(This is an old post)
"OH CITY, WHERE ART THOU?”
The chaos keeps coming like a tsunami poised to sweep away all vestiges of what is about to become, a lost civilization.
It is not enough that we are threatened by Washington with programs so stupid and taxes so confiscatory that some days all we want to do is stay in bed…take a mental health day from the maelstrom so to speak. It is not enough that we have to try and exist with a state government so dysfunctional that the entire country including Illinois, New Jersey, California and Louisiana take pride they are not us.
Now in the space of a single week two of the most irresponsible actions ever taken by bureaucrats and elected officials demonstrate we are closer to edge of the precipice then we were perhaps ever willing to believe. I speak of course about the second MTA “doomsday plan” in one year and the city Council’s decision to let 2200 jobs go down the toilet for purely ideological reasons.
First the MTA, who are the keepers of dual books and poster children for the lack of public accountability. It was only last spring that the long suffering public were threatened with draconian (a word used all too frequently with the MTA) service cuts or economy harmful fare hikes. Fares went up, the city was promised transit stability for a reasonable period of time and the suddenly after a disastrous and controversial wage arbitration, doomsday is once more upon us. This time public school children, elderly and disabled New Yorkers have been added to the array of victims along with the riders on 19 bus lines and 2 subway lines that will simply cease to exist. If that were not enough, weekend and/or overnight service on 45 other lines and deep service cuts to 16 other subway lines are scheduled as well. 4 express bus lines will also be impacted. 417, 243 public school students will lose their free full fare Metro Cards and 167, 912 other students will lose their half fare Metro Cards. This student subsidy program has been in place since 1948.
The city’s Access-A-Ride program provides 24 hour door to door service for around 65,000 disabled (half over the age of 75) New Yorkers a year and 26,500 rides a day. These trips mandated to a degree by Federal Law, average over $66 a trip with an annual budget of over $450,000 a year. For most of the riders they are an economic and psychological lifeline. Next year the 2010 MTA budget proposes to begin limiting the trips from home to the nearest accessible train and bus, which of course just got harder because of the cutbacks for those very services. Has anyone wondered how these New Yorkers will get to their final destination or for that matter back home again? Oh those pesky details!
What was the reaction of the Governor and the Mayor who was out of town in Green Copenhagen saving mankind from itself due to the fact we breathe? (Can you believe it? Politicians have finally perfected their art by actually coming up with a way to tax us for the use of air!) If you guessed tolls on bridges you win the big prize! Yes their solution is to make it even harder to travel in this city by putting the screws to drivers to make them pay for the rapacious wage demands of a workforce who have it so good they don’t even have to pay a co-pay for their medical coverage and the almost criminal ineptitude of management who can’t seem to ever get a budget to balance.
Hey Mayor …Hey Governor how about a wage freeze during the most serious economic downturn since the 1930s? Why do public service union members not have to sacrifice when small businesses are failing and total unemployment is heading toward 17%? I for one, like former Assemblyman Steve Kaufman’s idea of declaring a city or region wide emergency and issuing emergency franchises to provide as much private sector service as possible to cover the cut backs. For the record I am a friend of Kaufman but I have never failed to disagree with him on a host of issues. On this one he has nailed it!
City residents cannot continue to live with the ongoing uncertainty that they may not be able to get to their job or school or Doctor, or supermarket because of no transportation or unaffordable transportation. With all the daily indignities New Yorkers have to put up with such as tickets, rude public workers, sky high prices and ever rising housing and energy costs (yeah Mayor Mike don’t give me windmills …give me Nuclear or gas from the Marcellus Shale), it is way past the time that the taxpayers demand a new way of providing affordable and reliable public transit services for this city. Kaufman points the way.
The second atrocity inflicted on the suffering public this week is the politically engineered destruction of more than 2200 jobs at the proposed redevelopment of the Kingsbridge Armory in the Bronx. The City Council and the Bronx Borough President tag teamed to scuttle a $300 million economic development project that Mayors have been trying to get through since the Armory went vacant in 1993, costing the city $1 million a year just to maintain it.
The Bloomberg administration and the NYCEDC skillfully guided the project through all the environmental, land use and community sand traps and mine fields only to have an alleged “community alliance” called the Kingsbridge Armory Redevelopment Alliance or KARA enter the fray just prior to the selection of a developer to demand a “Community Benefit Agreement” (CBA) that demanded among other things that all retail jobs within the mall to be developed would pay a “living wage” of at least $10 an hour with benefits or $11.50 an hour without benefits. Related Cos. the selected developer promised Union prevailing wages with health and pension benefits for the building trades’ workers who would rebuild the armory into a shopping mall as well as union wages for all regular mall employees. The mall was to have a full scale 60,000 square foot supermarket, Movie Theater, community space, among other amenities. At Kara’s request there was even to be something called a “World Peace Atrium” which Related agreed to.
