, and the mayor is about to Council members who received the least break out of this glass bubble in in individually sponsored member items: $932,114 very dramatic fashion. And with his sensitive sign of Pisces now under the influence of inspired, enlightened and surprisingly ambitious Neptune, he is moving into a new zone of influence and power. However, the astrological and numerological transits indicate $401,464 $390,064 $379,707 $326,651 he will become a bigger player in Council members who received the most the world of finance and become in individually sponsored member items: $210,937 a powerful leader in a new field, so it’s unlikely that he will stay in politics. Jumaane Gale Inez Leroy Larry B. Erik Martin Domenic M. Lew Helen D. Jimmy Brewer Recchia Jr. Dickens Comrie Jr. Van Bramer Williams Dilan Fidler Sen. Chuck Schumer may be Seabrook Foster

By The Numbers

Remember Member Items?

$1,500,000

$1,300,000

$1,100,000

$900,000

$700,000

$500,000

$300,000

$100,000

Source: NYC Budget FY 2012

The Month Ahead (July 18–31) “Accelerate Upstate” conference in Buffalo

ABNY breakfast with State Comptroller Tom DiNapoli

(August 4–5) Councilman Domenic M. Recchia Jr.’s birthday

Downtown Alliance’s Jeff Simmon’s birthday Rep. Ed Towns’ birthday

Assemblyman Marcos Crespo’s birthday

Speaker Christine Quinn’s birthday

City Council holds first meeting in a month

Ridgewood Bushwick Senior Citizens Council annual picnic at Sunken Meadow State Park

Assemblyman Nick Perry’s birthday

Assemblyman Dean Murray’s birthday

JULY 18, 2011

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CITY HALL

SUMMER READING In which we ask city politicians to share their summer reading lists

Public Advocate Bill de Blasio The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York, by Robert A. Caro

Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer

Kennedy, Kennedy, by Theodore C. Sorenson

The Man Who Saved New York: Hugh Carey and the Great Fiscal Crisis of 1975, by Seymour P. Lachman and Robert Polner

Nothing to Fear: FDR’s Inner Circle and the Hundred Days That Created Modern America, America by Adam Cohen

Start-up Nation: The Story of Israel’s Economic Miracle, by Dan Senor and Saul Singer

City Comptroller John Liu

All Labor Has Dignity, Dignity by Martin Luther King Jr.

The South Lawn Plot, by Ray O’Hanlon

The Expectant Father: Facts, Tips, and Advice for Dads-to-Be, by Armin A. Brott and Jennifer Ash

The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education, by Diane Ravitch

The Little Borough That Could Staten Island punches above its weight in city spending

t’s the least-populated borough, but Staten Island appears to have held its own in New York City’s 2012 budget. The borough, home to 6 percent of the city’s residents, received a higher share of the city’s funding for a variety of expenditures on elderly programs (12 percent),

parks (10 percent), sanitation (9 percent), firefighting (8 percent) and building inspections (8 percent). The numbers only provide a snapshot, since city budget staffers break out just a fraction of agency spending by borough. And of course a borough’s relative population is only one factor in allocating funds. A NYPD spokesman noted that Manhattan’s residential population of about 1.6 million swells to more than 3 million when commuters and tourists are counted, boosting its need for police services, while the location

of 911 calls and potential terrorist targets across the city are also factored in. Park funding by borough can reflect investment in existing parks; Manhattan, for instance, has a greater number of recreation centers and pools that require more staffing. And as the Parks Department’s Phil Abramson explained, existing parkland is also a key factor. For example, “Staten Island has about three times as much park acreage as Brooklyn,” he says. —Jon Lentz jlentz@cityhallnews.com

Snapshot of borough allocations in 2012 New York City budget

17%

Percentage of city population

(extinguishing, emergency response, prevention)

27%

(precincts, borough command and detectives)

Fire

19%

31%

Police

Elderly community programs Buildings Department

(examinations and inspections)

Sanitation

(cleaning, collection, enforcement)

Parks

(playground maintenance, repairs, recreation, forestry)

Bronx

Brooklyn

Manhattan

Queens

Staten Island

18%

30%

28%

20%

16%

35%

20%

21%

58%

25%

12%

10%

26%

29%

27%

13%

32%

18%

29%

17%

22%

25%

10%

Source: NYC Ofﬁce of Management and Budget

www.cityhallnews.com Publisher/Executive Director: Darren Bloch

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EDITORIAL Editor: Adam Lisberg alisberg@cityhallnews.com Managing Editor: Andrew J. Hawkins ahawkins@cityhallnews.com Reporters: Chris Bragg cbragg@cityhallnews.com Laura Nahmias lnahmias@cityhallnews.com Jon Lentz jlentz@cityhallnews.com Photography Editor: Andrew Schwartz Intern: Jeff Jacobson

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JULY 18, 2011

Lab Space The race to build a top-tier engineering school in New York is about to begin By Andrew J. Hawkins

hen it comes to the competition to build a premiere engineering campus in New York City, Dan Huttenlocher, Cornell University’s dean of computing and information technology, had a brief message for perceived front-runner Stanford University: Bring it on. “Stanford makes a lot of noise. They have to,” the lanky Huttenlocher said as he prepared to give his remarks to a gathering of Cornell alums in Manhattan this month. “Our strategy is different.” If the strategy is different, the goal is the same: Dozens of academic institutions from around the world want to take up Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s offer to build a new top-tier engineering school in the city. The administration sees it as a way to make New York a tech magnet to rival Silicon Valley; and while some city schools

feel overlooked, others are ramping up the pressure. Cornell hired a lobbyist—Suri Kasirer—and a public relations firm— BerlinRosen—in its quest to be selected by the city. It has reached out to elected officials to shore up support. And after

“Our proposal will speak for itself,” said Lisa Lapin, Stanford’s assistant vice president for communications. “If it’s something New York is interested in, we’re interested too.” Bloomberg has said the winning applicant will be chosen by December, and that the city is prepared to offer four locations as possible sites: Farm Colony in Staten Island, Governors Island, Roosevelt Island and the Brooklyn Navy Yard.

istration is palpable. The mayor is said to want to have the new school up and running before he leaves office in January 2014. He has been bringing up the subject in social conversations and radio interviews. And he sees the project as a key piece of his legacy—and the linchpin in the city’s wider efforts to transform New York into a technology and engineering hub. Seth Pinsky, president of the city’s Economic Development Corporation, said the winning institution will be the one that proves it can bring in the most money for the city. “The goal of this project is to create economic activity,” Pinsky said. “So the project that demonstrates the greatest ability to do that, the greatest ability to spin out businesses, the greatest ability to help city-based businesses to expand, the greatest ability to attract existing businesses… That’s the project that we’ll ultimately go with.” The administration sees two main benefits of constructing and operating a new campus: creating jobs in the shortterm, such as construction, administrative and faculty positions; and spurring hundreds of tech start-ups that would

“Why didn’t the mayor talk to the schools that are here first? We are the engine behind a lot of things. We’ve been here for a long time.”

JULY 18, 2011

the city releases its formal request for proposals at the the end of the month, Cornell says it expects to submit an attractive offer. From the other side of the country, Stanford will flout its Silicon Valley connections and multibillion-dollar endowment in its own application. In its response to the original request for expressions of interest, Stanford said it would build a $1 billion facility to house 100 professors and 2,200 graduate students.

Bloomberg administration officials have been quietly drumming up support for the engineering campus over the past month and a half, holding a series of meetings around the city with elected officials and key stakeholders. On July 19 the mayor is convening a breakfast meeting at Google’s West Side Manhattan headquarters to discuss the importance of the initiative. The formal request for proposals will be released in the coming days. The sense of urgency within the admin-

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CITY HALL

emerge over time from the school’s engineering work. In the best case, administration officials hope the school would spin off a fast-moving “gazelle company”—like Facebook, Google or Twitter—that would employ thousands and reap millions of dollars of Applicants can either propose a economic activity for the city. privately owned site or one of four “That would be like hitting the lottery,” said one administration source. city-owned properties. But the effort will not be without its obstacles, or its detractors. Goldwater Hospital Campus Already, hometown schools are grumbling about the city’s unwillingon Roosevelt Island, Manhattan ness to invest in a preexisting, city-based engineering program. They complain that rather than sinking money into an out-of-state or out-ofcountry institution, the city would be better off bolstering engineering programs at Columbia University, CUNY or New York University. “Why didn’t the mayor talk to the schools that are here first?” asked Nada Anid, dean of the New York Institute of Technology’s School of Engineering and Computing Sciences. “We are the engine behind a lot Development sites on of things. We’ve been here for a long time. And we deserve to be the Governors Island, Manhattan primary partners in this project.” Navy Hospital Campus at Pinsky said the city routinely partners with local engineering schools Brooklyn Navy Yards, Brooklyn on a host of issues, and that the RFP is open to all schools that wish to apply, including hometown institutions. But some administration insiders were more blunt, noting that if any of the city’s current schools were going to have a top 10 engineering program, it would have happened already. Finishing the construction within the time frame set by the Bloomberg administration, and finding the right applicant that can put up most if not all of the financing, presents another Farm Colony, Staten Island host of challenges for the city. Some have suggested the city would likely chose a top 10 engineering school to expedite the process. Only three top 10 schools responded to the city’s initial request for expressions of interest: Stanford, Cornell and Carnegie Mellon. And as soon as the RFP is released, the race is on. “There’s universal enthusiasm for this effort,” said Kathy Wylde, president and CEO of the Partnership for New York City. “The advantage will probably go those who can demonstrate they can move more quickly and more comprehensively to meet that goal.” ahawkins@cityhallnews.com

Joey Carolino

SCHOOL ZONES:

“Working together We can continue to build, revitalize and groW neW York citY.” Deputy Mayor Stephen Goldsmith at GNY LECET Annual Contractors Forum on Public Construction Opportunities.

