Week of 23 July 2001:
School Construction
The report of a state commission released yesterday faulted the Board of
Education for being two billion dollars short of the money it needs to
complete its plans to construct new schools in the city. It said the Board
knew, or should have known, of the gap more than two years ago, and called
for authority over school construction to be taken away from the board and
given to "construction professionals" who answer directly to the mayor.
"This report shows that the system is so badly broken and that the board is
incapable of righting itself," said Roslynn R. Mauskopf, head of the
Moreland Commission, which Governor Pataki created two years ago to
investigate school construction. Schools Chancellor Harold Levy said he was
"disappointed in the overblown rhetoric" of the report and that, while the
planning process was certainly flawed, there was no evidence of fraud or
waste.
Trains To Planes
Direct train service from Penn Station to Newark Airport is scheduled to
begin September 30, according to an agreement signed yesterday between the
Port Authority and New Jersey Transit.
Token Booth Activism
A coalition of some 125 organizations and individuals (community groups,
block associations, advocacy organizations, public officials, the Transport
Workers Union) has so far collected 32,000 signatures to convince the
Metropolitan Transportation Authority to change its plans to close or reduce
the hours of about 100 of the subway's 740 token booths. M.T.A. officials
plan to replace the booths with MetroCard machines, which they say will save
$6 million a year. The Straphanger's Campaign, one of the members of the
inelegantly named Keep The Token Booths Open Coalition, has a list of the 35
booths that are scheduled to close in September,
posted online. Next
Thursday, the coalition is planning a citywide "petition mobilization" near
many of these booths.
Just the Stats, Ma'am
Statistics will soon enter the controversy over whether city police use
racial profiling. Mayor Giuliani and Council Speaker Peter Vallone yesterday
reached agreement on a bill that would require the NYPD to release quarterly
figures on a wide range of police activities including stop-and-frisks
broken down by the race and gender of those questioned. At Giuliani's
insistence, statistics will also be released on witness descriptions of
suspects, which, he says, will indicate police have a good reason to stop
the people they stop.
But statistics can create confusion as well as clarity. The
Daily News
reports that civilian complaints against the police soared by 12 percent
in the first six months of the year, despite Commissioner Bernard Kerik's
drive to improve police community relations. Police officials immediately
tried to downplay the increase, and Dennis Walcott, executive director of
the New York Urban League, said the rise could be an unintentional byproduct
of Kerik's outreach efforts.
A study by the New York City Alliance Against Sexual Assault, the city's
leading rape crisis center, has found that a third of the city's rape
victims had "negative experiences" with NYPD sex-crime investigators. The
findings, based on a study of 48 randomly selected cases, drew immediate
fire from police officials and noted sex crime prosecutor Linda Fairstein,
the Post reports.
A Later Runoff?
City election officials, fearing a long slow vote count after the September
11 primary, are considering delaying the runoff election now set for
September 25. The Board of Elections worries it simply won't have the votes
counted in time to determine which city-wide candidates, if any, should be
involved in the runoff election, according to today's
Times. A runoff for
mayor, public advocate and comptroller is required if none of the candidates
gets at least 40 percent of the vote.
Illegal But Open
The State Supreme Court ruled yesterday that the New York Power Authority
violated the law by failing to conduct environmental impact studies for six
new mini-power plants installed in New York City, but failed to shut them
down, according to Newsday. The court
gave the state until January 31 to complete evaluations of the environmental
and health effects of the plants. Meanwhile the Power Authority can continue
to run the 11 gas-fired turbines generators contained in the plants, 10 of
which are now operational and the last, in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, should be
ready by early August. Last fall, the plants were installed in an effort to
prepare for the summer power needs. The lawsuit was brought by a coalition
of environmental organizations, neighborhood groups, elected officials, and
businesses.
Water
The federal Environmental Protection Agency announced yesterday that it
would not make New York City build an expensive water filtration plant,
something it has been threatening to do for years, and which the city
dreaded, because of the estimated six billion dollar price tag. The city
will be asked instead to guard against possibly harmful bacteria and
parasites in the city's water in other ways, including the possibility of
building a much cheaper ultraviolet treatment plant.
Drugs
Governor George Pataki is offering a new plan to reform the Rockefeller-era
drug laws, which call for unusually harsh mandatory sentences for New
Yorkers convicted of drug offenses. Previous efforts this year were stalled
because of disagreements between the governor and the Democrats in the state
assembly, who felt that Pataki's earlier proposal did not go far enough.
Now, according to the New York Times, the governor is
offering the alternative of drug treatment not just to convicted drug users
but also to drug dealers, and calling for increasing the role of judges and
decreasing the role of prosecutors in deciding which defendants would be
eligible.
Burgers
They may taste the same wherever you eat them, and be just as bad for you,
but the meals at McDonald's and Burger King restaurants throughout the city
are certainly not uniform in price, according to a survey by the city's
Department of Consumer Affairs reported in the Daily News. A supersize Big Mac
Meal at the McDonald's on Fifth Ave. and 34th St. in Manhattan cost $5.87.
Two blocks away, at Manhattan Mall, the same meal cost $7.01. The highest
price for a specific set of items at Burger King was $12.27 at the outlet at
273 Canal Street; the lowest price for the same set of items was $8.28 at
the Burger King at 106 Liberty Street, also in Manhattan.
Subway Changes
A day after the Metropolitan Transportation Authority instituted the most
drastic changes to subway service in more than ten years, it is not only
subway passengers who are confused. The M.T.A.'s own posters attempting to
explain the changes included the line "It's too much to explain on a
poster."
The newspapers are having trouble as well: "The W replaced the B, at least
in Brooklyn," Shaila Dewan wrote in the Times. "The Q with a circle around
it replaced the D, and the Q with a diamond around it replaced the old Q
with a circle around it. Then there are the two new shuttle trains and two
new shuttle buses. It's too much to explain in an article."
See link to the Metropolitan Transportation Authority's map of the changes,
below.
School Compstat
The police called it Compstat, short for computer statistics, the program
that Mayor Rudy Giuliani credits for most of the decrease in crime in New
York City. The police used computers and statistics to pinpoint problem
areas (and problem perpetrators) and then held regular, tense meetings with
police commanders, grilling them about trends in their precincts, and
holding them accountable for any trouble spots. Under Giuliani's prodding,
some dozen city agencies have agreed to institute their own form of
Compstat. The latest to do so is the Board of Education, where Schools
Chancellor Harold Levy has ordered his 32 superintendents to meet at least
four times a year to go over the data about school performance. There are
differences, though, between the school Compstat and the one for the police.
For one, the meetings will be conducted in a "professional" environment
rather than with what school officials call the "paramilitary approach" of
the police department.
This does not please City Hall. "We're going to have to call it 'Nostat'
until we see the kind of meeting that we have recommended," Geoffrey Hess,
Giuliani's special adviser in charge of replicating the Compstat program in
other agencies, told the New York Times. "None of the other agencies are
hiding from this on the grounds that they are not a paramilitary agency."
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