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


Week of 9 July 2001:

Rent Deregulation
Stuyvesant Town and Peter Cooper Village, providers as well as symbols of middle class housing in New York, announced that they are removing their vacant apartments from rent regulation. Apartments in the two complexes will now rent to new occupants for as much as $4,200 a month.

Louima Settlement
Four years after being tortured in a Brooklyn police station, Abner Louima agreed yesterday to settle his civil lawsuit against the New York Police Department and the Patrolmen's Benevolent Association, the police union, for $8.7 million. It is the most the city has ever paid to settle a police brutality case. Nowhere in the 19-page agreement is there mention of a change in police procedures, which is what Louima had pushed for, and which had held up the settlement.

Back to Court
One day after a deal fell apart at the last minute, lawyers will return to Brooklyn federal court today to try to finalize the settlement in Abner Louima1s lawsuit against the city and the Police Benevolent Association. Yesterday the city's corporation counsel prematurely disclosed that the total settlement would be $8.75 million, of which $7.125 million would be paid by the city and $1.625 million by the Patrolmen's Benevolent Association. The snag in finalizing this reportedly had less to do with the details of the settlement than with the way it would be announced.

Louima, who was sodomized with a wooden stick at a Brooklyn police station in 1997, had originally sought $155 million in damages, as well as changes in police practices. If it stands, the cash settlement would be the largest the city has ever paid in a brutality case and would mark the first one where the police union has paid anything to a brutality victim. However, Newsday reports that some African-American leaders have expressed disappointment that the agreement would do virtually nothing to change the way the Police Department operates.

Stalled Schools
Faced with construction overruns of somewhere between $900 million and $1.5 billion or more, the Board of Education yesterday said plans for some new schools would have to be delayed or canceled. Schools Chancellor Harold Levy and board officials blamed the overruns in the $7 billion construction budget on a number of factors including rising building costs in the city and the difficulty of finding sites for schools. To help remedy the problem, Levy recommended increasing the amount set aside for construction contingencies and having the deputy chancellor approve all changes in a project that would add $3 million or more to the original estimate. It would now cost $9 billion to complete the building plan set out in 1999.

W In NYC
In his first visit to New York since he was elected, President George W. Bush spoke yesterday about easing immigration and honored the late Cardinal John O'Connor. The first stop on the President's six hour tour of the city was an Ellis Island ceremony where he led 29 immigrants from 18 countries in the pledge of allegiance. He then proposed speeding up immigration procedures by setting a six-month time limit for the Immigration and Naturalization Service to process applications. "New arrivals should be greeted not with suspicion and resentment, but with openness and courtesy," the President said. While New York remains a city of immigrants -- an estimated 3 million new arrivals currently reside in the city -- today's immigrants are in some ways different than those who came to Ellis Island in the 1900's. A recent article in Gotham Gazette argued that current immigrants are generally more educated, have more professional skills, and often achieve the same or greater economic success.

In the afternoon, President Bush honored Cardinal O'Connor at St. Patrick's Cathedral. He praised the Cardinal as a defender of the poor and of children, both borne and unborn. In a state that the President lost in the last election, the address was seen by many as a way of garnering support from Catholic and other religious communities for his faith-based initiatives.

Ballot Challenge Revolt
There are signs of a mini-revolt against New York's bizarre process of legal challenges against candidates for public office, which begins Thursday. Five of the six active candidates for City Council in district 6 on the Upper West Side announced they would not attempt to knock each other off the ballot. Also, three candidates for separate seats in Queens and Brooklyn -- Erica Ford in district 27, St. Albans; Charles Barron in district 42, East New York; Stanley Kinard in district 36, Bedford-Stuyvesant -- held a joint press conference calling on their opponents to agree not to take each other to court to challenge the validity of the voters' signatures on each other's nominating petitions. Evan Stavisky, a consultant working for Ford's opponent LeRoy Comrie, defended the practice of trying to use the courts to limit voters' choice of candidates. "There are already a lot of nuts running for office," he told the Daily News. "Without this there would be a lot more."

Summer School Absentees
"Although Schools Chancellor Harold O. Levy refused to release citywide attendance figures yesterday," the Times reports, "he hinted in an interview that many of the 190,853 students mandated to attend five weeks of summer school or face repeating a grade were not yet showing up for classes. Under the current law, the city cannot force children to attend summer school, no matter how poor their performance. Mr. Levy has urged the Legislature to make summer school compulsory for failing students."

The Vieques 2 More
Environmentalist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Dennis Rivera, the head of the 1199 health care workers union, were sentenced to 30 days in jail Friday for protesting U.S. Navy bombing exercises on the Puerto Rican island of Vieques. Unlike the four previous New Yorkers sent away for the same protest, Kennedy and Rivera will serve their term in a jail in San Juan.

Campaign Tangle 2
This Thursday is the deadline for major-party candidates to hand in the signatures of registered voters that they have gathered on petitions over the past six weeks, in order to qualify to appear on the ballot in the September 11th primary in New York. But that does not mean they will in fact appear on the ballot. "The filing of the petitions starts the candidate's anguish," says our Campaign Tangle correspondents in Gotham Gazette's Searchlight on Campaign 2001. We offer a preview of what will happen now (including the schedule of strange deadlines) in the bizarre process of legal challenges in which New York candidates try to kick each other off the ballot.

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