With billions of dollars committed to capital development, the city of new York offers exceptional business opportunities and jobs for signatory contractors and union laborers. to learn about the city’s contracting opportunities, visit the city record online: www.nyc.gov/cityrecord

greater neW York laborerS-emPloYerS cooPeration & education truSt a jointly managed trust fund, charged with supporting and promoting the interests of 1,500 signatory contractors and the 15,000 members of the mason tenders district council. its four point mission: marketing and promotion; legislative and governmental affairs; research and business development; and prevailing wage monitoring. 266 West 37th St. Suite 1100, new York, nY 10018 | Phone: (212) 452-9300 | Fax: (212) 452-9318 e-mail: lecet@gnylecet.net | www.masontenders.org

“a Partnership committed to the Future”

build better • build SaFer • build union CITY HALL

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JULY 18, 2011

Unwilling Partners? Some merchants angry at growth of Downtown Brooklyn Partnership By Stephen Witt

nonprofit created by the Bloomberg administration to redevelop downtown Brooklyn is poised to take over an older group that has served a section of the area for years—sparking fears that large developers will have a greater voice there than small businesses. The Downtown Brooklyn Partnership, a local development organization formed five years ago by then Deputy Mayor Daniel Doctoroff, soon expects to operate the MetroTech Business Improvement District, just as it operates two other nearby BIDs. “In the past five years, downtown Brooklyn has attracted an incredible amount of private investment,” said Andrew Brent, a spokesman for the Bloomberg administration, which created the partnership with $6 million in seed money. “During that time, the Downtown Brooklyn Partnership played a critical role in the revitalization of the entire area.” Under the new arrangement, the MetroTech BID will pay the partnership $215,000 a year for management and oversight of services like additional garbage pickups, security, marketing and holiday decorations. The BID board approved doing so in May, but the vote is being contested.

Courtesy of Downtown Brooklyn Partnership

Joe Chan has drawn fire for his six-figure salary. BIDs collect assessments from businesses and landowners in targeted areas, then spend those funds on extra services to spruce up their surroundings. Two other BIDs, the Fulton Mall Improvement Association and the Court-LivingstonSchermerhorn BID, merged with the partnership three years ago; each pays

the partnership $100,000 annually for management. But some smaller members of the MetroTech BID have resisted consolidation, saying their money would subsidize large developers with downtown Brooklyn interests instead of going toward services they want and need. “If the mayor of New York thinks the Downtown Brooklyn Partnership is

A former schoolteacher, Chan lives in Fort Greene and has won praise for working with local nonprofits to find work for dozens of unemployed residents from nearby housing projects. But his Bloomberg ties and his $220,000 annual salary have made him a controversial leader. Partnership spokesman Lee Silberstein said consolidated management makes sense for all three BIDs, which will get their money’s worth of services. “The boards of each of the BIDs continue to exist and set spending priorities,” Silberstein said. “In fact, the efficiencies created through consolidation ensure greater resources for these types of services and programs, and less bureaucratic overhead.” The MetroTech BID, for example, spends $270,000 of its $2.6 million annual budget for administrative salaries. By paying the partnership $215,000 for administration, the BID will save $55,000. But merchants note there is only one shopkeeper on the partnership’s board— Bridge Street Cleaners and Tailors owner Victoria Aviles—and say the partnership’s loyalty remains with developers like Bruce Ratner and Joshua Muss, who sit on its board and pay $450,000 in contributions. Aviles, who is also president of the MetroTech BID, refused to comment for this story, but close sources say she’s not happy about the merger. She also abstained from the May vote for the takeover, citing a conflict of interest because she sits on both boards—something Ratner and Muss, who also serve on both boards, did not do. City Councilman Stephen Levin, whose district includes the MetroTech BID, said he supports its independence but also believes the partnership is important. He abstained from voting on the takeover, but allocated $5,000 to the partnership to link downtown, DUMBO and the new Brooklyn Bridge Park.

“If the mayor of New York thinks the Downtown Brooklyn Partnership is so vital, let him write the check.”

Downtown Brooklyn Partnership

JULY 18, 2011

so vital, let him write the check,” said MetroTech BID board member Vincent Battista, who is president of the Institute of Design and Construction, a familyrun educational facility that has been in downtown Brooklyn since 1947. “When they were funded by the city, they didn’t want to know us,” he added. “Now they want to get the BID’s money.” The Downtown Brooklyn Partnership’s primary mission is to coordinate the $3.5 billion in private investments and $200 million in public funds that have poured into the area, building the Barclays Center arena, hotels, stores and thousands of new apartments. Its president, Joe Chan, was a Doctoroff protégé at the city’s Economic Development Corporation before coming to the partnership.

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Borough President Marty Markowitz supports the takeover, and says it will help small and big businesses alike. “The Downtown Brooklyn Partnership and local downtown BIDs will continue to lead our exciting and thriving downtown into Brooklyn’s bright future,” he said. Not every merchant affected is convinced, however. Eddie Aydag, owner of the Mirage Boutique downtown, claims security has suffered since the partnership took over the Fulton Mall Improvement Association. “We had a situation in our Fulton Mall store where we called security and they told me to call the police, which I can do myself,” Aydag said. “So why am I paying to get security?” editor@cityhallnews.com

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Central Stage By Chris Bragg Three days after Vinny Alvarez’s election as the new president of the Central Labor Council, the former electrical worker had hardly moved into his office. His walls were still bare. But other offices at the Manhattan headquarters of the city’s umbrella labor organization were wholly vacant, after a leadership crisis emptied out its top ranks. Near the beginning of the year the political, the legislative and the communications directors quit. So did Alvarez, who was serving as chief of staff, as pressure grew on former president Jack Ahern to resign. Now, sprucing up the place and hiring new staff will likely be the easy part as Alvarez returns to assume his former boss’ position. He is charged with implementing a new structure as the organization tries to rebound from the troubled tenures of Ahern and former Assemblyman Brian McLaughlin, amid unprec-

edented political and economic pressures for labor in New York and across the nation. “We’re going to do things in a way that was very different from past years,” Alvarez said. “It was part-time, and not as active a role as we and our board and our Vinny Alvarez will be a full-time affiliates think we should put forward.” Alvarez, a 21-year member of Local 3 president of the Central Labor Council. International Brotherhood of Electrical having a full-time executive director—a Workers, is wary of talking about the model used a few years ago in the wake past, specifically McLaughlin’s jailing on of McLaughlin’s departure—rather than a racketeering charges and the scandal full-time President. But the most important that erupted when Ahern doubled his voice in the room, AFL-CIO President Denis own salary. Alvarez shuns questions even Hughes, favored a full-time president. Others initially interested in being about his own departure from the CLC, and simply calls it a “professional deci- president including Arthur Cheliotes, president of CWA 1180, and Jim Conision…made at a particular time.” Ahern and McLaughlin each held onto gliaro Sr., directing business representheir posts as heads of their member tative for IAMAW District 15, but both unions while serving as president of the wanted to keep the presidency of their CLC. But beyond the scandal that went unions and serve part-time at the CLC. Alvarez, who was serving in a position along with their tenures, there was a general feeling among member unions at the AFL-CIO following his departure that the organization was not doing from the CLC, was a natural choice when nearly enough to unite or organize New the council decided on a new full-time York City’s labor movement into a cohe- presidency. And in June, CLC delegates amended the organization’s constitution sive, proactive force. After Ahern left, a small minority of to allow for a full-time president. The CLC’s second-in-command will member unions wanted to go back to

Andrew Schwartz

New Central Labor Council president takes on scandal-scarred group

now be a part-time secretary treasurer, Janella Hinds, a member of the United Federation of Teachers, who will handle financial and fiduciary oversight of the council, Alvarez said. Stuart Appelbaum, president of the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store workers union, said Alvarez had long volunteered to join the Labor Day parade even before working at the CLC, and had a reputation for getting people on the same page. The key going forward is whether Alvarez will be able to unite all the powerful and strong-willed leaders within the sometime fractious labor movement toward a common agenda. “Vinny has been put in a position where he has the confidence of a lot of people,” Appelbaum said. “Now he is going to have to exert the authority of the council.” Alvarez acknowledged that getting everyone on the same page can be difficult, but said he believes all the unions on the council have a renewed desire to work together. Alvarez said there would be a greater emphasis on using CLC staff to organize political and legislative actions among member unions, giving each a great stake in the others’ efforts. “We’re going to get people actively involved at a full-time staff level in politics and legislation, mobilizing and organizing support for our affiliates,” Alvarez said. cbragg@cityhallnews.com

Brooklyn Brawl Three-way Assembly race becomes a proxy battle for Democratic leadership By Colin Campbell

hen Brooklyn Assemblyman Darryl Towns vacated his seat to join the Cuomo administration, few imagined a competitive race to replace him. With no party primaries before a special election, the Democratic Party’s selection would automatically win in this heavily Democratic district. Or so it seemed. The local Democratic organization got behind Councilman Erik Martin Dilan’s chief of staff, Rafael Espinal. Soon after, Towns’ sister Deidra entered the race as an independent with the strong backing of their father, Rep. Ed Towns. And although Espinal and Towns both interviewed for the labor-backed Working Families Party endorsement, the party is running a third candidate, Make The Road New York organizer Jesus Gonzalez. Now all three campaigns are pushing for an advantage in their poor, heavily Hispanic section of Brooklyn—setting up a long, hot summer battle over the

JULY 18, 2011

strength of the Democratic organization in the Sept. 13 election. “We have one candidate who’s the daughter of a congressman. That’s what put her in the race. We have another candidate where it’s his relationship with the county boss Vito Lopez,” Gonzalez said. “And we have another candidate who’s in this race because of the community, and [who’s] been in the trenches in the battles for workers’ rights in the community.” It’s a brash statement, but no candidate running solely on the WFP line has won office in New York City since Tish James was elected to the City Council in 2009. And for all the union troops Gonzalez’s campaign can mobilize, the traditional Democratic machine still has heavy electoral influence for a special election in which turnout will likely be abysmal. Most of the party’s local political muscle comes from Lopez’s sprawling social-services empire, notably the Ridgewood Bushwick Senior Citizens Council. “A very high percentage of the few voters in this district who vote in every election are in some way affiliated with Ridgewood Bushwick,” said one Gonzalez-supporting Democrat. “They live in housing provided by Ridgewood Bushwick, they are employed by them or they have a family member who is.”

