Greenpoint residents suing city and developer

From The Brooklyn Paper:

Angry Greenpointers are planning to sue the city and developers over two planned waterfront luxury apartment complexes that they say are steam-rolling over environmental protections.

The ad hoc group announced the suit at a rally against the Greenpoint Landing and 77 Commercial Street developments on Wednesday night. Council candidate Stephen Pierson was on hand to tell the crowd of 75 protesters that he will spearhead the lawsuit with the goal of stopping the 12 towers from rising.

“This is not right, and [the developer] should not go unchallenged,” said Pierson.

The legal action would be based on the city’s decision that the developments — a 10 tower compound with as many as 5,500 apartments and a two tower neighbor with a total of 720 at the Newtown Creek end of Greenpoint — would have no negative environmental impact. The anti-high-rise group says the findings are based on a study that is eight years old, running afoul of a requirement that the city make decisions based on accurate information.

“[The developers] might claim that they have updated a few things,” said Pierson. “But if they had done anything significant, they would have published it.”

The energetic crowd toted signs bearing messages such as “The roof is too damn high” and “Greenpoint does not equal Midtown.” Protesters said they fear a repeat of the massive condo skyscrapers lining Williamsburg’s waterfront, which activists decried for increasing rents and failing on promises to expand parks, but failed to prevent from rising.

Pierson said that even if the Article 78 lawsuit does not hit its mark, it will buy neighbors time until a new mayor takes office, which could be a crucial factor in the battle against the project.

“Even if we lose, we can tie it up until we get a new mayoral administration that might be more sympathetic,” said Pierson “Bloomberg was setting the bar [for developers] very low.”

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DeBlasio would be Bloomberg 2.0

From the Wall Street Journal:

Bill de Blasio has risen to the top of the polls assailing the Bloomberg administration, but if elected he could pursue even more aggressive policies than his predecessor on a crucial issue: creating densely packed new residential towers through land-use decisions.

Mr. de Blasio, the city's public advocate, would push for mandatory affordable housing and fewer tax breaks for developers. But he wouldn't differ from Mr. Bloomberg on a fundamental premise that building significant amounts of new housing is a top way to spur economic growth and control housing costs.

Mr. de Blasio's pro-development policies have helped allay fears in the real-estate industry that perhaps the most liberal Democrat in the race would, as mayor, be a fearsome opponent on big developments.

For some, however, Mr. de Blasio's support for new high-rise towers—even with more affordable housing—is dissonant with his campaign's theme of easing income inequality. As a City Council member in the Park Slope section of Brooklyn, Mr. de Blasio was a strong supporter of the three major Bloomberg-backed development projects, including the project known as Atlantic Yards, which critics say has hastened gentrification and helped deepen the economic divide in that area.

Some liberal community groups said they feel betrayed. "The whole thing is a joke to us that people are looking at this guy as if he cares about the community," said Marlene Donnelly, a member of Friends and Residents of Greater Gowanus, a group that pushed to get the Gowanus Canal designated a Superfund site—a goal Mr. de Blasio unsuccessfully opposed. "I don't find any step of the way that he's actually been on our side here."

Mr. de Blasio has met with developers, and his campaign has received some $460,000 in contributions from real-estate interests, including developers, brokers, architects and construction firms, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis.

From New York Magazine:

Democratic mayoral front-runner Bill de Blasio has styled himself as a scourge of slumlords and a critic of the Bloomberg administration’s policies to shelter the homeless, assailing the “failure of the strategy” in his first policy statement as public advocate. But at a time when he was considered a long-shot candidate, De Blasio found financial support from an unlikely source: one of his most frequent targets, a former Bloomberg administration official who now runs a network of homeless shelters leased from some of the city’s most notorious landlords.

During 2011 and 2012, a small group of property owners and contractors who do business with the city’s Department of Homeless Services donated more than $35,000 to De Blasio’s campaign, according to records on file with the city and state campaign-finance boards. (See the full list at the bottom.) Most of the money came from landlords of single-room-occupancy hotels and slum apartment buildings that operate as shelters under the aegis of Housing Solutions USA, run by Robert Hess, formerly Mayor Bloomberg’s commissioner of homeless services. Though Hess’s organization is a nonprofit, the landlords he works with have reaped millions in public funds by turning their rundown properties into shelters, collecting sky-high rents from the city.

