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A New Future For The Great Port


Few holiday shoppers along Fordham Road in the Bronx or Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn or Roosevelt Avenue in Queens probably take the time to contemplate the waterfront, much less imagine how connected they are to the ship captains, truck drivers, warehouse managers, and stock boys who make their living from the port of New York and New Jersey. But the bargains New Yorkers seek on the shopping streets of the city began fantastic voyages in factories far away.

Far from being the mere backdrop to nostalgic old movies, the port is not only alive, it recently crossed a number of new milestones.

In the summer, another 1,000 longshoreman were hired, the first time in more than three decades that the on-dock labor force grew. This is not for lack of work, given that globalization has been fueling tremendous growth in international trade for the last half-century. Instead, advances in technology such as the shift from break-bulk to containerization have made port commerce much less labor intensive: A handful of workers, one in a crane and a few working on-dock vehicles can do the work that hundreds did back in the 1950s. The port now employs more than 228,000 people region-wide, making it a close competitor to education and health care as a major employer in New York City.

This fall, the port announced a 14.3 percent increase in container volumes, those modular steel boxes that sit on a truck trailer and arrive stacked in piles of thousands aboard oceangoing cargo ships. While the increase in imports was more than 16 percent for the first half of the year, the increase in exports through the port nearly topped 10 percent. The value of goods moved through the port in the period was also impressive: at more than 42 billion dollars for six months, this amount surpasses the value of the tourism industry in New York City over an entire year. The port isn't resting on these laurels either. They are fast-tracking a number of dredging projects to ease the approach to the container terminals along the Kill Van Kull and Newark Bay.

Undoubtedly the greatest sea-change of 2003 was seen in the Port Authority's recent support of the cross-harbor freight tunnel. As reported in Crain's New York Business, Port Authority Executive Director Joe Seymour has decided that building the tunnel is critical to regional and national security. To a region that has added millions in population yet not created a new cross-harbor linkage in 40 years, it is increasingly obvious that more linkages across our region are critical if we are to continue to add to the competitive advantage in transportation that makes New York a great place to live, work, and yes, consume. The benefits of the tunnel would be many.

Ironically, there is no press release on the Port Authority Web site announcing this new willingness to embrace a massive public works project that they have staved off for more than 70 years. The agency's acceptance of the cross harbor freight tunnel, however mild, is in no small part due to the diligence and dedication of a small group within the city's Economic Development Corporation, who for years now have shepherded a cross-harbor freight study through the exploration of more than three dozen options to link New York and New Jersey across the water, including the tunnel. The draft environmental impact statement is expected in a matter of months.

Looking ahead, the city will need more than massive regional projects such as the freight tunnel; we need local infrastructure too. Another milestone passed quietly in November, when the Manhattan and Bronx Surface Operating Transit Authority cleared out all the buses from Pier 57 in Hudson River Park. With a "request for expressions of interest" now out on the streets, it is looking more and more like another waterfront transportation facility may be hacked up by golf clubs and squash rackets. With a big-box store headed for Erie Basin, the largest protected inlet within New York City, it looks more and more as if the city is turning a blind eye to freight movement just as New York State and the Port Authority are starting to catch on.

Carter Craft, an urban planner, is program director of the Metropolitan Waterfront Alliance.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Advocates For The Ill


When illness strikes, middle-class patients and their families can quickly slip into poverty. As they struggle with the impacts of sickness, such as pain, changing family roles and changing work situations, they may not know that they are eligible for support that could prevent further financial decline.

Patients already poor could become even worse off.

This is why a shadow industry has emerged to let ill people know what public benefits they are entitled to, to help them fill out applications, even to communicate with government caseworkers when things go wrong.

Finding a trained advocate is often the only thing that keeps a family together in their own home. However, many agencies serve only a slice of the population with specific characteristics, so another large part of what they do is “information and referral,” often between one another.

Housing Works is one of dozens of agencies serving the HIV+ population. Its case managers, among their other duties, struggle to get the city’s HIV/AIDS Service Agency to fulfill its mandate to coordinate services for their clients.

