Gotham Gazette

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Open Government

Open Government

New Bills: Clean Energy to Cough Syrup


After sprinting through the approval of campaign finance reform legislation and its fiscal '08 budget, the City Council has slowed down to a meandering stroll. With more than two weeks before its next stated meeting on July 25, the council isn't slated for much. So far, only three days of meetings are scheduled in July and nothing is on the calendar yet for August.

Nonetheless, in the past month council members made sure to get some new bills and resolutions on the books before the summer hiatus. Some of the proposed legislation is destined to resurface for a debate before the whole body, while other bills are destined for - well, nowhere.

Here are some of the highlights.

Clean Energy

More than 22 council members have signed onto a bill (Intro 594) that would mandate all heating oil in city-owned buildings contain at least 20 percent biodiesel by 2012. The bill would incorporate clean fuel into city facilities incrementally, with oil containing 5 percent biodiesel required by July of next year.

Biodiesel includes sustainable fuel derived from a natural substance, such as vegetable oil or animal fat.

Councilmember James Gennaro of Fresh Meadows, the primary sponsor of the legislation and chair of the council's Environmental Protection Committee, said, “New York City can make dramatic improvements in its air quality, reduce our dependence on foreign oil, and stimulate local business and job growth, all by encouraging the use of cleaner, renewable heating oil."

While city buildings would be required to use the clean fuel under the legislation, the biodiesel also would be available for purchase by private businesses and residents starting in 2009.

Councilmember David Yassky of Brooklyn has introduced nearly identical legislation (Intro 599), which would also require 20 percent biodiesel be used in city buildings, but by 2011 - a year earlier than Gennaro's timeline. Yassky has garnered six co-sponsors, all of whom have also signed onto Gennaro's bill.

Water Rates

Beyond clean energy, both Gennaro and Councilmember David Weprin have proposed a resolution (Reso. 933) calling for the immediate renegotiation of the city's lease with the New York City Water Board, which oversees the city's water rates. The members hope to roll back the 11.5 percent water rate hike approved by the board in May to approximately 8.5 percent. The approved increase was the highest in 15 years, according to the council members.

Water rates, the resolution says, have increased more than 50 percent in the last decade to cover the cost of operating the wastewater treatment system and other related facilities and projects. This year's water rate hike will increase the average single-family homeowner's annual water and sewer bill by $72, to about $700 a year, the resolution states.

Because the water authority’s rental payments to the city are projected to triple – from $102 million in 2003 to approximately $312 million in 2015 – some council members hope to funnel some of that funding back to the ratepayer. Instead of folding the money into general revenues, they would like to see it used to offset the skyrocketing water rates.

So-Called Religious Equality

Although the Department of Education currently allows for the display of certain religious symbols during the holiday season, it prohibits the presentation of a nativity scene or crèche. Councilmember Tony Avella would like to change that.

The councilmember has introduced a resolution (Res. 930) that would incorporate a nativity scene into the department's policy, which now permits religious symbols, such as a menorah, Islamic star and crescent and Christmas tree.

"This resolution is clearly about equality and inclusion," said Avella in a prepared statement. "By adding a nativity scene/crèche to the holiday display, Christianity will receive equal representation with other religious faiths during the holiday season."

Because the stated purpose of the department's policy is to promote religious understanding, Avella argues excluding a nativity scene is hypocritical. The resolution has garnered support from seven of his colleagues and the Polish- American Congress.

Defacing American Flags

Last summer, residents at seven homes in Brooklyn awoke one morning to find their American flags incinerated.

Is response, Councilmembers James Oddo and Lewis Fidler introduced legislation (Intro 590) that would impose a fine of up to $10,000 fine for anyone who defaces or damages an American flag on private property.

Prohibiting Toys

New York City could become the second city in the nation after San Francisco to ban the use of phthalates in toys and childcare products. Under a bill (Intro 589) introduced by Councilmember Eric Gioia, merchants in the city would be banned from selling toys containing more than .1 percent of phthalates.

Several European nations have also enacted phthalates bans.