Daniel M. Burnstein

Jesus Gonzalez said the WFP was one of the first groups his campaign approached before he decided to run for the Assembly. The third-party challenge is a complicating factor in the old-fashioned political feud that has simmered for years between the Dilan and Towns families. Earlier this year the Towns family lost an intra-party leadership battle against the Lopez-backed Dilan family for Darryl Towns’ district leader position. Sen. Martin Dilan, father to Erik Dilan, argued that Gonzalez is in the race to split the Hispanic vote and deliver the Assembly seat to Deidra Towns. “It’s about congressional politics,” Dilan said. “In my mind, Congressman Towns is in cahoots with [Congresswoman] Nydia Velázquez.” If Deidra Towns is victorious, the argu-

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ment goes, there would be a ripple effect for the congressional players involved. Ed Towns would emerge stronger for his 2012 reelection bid against a Lopez-backed challenger like Assemblyman Hakeem Jeffries, and Velázquez’s position would be strengthened to battle Lopez over Diana Reyna’s open Council seat in 2013. Hank Sheinkopf, a Democratic consultant who advises Deidra Towns’ campaign, believes the WFP has its sights set on winning the special election. “It’s an attempt to show political influence that will be larger than the actual act itself,” he said. “There’s nothing symbolic about victory.” editor@cityhallnews.com

CITY HALL

Industrial Revolution Sale of Brooklyn warehouse aimed at revitalizing manufacturing sector By Andrew J. Hawkins

which is expected to cost approximately $45–50 million, including the purchase price. They have to finish repairing the façade, gutting the interior, and removing the asbestos and leftover detritus from previous tenants, including the Internal Revenue Service and the Federal Drug Administration. Former FDA labs on the seventh floor,

Andrew Schwartz

s they climbed the stairs of a hulking Brooklyn industrial warehouse they were about to buy, Sal Rusi and Marvin Schein found a strange sight on the third-floor landing: a propped-up animal skull. “Probably the last guy who tried to make the deal on this place,” Rusi said without stopping. Federal Building No. 2, which occupies an entire block on the Brooklyn waterfront in Sunset Park and is believed to be the largest vacant industrial space in the city, has certainly been through ups and downs over the past decade. One possible buyer flirted with purchasing the WWI-era building, only to have the economy tank and financing fall through. The cost of operating the cavernous space may turn out to be astronomical, and questions have arisen about the property’s usefulness and value. But the city Economic Development Corporation, which has taken over the sale of the property from the federal government, believes it has finally found buyers for the building, and with it an important piece of the Bloomberg administration’s effort to revitalize the Federal Building No. 2 in Brooklyn is getting city’s sagging manufacturing new owners, and a new look. and industrial sectors. “This is really a great win for the people for instance, will require specialized of the city,” said Seth Pinsky, president of cleanup to completely purge chemicals EDC. “You’re taking a building that has and toxic residue. As part of the deed of great bones, but unfortunately has not sale, Salmar is required to finish the renobeen kept up for modern users. And you’re vations in two years. The only thing that could derail the now going to see a substantial amount of capital injected into the building, and deal is Congress, which must vote to make it available for the kind of busi- approve the sale. And given the current political climate in Washington, the nesses we’re hoping to bring to the city.” Indeed, the property is an anomaly in buyers are understandably nervous. The building’s congressional chamthe city’s waterfront strategy: Rather than convert the 1.1 million square-foot ware- pions, Reps. Nydia Velázquez and Jerrold house into luxury housing or parkland, Nadler, insist the vote will be pro forma the city is requiring Salmar Properties, and noncontroversial. “A healthy local and regional economy Rusi and Schein’s year-old partnership, to lease out the property to light- is one that balances industrial and marimanufacturing and industrial operations. time jobs with service, finance, and In the end, the development is expected other key sectors,” Nadler said in a stateto create 400 temporary construction ment. “Federal Building No. 2 will serve as symbolic testimony to what we can jobs and 1,300 permanent jobs. Rusi and Schein, who currently own accomplish when we put our minds to it.” When he looks at the exterior of the additional office and warehouse space in the surrounding area and Long Island, have building, Rusi says he does not just see a already plotted the types of business they crumbling façade in dire need of repair. envision will eventually fill the building’s He sees something more abstract. “Opportunities,” he said. “For eight floors: film studios, research labs, everyone, not just us.” training facilities, high-tech businesses. ahawkins@cityhallnews.com First, though, comes the restoration,

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Our Perspective Corporate Profits Recovering, Not Workers’ Wages By Stuart Appelbaum, President, Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union, RWDSU, UFCW

ccording to all recent economic indicators — and a number of independent studies — corporate profits are soaring as big-business rebounds from the Great Recession of 2007-2009. But if you talk to working people throughout the U.S. and New York City, they’ll tell you that they are still struggling to put food on the table and support their families. That’s because corporate America is hoarding money and pocketing profits while withholding investment in new jobs. Thanks to the current way of doing business, the only beneficiaries of the post-recession economy have been corporations and stockholders. In New York City, Wall Street is back on its feet, and corporations and developers are benefiting from huge taxpayer-provided subsidies and raking in profits. Corporate America as a whole is doing well. According to a new study by economic researchers at Northeastern University, corporate profits represent 88 percent of the growth in real national income over the past two years. When compared to four previous economic recoveries over the last three decades, the small amount of wage and income growth for working people this time around is unprecedented. The results of the study point to a lack of any net job growth, and stagnant real hourly and weekly wages. Clearly, something has to be done to reverse this trend. The Living Wage NYC Campaign has been growing and gaining momentum since it began just over a year ago, and studies like the one from Northeastern University are showing why. In a time when bad jobs are replacing good ones and a striking majority of economic growth is padding corporate bank accounts, it’s becoming obvious that something has to be done to level the playing field. The worker and community activists who make up the foot soldiers of the Living Wage NYC Campaign are fighting for passage of the Fair Wages for New Yorkers Act. The act requires that developers who receive major taxpayer-funded subsidies must pay at least a living wage for the jobs they create. The law could help turn back the clock on the erosion of decent jobs in New York City, and show other cities that redevelopment and living wages can and should go hand in hand. Corporate profits are growing, but they aren’t going to create the kinds of jobs that would help usher in an economic recovery for working people. The Fair Wages for New Yorkers Act will ensure that taxpayer money — our money — will go toward the creation of jobs that pay living wages, and help lift up working people instead of just ensuring that the rich get richer.

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JULY 18, 2011

An Energy Policy for New York City Grow Better Not Bigger We have to reduce our energy consumption. Growth that adds density no matter how smart, increases energy consumption. Conservation and efficiency are a must. We should also revisit Congestion Pricing. A million vehicles entering the City daily is a waste of fuel. Other places less polluted and congested are better suited for growth when it is necessary. It was insanity to site a nuclear power plant (Indian Point) in this densely populated area 25 miles from New York City. Twenty million people are in peril because there is no evacuation plan feasible. There can be accidents at nuclear power plants. Fukushima is on an earthquake fault, Chernobyl was destroyed by human error. Everyday use produces radiation, with the resulting increase in the incidence of cancer. ThErE Is NO sOluTION FOr dIspOsING OF NuClEAr WAsTE. Other countries are taking very seriously the Fukushima accident. Germany is intent on making the country the leader in solar energy. let’s learn from them. We are having time consuming discussion instead of rigorous action. According to richard perez, research professor suNY Albany, 33% of New York City peak-load of electricity could be supplied by photo-voltaic. A substantial portion of NYC acreage: commercial, industrial and residential roofs, parking lots and exclusion zones could be used to deploy pV technology (solar panels). The peak-load occurs when the sun is the hottest. Committee For Environmentally Sound Development P.O. Box 20464, Columbus Circle Station New York, NY 10023 Tel: 212-877-4394

JULY 18, 2011

Money Trees

City taps private cash to help maintain expensive parkland, but model could prove troublesome By David Sims

peak to Parks Department officials about the future of the city’s parkland, and they may tell you it is in “one of the largest expansion periods since the time of Moses”— Robert Moses, that is. But with the agency lacking the funds to maintain one of its new flagship parks, that expansionist vision is cast into doubt, begging the question of how much longer the department can keep up its balancing act. Fashionable parks like the High Line and Brooklyn Bridge Park, created by public dollars and maintained through private funding, have proven a popular way to expand the city’s green space in leaner fiscal times. More such development is on the way, including the rezoned Williamsburg waterfront, Fresh Kills Park in Staten Island and Governors Island. But while the initial dollars are there to build them, the recurring dollars to keep them up are not. Brooklyn Bridge Park is the biggest example of this imbalance. “We have to have some kind of steady income from the site, because we could bankrupt the city trying to fund the operation,” Parks Commissioner Adrian Benepe said in an interview. “As it is, we don’t have enough money to continue maintaining the park.” The sprawling shoreline park costs $16 million a year for upkeep, which the city insists it must generate on its own. Benepe says more luxury real estate developments, like the adjacent One Brooklyn Bridge Park, are the only way to go. Residents of that building pay a fee to help fund park maintenance. State Sen. Daniel Squadron and other state legislators say they’ll veto any plan that includes more apartment developments in the park. Proposals to tap property taxes or set up a businessimprovement district around the park have also been rejected. “There really aren’t any [funding] alternatives to housing,” Benepe said. “They won’t get any new revenue to the site unless the sites that are slated to be developed for residential housing are developed.” Hudson River Park, a strip of parkland on the West Side of Manhattan, is in the midst of a similar crisis. It was created with the idea that a developer would capitalize on the massive Pier 40 site, which years later remains a parking lot. “It’s not working as well as we’d have liked it to work,” Benepe said. “The creation of residential housing is a more surefire way of deriving income.” Despite these problems and further cuts to the department’s expense budget this year, growth will continue.