Hess has contributed just $400 to De Blasio, the maximum that campaign-finance law allows for contractors doing business with the city, but in May 2012 he held an intimate fund-raiser for the candidate at his Long Island City apartment. Among the handful of attendees were two hotel landlords who gave generously to De Blasio's campaign, including Alan Lapes, one of the largest and most controversial players in the for-profit shelter industry.

Hess declined to comment on the event when reached by phone yesterday. “That’s a personal matter,” he said. But other attendees described an informal living-room dialogue about De Blasio’s campaign and his plans to care for the city’s homeless population, which has risen to record levels under Bloomberg. Providing shelter beds can be lucrative for landlords — the city typically pays rents of more than $3,000 a month — and one attendee recalls that, prior to the event, Lapes was frank about his reasons for giving. “This is the guy who is going to win,” he recalls Lapes saying. “This is the guy to bet on.”

In February, after the Times reported that Lapes had exploited an obscure loophole in the city’s campaign-finance rules to give De Blasio twice the legal limit, the candidate returned nearly $15,000 in donations from the landlord and his wife. “I’ve just made the decision to return the money, and that’s all I have to say,” he told the Post. But the broader pattern of giving — which ramped up as Housing Solutions USA, formed only in 2011, was pressing forward with controversial multi-million-dollar city shelter contracts in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and the Bronx — has not previously been reported.

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The burden is on Amanda to push through last-minute projects

From Crains:

A derelict sugar refinery in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, the world's largest indoor ice-skating complex in the Bronx and a 63-story Ferris wheel on Staten Island are among a crush of projects that developers are trying to get through the Department of City Planning before the pro-development Bloomberg administration comes to a close on Dec. 31, and its powerful chairwoman, Amanda Burden, steps down.

Adding to the pressure on the department, the mayor himself is looking to win approval on a number of his own legacy projects, including a massive rezoning of midtown east.

The reason for the frenzy is simple: The planning commission, along with the City Council, has the final say on the shape of all land-use projects. Without City Planning's approval now, dozens of projects will need to start from square one with a commission headed by the new mayor's appointees—seven of the 13 members—a prospect that will add great uncertainty, and potentially months or even years of work.

The projects now heaped at the department's downtown door at 22 Reade St. roughly fall into three categories: city-led developments, private projects and those being pursued by private developers on public property. For many, it almost feels like now or never.

In an effort to meet its titanic obligations, the department recently added four temporary planners at its Manhattan headquarters.

"Mayor Bloomberg has asked all city agencies to get as much done as they possibly can in the next 134 days, and the Department of City Planning is working hard to do just that," said a spokesman for the department.

Some developers are going so far as to throw together provisional plans for upcoming projects and then try to get preliminary approvals for these project outlines.

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Candidates want to be anybody but Bloomberg

From the NY Times:

Michael R. Bloomberg is a data-loving, health-enforcing nonpartisan who defined what it meant to be a mayor over the past 12 years, mentoring big-city chief executives from New Orleans to Philadelphia.

But closer to home, the major candidates vying to succeed him at City Hall in New York are not pleading for his pointers, or pressing for a place in his photo ops: none of them, Democrat or Republican, have even asked for his political blessing in the primaries next week.

They instead describe polls showing that Mr. Bloomberg’s endorsement, once deemed a coveted prize, would now dampen their appeal to the party faithful, not burnish it, and they fret over lashing themselves to his divisive policies on policing, not to mention his soured relationship with municipal unions.

It is a humbling and alien experience for the relatively popular mogul turned mayor, who is unpracticed in humility: in the race to lead a post-Bloomberg New York City, there is profound wariness of being viewed as, well, too much like Mr. Bloomberg.

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Udalls Cove needs more protection

From Bayside Patch:

A Douglaston civic organization is calling on the city to purchase five parcels of Udalls Cove to protect it from possibly being developed.

The Udalls Cove Preservation Committee sent a letter to Mayor Michael Bloomberg earlier this week, calling on him to allocate funding for the acquisition of five parcels of the cove.

Walter Mugdan, the group’s president said he recently discovered that the parcels’ owner intended to sell the land.

Mugdan said the last time such a threat arose in 2002. Two years later, the mayor agreed to allocate funding to acquire a section of Udalls Cove for preservation purposes and to prevent 18 homes from being constructed at the site.

Bloomberg actually bought land to prevent development somewhere? Why is Douglaston so different from the rest of the city?

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Bloomberg pushing the fingerprinting of NYCHA residents

From CBS New York:

Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s latest crime-fighting idea had a lot of people riled up on Friday.

