Category: News and Opinion

I’ll make one more post about the snow and then leave it to the noisemakers and social climbers. As noted previously, the snow emergency rules are not what I would have expected. They don’t say you shouldn’t drive. They only say you shouldn’t park on snow emergency routes, and shouldn’t drive there without chains or snow tires.

Well, I looked over the list of snow emergency streets — the priority streets. There aren’t a lot of them. For example, I live in the middle of Windsor Terrace, Brooklyn. The nearest snow emergency routes are 3rd and 4th Avenue in lower Park Slope, Coney Island Avenue in Flatbush, Fort Hamilton Parkway in Kensignton, and the Prospect Expressway. In the whole of Windsor Terrace, plowing is theoretically a lower priority, and everyone is free to drive without snow tires and get stuck in the middle of the road. What would happen if there was an emergency — a fire or someone needed an ambulance on my street, and the Prospect Expressway exit ramp was the closed location passable?

From the New York Times: “Harry Nespoli, president of the Uniformed Sanitationmen’s Association, said the problems late Sunday underscored how the city could not rely on outside contractors to help with snow removal and other jobs in such storms, particularly during a holiday weekend. ‘You can never count on the privates, because they don’t have to show up,’ he said. ‘What obligation do they have? The mayor can’t order them out. The commissioner can’t order them out.’” From the New York Post: “Selfish Sanitation Department bosses from the snow-slammed outer boroughs ordered their drivers to snarl the blizzard cleanup to protest budget cuts — a disastrous move that turned streets into a minefield for emergency-services vehicles, The Post has learned… ‘They sent a message to the rest of the city that these particular labor issues are more important,’ said City Councilman Dan Halloran (R-Queens), who was visited yesterday by a group of guilt-ridden sanitation workers who confessed the shameless plot.’”

Now let’s get one thing clear. There are no Sanitation Department budget cuts. There are no cuts in most agencies, except for the usual suspects like parks, libraries, the Administration for Children’s Services and public higher education. If there was, taxes would be going down, and no one is suggesting that. What is happening is a huge shift of resources from people providing services today (public or private) to debts run up by Generation Greed, and retirement and senior health care that they had promised themselves but chose not to pay for (or, in another factor, cut a deal to retroactively enhance). And this is just getting started.

With rumors flying that Bloomberg has a conspiracy against all the boroughs except Manhattan and the Sanitation workers engaged in a job action, the critics clearly have created an over-reaction. We’ve had garbage trucks going by twice this evening scraping blacktop on my block. Look guys, if your area is clear go home, get some sleep, and eventually pick up the garbage OK?

The real problems are there were not enough streets clear during the height of the storm to provide emergency access, which may have led to tragedy, and all the stuck vehicles in the road inhibited recovery. Let’s think about what to do about that. If the state government is not involved and it doesn’t cost money, this may be fixable, and the next storm could hit at any time. Five of the top seven in the past 15 years. Four of the top seven in seven years. Two of the top seven in the past year.

GATE (2/24/10): One may well argue that David Greenfield would be just as subservient to [his benefactors such as Vito Lopez and the Mayor]…I’m not sure the accusation is true. The truth is that Greenfield appears to be one ballsy son of a bitch.

Night after night drinking at the trade show hotels bragging to your business colleagues the next morning how drunk you were the night before regardless to the amazing culture there may have been ignored around you.  It was a vacuum in space living not on your own dime but on the corporate expense account.

This should be a letter to the present mayor (and to all wanabee future mayors of New York City). Instead of just some political column, I could title it:“Start treating the outer-boroughs right; enough is enough”.

To paraphrase Churchill, we have reached here, if not the beginning of the end, then at least the end of the beginning.

I speak here of Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s reign as America’s prince of the ideology that dare not speak its name–hence it’s faux name, “No Labels.”

Maybe it has no label because, upon inspection, the package is empty.

Wednesday’s Post confirmed that the Independence Party slipped to the No. 5 ballot spot behind the Conservative & Working Family Parties.

http://www.nypost.com/p/news/local/if_you_re_con_then_you_re_on_6Trwj4ulcCPrCwQcNvw1cI

Mikhail Gorbachev speaking in the New York Times says that a nuclear test ban treaty must be concluded because it is “a step toward creating a truly global community of nations in which all share the responsibility for humankind’s future.”

I’ve been thinking through the response to the recent snowstorm in comparison with “the big one” in 1996. That storm is down the list from the point of view of Central Park, but it hit Brooklyn much harder. There was 30 inches on the table in my back yard according to a tape measure, before the windstorm (as in this storm) knocked all the snow from the rooftops down into the yards and streets.

The good news is that as I remember it (MSM organizations have morgues and should be able to make these comparisons more easily) subway service was restored and my street was plowed 24 hours and several days earlier in 2010 than it had been in 1996. But the 2010 storm was much worse in one key respect – the lack of emergency access during and in the first 24 hours after the storm, and the number of stuck and abandoned cars, trucks, buses and eventually plows and emergency vehicles littering the streets.