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“Expansion has slowed a little bit, but we’re still in expansion mode,” Benepe insisted. “We’re going to be...challenged to maintain the parks.” New York City Parks Advocates president Geoffrey Croft is a vocal critic of the reliance on private partnerships. “We don’t have anywhere near what we need to take care of what we have,” he said. “Clearly, these aren’t sustainable funding models.” For future parks, partnering with real estate remains crucial for the city. The rezoning of the Williamsburg waterfront, which allowed luxury towers to spring up, required developers to create parkland along the East River that they will pay the city to maintain. The Hunter’s Point South complex in Queens will include waterfront parkland as well, maintained in lieu of taxes by residents in the surrounding buildings. With Governors Island, the city is still waiting on major private partners as it constructs new parkland, since the island cannot be developed for real estate purposes. The public-private model worked better at the High Line. While the city poured capital dollars into its creation, the park is now operated and maintained by a private nonprofit that raises money for its upkeep with a board chock-full of the city’s VIPs, similar to the Central Park Conservancy. But that example is a rarity nearly impossible to replicate, Benepe said. “We have thousands of parks in New York City, and only two handfuls are ever going to get large amounts of private dollars,” he said. “The basic model for most parks is and probably always will be public dollars and volunteer labor.” Those smaller neighborhood parks are usually created with funding from a local elected official and maintained entirely by Parks Department staff. As many as 465 of those workers could lose their jobs in the 2012 budget, although the agency is still discussing a layoff-free plan involving early retirements and making some jobs seasonal with District Council 37. Local 1505 president Dilcy Benn, who represents the workers who help maintain the public parks, said she had already seen signs of decline. “I went to Mullaly Park, opposite Yankee Stadium, in the morning,” she said. “It looked like a war zone.” Further cutbacks will only make things worse, Benn said. “They’ve cut my seasonal staff in half already; they don’t have enough...to maintain parks now,” she said. “The parks with conservancies can hire more people, but if they cut my workforce, it’s just going to be a total disaster. Who’s going to collect the garbage?” editor@cityhallnews.com

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Family Matters

THE BREAST CENTER NEW YORK DOWNTOWN HOSPITAL

Indictment tarnishes Brooklyn family’s political legacy

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By Aaron Short

hen Brooklyn Assemblyman William Boyland Jr. got indicted, he was an afterthought. Marched into the federal building in lower Manhattan, he got a fraction of the attention his colleague Sen. Carl Kruger did. Charged with bribery for a $177,368 no-show consulting job at a Brooklyn hospital, Boyland was undistinguished even in disgrace. Boyland, who could face up to 25 years in prison, pleaded not guilty and has remained defiant—but others in his section of Brooklyn sense weakness, and see the scion of a popular family now counting down his days in power. “People get accused of things all the time. That doesn’t necessarily make them true,” Boyland told NY1 after his indictment. “The family is behind me 100 percent.” Some of his peers were less enthusiastic, calling for him to step down. “Elected officials from the borough of Brooklyn cannot be handcuffed any more than they already are,” said Democratic District Leader Chris Owens. “Resignation is a respectful resolution.” The Boylands are the closest thing the Brooklyn neighborhood of Ocean Hill has to a ruling class—a park, a street and a political club bear their patriarch’s name. Thomas Boyland served as the neighborhood’s assemblyman from 1977 to 1982, when he died unexpectedly at 39. His brother, William Sr. (known as “Frank”), snatched the seat in a Democratic primary that year. For 20 years Boyland Sr. served Ocean Hill and Brownsville, solidifying his family’s hold on the neighborhood by developing housing projects. He also spent many years doing public outreach on the payroll of the neighborhood’s largest employer, Brookdale Hospital, and served on its board. Frank’s children, Tracy and William Jr., caught the political bug early; Junior helped his sister get elected to the City Council in 1997. In 1998, Boyland Jr. began working for Brookdale as an outreach coordinator with its Urban Strategies satellite clinic. When his father resigned four years later, Junior won a special election to succeed him—but kept the Brookdale job, this time as a “consultant.” As Junior launched his political career, the FBI became increasingly interested in executives from Brookdale’s management company, MediSys Inc. One investigator who probed the hospital found that from December 2003 to November 2008 Boyland

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Assemblyman William Boyland Jr. received $2,956 per month, approximately $35,473 a year, reporting directly to MediSys CEO David Rosen—though he never provided reports for his activities or kept a workplace at the hospital. Instead the FBI found that the legislator awarded $22,700 in state grants to Urban Strategies in 2003, lobbied Speaker Sheldon Silver to allocate $3 million for Brookdale in 2004 and 2007, and tried to influence the state health commissioner to allow MediSys to acquire a hospital in Queens. When several FBI agents interviewed Boyland in December 2009, he admitted he was never a consultant. Boyland claimed he never set up any meetings to further Brookdale Hospital business and that he always kept his hospital work and his Assembly work separate. After the indictments, Boyland, like Kruger, spent much of the subsequent session under a cloud of suspicion. Unlike Kruger, who introduced 372 bills into the record this year, Boyland advanced zero. And last week, the Daily News reported Boyland didn’t even show up to one-third of the Assembly’s 60 sessions. Back home Boyland has been more active, if a bit wary. Constituents praised his work fighting to stop a proposed homeless shelter from opening on Herkimer Street. “Some people were saying he wouldn’t respond because of the investigations, but he has been taking our calls and has been coming to our meetings with [shelter] providers,” said Ocean Hill activist Bernadette Mitchell. Boyland’s next court date isn’t until October. If he steps down before then, sources say his sister, Tracy, would plan to run for the seat. Already a half-dozen candidates, including some backed by rival pol Councilwoman Darlene Mealy, have emerged. It’s a sad ending for one of Brooklyn’s strongest political dynasties. “It’s a dynamic legacy that has been completely tarnished,” said former Council candidate Geoff Davis. “It was a major legacy that Thomas Boyland left, and his family ruined it.” editor@cityhallnews.com

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ISSUESPOTLIGHT

Transportation

DELAYS AHEAD How New York is falling behind at getting around

Andrew Schwartz

BY ADAM LISBERG

ew York City is a global capital that shapes the future, but its aging transportation grid is stuck in the past—and everyone who relies on it suffers. China is building new airports and a network of bullet trains. London is digging 13 miles of new train tunnels under the central city. Bogotá has built fast busways to shuttle riders in and out of the central city at a fraction of the cost of a subway. Yet in the New York region, new train tunnels under the Hudson River have been scuttled to save money, East Siders are still waiting for a Second Avenue subway first proposed in 1929, the Tappan Zee Bridge is on borrowed time and the most prominent fight over getting around town involves bike lanes.

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In this special section of City Hall, transit planners, politicians and business leaders explain New York’s pressing

traffic, not making vast new investments in the future. “It’s hard to get both the electorate

“The city has to move, and if it doesn’t move, people will move away.” transportation problems, and the lack of solutions for them. “What’s next? Who’s pushing for the next big thing?” asked traffic engineer Samuel “Gridlock Sam” Schwartz. “I don’t think there’s ever been a time when money came easily.” Part of the problem is financial: Making New York run better will cost tens of billions of dollars. But part of the problem is one of vision: New York is largely scrambling to keep up with today’s

and politicians focused on those longterm investments,” said Petra Todorovich, director of America 2050, an urbanplanning initiative from the Regional Plan Association. “The politician who makes the hard choice to fund the infrastructure investment is not going to be the same politician who’s in office to cut the ribbons on opening day,” she said. “Sometimes it is a failure of leadership, or a failure of the structure of government that doesn’t

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allow a long-term perspective because we have short-term political cycles.” The hours lost to traffic jams and stalled trains take a toll on more than just New Yorkers’ nerves: They make it harder for businesses to function, raise costs for everyone and drive economic opportunity elsewhere. The following pages explain New York’s challenges, highlight some promising improvements and try to consider a bigger vision for the future. “The more you improve transportation, the more you increase the likelihood of real economic growth,” said CUNY’s Robert Paaswell. “The city has to move, and if it doesn’t move, people will move away. That’s always been my fear in New York. We’re beginning to see that.” With additional reporting by Jon Lentz alisberg@cityhallnews.com JULY 18, 2011

Ready For Takeoff? NYC’s congested airspace could worsen without new technology, new runways BY JON LENTZ

ore than a quarter-million people soar above New York City’s gleaming skyline every day on flights in and out of the region—but planners fear a creaky and delay-prone aviation system will push them to take their business elsewhere. Transportation advocates and business leaders say the solutions are easy to see but hard to implement: digital air-traffic control technology to pack more planes into limited airspace, new runways to get them in and out of the sky faster and new terminals to make traveling easier. Without the changes, they warn, millions of travelers, commuters and tourists will head to cities with less airport hassle—slowing economic growth and jeopardizing New York’s status as a world-class city. “Our business in this city is global,” Kathy Wylde, president of the Partnership for New York City, said earlier this year. “We have to expand, tap new

markets. The emerging markets are where we have the fewest flights and destinations. Those are the markets that are our most important customers and consumers. We will not be a center of international business unless we do expand.” New York’s 104 million annual passengers face the worst flight delays in the country, shuttling through crowded airport corridors to wait for precious slots on overscheduled runways. Flight delays at JFK International

portation System (NextGen), which uses digital technology and GPS to improve air-traffic control, more accurately track planes and significantly increase capacity by allowing planes to fly more closely together. Others say NextGen is a necessary step, but one that will only keep pace with demand for 5 to 10 years. That won’t be enough. Jeffrey Zupan, a transportation analyst for the Regional Plan Association and coauthor of a January report outlining options

“With all of these things, as usual in transportation there’s no silver bullet—or silver bullet train, for that matter.” for adding flights, predicts passenger growth will continue its upward trend as the economy improves, reaching 150 million as early as 2030. The Port Authority operates the region’s three major airports, and acquired Orange County’s Stewart Airport in 2007 with hopes of making it the fourth, but limited demand and a lack of convenient public transit have made Stewart a disapflight delays* pointment so far. “With all of these things, as usual in transportation there’s no silver bullet—or silver bullet train, for that matter,” Zupan said. “We’ve got to be thinking about all of these things, but in the long run none of them will matter enough

Airport and Newark Liberty International already average at least 23 minutes, with many passengers facing much longer waits or cancellations. A typical flight via LaGuardia Airport runs just over 20 minutes late—double the national average. In the short-term, the widely accepted solution is Next Generation Air Trans-

Running Late The 10 major U.S. airports with the worst

10.5

Chicago Midway International Airport Dulles International Airport (Washington, D.C.)