But Related could not nor should it have agreed to try and bring in a variety of businesses with mandated “living wages” as a prerequisite. The Bronx is the poorest county in the nation. Unemployment in the Bronx is at 13.4%. 10% of all “Bronxites” or 128,000 persons are on public assistance. 29% are on food stamps. Other projects such as the redevelopment around Yankee Stadium did not have to go forward under the kind of blackmail that this project was subjected to.
The Bronx Borough President disapproved the plan for specious parking and traffic reasons even though the state and city and the City Planning Commission examined these “issues” and approved them . The City Council allegedly directed by the Working Families Party acting in behest of retail workers decided ‘to hell” with their brothers and sisters in the Building and Construction Trades Council and got the City Council to defeat the plan 45 to 1 for the same spurious reasons the Borough President had conjured up. In short they simply let 2200 jobs disappear probably never to be seen again. Then in an orgy of pompous self congratulations they publicly celebrated this almost unbelievable act of self indulgent, stupid and arrogant incompetence by boisterously patting themselves on the back.
One is left wondering what in hell is the world view of elected officials who would take away jobs from people who desperately need them and then “crow” about it as if they did something good!
One can also only hope that these same elected officials will spend the rest of their terms in office explaining to construction workers, students needing jobs and people looking for their first job or for a much needed second job why those jobs are not there and why that is so damned good!
Where is the city of my youth? Where is the lusty, brawling metropolis of big dreams, big ideas and big achievements where you could live your life in the midst of giants who would turn their visions into reality and that reality into magic? New York was like no other place on earth then because the leadership in both the city and state was second to none and there was a shared consensus that capitalism was good and hard work was the only sure path to success.
Now we are becoming second rate because those shared values no longer have the same resonance that they did for former generations. There is a new game in town. It is played by the ideological children of Saul Alinsky and they mean to shove their nasty little beliefs down our throats despite all our protests and all our struggles. Somehow we have to summon the spirit and strength of yesterday to defeat today and preserve tomorrow for all of those yet to come. Oh New York…oh my city…where art thou?
ERLANDSSON
The chaos keeps coming like a tsunami poised to sweep away all vestiges of what is about to become, a lost civilization.
It is not enough that we are threatened by Washington with programs so stupid and taxes so confiscatory that some days all we want to do is stay in bed…take a mental health day from the maelstrom so to speak. It is not enough that we have to try and exist with a state government so dysfunctional that the entire country including Illinois, New Jersey, California and Louisiana take pride they are not us.
Now in the space of a single week two of the most irresponsible actions ever taken by bureaucrats and elected officials demonstrate we are closer to edge of the precipice then we were perhaps ever willing to believe. I speak of course about the second MTA “doomsday plan” in one year and the city Council’s decision to let 2200 jobs go down the toilet for purely ideological reasons.
First the MTA, who are the keepers of dual books and poster children for the lack of public accountability. It was only last spring that the long suffering public were threatened with draconian (a word used all too frequently with the MTA) service cuts or economy harmful fare hikes. Fares went up, the city was promised transit stability for a reasonable period of time and the suddenly after a disastrous and controversial wage arbitration, doomsday is once more upon us. This time public school children, elderly and disabled New Yorkers have been added to the array of victims along with the riders on 19 bus lines and 2 subway lines that will simply cease to exist. If that were not enough, weekend and/or overnight service on 45 other lines and deep service cuts to 16 other subway lines are scheduled as well. 4 express bus lines will also be impacted. 417, 243 public school students will lose their free full fare Metro Cards and 167, 912 other students will lose their half fare Metro Cards. This student subsidy program has been in place since 1948.
The city’s Access-A-Ride program provides 24 hour door to door service for around 65,000 disabled (half over the age of 75) New Yorkers a year and 26,500 rides a day. These trips mandated to a degree by Federal Law, average over $66 a trip with an annual budget of over $450,000 a year. For most of the riders they are an economic and psychological lifeline. Next year the 2010 MTA budget proposes to begin limiting the trips from home to the nearest accessible train and bus, which of course just got harder because of the cutbacks for those very services. Has anyone wondered how these New Yorkers will get to their final destination or for that matter back home again? Oh those pesky details!
