This Week's Stories
GG's quick takes on recent NYC news


Week of 19 March 2001:

Louima Settlement
As first reported in the Daily News yesterday, the city and the police union have reached a tentative settlement with Abner Louima, who was tortured in a police station house in Brooklyn in 1997. The city's $ 7 million share of the $8.6 million total would be the most it has ever paid to settle a police brutality lawsuit. The parties to the settlement are expected to sign it next Wednesday. In the settlement, Louima, a Haitian immigrant, dropped the call for reform of police procedure, specifically the "48 hour rule," which allows officers suspected of wrongdoing two days to consult with lawyers and union officials before being questioned. Critics charged this made it easier for the police to fabricate alibis. But the Rev. Al Sharpton, a Louima advisor, says that he believes the city has agreed to eliminate the rule when it next negotiates a contract with the union.

Cuts
Mayor Rudolph Giuliani is calling for as much as $500 million in budget cuts from city agencies as a result of the slowdown in the national economy. Critics responded that 1. he should first trim his proposed $401 million in tax cuts, 2. this might be a ploy by the mayor to get the municipal unions to settle contract talks for less money, 3. the cuts are unnecessary because of the relative strength of the local economy: The unemployment rate is 4.9 percent, the lowest since 1988.

Electoral Reform
Seeing that he has little support, City Councilmember Stanley Michels has dropped his effort to bring to the full City Council a vote on the repeal of term limits. A council committee had defeated the bill last week. The effort to end term limits is now, officially, dead.

Nationally, the debate over campaign finance reform continues. The Senate voted 70-30 to tighten restrictions on how much TV stations can charge for political ads late in campaigns, the Wall Street Journal reports. Senators also rejected an amendment to curb political activity by unions and corporations.

Another Memorial
An "Irish Hunger Memorial" is joining the museum about the Holocaust and the police memorial in Battery Park City. The Battery Park City Authority will spend $4.7 million for the memorial, which will include a cottage and a symbolic potato field without potatoes, as well as a library focusing on starvation.

New Beginning, New Ending
Spring began yesterday. The Fresh Kills landfill will accept its last load of the city's garbage tomorrow at noon, 600 tons of household waste from Queens. The ceremony planned, with the governor, the mayor and other elected officials expected to be in attendance, may be the first such solemn occasion ever for a load of garbage. There have been some 400,000 such loads, an estimated two billion tons over the past 53 years, to a part of Staten Island that became the highest point on the Eastern Seaboard - unaffectionately referred to as Mount Trashmore. The city will now haul its garbage by truck, and eventually by train and barge, to places as yet not completely determined, at a cost far higher - $63 a ton, as opposed to the $43 that it cost to put it in Fresh Kills.

Twin Towers, Take 2
The sale of the World Trade Center to Vornado Realty Trust has fallen through because of "seven or eight substantial issues," including Vornado's refusal to put up $100 million as a show of good faith. The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey has started exclusive negotiations with the second-place bidder, Silverstein Properties, which offered $600 million less than the record $3.25 billion bid from Vornado. Developer Larry A. Silverstein owns 7 World Trade Center, a 47-story tower that is part of the complex but is not owned by the Port Authority.

Vetoed
Mayor Giuliani vetoed Friday a City Council bill meant to shore up the city' s campaign finance law. The City Council has the votes to override the veto, and pledged to do so.

Acquitted A jury found Sean Combs, the rap impresario known as Puffy or Puff Daddy, innocent on all charges connected to a shooting incident in a midtown nightclub called Club New York.

Rejoined The Metropolitan Opera has agreed to rejoin the Lincoln Center $1.5 billion redevelopment project under new rules that would give it a far larger say.

Closed After 18 years, A Different Light, the premiere literary gay bookstore in New York, has shut down, the latest of a wave of independent bookstores in New York to succumb to the competition from the chains and from the Internet.

Transformed Behind the spectacular new Census figures, as both the Times and our own demographics columnist Andrew Beveridge report, is the transformation of neighborhoods throughout the city, both in growth and in diversity, especially in Queens.

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