10.7

10.9

Charlotte Douglas International Airport

12.2

Boston Logan International Airport

13.9

O'Hare International Airport (Chicago)

14.1

Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport

16.8

Philadelphia International Airport

if we don’t go for the new runway at Kennedy and Newark.” Today about a third of all U.S. air passengers fly in and out of the New York City area, making it the country’s busiest airspace. Expanding runways at the region’s three airports is a geographic puzzle. Their existing runways create intersecting flight paths; they are surrounded by densely populated residential areas; and JFK and LaGuardia border bodies of water. A new runway at Newark could be in place by 2020, according to Zupan. What may be more controversial—and will likely take more time—is adding runways at JFK, an act that would likely require filling in a portion of Jamaica Bay, a federally protected marshlands area. Environmentalists are already lining up against any effort to encroach on the wetlands. “This would degrade the environment, both locally wherever they fill in—and then, also, the whole bay’s hydrology changes as a result,” said Dan Hendrick, a spokesman for the New York League of Conservation Voters. “The question is: Is this natural resource valuable enough for us to protect?” New York’s airport crowding is in some ways a victim of its own success: As airlines like American, Continental and JetBlue built new terminals at JFK and Newark, they drove passenger volumes higher and made delays longer. At LaGuardia, however, Port Authority executive director Chris Ward has said the aging terminals are an embarrassment for New York’s travelers and should be torn down and rebuilt. The authority has hired architects to draw up designs for a new terminal. Improving ground capacity may be the easiest step: Ward hopes the federal government will allow airports to raise their passenger facility charge on each arriving and departing passenger to $7, up from $4.50, to fund new construction projects. “Our airspace challenges require dynamic leadership, require funding and require a vision that will build us out of the delays that we face today,” Ward said earlier this year. “All of the work…that the Port Authority will take on the ground is only half the puzzle.” jlentz@cityhallnews.com

20.3

LaGuardia Airport

23.0

Newark Liberty International Airport

23.5

John F. Kennedy International Airport

Average Aircraft Delay (in minutes) *Delay is measured as average time deviation from the flight plan during 2007.

JULY 18, 2011

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Sources: Regional Plan Association, FAA Aviation Performance Metrics

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Stuck In A Rut

No light at tunnel’s end for city’s aging highways and bridges BY JON LENTZ

ment Project, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit known as TRIP. That ranks the New York City area as having the seventh-worst roads of all major U.S. urban centers. “We’re the worst state in the country on a statewide basis,” said Robert Sinclair Jr., a spokesman for AAA New York. “On an individual municipality basis we’ve got some that are bad, with New York City near the top of the list.” One challenge for New York City is the snowy winters with freezing tempera-

“Had we kept the tolls on those bridges, in today’s dollars it would have been $31 billion, enough to pay for another 20 East River bridges or subways or whatever.” maintenance. The portion of state highways rated “good” or “excellent” is projected to decline from 55 percent to 43 percent over two years. In the densely populated New York City metropolitan area, including neighboring Newark, just over half of the major roads, freeways and interstate highways are in poor shape, according to a 2010 report from the Road Improve-

tures that leave pavements dotted with potholes after each spring thaw. Another is the city’s heavy auto traffic, exacerbated by the lack of a freight-rail line and the reliance on delivery trucks that dramatically increase the wear and tear on city thoroughfares. Then there is the chronic lack of funding for new projects to replace aging infrastructure built as far back as 100

Courtesy of Greater Astoria Historical Society

It was a victory for opening New York City’s roads and a defeat for paying for them: One hundred years ago this week, Mayor William Gaynor removed the 10-cent car toll from the city’s four East River bridges. The popular move established the expectation that New Yorkers could drive freely among their boroughs, but it took away the most obvious funding source to maintain them. Every plan to impose new tolls on the bridges since then has failed, and for a time in the 1980s, it looked like some of the bridges would fail too. “Had we kept the tolls on those bridges, in today’s dollars it would have been $31 billion, enough to pay for another 20 East River bridges or subways or whatever,” said Samuel “Gridlock Sam” Schwartz, the former city traffic commissioner, who now runs a transportation engineering firm. Schwartz, alongside the Straphangers Campaign and Transportation Alternatives, plans to mark the July 19 centennial by erecting an old-style tollbooth at the Manhattan entrance to the Williamsburg Bridge, collecting dimes

from vintage cars. The dilemma remains the same: New York never has enough money to maintain its sprawling network of free roads and bridges. It took a $3 billion rehabilitation plan for the city to rebuild its crumbling bridges after scares forced the Williamsburg Bridge to close in the 1980s, and New York City has made bridge maintenance a priority since then. But anyone who drives New York’s rutted roads can see the toll of deferred

Mayor George McClellan Jr. and other city ofﬁcials pay the ﬁrst 10-cent toll on the opening day of the Queensboro Bridge in 1909.

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years ago, compounded by rising material costs and years of deferred maintenance. Despite the region’s wealth, securing the dollars needed has proven to be a heavy lift. One attempted solution was the state’s Dedicated Highway Bridge and Trust Fund, created in 1991 to divert gasoline taxes and motor-vehicle fees to fund state transportation capital projects. But by 2009 the state Legislature had raided more than half of the $33 billion in the fund for debt service and various noncapital expenditures, State Comptroller Tom DiNapoli found. This year the fund is projected to have a gap of $450 million. The lack of investment ends up hurting the city’s attractiveness to business, as well as costing the city’s commuters, road advocates say. TRIP estimates New York drivers pay an additional $405 a year in extra maintenance costs for their cars, or $4.5 billion overall. Delayed maintenance can also compromise safety, AAA New York argues. The association found this year that a high percentage of highway lane markings are missing and highway lighting is burnt out, flaws that can make bumpy roads riskier to navigate. The city’s bridges aren’t in much better shape than its roads. In 2010, fewer than half of the bridges owned, operated or maintained by the New York City Department of Transportation were rated in “good” or “very good” condition. Today the worst bridges in the region are the Tappan Zee, the Kosciuszko and the Goethals. The Tappan Zee, which is over capacity and structurally deficient, poses perhaps the toughest challenge for transportation planners, given the $16 billion price tag to replace it, but a replacement for the Kosciuszko connecting Brooklyn and Queens is on track to begin construction in 2014. The East River bridges are now among the few bright spots in the city’s tangled web of roads and bridges. The Brooklyn Bridge, a New York City architectural landmark, is getting a makeover, and the Williamsburg Bridge had a major renovation after it was closed in the 1980s. Frank R. Moretti, TRIP’s policy director, said public outcry led to improvements on those bridges, the subway system and other elements of the city’s infrastructure in the 1980s and 1990s, and that similar pressure on city and state leaders will be critical to spurring needed road and bridge investments today. “Ultimately the public has to recognize that it’s in their best interest that state and local and federal governments gather the resources to adequately maintain a transportation system,” Moretti said. “It’s in the public’s best interest to pay the pennies to have these repairs done.” jlentz@cityhallnews.com JULY 18, 2011

Sidetracked Hopes for higher-speed rail to New York City on hold as funding dries up BY JON LENTZ

he start of construction work last year to convert the James A. Farley Post Office building into a gleaming new train station took more than a decade of planning—but the transformation could take another decade or more to complete. As plans for the city’s long-awaited Moynihan Station were negotiated, scrapped and redrawn in recent years, the country’s emerging economic rival, China, funneled billions of dollars into more than 5,000 miles of new bullet-train tracks in a short six-year period. The plodding pace of building a single train station in New York reflects America’s challenges in keeping up its rail infrastructure as a global center of international commerce and trade. “New York City is the major city it is thanks to the investments we made in transportation over a generation ago,” said Petra Todorovich, a researcher at the

Regional Plan Association and director of its America 2050 initiative. “Now, as we look to developing countries like China, they are starting to leap ahead of us in terms of their transportation-infrastructure investments.” China plans to spend hundreds of billions of dollars to double the length of its highspeed rail lines by 2020. In June the country unveiled its new rail line between Beijing and Shanghai, with bullet trains that can travel at speeds of 200 miles per hour or more. A few months before, the U.S. Congress stripped $400 million from the budget already allocated for high-speed rail. After a burst of stimulus-funded investments in rail projects around the country during 2008–09, the Obama administration also scaled back plans for more than $53 billion in spending over the next six years, providing no new funding. Advocates now say they would be lucky if it took 15 years to install a worldclass high-speed rail line in the Northeast Corridor, the country’s only high-speed rail line.