Phthalates are a group of industrial compounds used for flexibility in plastic products. Although the Consumer Products Safety Commission found there was no risk to children under the age of 5 from exposure to products with phthalates, other studies have found some harm to animals. In one study, a pregnant rat exposed to phthalates gave birth to rats that weighed less than normal.

The bill would require the commissioner of the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene to compile a list of banned products.

Restricting Cough Syrup

To prevent the abuse of products containing dextromethorphan, Councilmembers Maria Baez and Sara Gonzalez have proposed banning the sale of some medications to minors.

The bill (Intro 592) would ban those under 18 years old from buying medications that contain dextropmethorphan. The substance is found in more than 120 medications, such as Alka-Seltzer Plus Cold & Cough Medicine, Dayquil LiquiCaps, Dimetapp DM and Robitussin.

In recent years, teenagers have abused such products to get high. Common side effects from such abuse are blurred vision, loss of physical coordination, abdominal pain, and rapid heartbeat. According to the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, 12,584 emergency department visits were caused by the substance in 2004, with half of those involving teenagers.

The bill would require that medications containing the substance be moved behind the counter. Merchants who sell the product to minors could be subject to a $250 for the first violation, $500 for the second violation and a $750 fine for subsequent violations.

 

Summer Reading: Experts Pick Their Favorite New York Books


Franz Kafka, the sometimes inscrutable Czech writer who chronicled man’s search for worth and meaning, and Mickey Spillane, the tough detective writer whose novels featured sultry blondes and bleeding bodies (often the sultry blonde is the bleeding body) have little in common. Amid their many differences, however, both men found inspiration in New York and wrote books that the academics, writers and others we asked cited as among their favorite works about the city.

MORE NEW YORK READS

Summer Reading Part I:
People who make their living from books pick the book they love about the city where they live.

The Latest Books About New York:
New books – fiction and nonfiction – about the city.

This week’s recommendations come from experts about the city and from artists who work in the city. Most of those who responded also told us what made their selection especially noteworthy. (Their comments are included.)

Interestingly many of the experts, including many who have written nonfiction works about New York, pointed to works of fiction or photography as their favorites. So, if you are heading out of town, whether to Jones Beach or the Kalahari, and want to bring a piece of New York with you, there’s almost certainly something here to satisfy your taste. If not, look at our choices from last week when people who work with books – as booksellers, librarians and writers – recommended their favorite volumes about the city.

FICTION

Andreas Killen, professor of history, City College of New York

Amerika by Franz Kafka
One of my favorite books about New York is actually by someone who never visited it. The New York that Kafka creates is a place of wondrously tall buildings, elevators, speedy vehicles, businessmen sitting behind enormously large desks, slightly creepy characters, and mysterious, opaque events. It is an almost childlike vision of New York at the dawn of its emergence as the capital of the 20th century. Kafka's city is a purely imaginary construct, and precisely for that reason it captures something quite basic about New York, which is for so many people an imaginary construct before they ever visit it and even after they have come to know it quite well.

Jenny Weiss, editor, Overheard in New York

V. by Thomas Pynchon
I found V. on my father's bookshelf when I was a teenager. Before that, Manhattan to me was counting limousines and eating Italian ices from hollowed-out orange rinds. The characters in the Manhattan sections of V. are unstable, lacking strong connections to other people or any moral grounding. The depiction of money and job woes is bitingly true -- at least until one character lands a gig hunting alligators in the sewer.

A Hazard of New Fortunes by William Dean Howells
This is a classic work of American literature from 1890. It begins with an extended search for a New York apartment, when Basil March moves from Boston to work in publishing. Of course, he ends up paying twice what he planned for half the features! This novel also shows the politics around early public transportation, which make our transit strikes look very tame by comparison.

Kiss Me, Deadly by Mickey Spillane
In 1952, this became the first private-eye novel to make the New York Times best-seller list. Detective Mike Hammer wants to find out who totaled his car and nearly killed him. The men he encounters as he follows leads from borough to borough are quite unsavory, the women very savory, but all murderous. (Maybe if he had just taken the train. . . .) The 1955 adaptation of this book, though set in Los Angeles, is one of my favorite movies.