What was the reaction of the Governor and the Mayor who was out of town in Green Copenhagen saving mankind from itself due to the fact we breathe? (Can you believe it? Politicians have finally perfected their art by actually coming up with a way to tax us for the use of air!) If you guessed tolls on bridges you win the big prize! Yes their solution is to make it even harder to travel in this city by putting the screws to drivers to make them pay for the rapacious wage demands of a workforce who have it so good they don’t even have to pay a co-pay for their medical coverage and the almost criminal ineptitude of management who can’t seem to ever get a budget to balance.
Hey Mayor …Hey Governor how about a wage freeze during the most serious economic downturn since the 1930s? Why do public service union members not have to sacrifice when small businesses are failing and total unemployment is heading toward 17%? I for one, like former Assemblyman Steve Kaufman’s idea of declaring a city or region wide emergency and issuing emergency franchises to provide as much private sector service as possible to cover the cut backs. For the record I am a friend of Kaufman but I have never failed to disagree with him on a host of issues. On this one he has nailed it!
City residents cannot continue to live with the ongoing uncertainty that they may not be able to get to their job or school or Doctor, or supermarket because of no transportation or unaffordable transportation. With all the daily indignities New Yorkers have to put up with such as tickets, rude public workers, sky high prices and ever rising housing and energy costs (yeah Mayor Mike don’t give me windmills …give me Nuclear or gas from the Marcellus Shale), it is way past the time that the taxpayers demand a new way of providing affordable and reliable public transit services for this city. Kaufman points the way.
The second atrocity inflicted on the suffering public this week is the politically engineered destruction of more than 2200 jobs at the proposed redevelopment of the Kingsbridge Armory in the Bronx. The City Council and the Bronx Borough President tag teamed to scuttle a $300 million economic development project that Mayors have been trying to get through since the Armory went vacant in 1993, costing the city $1 million a year just to maintain it.
The Bloomberg administration and the NYCEDC skillfully guided the project through all the environmental, land use and community sand traps and mine fields only to have an alleged “community alliance” called the Kingsbridge Armory Redevelopment Alliance or KARA enter the fray just prior to the selection of a developer to demand a “Community Benefit Agreement” (CBA) that demanded among other things that all retail jobs within the mall to be developed would pay a “living wage” of at least $10 an hour with benefits or $11.50 an hour without benefits. Related Cos. the selected developer promised Union prevailing wages with health and pension benefits for the building trades’ workers who would rebuild the armory into a shopping mall as well as union wages for all regular mall employees. The mall was to have a full scale 60,000 square foot supermarket, Movie Theater, community space, among other amenities. At Kara’s request there was even to be something called a “World Peace Atrium” which Related agreed to.
But Related could not nor should it have agreed to try and bring in a variety of businesses with mandated “living wages” as a prerequisite. The Bronx is the poorest county in the nation. Unemployment in the Bronx is at 13.4%. 10% of all “Bronxites” or 128,000 persons are on public assistance. 29% are on food stamps. Other projects such as the redevelopment around Yankee Stadium did not have to go forward under the kind of blackmail that this project was subjected to.
The Bronx Borough President disapproved the plan for specious parking and traffic reasons even though the state and city and the City Planning Commission examined these “issues” and approved them . The City Council allegedly directed by the Working Families Party acting in behest of retail workers decided ‘to hell” with their brothers and sisters in the Building and Construction Trades Council and got the City Council to defeat the plan 45 to 1 for the same spurious reasons the Borough President had conjured up. In short they simply let 2200 jobs disappear probably never to be seen again. Then in an orgy of pompous self congratulations they publicly celebrated this almost unbelievable act of self indulgent, stupid and arrogant incompetence by boisterously patting themselves on the back.
One is left wondering what in hell is the world view of elected officials who would take away jobs from people who desperately need them and then “crow” about it as if they did something good!
One can also only hope that these same elected officials will spend the rest of their terms in office explaining to construction workers, students needing jobs and people looking for their first job or for a much needed second job why those jobs are not there and why that is so damned good!
Where is the city of my youth? Where is the lusty, brawling metropolis of big dreams, big ideas and big achievements where you could live your life in the midst of giants who would turn their visions into reality and that reality into magic? New York was like no other place on earth then because the leadership in both the city and state was second to none and there was a shared consensus that capitalism was good and hard work was the only sure path to success.
Now we are becoming second rate because those shared values no longer have the same resonance that they did for former generations. There is a new game in town. It is played by the ideological children of Saul Alinsky and they mean to shove their nasty little beliefs down our throats despite all our protests and all our struggles. Somehow we have to summon the spirit and strength of yesterday to defeat today and preserve tomorrow for all of those yet to come. Oh New York…oh my city…where art thou?
ERLANDSSON
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