“There’s an irony here,” said Manfred Ohrenstein, a partner with Ohrenstein & Brown, LLP who has represented firms that specialize in rail infrastructure. “The east coast of China is being developed by a series of links into a major high-speed railroad network. And the East Coast of the United States isn’t moving in the same direction. How can we allow that?” One reason is the continuing impact of the recession and the sluggish recovery—and a resurgent Republican majority in the House that has blocked rail spending. In recent months the GOP has been pushing to privatize the nation’s passenger railways. Rail advocates worry the U.S. is lagging behind other countries and losing out on an important investment that could create jobs in the short-term and spur economic growth in the future. “Continuing to build and invest in the region’s transportation infrastructure is essential if we are to maintain New York’s status as the preeminent global economic capital,” said Sen. Charles Schumer, one of the principal advocates for Moynihan

Station. “It has always been the genius of our city and region that we have built not just for the present but for the future. And it is imperative that we maintain that focus on the future today.” As the largest U.S. city and the key stop on the Northeast Corridor, New York City stands to gain the most from renewed spending on trains. Proposals to build entirely new passenger rail lines the entire length of the corridor, from Boston to Washington, D.C., would reduce trip times from New York City to D.C. to 90 minutes, and shorten other trips—at a cost of $100 billion or more. But even if the economy picked up and lawmakers became more receptive to that investment, the years of review and the slow pace of obtaining financing could jeopardize its chances of ever being completed. “There’s a risk we take 25 to 30 years, and frankly, I don’t think we have that amount of time,” Todorovich said. “If we continue to take that long to build megaprojects, we won’t be building many megaprojects.” The scuttling of the Access to the Region’s Core (ARC) train tunnel connecting New Jersey to Manhattan

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CITY HALL 7/14/11 10:19 AM

Courtesy of Friends of Moynihan Station

under the Hudson River serves as a cautionary tale of what can happen to costly, long-term projects when political winds shift. New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie pulled out of the project last year after millions had been spent, saying the state simply couldn’t afford a price tag of up to $14 billion no matter the benefits. But the obstacles to high-speed rail haven’t stopped transit advocates from dreaming big. Many also want to see expansion of high-speed lines connecting to New York’s three major airports. Robert Paaswell, a civil engineering professor at City College, said the most pressing need is rapid transit service to

Moynihan Station took a decade to plan, and may take another to build. Station and take one of three highspeed rail lines to connect to the airline terminal.

“The east coast of China is being developed by a series of links into a major high-speed railroad network. And the East Coast of the United States isn’t moving in the same direction. How can we allow that?” LaGuardia Airport, which today is only accessible by bus or car. Access to JFK International Airport and Newark Liberty International Airport is passable for now, he added. But the global standard would be for passengers to be able to arrive at Penn Station, book the best flight, check in at Moynihan

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“You need what all the cities have,” Paaswell said. “You get off at the airport and you go downstairs to a train station and you get on a train and it takes you to the heart of the city. London, Paris—it goes to all these central stations. Switzerland, Germany. It goes on and on and on.” jlentz@cityhallnews.com

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Andrew Schwartz

Paying The Fare MTA needs billions to pay for big expansions BY ADAM LISBERG

ew York City’s newest train station is slathered in muck. Dust and the sound of hammering fill the dim air as hundreds of workers dig eight new Long Island Rail Road platforms 140 feet below Grand Central Terminal. This is what progress looks like: When the new East Side Access project opens in five years, 240,000 Long Island passengers a day will go directly to Grand Central, easing their daily commute and relieving crowding at Penn Station. “We’re full speed ahead,” said Alan Paskoff, who manages the $7.3 billion project for MTA Capital Construction, as he navigated his muddy boots through the maze of stone. “The railway expansion of 100 years ago made the city possible, the same way the Erie Canal did 200 years ago. For New York to stay competitive, we have to continue to do this.” The MTA is trying: It is in the midst of a rarely seen burst of expensive improvements for subway and train riders. In addition to East Side Access, the agency is digging the first phase of the Second Avenue subway, extending the No. 7 train to Hudson Yards and creating a subwaypedestrian hub at Fulton Street. Transit planners say that’s exactly the sort of capacity growth and expansionist spirit that New York needs to accommodate the region’s growing population—and to keep the city from

JULY 18, 2011

choking on a mass transit system stretched to its limit. “We have this phenomenal business center located on this tiny island,” MTA Chairman Jay Walder said. “The thing we can’t ever tell ourselves is that we’ve done enough.” The thing the MTA can’t tell anyone yet is how to pay for it all. The MTA’s fiveyear, $25 billion capital spending plan covers those flashy expansions as well as the inglorious work of keeping the system in a state of good repair. But the money runs out at the end of December, and there is no strategy yet to find the $10 billion or so still missing. “I think of the MTA capital plan as civic castor oil—it’s good for you, but it tastes awful,” said Gene Russianoff of the Straphangers Campaign. “We don’t have money to maintain the existing system.” One idea would be a surcharge on the next MTA fare increase dedicated solely for the capital plan. Walder flatly rejects this, saying the MTA has already pledged a 7.5 percent fare increase for 2013 to keep up with inflation and won’t sacrifice its credibility by trying to raise it higher. Gov. Andrew Cuomo called for taking control of the MTA during his campaign last year, but has been mum since then. He has avoided weighing in on the MTA’s long-term spending, saying only that the state can’t afford to subsidize it. A spokesman for the governor did not respond to requests for comment. MTA officials and politicians believe there is no public appetite for new tax increases to pay for the agency, especially after a controversial payroll tax failed to

Deep underneath Grand Central Terminal, 800 construction workers dig eight new train platforms around the clock. generate as much as projected. Republicans in the State Senate have vowed to repeal the payroll tax. Walder said the agency is trying to trim expenses, not just raise new money. The MTA has cut $2 billion from the plan to date and is searching for another $2 billion in savings. It is also seeking a $3 billion low-interest loan from a federal rail program that would cover the cost of finishing East Side Access. There is another option to fill the gap,

Bloomberg aides have helped with the new discussions, sources have said, though no plan appears imminent. Whether Cuomo would support it is unknown. “I have to think a governor who has accomplished so much in so many areas…is not going to let the MTA capital plan fall apart,” said one transit advocate working on the proposal. New York’s subways needed decades to recover from their nadir in the 1970s and ’80s, when deferred maintenance took

“The railway expansion of 100 years ago made the city possible, the same way the Erie Canal did 200 years ago. For New York to stay competitive, we have to continue to do this.” which a group of transportation experts and regional thinkers has been quietly working on since last year. It would resurrect Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s congestion-pricing plan by imposing new tolls for drivers entering the Manhattan business district and using the money to improve mass transit. Congestion pricing and alternate plans to expand bridge tolls both died in Albany two years ago, and the idea of charging drivers to enter a public street is still a political challenge for many lawmakers. But others say there is simply no other potential revenue source to pay for the transit improvements New York needs— and certainly none so directly tied to the problem it is trying to solve.

www.cityhallnews.com

them close to total breakdown. Long-term planners say they’re thrilled the MTA is tackling big challenges now—but they hope the agency won’t squander that energy merely scraping for money to finish its current plans rather than continuing to think big for the decades to come. “London is building billions and billions of dollars’ worth of new transit, and they’re not fiscally any better than New York,” said CUNY engineering professor Robert Paaswell. “If we don’t get things done, if we don’t collect higher taxes to pay for them, we’re going to begin to lose the battle with London and Tokyo and Shanghai as a big financial capital.” alisberg@cityhallnews.com

CITY HALL

In 2010, 269

people were killed in traffic crashes in New York City. More than 70,000 were injured. Until

recently, New Yorkers did not have access to whether those traffic crashes occurred on their block or in another borough. With a new law enacted in February, Mayor Bloomberg and the New York City Council put an end to the information deficit. Now the NYPD is required to publish information online about every traffic crash in New York City. Thanks to these leaders, for the first time ever, New Yorkers can know exactly how safe or unsafe traffic is on their block.

Every New Yorker now has the tools to identify the danger zones in their neighborhood: crashstat.org/data

What information is available? • Location of every traffic crash in New York City, organized by intersection, NYPD precinct and borough • Number of motorists, passengers, pedestrians and bicyclists involved in each crash • Number of people killed or injured in each crash • Contributing factors to each crash, such as cell phone use, speeding or failure to yield to pedestrians • Number and type of moving violation summonses issued by each precinct

S U N DBIT ES Nicole Gelinas, senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute

Focusing on specific revenue sources is a 30-yearold distraction. Just two years ago, state and city politicians exhausted themselves cobbling together a new permanent payroll-tax revenue source to fix the MTA’s budget deficits. Today the politicians—many of them the same people—are trying to figure out ways to get rid of that tax. Meanwhile, the MTA still has insufficient money for capital investments. No matter what the faddish dedicated tax during a particular legislative session, the money all comes from the same place—New York. We’ve got to rejigger spending across the city and state so more money goes to transportation and transit, and less toward ever-rising publicemployee, education, and health-care costs.

Mitchell Moss, director of the Rudin Center for Transportation Policy and Management

The New York region has two

superb regional transportation agencies: the Port Authority and the MTA. The challenge for the region is the lack of adequate funding to maintain our existing mass transit and arterial infrastructure, and to develop additional air-travel capacity. We cannot count on the federal government to provide the funds necessary for the region’s transportation. States should press the Congress to get authority to impose tolls on existing interstate highways that are now heavily used, deploying new technologies over great distances.

Carl Hum, president and CEO of the Brooklyn Chamber of Commerce

The recently launched ferry service from northern Brooklyn to Manhattan is a great step toward improving our transportation system. It supports waterborne activity, reinforces our investments along the waterfront and saves our borough’s commuters valuable time. However, a main artery for the movement of goods and people in Brooklyn is the Gowanus Expressway, which is decades past its anticipated useful shelf life. In order for Brooklyn’s residential and business community to grow, we need to address this issue. At the end of the day, our transporta-

tion system is a beneﬁt for both the business and residential community, and its cost should therefore be equally borne by all. But when the business community is asked to contribute more—a good example is last year’s increase in the MTA payroll tax—we want to see the return on our investment.

Bill Di Paola, executive director of Time’s Up!

The New York region should get its revenue for unfunded transportation needs from oil taxes. But more important is to reward individuals who use sustainable means of transportation. For instance, if they take their bicycle to work or commute by the subway, they should get a tax break and should always be considered ﬁrst for the largest ofﬁce or the one with the best view.