Leon Reid IV - Street artist, Brooklyn

Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
Anyone interested in New York City squatting, subway tunnel dwelling, and/or other traditions of establishment exploitation should take a close read into Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man. The book is a landmark not only for its bedrock truth regarding race relations in the "cosmopolitan" New York of the 1950s, but also because of the language with which Ellison allows the protagonist to describe his predicament, slyly, without one mention of Mr. Invisible's identity. Haven't we all wished at some point to be transparent? Read Ralph's narrative as a testimony from someone who was.

Laura Washington, New-York Historical Society

Falling Man by Don DeLillo

Marcy Arlin, artistic director, Immigrants' Theatre Project:

The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon
My favorite because he captures the humor and the surreal quality of New York as well as the interconnectedness of all of the people that live here.

The Alienist by Caleb Carr

Winter’s Tale by Mark Helprin
(One of our readers, Matthew Sholler, also endorses Winter’s Tale: “If you're any kind of a fan of the magical realism genre that many late 20th-century Latin American novels and shorter stories are known for, then this will be a treat. Set in New York City in the early 1900's, it's the only book I've read that uses this approach to storytelling in a North American context. Helprin creates a wonderfully compelling protagonist in Peter Lake, a wily, good-hearted thief who goes on an incredible journey following a chance encounter with the daughter of a wealthy newspaper publisher. In addition to its distinctive characters, Winter's Tale contains some of the most vivid and inspiring descriptions of New York City, giving it a life of its own, a life that anyone who appreciates New York will recognize and celebrate.”)

THE ART OF NEW YORK

Deborah Schwartz, director, Brooklyn Historical Society

Broken Land, an anthology of Brooklyn poems edited by Julia Spicher Kasdorf and Michael Tyrell
It’s just very lovely, … very evocative and gives the reader a very powerful sense of the many faces of Brooklyn, the different characters of Brooklyn, the tension and dynamism and the beauty of the borough. Some of it is about neighborhood; some about emotional issues; some about political issues; one about the Brooklyn botanic garden. There are stories that are very personal and private and others that are the grander scheme of urban life. It’s a great treat. It’s beautifully done.

Lester Thomas Shane - actor, director, writer, and faculty membr at New York’s New Actors Workshop, the American Academy of Dramatic Art, New York Film Academy, and a children’s company, the TADA! Ensemble.

Broadway by Brooks Atkinson

The Season: A Candid Look at Broadway by William Goldman

Eloise by Kay Thompson

The Zagat’s guide
The one I use most.

Steven McElroy, artistic director and member of the New Ensemble Theatre Company, LITE (Laboratory for International Theatre Exchange) and Emerging Artists Theatre Company

Playing Underground: A Critical History of the 1960s Off-Off-Broadway Movement by Stephen J. Bottoms

Off Off Broadway Explosion by David Crespy

Caffe Cino: The Birthplace of Off-Off-Broadway by Wendell C. Stone

Most of the reading about the city I’ve done in the recent past has been about the birth of the Off Off Broadway theater movement in the 1960s and there are three great books on my short list. Since, to me, Off Off Broadway is a vital part of the city's history -- not only theatrical, but generally -- these books are definitely books about New York, and good ones.

LOOKING TO THE PAST…

Eric Sharfstein, communications manager, Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History.

The Island at the Center of the World: The Epic Story of Dutch Manhattan and the Forgotten Colony That Shaped America
Shorto makes history read like a novel. Island at the Center of the World tells the story of New York before it was even New York and reveals a community that was more upwardly mobile than we might imagine and far more multi-ethnic than the grade-school lessons we all remember about the early settlements to New York’s north and south.”

Joshua Freeman, author of Working Class New York and professor of history, Queens College

Old New York In Early Photographs, 1853-1901: Prints from the Collection of the New-York Historical Society by Mary Black
Neighborhood by neighborhood, these extraordinary images freeze a city in constant flux: carters moving goods to sailing ships on South Street; pushcarts, peddlers and shoppers lining the sides of Mulberry Street; crowds on Fifth Avenue greeting Admiral Dewey; bicyclists going past Grant's Tomb; the dizzying S-curve of the Ninth Avenue elevated train at 110th street, running through virtual countryside. That we have photographic images of all this and more seems miraculous.”

