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.
Last week's stories...
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