PHOTO BY SCOOPY
Councilmembers Jumaane Williams, left, and Rosie Mendez were all smiles on stage together at Councilmember Margaret Chin’s inauguration last Sunday.
FRIENDS AGAIN? There may be — at least publicly — no hard feelings after openly lesbian City Councilmember Rosie Mendez blasted her colleague Jumaane Williams for his stance against marriage equality and abortion rights during his recent unsuccessful bid to become the next Council speaker. The two briefly shared the stage on Jan. 5 at the inauguration ceremony for Councilmember Margaret Chin, who is now entering her second term. Although Williams, after giving his congratulatory remarks, left the stage almost immediately once Mendez began her speech, she started off by making a rather friendly reference to Williams’s musical talent. “Did Jumaane sing?” Mendez asked the crowd, smiling. “Oh, he didn’t? That’s a real treat, you know, hearing Jumaane sing.” Mendez, who represents the East Village and part of the Lower East Side, took a public shot at Williams, of Brooklyn, in late November when she said she wouldn’t support him in the speaker’s race because he opposes same-sex marriage and abortion. “As an out lesbian, it’s problematic for me that the person who would be representing this body is anti-gay marriage, anti-a woman’s right to choose,” Mendez said then in an interview with Capital New York. “Those are two really fundamental progressive issues.” Williams is, in fact, a member of the Council’s Progressive Caucus, though many in the city certainly do not consider his views on marriage and choice to be progressive in nature. Mendez, for her part, has declined to join that caucus, while she is generally regarded as one of the city’s most liberal elected officials. While praising Chin on Sunday, Williams highlighted Chin’s role as a founding member of the Progressive Caucus
as a reason for his continued support of her. “We’ve been doing a lot of good things in [the Progressive Caucus], and I’m looking forward to serving with her for another four years,” he said. A day after the inauguration, in response to our question about his relationship with Mendez, Williams released a terse statement in which he did not allude to anything that went on during his bid to become speaker. “Councilmember Rose [sic] Mendez and I have a great relationship, and I look forward to continuing our work together,” he said. Mendez’s office did not immediately return a request for comment. Moments after Williams and Mendez spoke on Sunday, a political staffer, speaking anonymously, said that Williams simply can’t afford to lash out against critics of his socially conservative views. “If he still held grudges against anyone for that, he wouldn’t have any friends left,” the staffer said.
RIDERS ON THE STORM? Bike-share stayed up and run-
ning last week through winter storm Hercules, but one had to wonder how many people were out there cycling on bikes of any kind. We tried one of the Citi Bikes around 10:30 last Thursday night as an inch or so of snow had already fallen, and it was way to slippery to ride for anyone other than Evel Knievel. As the storm was bearing down on the Big Apple, Dani Simons, a rep for NYC Bike Share, LLC, along with spokespersons for the city’s Department of Transportation, told us the plan was to start removing some of the cycles from on-street bike stations on major roadways and temporarily relocate them to stations on sidewalks and in plazas. “We anticipate leaving the system open but are prepared to
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shut it down if the storm worsens overnight,” Simons said. Seth Solomonow, a D.O.T. spokesperson, added, “Workers will shovel out bike stations promptly.” If necessary, Solomonow added, NYC Bike Share would install “snow flags” to indicate on-street bike-docking stations. In the end, the system was never shut down. As for how many people actually used bike-share during the peak-snow period, Nicholas Mosquera, a D.O.T. spokesperson, on Friday afternoon, told us, “There have been more than 3,000 rides [on Citi Bikes] in the less than 24 hours since snow first started falling.” Snow, in fact, was on elected officials’ minds this summer, when, on July 1, a month after bike-share launch, a posse of local politicians wrote a joint letter to Janette Sadik-Khan, then commissioner of D.O.T., expressing concerns about bikeshare and snow removal. While they noted they support bike-share, the elected officials said the agreement between D.O.T. and bike-share’s operator was unclear on who would plow snow near the bike-share stations. They noted that at one community meeting, “a D.O.T. representative raised concerns that the Department of Sanitation should not be plowing near bike-share stations, as it would cover the bikes in snow.” The pols also expressed concern that plows would smash into the bike-share docks if they were hidden in snow piles. In addition, they asked “what is the protocol” regarding shoveling snow for building owners who have bike-share stations directly in front of their buildings? “Are these owners supposed to shovel the snow into the [bike-share] station itself?” they asked. Signing the letter were Assemblymembers Deborah Glick and Brian Kavanagh, Congressmember Jerrold Nadler, state Senators Brad Hoylman and Daniel Squadron, Councilmembers Mendez and Chin and former Council Speaker Christine Quinn. Sadik-Khan answered them on July 17, saying, in part, “Guidelines for snow removal will be similar to those for trash. Property owners should make piles along the sidewalk, and if there is a bike-share station on the SCOOPY'S, continued on p. 4
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