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


Week of 4 June 2001:

Budget Passed
The City Council voted 48 to 0 to adopt the $39.7 billion budget for the city, which will go into effect July 1. The budget, which has changed little from what the mayor first proposed in April, would "put the city's payroll at the highest level in 25 years," according to Diana Fortuna of the Citizens Budget Commission. It would also help subsidize day care for an additional 11,000 children (though 25,000 are waiting), and pay for the construction of some 2,850 new homes. Much of a proposed $500 million tax cut requires approval of the state legislature. Also in the budget is $1.7 million more for the Board of Elections, to hire extra mechanics and interpreters, increase the pay of the 30,000 poll workers, and staff a center where voters can telephone with questions on Election Day. Much of this, too, requires approval in Albany.

Budget Balm
It had been billed as likely to be the most acrimonious budget negotiation in years. But yesterday Mayor Giuliani and City Council Speaker Peter Vallone shook hands on a $39.6 billion budget for fiscal year 2002 that could be approved by the council today. The accord abandons the mayor's push to privatize some failing schools and averts the planned closing of 27 city health clinics and restores library and museum funding.

The agreement calls for about $500 million in tax cuts including elimination of part of the surcharge on the personal income tax, saving the average household about $49 a year. It would exempt some businesses from a commercial-rent tax. Other tax cuts in the package have to be approved by the state legislature. Depending upon the eventual size of these cuts, analysts said the new budget projects revenue gaps around $2 billion in fiscal years 2003 to 2005.

Most criticism of the accord came from the school system. Officials professed disappointment with their $11.5 billion, which the Giuliani administration said was about a $50 million increase from the current fiscal year but which school officials said would not cover inflation. Giuliani abandoned his plan to withhold $80 million from the Board of Education budget and use it to hire private companies to run schools. Instead, that $80 million will be set aside for programs aimed at improving some 100 failing schools, a restriction Schools Chancellor Harold Levy said could force him to cut other services.

While the accord was seen as indicative of the political rapprochement between the mayor and mayoral hopeful Vallone, another mayoral candidate, Bronx Borough President Fernando Ferrer, quickly condemned the deal as "a political shell game . . . that sells our public school children short."

Immigrant Victory
New York's highest court has ruled unconstitutional the state's denial of Medicaid to legal immigrants. Congress, in its 1996 Welfare Reform Act, barred immigrants who arrived in the United States after August, 1996 from a range of federal benefits, leaving it up to the states whether or not to pay for them. Governor George Pataki pushed through state legislation to deny Medicaid, the health insurance program for the poor, to these immigrants, according to the Times.

Some 100,000 legal immigrants in the state (most in the city) will now be eligible for Medicaid. The governor estimates the extra cost in the hundreds of millions, but a recent report projected the cost to be about $2.5 million a year.

Roommates
For 18 years, New York tenants have been legally allowed to have roommates. As of 1999, according to a study by the Census Bureau, 158,238 New Yorkers were living in rent-stabilized apartments with nonrelatives. It has been a common practice for tenants whose names are on the lease to charge their roommates more than half the rent. Now Housing Court Judge Larry S. Schachner has ruled that such overcharging can get both tenants evicted. The case involves a 70-year-old woman who has an annual income of $12,000, uses a wheelchair and relies on an oxygen tent, and has been charging a roommate $2,200 to share the apartment where she has lived on Park Avenue for 32 years, though her monthly rent was $1,847.77. The judge based his decision on a new fair share roommate rule that is part of the new state housing code. Tenant activist groups are fighting the new code.

School Abuse
Responding to a rise in reported incidents of sexual abuse in the schools, the City Council held hearings for a proposed law that would make it a crime for school officials to fail to report to police a sexual offense or other crime.

Though many testified in support of the law, some said the increase was due to more people reporting incidents rather than an actual rise in those incidents. Schools Chancellor Harold Levy warned that the law might encourage reporting of normal childhood and adolescent behavior. "We must make certain that we do not put innocent children at risk of criminalization even as we seek to protect others from violence."

AIDS At 20
Tomorrow marks the twentieth anniversary of the first report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on what would eventually be known as acquired immune deficiency syndrome. In the 20 years since, AIDS has killed 75,000 New Yorkers, nearly 20 percent of the Americans who have died from the disease. And, according to a series in the Times, it has transformed the city in both vast and subtle ways.

Broadway Records
The Producers last night won all 12 Tony Awards for which it had been nominated, more Tonys than any other show in Broadway history. The musical also has a higher top ticket price ($100) than any other open-ended show in Broadway history. This may help explain why in the 2000-2001 season, Broadway box-office totals reached an all-time high of $665 million, about ten percent more than last year. There were 11.9 million tickets sold, another record.

Campaign Tangle
There are now officially at least 324 candidates running for public office in New York City this year, a record number. (The 324 is the number of candidates who signed up for the city's campaign finance program by last Friday's deadline, but there are still some applications coming in by mail, and other candidates are choosing not to take public money.) Starting tomorrow, these candidates will spend the next six weeks collecting signatures of registered voters on nominating petitions, so that the candidates can qualify for a place on the primary day ballot in September.

In New York, which has more court challenges to these nominating petitions than in all other states combined, this starts a time of great employment for election lawyers. They are hired to translate the state's Byzantine election law, to knock opponents off the ballot on legal technicalities, and to defend their own clients from getting knocked off. Gotham Gazette correspondent Bob Liff, former political reporter for the Daily News, explains this odd system in "The Campaign Tangle Begins"

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