• People with other specific diseases or conditions may turn to specialty organizations, such as Cancer Care, Inc., which employs 50 social workers trained to help cancer patients deal with the emotional, financial, and medical effects of their illness.

• Independent living centers help low-income people with disabilities to apply for social security benefits and similar income supports, and navigate agencies and courts concerned with such major life issues as child welfare and housing.

• Immigrants, descendants of different ethnic groups, and subgroups of these populations have their own social service agencies. For example, Blue Card was founded by Jewish refugees in 1939, and is still helping low-income Jewish Holocaust survivors to cover the gap between inadequate incomes and the rising cost of living.

• Supportive housing providers not only house residents with mental illness or substance abuse histories. They also provide rehabilitative treatment and coordinate residents’ public benefits and other social services.

• Many senior centers have social workers on staff to help members get the benefits they are entitled to. They sometimes report having a hard time convincing impoverished elderly people to apply for food stamps, due to the stigma attached to “welfare”.

Every hospital employs “discharge planners,” usually social workers, whose role includes making sure that after a hospital stay, patients have a place to go home to, and someone to help them with everyday tasks, if necessary. Single parents who can manage their own daily lives may need a homemaker for their children. Poor people may need help applying for Medicaid so that they can afford follow-up health care.

However, once the patient is back home, the hospital discharge planner is rarely involved in making sure that services work as planned, or that they change to meet changing needs.

When a government agency denies an application for benefits or services, or reduces or ends existing services, legal help can be needed to reverse the decision. Each government agency has an appeals process that, in theory, does not require a lawyer’s assistance. However, layers of inadequately trained personnel separate clients and their advocates from the officials who judge their appeals. It can be equally difficult to learn the process of appealing a decision that denies services, to gather documents and successfully present a client’s case, and to compel an agency to comply with a hearing officer’s decision in the client’s favor.

The New York Legal Assistance Group launched the LegalHealth project in September 2001 as a response to the complex needs of people with serious and chronic illnesses, and low-income patients needing medical care. Since then, they have directly helped more than 600 patients, and trained over 1,000 medical professionals and social workers how to identify and deal with the legal problems of low-income, chronically ill patients.

A typical LegalHealth client is a cancer survivor who missed a Medicaid appointment while she was in the hospital for treatment. The missed appointment triggered a halt to her welfare benefits, which could have prevented her from paying rent and resulted in her family becoming homeless, not for the first time. She also was required to go to Family Court to be a witness in a child support hearing, despite her severe illness.

The New York Legal Assistance Group successfully appealed the cutoff of her welfare checks, accompanied her to Family Court to ensure that proceedings went as quickly as possible, helped her draw up a will providing for legal guardianship of her young son, and assisted her with income tax problems.

Linda Ostreicher, a former budget analyst for the New York City Council, is a freelance writer and consultant to nonprofits.

Stopping The Truckers From Idling At Hunts Point


A half-dozen trucks are lined up on Halleck Street outside the Hunts Point Produce Market. The seats are empty, but the engines are running as drivers squirrel up in the back of their cabs and while away the hours with the help of a little satellite television. They are.waiting for an open bay inside the market.

It's an unusual sight in this neighborhood only when you consider that it comes less a week after the market's promised November 1st crackdown on excessive idling. The product of an agreement with the state attorney general's office, the crackdown is supposed to send a message to out-of-state truckers: In a state that forbids non- operational idling past five minutes and a city that forbids it past three minutes, the city has zero tolerance for egregious offenders.

For Majora Carter, executive director of Sustainable South Bronx, a local non-profit  dedicated to the environmental remediation of this blue collar neighborhoods, it's a frustrating reminder that some messages take a while to get through.

"We thought the agreement was great," says Carter. "The problem now is enforcement. There's still an atmosphere that says you can do whatever you want."

THE ATTORNEY GENERAL'S "CARROT"

Clearing up that atmosphere, not to mention the real atmosphere of Hunts Point, is no easy task. Idling is a problem citywide, as recent attempts to clean up the city's school bus fleet has dramatized.