Paul Steely White, executive director of Transportation Alternatives

In this constrained ﬁscal environment, it all comes back to Bus Rapid Transit. Everyone wants to build additional subway lines with separated rights-of-way,

whether that’s tunnels or bridges or elevated. But those are nonstarters. It will be a miracle if we can get the Second Avenue subway built that already has billions poured into it. I think expansion is going to be making more efﬁcient use of what we already have—and, by and large, that’s the streets. We’ve got to be getting people out of their cars and getting them onto these higher efﬁciency modes of travel. That’s why Bus Rapid Transit is so promising.

Joel Ettinger, executive director of the New York Metropolitan Transportation Council

Funding for transportation projects comes from a variety of federal, state and local sources. The needs of the region are tremendous, and the resources required to meet these needs over the next 25 years will be dependent on both traditional and supplemental sources of revenue.

BAD POLITICS IS BAD POLICY FOR NEW YORK DRIVERS AND PASSENGERS

n an Albany back room deal, Mayor Bloomberg and TLC Commissioner David Yassky did an end run around the New York City Council to avoid scrutiny by the Council of their ill-conceived plan to expand taxi service. Instead of providing the public with safe, reliable taxi service, they created a plan to provide substandard service while bankrupting thousands of working class drivers and small business owners—falsely promising revenue that will never be realized.

THERE’S A BETTER SOLUTION:

 Auction 6000 outer borough medallions  Designate two-thirds of these medallions for the For-Hire Industry

 Add taxi stands in outer boroughs and Upper Manhattan for outer borough medallions

Paid for by the Committee on Taxi Safety

JULY 18, 2011

www.cityhallnews.com

CITY HALL

Point/Counterpoint:

Two Views of NYC’s Transportation Future

hile bright new bike lanes and pedestrian plazas pop up all over the city, making New York City move better and paying the price for it is still a struggle. City Hall asked Janette Sadik-Khan, commissioner of the city Department of Transportation, and Jimmy Vacca, chair of the City Council Committee on Transportation, to discuss these issues and more before the city. What follows is an edited transcript.

Q: Does the New York region need a single body to coordinate transportation needs between the city, state and federal governments, in addition to the Port Authority and MTA?

Janette Sadik-Khan

Janette Sadik-Khan: We do have a regional coordinating body, and that’s called NYMTC, the New York Metropolitan Transportation Council, which is our local metropolitan planning organization. And it’s a federally designated body whose responsibilities include the coordination, on a regional basis, of the programs, policies and funding streams for the region. I think it’s done an adequate job up until now. There is an unprecedented amount of conversation that takes place between the Port Authority, the MTA and the city on the coordination of major capitol projects, working through funding needs and, really, an understanding of where we are and where we need to go. I think for the first time the heads of all three agencies…were all on a

first-name basis.

Jimmy Vacca: I don’t know if New York needing a single body is the answer. I think that we do need better coordination among the bodies that we do have. We have to increase their coordination. I don’t think combining the MTA with the Port Authority is going to result in any noticeable service improvement for users of mass transit. I don’t that that’s a necessity.

JV: I think a big flaw of New York City’s transit system is lack of accessibility. I think that when you look at parts of the city, especially when you look at Queens, for example, you look at Southeast Queens, people don’t have access to good transportation, and I think that we have to find a way to give what we call the “outer boroughs” better transit services. They were hurt by the MTA budget cuts—and those services that were eliminated were mostly in the outer borough communities, leaving many people even more stranded. I do think that the bottom line is that in the next couple of years we’re going to have to learn how to do more with less. I don’t see an infusion of expense money coming to the MTA, so I do think the MTA is going to have to do more for less. Q: Is Bus Rapid Transit and Select Bus Service the city’s major hope for increasing MTA capacity, or will subway lines ever grow again?

JSK: I think it’s part of the solution, and it’s an impor-

Jimmy Vacca

tant part of the solution, setting up a surface subway system. Some of these bus routes serve more people each day than transit systems of entire cities. This is a great way to engineer our streets and make them more effective and efficient for the three million people that use our buses every day—and if we’re going to grow the system, we’re going to have to continue those investments. And a lot of these investments are paid for mostly by the federal government.

JV: I think subway lines will have to grow as we go into the future. But I do think that the SBS routes represent a significant improvement for straphangers. Getting people to where they want to go quicker is a way to keep people out of their cars.

Q: Is New York’s mobility falling behind that of the world’s other major cities? JSK: This is a really critical time for transportation in New York. We are locked in an unprecedented competition with other cities to both attract and retain businesses and people—and with new-technology companies that can increasingly do business anywhere in the world these days. And so we’ve got to make the compelling case that they need to do business here. And it’s not enough to just talk about it; we need to build it. It starts with the streets themselves. And when you look back at the history of New York City streets, you see the last time we made any really major changes to the street system prior to the Bloomberg administration was in the 1950s and ’60s, when most major avenues were changed from two-way traffic to one-way traffic. It’s been a long time since we really looked at what our streets need to do to serve a variety of users and the variety of demands they have on them today. JV: I think we face the danger of falling behind unless we go where people are going. Jobs are now increasing, and they have been increasing for the past 20 years, outside of Manhattan. You have job centers that have been built up in suburban areas. I can think of White Plains, for example. I can think of Westchester County, Long Island. So I think that a challenge we face in the future is: How do we meet those transportation needs for people who are looking for alternatives other than their car to go to work every day, who normally probably would go to Manhattan by express bus or train but now have that different challenge? There I think we’re falling on the wayside. How do you go from Throgs Neck to Riverdale? By bus. It’s a challenge. How do you go from the East Bronx to the West Bronx? Maybe there’s three buses you have to take. But maybe your job is in the West Bronx and you live in the East Bronx. We have more and more of things like that occurring. So when people see three buses to get to their job, they often say, “I’m taking my car.” Q: Is New York’s biggest transportation flaw simply a lack of money, or a lack of coordination and attention?

Q: Have new bike lanes and pedestrian plazas won over New Yorkers, or are they seen as a temporary fad? JSK: The last Quinnipiac poll showed a 56 percent support by New Yorkers for bike lanes, so I think that’s an important vote of confidence for this approach. I think that’s an incredibly high number. People talk a lot about bike lanes and plazas in terms of bike riders and pedestrians, but these investments also increase safety for everybody on the street. We did a pedestrian and safety-in-action study last year and found that streets with bike lanes were 40 percent safer for pedestrians; and when we put in the protected bike path, we’ve seen injuries fall by, like, 50 percent for everyone who uses the street, for both pedestrians and motorists and cyclists alike. I think the comprehensive approach, this balanced approach we’re taking to our streets, is making our streets safer—and the last four years have been the safest in the city since we first started to keep records, and our goal is to cut traffic fatalities in half by 2030 compared to 2007.

JV: I do think the question people have to ask when they have a pedestrian-plaza proposal, and it’s a fair question: If you omit traffic here, where does traffic go, and what is the impact of the diversion on those surrounding streets? Is there a need for more pedestrian-friendly streets in this city?…On the bike lanes I think you have to look on a case-by-case basis. Perhaps in some communities, bike lanes have had a positive impact, and in other communities, we hear the bike lanes are not used. And why are there bike lanes that are not used omitting lanes of parking that could be available for the small-business community or commercial tenants? I think on bike lanes, neighborhood input becomes very important. Q: Will New York eventually see some version of congestion pricing or tolls on the East River bridges? JSK: I think that’s a matter of when and not if. I guess I’ll leave it at that. I don’t see

JSK: I think funding is a challenge. In these times, certainly. The federal government is cutting back on funding. You see how the state is on funding. The city itself is stretched. You see the cuts we made on the capital program side. One of the positive things we’ve been able to do is to make a lot of changes that have been fairly cost-effective for New Yorkers. We’ve done a lot to take care of the basics. We’ve also been able to innovate on top of that. One example is what we’ve been

CITY HALL

able to do, say, on the bus side, with our Select Bus Service. We’re really building a new bus network that gets people where they’re going, fast. We’ve got 3 million New Yorkers that use the bus every day, but unfortunately, while it’s the country’s largest bus system, it’s also its slowest, and it’s gotten slower over time. But we’ve been able to work closely with the MTA on these select bus routes.

any other way to pay for the infrastructure that we’re looking to do and manage our network in an effective way as we can.

JV: The congestion-pricing question is always in the room. The bridge-toll question is always in the room. I don’t sense at this point in time that there is a groundswell of support to either one.

www.cityhallnews.com

JULY 18, 2011

Right-Of-Way DOT relies on flashy projects, small fixes for improvements to grid and its own reputation BY ANDREW J. HAWKINS

n a muggy July afternoon, a familiar scene unfolded at a busy intersection on the Upper West Side of Manhattan: elected officials, seniors and local residents standing together to bash the city Department of Transportation. At issue was the DOT’s unfulfilled promise to improve pedestrian and traffic safety at the corner of 71st Street, Amsterdam and Broadway, which the pols labeled the “the bow tie of death.” In the last two years the intersection has seen at least 34 accidents, ranks in the 94th percentile for pedestrian crashes and is classified as an NYPD “high crash location.” “It’s time for the DOT to start treating this crosswalk like they would treat a beloved plaza,” said Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer. “We get brushed off and brushed aside.” The DOT is a favorite punching bag for

Mr. Fix-It Charles Monheim sets his sights on sprucing up the MTA BY LAURA NAHMIAS

f you want something done about your subways, call Charles Monheim. He did it in New York in the 1980s, where he oversaw the transformation of a once-sagging system. He did it in London a decade ago, where he introduced a touch-and-go transit payment card called the Oyster. Now Monheim’s former boss in London, MTA Chairman Jay Walder, is relying on him to launch technological improvements that will restore New Yorkers’ faith in their subway system. “If you had to sum up what I do in one sentence, it would be projects that require intense hands-on management,” said Monheim, the agency’s chief operating officer. Monheim started his career in transit more than two decades ago in New York, but his position now has a lot in

politicians and community groups who say the Bloomberg administration has a high-handed approach to the city’s streets. Many gleefully point out that not only has the mayor’s push for congestion pricing went nowhere, but new bike lanes and pedestrian plazas are also routinely jeered. But all the negative rhetoric, lawsuits and bad press can sometimes obscure the fact that this administration has presided over one of the most transformative periods for streets in New York City history. And as capital budgets are slashed and street repairs slow to a crawl, the city is focusing its attention on crowd-pleasing marquee projects, as well as smaller quality-of-life fixes, in the hopes of modernizing the city’s aging transportation grid. The appearance of pedestrian plazas in places like the Flatiron District, Herald Square and Times Square are regularly cited as being among the more dramatic and