The mayor wants to fingerprint more than 600,000 people who live in public housing. He said it would be done to make the projects safer.

Bloomberg was responding to questions about Federal Judge Shira Schendlin’s ruling on the stop-and-frisk program when the topic shifted to security and the New York City Housing Authority. Bloomberg said there has to be a way to make the projects safer.

“Five percent of our population lives in NYCHA housing, 20 percent of the crime is in NYCHA housing – numbers like that. And we’ve just got to find some way to keep bringing crime down there. And we have a whole group of police officers assigned to NYCHA housing,” Bloomberg said. “The people that live there, most of them, want more police protection. They want more people. If you have strangers walking in the halls of your apartment building, don’t you want somebody to stop and say, ‘Who are you, why are you here?’”

Needless to say, there was a lot of finger-pointing at Mayor Bloomberg on Friday. The notion of fingerprinting 620,000 people in public housing — even with the best of intentions of making buildings safer — caught a lot of New York City residents off guard.

“What we really should have is fingerprinting to get in, since there’s an allegation that some of the apartments aren’t occupied by the people who originally have the lease,” Bloomberg said on his weekly radio show.

I guess he means like this guy. There's also Bloomberg's plan for market rate housing between the projects.

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Blast from the past

Back in 2001 when this mailer went out, Mike Bloomberg made a big deal about putting an end to racial profiling. So much for that.

UPDATE: A federal judge has ruled stop-and-frisk unconstitutional.

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That's some interesting logic

From the Daily News:

One of the worst frauds in New York history actually saved the “lucky” city money, Mayor Bloomberg boasted Friday.

Federal prosecutors have indicted 11 contractors and consultants in a $500 million rip-off involving the computerized CityTime payroll system.

But, since the U.S. attorney forced the main contractor, SAIC, to reimburse the city’s losses, taxpayers came out ahead, Bloomberg said.

“There was fraud,” Hizzoner conceded Friday on his weekly radio show,” but added, “We recovered most of the money ... that whole system cost us something like $100 million dollars and it should’ve been many times that.”

“We were lucky,” the mayor continued. “Because of the fraud, in the end, it turned out, that because of the recovery that we saved a lot of money.”

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Existing parks are Bloomberg's stepchildren

From Crains:

Google billionaire Eric Schmidt and his wife, Wendy, donated $15 million to officially kick-start the capital campaign to raise private funds to build a new public park on Governors Island that's slated to open in 2015.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg officially broke ground on The Hills on Thursday and said a total of $36 million had been raised to build the park that will be made from recycled construction and fill materials.

The Trust for Governors Island, the nonprofit that runs the former military base now owned by the city, will need to raise a total of $70 million for The Hills. The park will rise from 25 feet to 80 feet above sea level and at its highest point will provide visitors with a 360-degree panorama of the Statue of Liberty, New York Harbor and lower Manhattan's skyline.

In addition to the Schmidts' gift, donations have been pledged by Bloomberg Philanthropies, the Carson Family Charitable Trust, Charina Endowment Fund, the Lauder Foundation, Joan H. Tisch and family and the Tiffany & Co. Foundation.

In a statement, Mr. Bloomberg called Governors Island "at the center of our administration's efforts to revitalize our waterfront and create new and innovative green spaces along the water's edge." He predicted that construction of The Hills "will create a landmark in New York Harbor that will be enjoyed for generations to come."

New parks: Worthy of Bloomberg philanthropy.
Existing parks: Worthy of private development.

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BOE trying to stymie DOI investigation

From the Daily News:

The patronage slugs at the city Board of Elections have long been incorrigibly incompetent — and now they’re proving anything but incompetently incorrigible.

With the skill of a crime family consigliere, board general counsel Steven Richman has set out to sabotage a Department of Investigation probe of the agency’s numerous failings by engineering a coverup in plain sight.

Mayor Bloomberg has allocated $800,000 so that DOI can get to the bottom of how and why the board mishandles elections while wasting huge money to hire politically connected staff members and their brothers-in-law.

The board is an independent operation, ruled by a panel divided equally between representatives of Democratic and Republican Party bosses. The mayor funds the budget but has no say over how business is done, except he has authority to dispatch DOI to look at the innards.

Backed with that power, on July 8, DOI Deputy General Counsel Benet Kearney and Inspector General Michelle Offsey Raimondi met with Richman and a deputy to discuss access to the records and information.

Richman told them, among other things, that all requests for interviews and paperwork would have to be in writing and would be submitted to the ten-member board for public discussion, regardless of whether DOI needed to keep questions secret for investigative purposes.

