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


Week of 09 April 2001:

Good Friday
A philanthropist has offered $150 million to keep open six parochial schools that the Archdiocese has been threatening to close. The schools may still close, though, if they cannot convince church leaders by the April 24 deadline that they have a plan for increased enrollment and tuition to reduce their sizable deficits.

Friday the 13th, Part I
More than 1,700 teachers left New York City public schools to teach elsewhere last year, according to a survey conducted by Schools Chancellor Harold Levy. This is four times as many as two years earlier.

Friday the 13th, Part II
It was to be the first big hit of Silicon Alley. Kozmo, the online deliverers that started three years ago in an East Village apartment and rapidly grew to a company with $280 million of investors' money, 400,000 customers and 3,300 employees, announced it was going out of business this week.

New Contract
The city has come to an agreement with the largest union representing municipal workers, District Council 37, whose 125,000 members still must vote to ratify it. The agreement calls for a four percent pay increase retroactive to April 1, 2000, when the last contract expired, and another four percent as of April 1, 2001. But most significantly, it concedes to Mayor Rudolph Giuliani something that would set a precedent for the other unions: For the first time, the city could have a system involving merit pay (raises based on performance).

Rent Profit
Landlords of the city's one million rent-stabilized apartments had record profits in 1999, the last year for which records are available, according to a report released yesterday by the Rent Guidelines Board. The average net income was $314 per apartment per month, up $13 from the previous year. The board uses its reports, which it has been making since 1989, to determine how much of a rent increase it will allow in lease renewals, a decision made each June. Tenant groups reacted to the news by saying there should be no rent increase this year. Landlord groups said the figures were misleading and out of date; fuel prices have risen sharply since 1999.

Radios
The heat continues on Fire Commissioner Thomas Von Essen who testified yesterday at a City Council hearing on the failure of the department's new two-way radios. The radios were withdrawn from use after a firefighter using one while trapped in a burning house was unable to communicate to some of his colleagues. The commissioner admitted that the department failed to field-test the equipment adequately, as required by their own safety protocols, and did not train firefighters properly in the use of the new digital technology. Von Essen said the furor over the $15 million worth of hand-held radios was part of a wider vendetta against him by the fire unions. "It galls me that people are using political agendas as an excuse for character assassination," he said. "I resent it bitterly."

Bush's Budget
To accommodate his proposed tax cuts, the $1.96 trillion budget that President George W Bush submitted yesterday includes cuts in funding for public housing, mass transit, police, and research hospitals that will all affect New York City adversely, leading local Democratic officials said. "The headline on the Bush budget should be: Bush to New York, drop dead," said Congressman Anthony Weiner, Democrat from Brooklyn. The city's transit system, for example, could lose $40 million for replacing old tracks and subway cars, or about 15 percent of what it received this year for that purpose. Cuts to Title I, a program to help schools with poor children, could exceed more than $15 million in the city. New York City would have $88 million less to cover the costs of needed repairs in public housing, which is home for more than 500,000 New Yorkers. New York could lose at least $11 million as a result of the cuts to the COPS (Community Oriented Policing Services) program, which is former President Clinton's initiative to add 100,000 more police officers nationally. On the other hand, Bush's budget does include as new expenditures $25 million to help eradicate West Nile virus on the Eastern Seaboard and almost $50 million to control the Asian longhorn beetle, which has been killing trees in New York City.

Power Plants
A state judge threw out a lawsuit by community groups on Friday, thus giving the go-ahead to the New York Power Authority to put power plants by June 1 in Long Island City in Queens, the Williamsburg and Sunset Park sections of Brooklyn, and two sites in the South Bronx. Two days earlier, a different state judge had halted the construction of a similar pair of electric generators near Silvercup Studios on Vernon Boulevard in Long Island City, saying the power authority had not sufficiently studied the environmental impact. The latest ruling will not affect the earlier one.

Books
There has been a steady rise in new nonfiction books published about New York City. In the 1980's, there were about 800 new titles. In the 1990's, it went up to some 2,000 (not including biographies). Now there are so many books about New York City that Barbara Cohen, former proprietor of the late lamented New York Bound Bookshop (a bookstore that carried only books about the city), is writing a new book about books about New York, a guidebook to be published next year. Some credit this book boom to the falling crime rate.

An article, which focuses on NYC books about to be published, appeared this weekend in the City section of the New York Times. An article, which offers an opinionated guide to the best NYC books ever published, appeared six months ago on Gotham Gazette.

Last week's stories...


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