Here in Hunts  Point, however, the issue is a little more pressing. Site of the two largest wholesale markets in the city -- the produce market and the nearby Hunts Point Cooperative, a wholesale meat market -- Hunts Point is a magnet for big rigs and the sooty exhaust they bring. Little wonder the neighborhood scores among the highest in the city when it comes to childhood asthma rates -- 10 per thousand vs. 6.06 per thousand citywide and 3.36 nationwide according to a 2000 New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene study.

Lem Srolovic of the Attorney General's environmental protection bureau, the organization that forged a June, 2003 deal with the Hunts Point Produce Market to launch the self-policing program, says his office is weighing other ways to reduce emissions in the neighborhood. Still, with only four lawyers covering a region that stretches from Poughkeepsie to Montauk, Srolovic admits to being selective in both methods and targets.

"We've decided that with out tools and our resources, we could be most effective at the fleet or market level," Srolovic says.

In the case of the Hunts Point Produce Market, a regional wholesale supplier to local green grocers, that meant applying a strategy perfected over the last three years against large scale operators such as Frito-Lay, Inc. and Greyhound Lines, Inc.  First, Srolovic and his staff documented the high number of residential complaints over truck exhaust and truck noise, building a quality-of-life component into the state's case. Second, they gathered together a paper trail of police and traffic citations, framing the market as a nuisance. Finally, they offered market operators a carrot-or-stick proposition: Fix the problem yourself or have the state fix it at the market's expense.

"The state idling law specifically puts an obligation on the owner or operator of real estate that exercises control over vehicles operating within that real estate," says Srolovic. "So there is a direct legal obligation on the market's part to effectively control idling."

To their credit, market operators chose the carrot. The market has hired four enforcement officers who, since the beginning of the month, have been issuing citations to trucks ignoring the local anti-idling statutes. Citations run from $250 to $875 depending on the nature of the offense.

SHIFTING THE EXHAUST

In stepping up enforcement within its own gates, however, the Hunts Point Produce Market has achieved the unfortunate short term result of pushing more scofflaws --and more exhaust -- out into unpoliced neighborhood streets.

Eager to correct this problem, politicians, neighborhood groups, and even the market itself are now searching for fresh carrots and scarier sticks.

On the carrot side, Carter and her colleagues point to the nearby Hunts Point Cooperative Market, and its 28 ."ATE" bays - ATE standing for Advanced Truck Electrification. They were created with funds from a combination of government and non-profit agencies.

Outfitted with air conditioners and heating units, these towers pipe in basic amenities that allow truckers to live and sleep in their rigs while waiting for an open slot in one of the terminal bays.

"They've got everything: Internet, cable TV, 125 channels," notes Ernie Digenstein, a trucker dropping off a load of frozen turkeys at the meat market.

Based out of Watertown, South Dakota, Digenstein says the towers are fairly standard at truck stops across the country and provide a welcome alternative to the engine wear and fuel consumption that comes with operating a truck engine in idle mode as a way to generate heat and power.

Still, old habits die hard. So do old attitudes. New York's reputation as one of the costliest destinations in the country creates a situation where many drivers don't feel an obligation to do the city, or its residents, any favors.

"If it's below zero, and the towers are full, I don't care how many tickets I'm gonna get," says Digenstein. "I need heat."

THE NEXT STEP?

Such attitudes will take a while to overcome. Hunts Point Produce Market managers are  already talking with companies about installing similar units. In the meantime, local politicians are working on the stick-side of the equation. The New York City Council is currently weighing a bill, Bill No. 366,  to increase the number of traffic officers authorized to issue citations for off-route driving and excessive idling.

Srolovic of the Attorney General's Office sees the June agreement as a "first step" and acknowledges that more steps will need to be taken in order to diminish the problem in a way that will satisfy Carter and other local residents. At the same time, however, he says his office is already looking toward the next major step in the hope that truck and bus companies, at least at the management level, don't take the current enforcement gap as a signal to relax.

"This is not the end of the idling enforcement story," Srolovic says."We do have other investigations underway."

 



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