Richman also said no employees would be available for interviews during working hours until after the panel certifies the results of the November mayoral election because, you see, everyone will be just too busy until then.

As for when certification might take place, consider: The board only got around to certifying the outcome of last year’s presidential election on July 2, a full eight months after the fact.
Richman is open about his intention to resist DOI until after Bloomberg is gone, while hoping for greater tolerance from the next mayor.

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Bloomberg taking Liu to court over former commissioner's contract

From the NY Times:

Fed up with what he views as a pattern of obstructionist behavior, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg has taken the rare step of filing a lawsuit against the city comptroller, John C. Liu, for rejecting two municipal contracts.

The contracts would pay Aguila Inc., a company run by Robert V. Hess, Mr. Bloomberg’s former commissioner of homeless services, a total of $67.6 million to operate homeless shelters in the South Bronx and on the Upper West Side. The shelters on the Upper West Side, on West 95th Street, have long been a target of criticism from local residents and elected officials, who say, among other complaints, that the area has an excess of similar facilities.

Mr. Liu rejected the contracts on July 3, saying they were too vague as to how many people would be offered services. And in a criticism of Mr. Bloomberg’s record on homelessness, Mr. Liu argued that “it would be unconscionable to compound past errors with these faulty contracts.”

But Mr. Bloomberg, in a lawsuit filed on Thursday in State Supreme Court in Manhattan, said the courts had long held that registration of contracts was “not a vehicle for the comptroller to usurp the mayor’s authority to enter into contracts.”

So what do you think is really going on here? Bloomie trying to get his buddy a contract before he leaves. So loyal to this particular individual that he will waste taxpayer money on a lawsuit to make sure he gets paid. Sounds like honest graft to me.

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What lame duck deputy mayors do with their time

From DNA Info:

Mayor Michael Bloomberg targeted Queens City Councilman Mark Weprin in retaliation for his support of two bills aimed at reining in the NYPD, sources told DNAinfo New York.

The two stop-and-frisk related measures, which passed the City Council last month, would allow people to sue the NYPD if they believe they were racially profiled and also creates an inspector general to oversee the department.

Bloomberg aide Howard Wolfson was “actively making the phone calls and making the last-ditch effort to find a viable candidate to run” against Weprin, said one Queens Republican insider.

The mayor’s office declined to comment.

But multiple sources on the ground in Queens confirmed that calls from Wolfson went out scouting for candidates who would use the mayor's considerable resources to run a campaign against Weprin.

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Pinsky leaves EDC

From Crains:

Seth Pinsky, the long-time head of the city Economic Development Corp., will be leaving his post at the agency to join the real estate investment firm RXR Realty, the company announced on Tuesday morning.

The city said Kyle Kimball, currently an executive director at the agency, will serve as as Mr. Pinsky's successor. Mr. Pinsky will stay at the agency until August.

"Seth Pinsky has been an exceptional public servant," said Mayor Michael Bloomberg in a statement. "We're going to be counting on [Kyle Kimball] as we sprint to the finish over the next 168 days, and I have no doubt he will succeed in managing some of our most important projects."

Mr. Pinsky, a stalwart of Mr. Bloomberg's economic development agenda for the past five years, will lead a new arm of RXR Realty that the company said will focus on investment in developing New York markets.

He leaves behind a big list of failed legacy projects.

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Bloomberg lets slip that FMCP soccer stadium is off the table

From DNA Info:

It has yet to be officially announced where New York City F.C. will call home when the new Major League Soccer franchise begins play in 2015.

But the mayor casually revealed that Yankee Stadium will be the home for the new soccer team during his weekly radio address Sunday touting New York's status as a "global sports mecca" ahead of this week's MLB All-Star Game.

"Just look at our three newest sports arenas: the new Yankee Stadium; the Barclays Center, home of the Brooklyn Nets; and the Mets' home base, Citi Field. Each pumps millions of dollars into our economy with every game they host. And each venue is gearing up to play an even bigger role in our city’s economy,” said Bloomberg, according to a transcript that was amended roughly one hour after it was posted on his website.

"Yankee Stadium will become the home of the New York City Football Club, the first soccer club in the five boroughs since the 1970s," Bloomberg said. "Barclays will add the New York Islanders to its roster in 2015. And, of course, Citi Field is hosting Tuesday’s All-Star Game.”

A Google cache version of the transcript page reveals Bloomberg's original remarks, which did not indicate whether the team would play at Yankee Stadium on a temporary or permanent basis.