(Freeman is also a great fan of fiction set in New York, including: Herman Melville's Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street; In Dreams Begin Responsibilities by Delmore Schwartz; the Harlem detective novels of Chester Himes and Richard Price's Blood Brothers.”

Fred Siegel, author of The Prince of the City: Giuliani, New York and the Genius of American Life

Tough Liberal by Richard Kahlenberg
The biography of Albert Shanker of the United Federation of Teachers is the most important book I have read on New York and education in quite a while

Michael Miscione, historian

Forgotten New York by Kevin Walsh
The roadmap to a five-borough historical treasure hunt. Walsh has located, cataloged and deciphered all the oddities and anachronisms that dot the Gotham landscape. You'll scratch your head no more over that curious statue or that mysterious structure or that bizarre inscription.”

Out of Fire and Valor: The War Memorials of New York from the Revolution to 9/11 by Cal Snyder
It's shameful how we New Yorkers disregard the war memorials all around us. After reading Cal Snyder's book, you'll never pass another monument without pondering its heartfelt significance.”

Sarah M. Henry, vice president for programs, Museum of the City of New York

A Living Lens: Photographs of Jewish Life from the Pages of the Forward by Alana Newhouse
It’s a wonderful project of photographs never seen before. [The museum has featured an exhibition of some of the photographs.]

Kathleen Treat, Gotham Gazette reader

Bronx Primitive by Kate Simon

She also wrote New York Places & Pleasures

(Treat also recommended for children, Sidney Taylor’s All-of-a-Kind Family, a “wonderful series about growing up on the Lower East Side.” And she wonders, “Does anyone read Harry Golden any more?”

…THE PRESENT AND THE FUTURE

Michael Wallace, co-author of Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898

From Welfare State to Real Estate: Regime Change in New York City, 1974 to the Present by Kim Moody
The juxtaposition of rags and riches is an old story in New York City, but the divisions have never been sharper. While thousands of black and Hispanic youths, spurred by a poverty rate twice the country's, line up for a handful of jobs at a Times Square store, the superrich are busy snapping up $20 million condos. Kim Moody's compelling narrative of Gotham's post fiscal crisis history offers an explanation of what produced this jagged social topography. Economic elites and powerful mayors, operating in a municipal environment transformed by globalization and 9/11, were able, he argues, to impose a neo-liberal agenda on the city. And subsidizing real estate and corporate development, while rolling back social programs, in turn exacerbated the income gap. Moody's assessment – comprehensive, cogent and rooted in solid research – is essential reading for those seeking to understand the contemporary relationship between "progress" and poverty.

The Suburbanization of New York: Is the World’s Greatest City Becoming Just Another Town? edited by Jerilou Hammett and Kingsley Hammett
What's next for New York? Will it retain its edgy preeminence as global crucible, the place par excellence where the world's peoples come to clash and fuse and create the future? Or will the forces of suburbanization – now sprawling and malling their way into town – tame the raucous metropolis, subdue its contrarian politics, make of it just another outlet for Disneyfied culture, big-box commerce and franchise food? Perhaps something altogether new is busy being born at the contested urban-suburban frontier? Only two things are sure: New York is in rapid motion, and this book is a great guide to where it might be headed. Its diverse array of speculations -- written by some of the country's smartest (and wittiest) analysts and activists -- are incisive and accessible, provocative and entertaining, perfect for an urban studies course and for anyone interesting in pondering the past and future of cities.

Mark Finley, playwright and theater director

Gay New York by George Chauncey
Because it's so thoroughly researched, it's full of scope and detail - two things you rarely find in the same place.

Stonewall: The Riots that Sparked the Gay Revolution by David Carter
It also is impeccably researched and detailed. It's so immediate and relevant because it focuses on a time closer to our own and some of the key players are still around. A boundless source of insight.

(Finley also likes several novels: Old New York by Edith Wharton, because “The author does such a fantastic job in evoking the period you feel like are there, not just want to be there”: and Time and Again by Jack Finney and The Alienist by Caleb Carr. Both of which he says are not classics of the Edith Wharton mold, but terrific stories told by great storytellers.)

Reporting by Besa Luci, Mara Gay, Zach Rose and Valerio Russo

 



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