Pedestrian plazas in Times Square are all the rage. successful ideas concocted by the Bloomberg administration. “These were long-needed in the city,”

JULY 18, 2011

Bike lanes, though often portrayed by critics and tabloids as magnets for controversy, also enjoy wide support among New Yorkers. A recent Quinnipiac poll found 56 percent of those surveyed declared bike lanes a worthwhile, if underused, addition to city streets. Traffic safety is more of a mixed bag. The total number of traffic deaths citywide has dropped—to 259 in 2010 from 300 in 2008—but the overall number of crashes has risen to 183,278 in 2010 from 182,805 in 2008, according to the most recent mayor’s management report. Likewise, pothole repair has slowed, with the average repaving taking almost a day longer in 2010 than in the previous year. Janette Sadik-Khan, the transportation commissioner, said that while pedestrian plazas and bike lanes get all the attention, safety measures and road repair are the real nuts and bolts behind the DOT. The agency filled some 400,000 potholes last year, she said, and embarked on a host of safety improvements that rarely get mentioned in the press. She cited “Safe Streets for Seniors” as a littlenoticed initiative to improve pedestrian safety in neighborhoods with a high concentration of elderly residents. “Change is hard,” she said. “New Yorkers take their streets very seriously, and very personally.” Future projects like a citywide bikeshare program further illustrate the DOT’s shift away from car-centric policies of the past. But if the agency wants to be less polarizing, it needs to ensure that its projects are benefiting the largest number of residents for the best possible payout, said Jon Peters, a professor of finance at the College of Staten Island. “Do you get the maximum amount of economic benefit for every dollar spent?” Peters said. “That’s the real tricky question.” ahawkins@cityhallnews.com

“People love it. The taxis don’t love it, but that’s the breaks.”

common with the first job he ever had—grading the city’s policy responses to the 1977 blackout. He joined New York’s transit system a few years later, just as it began a massive overhaul of its fleet. “They were graffitied everywhere, and their performance was very poor,” he said. “I was really intrigued by opportunities to be involved in a public-sector turnaround situation.” In London, he introduced a modern version of the MetroCard that has

said Robert Paaswell, director of CUNY’s University Transportation Research Center. “People love it. The taxis don’t love it, but that’s the breaks.”

the MTA is sponsoring, like real-time bus information enabling people to see on their phones or computers where their bus is. Several years working in Taiwan on a high-speed rail project also convinced him the MTA would do well to train its employees to come up with their own applications and programming ideas for the agency, instead of contracting out the technology that has increasingly become an embedded part of transit. Back in New York, Monheim sees his goal as more than just implementing new payment systems or subway countdown clocks: He wants to restore public faith in a beleaguered agency plagued for years by accusations of fiscal mismanagement. His task is to upgrade buses and trains while showing riders how their dollars are being spent. “It’s always challenging to get an organization to look at itself differently and to figure out ways to do things better,” he said. “I think the real challenge is getting people to believe that that’s possible.” lnahmias@cityhallnews.com

“It’s always challenging to get an organization to look at itself differently and to figure out ways to do things better.”

Andrew Schwartz

proved wildly popular. London tube riders simply wave their Oyster at turnstiles, rather than endure the fickle magnetic strips and occasional jams that bedevil New Yorkers. Time away from New York helped Monheim pick up the best of other cities’ good habits. Towns like Seattle were among the first to pioneer projects

www.cityhallnews.com

CITY HALL

BACK & F O R T H

A Class By Himself Children’s Aid Society’s Richard Buery jumps into the business of schooling

s the youngest person to head the Children’s Aid Society in 150 years, Richard Buery Jr., 39, arrived on the scene with a vision of social entrepreneurship. A Brooklyn native, Buery spent his years after Harvard and Yale Law School founding two companies aimed at helping needy children and their families. He spoke candidly about his educational vision for the city’s most vulnerable children, and about how New York’s government is failing to do its part to help those children succeed academically and professionally. What follows is an edited transcript.

City Hall: What’s the biggest difference for you between working for your own start-up and working for a city institution?

Richard Buery: The difference in coming to a place like the Children’s Aid Society is that I’m somewhat of an unknown quantity here. It takes time to build up the kind of trust that I think people kind of take for granted in an organization that you built.

Morrisania neighborhood in the South Bronx, and we will be leveraging a lot of resources that we already provide in that community. Our job is to make sure that we’re able to provide access to all these supports, whether it’s in the building itself or whether it’s a block or two blocks away.

CH: Do you see this school as the CH: In the past, Children’s Aid has partnered with the

first of many?

Department of Education to create community schools, and now the agency is opening its own school. How did that come about?

RB: We certainly know that in all the

RB: What we found in our 20-year-old partnership with the Department of Education is that there are multiple legs to a great school. A great school needs great leadership and instruction. It needs enriching after-school and summer experiences for the children who attend there. And it needs a series of supports for children’s families. The best school can’t teach kids who are too sick to get to school, or whose families are so disruptive that they can’t get to school reliably, or who are too hungry to pay attention once they’re there, or who need glasses and can’t see the blackboard. We think we can create a really unique school, one that is equipped to serve truly all children, including the most vulnerable. We’re actually building our lottery to give preference to young people who’ve been involved in the foster-care system, or who are coming from single-parent households. We really believe that by wedding quality academics to quality enrichment services to intensive social supports for families, we can create a school that gives children all the things they need to be productive citizens and ultimately to be college graduates and productive citizens.

CH: Why a charter school?

neighborhoods we work in, children need quality educational options. If we’re successful in doing this in Morrisania, we absolutely would see ourselves building these kinds of resources in other communities where we work, as well.

CH: Are you opening your own facility, or are you taking space in an existing facility?

RB: We don’t know if we’ll be in our own building. That’s certainly a possibility. The school will be opened in the

CITY HALL

some Children’s Aid programs in wealthier areas like Greenwich Village, saying the agency needs to focus on poorer areas. Can you talk about that a little bit?

RB: Our mission is to serve the most vulnerable kids in New York City. And to do that, we have to be focused. We have to focus every dollar, every bit of our energy, every bit of our mental energy, on children who need us the most. It’s a difficult call, but it’s an obvious one. CH: You’ve proposed reinstating a personal income-tax surcharge to fund programs like yours. What do you envision?

RB: When David Dinkins was mayor he enacted a personal income-tax surcharge to finance the hiring of 4,000 new police officers—the “Safe Streets, Safe City” program. We need that same kind of investment today, for the children of New York City.

CH: What kind of effect do you think that would have on Children’s Aid services?

RB: This country has never really stood up to a promise, the idea that wherever you come from, wherever you started, doesn’t have to define where you end up. Today our children are far more likely than they were 30 years ago to remain in the socioeconomic class into which Andrew Schwartz they were born. This isn’t American. And it’s bad public policy. We understand that we have to cut back and we have to be efficient and I’m all for those things, but we also know you can’t get something for nothing.

CH: Do you see yourself as breaking away from the Department of Education by creating your own school?

CH: What can city government do?

RB: No, absolutely not. At the end of the day most children in New York City are going to attend traditional public schools. I feel strongly about working with traditional public schools, but I also see charter public schools as a part of our portfolio services that we offer neighborhoods.

RB: I do commend the mayor and the speaker and the Council for working so hard to restore some of the cuts they’ve restored, but as much as they’ve done, they just haven’t done enough. Citizens should have to understand what it means when you don’t raise taxes on the wealthy and only cut. We constantly tell a story that makes people think things are okay when they’re not really okay. I think if people understand what’s really happening, they’ll make good choices. But we have to start by telling the truth.

CH: Do you have teaching experience? RB: I did spend a year earlier in my life teaching at an orphanage school in Zimbabwe. But I’m a lawyer by training, and I’ve spent most of my career building and running nonprofit organizations. I do come from teacher stock. My mom is a 33-year veteran of the DOE. Education has always been in my blood. It’s always been a passion of mine.

RB: We’ve created, in some ways, an unrealistic wall between charter schools and traditional schools. These are all public schools. They are all designed to serve the children of New York City. The question at the end of the day is: Can we build a great school or not? I think we can build great traditional schools, but we can also build great schools through the charter law. And we think that all these options should be available to kids.

CH: You’ve come under fire a bit for proposing to close

CH: At what point did you realize that working with kids was going to be your career?

RB: I knew in college. That’s where I really fell in love with the idea of being a social entrepreneur, of creating a situation that could make the story that I had, growing up in a place like East New York, less an exception and more the norm for people in communities like that. Really, it’s my chance to make my contribution to the American dream. When faced with injustice, when faced with inequality, you can sit there and complain about it and read about it and think about it, but you can also do something about it. www.cityhallnews.com

CH: How would you propose increasing transparency in local government?

RB: At the end of the day, when the city puts out a budget, it’s not just numbers on a spreadsheet. It’s a statement of values about what is important, what’s critical and what’s expendable. We need to have an actual debate in the city about what matters to us, what we’re willing to give up and what’s important to invest in.

CH: What are your interests when you’re not working? RB: My interests when I’m not working are named Deborah, Ellis and Ethan, and those are my wife and my two sons, who are 7 and 5. And if you think social media is hard, try to figure out how to be a good dad. It’s a whole lot harder. —Lela Moore editor@cityhallnews.com JULY 18, 2011

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