Julie Wood, a spokesperson for the mayor, characterized Bloomberg's original remarks as an overstatement.

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City jacking up streets of Broad Channel

From the NY Times:

“We do not care about budgets; we are taxpaying people,” said John Heaphy, 69, a lifelong resident of the area, Broad Channel, Queens, which is built on a marsh that juts into the bay. “From the lowest politician to the governor’s office, we’ve been begging, please help us.”

Now, the city is doing just that, budgeting $22 million to try to save the neighborhood by installing bulkheads and by raising streets and sidewalks by three feet.

The Broad Channel project offers a preview of the infrastructure outlays that Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg is envisioning as part of a new $20 billion plan to protect the city’s 520 miles of coast over the next decade from rising sea levels.

But the project also raises fundamental questions about whether, in an era of extreme weather, the government should come to the aid of neighborhoods that are trying to fend off inevitably rising waters.

Broad Channel’s vulnerability was exposed in October during Hurricane Sandy, which toppled homes into the bay, some of which still lie in ruins along the beach. Yet the situation here is far worse than in some other neighborhoods damaged in the hurricane because Broad Channel suffers flooding from the tides and heavy rain, not just from storm surges.

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Sealed with a kiss

From the Politicker:

For one, it marked the end of an era, his last governing document over the finances of the city he’s run for the past 12 years. For the other, it marked the start of a new chapter, her chance to celebrate the early budget she hopes to inherit come January.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg and his wannabe successor, City Council Speaker Christine Quinn, unveiled the duo’s final budget deal Sunday evening, surrounded by fellow council members in the grand rotunda of City Hall.

With a handshake and kiss on the cheek following lots of applause and accolades, the pair announced a $70 billion deal that restores threatened cuts to libraries and childcare, prevents fire house closures, and adds an extra $58 million to the New York City Housing Authority to help plug a $200 million budget hole caused by federal sequestration cuts.

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Liu rejects Central Park Conservancy contract as unfair to rest of City

From A Walk in the Park:

June 19, 2013

Honorable Michael R. Bloomberg
Mayor
City Hall
New York, NY 10007

Dear Mayor Bloomberg:

My office has returned the ten-year, $90 million Central Park Conservancy contract submitted by the NYC Department of Parks & Recreation and is currently reviewing an additional $60 million capital contract with the Conservancy.

I write to ask you to reflect on the wide disparities that exist among parks in the five boroughs. For example, St. Nicholas Park, located just a few blocks north of Central Park in Harlem, recently received a score of 77 out of a possible 100 points from New Yorkers for Parks because of trip hazards, litter, and out-of-service drinking fountains.

The Parks Department can and should amend both Conservancy contracts so that they help provide more equity among parks. These modifications should also take into account the exceptionally strong financial condition of the Conservancy.

We recommend that the following changes be made:

· Eliminate or reduce the Conservancy’s revenue-sharing agreement. Currently 50 percent of the estimated approximately $12 million Central Park net concession and special event revenue is distributed to the Conservancy. In contrast, very few if any other City parks have such a beneficial arrangement.

· Reallocate capital funds toward higher-needs parks. If we are serious about equitably distributing scarce resources, we need to reallocate a portion of the City’s capital contributions for Central Park to parks with higher needs that are over-reliant on discretionary funds.

· Increase financial transparency. The Conservancy’s 2011-2012 tax filings show revenues of $47 million. Other public sources indicate that the Conservancy has a workforce of approximately 300 employees, ranging from seasonal grounds technicians paid $18,228 to the President and CEO, who received total compensation of $456,319. Like the Parks Department and every other City agency, the Conservancy should publish spending and payroll data on Checkbook NYC, the City’s financial transparency website. Mandatory federal tax filings do not provide adequate transparency.

· Encourage expanded support of area parks. The Conservancy should work with the Parks Department to identify struggling parks throughout the five boroughs that would benefit from the Conservancy’s operational and development expertise. Such a collaboration could help mitigate some of the widespread concerns that public-private partnerships favor only a handful of elite parks.

According to its most recent tax return, the Conservancy has more than $215 million in assets. This staggering number does not take into account the recently announced $100 million private donation.

The City should ensure that parks across the five boroughs—and not just Central Park—are being funded adequately and equitably. When the City is unable to provide funding for basic maintenance and much-needed capital projects, one must question whether it is appropriate to provide our wealthiest park with $150 million of new resources.

