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


Week of 18 June 2001:

Deal
For five years Empire Blue Cross and Blue Shield has been seeking to convert to a for-profit health insurance company. Both the Greater New York Hospital Association and the health care union local 1199 opposed the move, arguing that a private Blue Cross would value its stock price over its patients, who are primarily the poor. But the two opponents have now become supporters after Empire promised to give half a billion dollars from its initial stock offering in charitable donations to hospitals to buy computer systems. The hospitals said this would help reduce errors. The union said that financially stronger hospitals would make them less likely to lay off workers. "It was not immediately clear how buying such systems would help poor patients get insurance or health care," the Times reports.

Scandal
Faced with court testimony by a building industry consultant that contradicted his earlier denials, Councilmember Thomas Ognibene yesterday reversed himself and admitted that he had accepted gifts from the consultant, who is at the center of a corruption inquiry involving the Buildings Department.

Archie Bunker Dead
Carroll O'Connor died of a heart attack yesterday at the age of 76. For 13 years starting in 1971, O'Connor, a New York native who grew up in Forest Hills, played the character Archie Bunker in two hit television series, depicting a familiar stereotype of a certain kind of white man from Queens who was a blue-collar, narrow-minded bigot. But with the percentage of white people living in Queens falling from 47 to 32 percent in the last ten years, the loss of once-plentiful manufacturing jobs in the city, and a massive influx of immigrants of color turning Northwest Queens into the Lower East Side of the new millennium, it is not just O'Connor, but Archie Bunker, who has died.

Rent Hikes
The Rent Guidelines Board last night gave residents of New York's 1 million rent-stabilized apartments a bigger rent increase than anticipated, enraging tenants but disappointing landlords. At a meeting so raucous the police had to be called, the board approved a hike of 4 percent for one-year leases and 6 percent for two-year deals, upping the 3 percent and 5 percent increases it had tentatively approved on May 9. According to the New York Post, neither tenants nor landlords could recall another year when the board changed its preliminary recommendation.

Many tenant leaders blamed Mayor Giuliani for the board's change, noting that all three of his new appointees switched their votes to support the higher rents. Last month, the mayor had pressed to keep the increase to 3 percent and 5 percent.

Yesterday's rowdy meeting caps a strange year for the board. At its May gathering, the group first approved the 4 percent and 6 percent hikes, then reversed itself, saying one member had not understood what he had voted for. It then approved the 3 percent and 5 percent raises, only to go back to 4 percent and 6 percent yesterday.

The panel rejected a $15 surcharge for tenants paying rents under $500.

Counting On Chaos
Political maneuvering in Albany has created the possibility that New York City may have to use paper ballots in the September primary. The legislation being debated arose from court decisions that said the city must give voters the ability to write in candidates. But the Assembly and Senate differ on which versions of the legislation to pass because some provisions would give political parties more control over the State Board of Elections. Daniel DeFrancesco, director of the New York City Board of Elections, said that with six major mayoral candidates and nearly 300 City Council candidates, there was not room on the machines to allow people to write in challengers for dozens of party positions, like district leader or judicial delegate. Without new legislation, he said, the only option is paper ballots, which would mean counting more than a million pieces of paper. That could take more than two weeks and could delay a runoff election.

Aftermath
Investigators are still trying to determine the cause of an explosion in the Astoria hardware store on Father's Day that injured more than 50 firefighters and killed three of them. As in most such tragedies, officials were looking for a lesson to learn, a mistake in procedure to fix, a policy to implement. Yesterday, Fire Commissioner Thomas Von Essen said that no lives would have been lost had there been a sprinkler in the basement where the fire started. The building was not required to have one because it was built 128 years ago. The Commissioner called for laws requiring sprinkler systems in all buildings where flammable materials are stored

Forecast
Though the city continues to add jobs, and in other ways indicates that it is doing better than the nation as a whole, there are signs that New York City's economy is "losing steam," according to Crain's New York Business. Cutbacks in crucial industries such as Wall Street, high tech and manufacturing have not yet been reflected in the official city data, several analysts said, and they are likely to get worse. The real shock will come in December, Crain's said, when Wall Street bonus payments will be much less than the $13 billion this year, "and are one reason why the New York economy has held up so well compared with the rest of the country. Wall Street profits for this year are now likely to be only a third to a half of last year's, which would reduce bonuses by at least that amount." In anticipation of lower profits, according to the Wall Street Journal, brokerage houses are cutting back expenses, sometimes in trivial ways: In some offices of Salomon Smith Barney, for example, brokers are now forbidden to call 411 directory assistance, and indeed have the number blocked on their phone.

New Charter Revision
Mayor Rudy Giuliani formed his third commission in four years to revise the city charter late Friday afternoon. Former Deputy Mayor Randy Mastro was again appointed chairman, as he was for the 1999 commission, whose recommendations the voters overwhelmingly defeated. What will the new commission try to change? Mayor Rudolph Giuliani said that he would like New York City to have nonpartisan elections, an idea proposed by Republican mayoral candidate Michael Bloomberg and one seen as favoring Republican candidates. Other proposals: to place the scandal-ridden and inept Buildings Department under the control of the Fire Department, and to make permanent two agencies that the mayor created by executive order, the Administration for Children's Services and the Office of Emergency Management.

Good-government groups criticized the mayor for once again giving such little time for the public to consider the proposals and the commission to do its work; the commission has only until early September to decide what recommendations to pitch to the voters on the November ballot. "The mayor has one last chance to degrade the process of amending the city's constitution," said Gene Russianoff of the New York Public Interest Research Group, "and he's taking it."

Albany
"Unless unexpected political shifts occur," the Times reports, "lawmakers will go home without passing a budget, now 11 weeks late, or reaching agreement on most major bills before them."

U.S. Attorney
The Bush Administration is keeping on Mary Jo White as United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, largely to complete two politically charged investigations (one of Clinton's pardons), according to the Times.

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