Let’s work together to maintain Central Park and provide equity among all of our parks.

Sincerely,


John C. Liu

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Whoever we vote for, the city is screwed

From City Journal:

Listening to some of the candidates to succeed Mayor Michael Bloomberg, you’d think that New York City’s biggest challenge was how to spend billions of dollars in spare revenue. Bill Thompson wants to put 2,000 extra cops on the street at a cost of $200 million a year. One of his rivals, Public Advocate Bill de Blasio, pledges to introduce universal pre-K in the city’s schools, a project with a $530 million annual price tag. Thompson, de Blasio, and another candidate, New York City comptroller John Liu, want to build at least 60,000 units of new subsidized housing over the next four years. The bill for that could dwarf the cost of the police and school proposals.

But no matter how big the spending dreams of the city’s would-be mayors, one of them is going to wake up to a fiscal nightmare in November. New York’s budget has grown hugely over Mayor Bloomberg’s 12 years in office, and it may finally have outstripped the Wall Street–generated tax revenues that have made such profligacy possible. The next mayor won’t have the luxury of expanding the government; instead, he’ll have to figure out how to pay for one that’s already dangerously bloated.

If Bloomberg’s goal was soaking up revenue and leaving his successor as little to spend as possible, he seems to have pulled it off. Spending from city revenues rose from $28.9 billion when Bloomberg took office to $47.5 billion in fiscal year 2012 and will be an estimated $50.2 billion in 2013—a staggering 70 percent increase per resident. Inflation rose only 29 percent over the same period. Had Bloomberg held Gotham’s budget increase to the growth rates of inflation and population, the city would currently be spending $12 billion less a year.

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"Senator Rules" is Mike Bloomberg

From the Queens Chronicle:

Within the halls of Albany roams a lawmaker, unelected and unseen, with one role: to introduce legislation no other state senator wants to be associated with. “Senator Rules” is his (or her) name, and he (or she) is the lead sponsor of a bill currently in the Senate’s Rules Committee that will alienate what is now parkland to allow the United States Tennis Association to expand its presence in Flushing Meadows Corona Park.

The legislation literally lists “Rules” as its sponsor, reflecting the committee’s ability to refer bills to itself. It is part of a common practice in the Senate, sources with knowledge of Senate practices told the Chronicle.

“Senator Rules” is the resulting fictitious lawmaker jokingly referred to in the halls of the state Capitol for such bills. But intrigue surrounds who exactly pushed for the USTA alienation bill. Several lawmakers demurred at speculating who pushed the Rules Committee to take up the bill, but several sources said a Republican-controlled Senate committee would not grant anonymity to a Democratic lawmaker.

“Senator Rules” commonly introduces bills that increase taxes in Republican districts, said one source with knowledge of the Senate’s machinations. The fictional lawmaker also sponsors legislation on behalf of municipalities — which may point to the USTA bill’s author, which some sources believe to be the Bloomberg administration.

The last line of the bill’s sponsor’s memo reads, “Accordingly, the Mayor urges the earliest possible favorable consideration of this proposal by the Legislature.”

“The bill seems to have been submitted directly from the Mayor’s Office,” said one source, who asked to remain anonymous.

An inquiry with the Mayor’s Office prompted a terse response stating Bloomberg supports the USTA’s plan, but no specifics about the administration’s role in the legislation’s genesis.

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Outer borough street hails get green light

From the NY Post:

The state Court of Appeals handed Mayor Bloomberg a major victory today by clearing the way for a new taxi system in the outer boroughs to allow street hails.

The yellow cab industry had sued to block the plan, claiming the administration had not gotten approval with the City Council before getting the green light in Albany.

"We conclude that the HAIL Act addresses a matter of substantial State concern. This is not a purely local issue," Judge Eugene F. Pigott Jr. wrote in his decision. "Millions of people from within and without the State visit the City annually. Some of these visitors are disabled, and will undoubtedly benefit from the increase in accessible vehicles in the Manhattan central business district and in the outer boroughs. The Act is for the benefit of all New Yorkers, and not merely those residing within the City."

The appeals court decision also allows the city to proceed with the sale of $1 billion of new taxi medallions.

The new system would create a new class of taxicabs in the outer boroughs and northern Manhattan, to supplement the yellow taxicabs which can cruise anywhere but mostly operate in Midtown and downtown Manhattan.

Many of the current livery cab drivers are expected to join the new livery system and pick up street hails in the outer boroughs. Legally, they can only pick up by appointment but the law is widely flouted.

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