Inspector Clouseau at the DOH

It used to be said that hell hath no fury like a woman scorned. Well, the proverbial woman has nothing on our health commissioner, on a rat jihad ever since his agency was transfixed by the rodent video at the Village Taco Bell. As the NY Post is reporting this morning, some of the city's best restaurants have been closed as inspection zealousness has gone amok. The paper points out that, "Owners of several prominent restaurants forced to close said they were unfair victims of a culinary witch hunt by overzealous inspectors."

All of this "rat, tat, tat," is threatening to become ridiculous, and is forcing us to lose sight of some of the endemic problems with the entire inspection system. For instance, in an editorial in today's NY Daily News, the paper indicates that, "We trust that the department will now work its little rump off to insure city restaurants are vermin-free."

What the News misses is that the inspection process has long-ago ceased to have any real correlation to the protection of the public health. It is simply a cash-driven money machine and the city's eateries are paying a tithe to the needs of big government. It is another indication that we live in a city that puts the productivity of its businesses way behind the needs of its municipal Leviathan.

Water Torture

In today's NY Times there is the usual good reporting by Anthony DePalma on the threatened 11.5% rise in the city's water rates. The rise, which could cost the average homeowner an additional $72 a year, is linked to the fact that the DEP has an arrearage of around $610 million in unpaid bills, and "Uncollected bills have to be taken into account when new rates are calculated."

But why can't the agency collect its unpaid bills? The reason lies with the DEP's inability to accurately gauge the bills that it sends out. Without the ability to defend the bills' veracity there is no way that a collection process could survive a court challenge. For a number of years we represented the Water Group, a consulting firm that used its superior expertise to help businesses challenge erroneous water bills. It helped Columbia Presbyterian, for instance, resolve a multi-million arrearage that neither the hospital's finance director nor the DEP could justify.

What all of this makes clear, is that the DEP is structurally incapable of being fiscally responsible. This means that all of its fiscal projections need to be taken lightly and we would suggest that the city put the agency into a form of receivership so that it can be restructured(along with the installation of competent management). Its keystone kops approach to billing would indicate that that agency should be run by Harold Lloyd and not Emily Lloyd.

All of which brings us to our own particular dust up with the agency over the use of food waste disposers. DEP had told the world that the installation of 20,000 commercial disposers would cost the agency $3 billion in retrofitting costs to the waste water treatment facilities.

What is even more laughable than the estimate is the agency that issued it. Put simply, if it can't properly estimate a home owner's water bill than how in heaven's name can we trust it to be accurate on this larger larger fiscal issues? In the meantime, as we have observed, here come the rats.

On Closer Inspection

Well, the DOH has fired its Taco Belle and, according to the NY Times, has revamped its inspection protocol, so we can now all at least feel safe from the rodent army. But, as we told the NY Sun this morning there's something more than a little remiss in all of this face saving.

The problem lies with the fact that the entire inspection racket is politically corrupt; it is designed to generate revenues from hard pressed local eateries, not protect the public health, and the failure to spot the herd of rats was symptomatic of the crackpot rationality that governs the entire process. Maybe if Dr. Frieden paid more attention to the agency's core mission, and less to the need to use public health as an ideological bludgeon, all of us would be better off. There is nothing worse in this regard than an army of public health scolds.

And as far as the rats are concerned, the city still will not lift a finger to help the restaurants eliminate the food waste that accumulates in storage. The use of food waste disposers would of course be a public health boon, but backstabbing the local businesses seems to have reached the level of public sport. Perhaps the next mayor and speaker will be less hostile to the most important economic engine the city has, aside from its Wall Street cash cow.

A Hundred Bottles of Beer on the Wall

Just like this post's title, the bottle bill saga threatens to become a tedious and endless song whose only saving grace is the help it gives to bored children to get them through a long trip back to camp. In today's NY Times, Michael Cooper tells us that the governor apparently hasn't given up on his quest to satisfy the folks at NYPRG and those on the editorial page of the putative paper of record.

Now the governor has hired three new workers, "a lawyer and two program specialists," to watch over the bottle bill enforcement at the state level. Apparently, this is all geared towards having staff available if the BBBB should pass the legislature this session. Otherwise, why add a lawyer to the mix. Imagine telling your mom after graduating from law school that the governor hired you to count bottles and cans-in the name of the environment of course. More on this is sure to come.

Security Threat

We have already commented on the dangerous precedent being set by the law suit brought by a bunch of self-styled Muslim clerics (Reverend Sharpton anyone?) against not only USAir, but also against the passengers on the flight that brought these people to the attention of the American public. We have also lauded the work of Congressman Peter King in his effort to immunize public whistle blowers. Now that the King amendment has passed the House, we are waiting for the senate to take up the issue on behalf of homeland security.

We are also waiting, as usual, for the NY Times to take up the issue. The NY Post does so again today, and the NY Daily News has already chimed in on the side of safety for New Yorkers, as well as for all Americans. From the Times? Ungatz! Just like its silence on the Duke lacrosse case, after devoting 6,000 words in an article that bent over backwards to include anything possibly damaging to those kids who were falsely accused.

The Times' Duke coverage was colored by the usual liberal correctness lens that substitutes "meta-narratives" for reporting; in this case the "victim" was poor and black and the "offenders" were rich athletes-just throw the facts out the window. In the case of the imams we have two taboo Times areas to traverse: Islam and civil liberties.

With these two liberal taboos in play, our public safety will no longer concern the Times, a paper that long ago forfeited the right to speak on behalf of regular New Yorkers. Conveniently forgotten are the signs plastered all over our subway stations and cars that warn us: "If you see something, Say something." For the Times, however, the safety of New Yorkers ranks behind the machinations of a group of clerics who represent a strain of fundamentalism that would immediately get the Times' dander up if only it were coming from a Christian source.

Put Deposits on Newspapers!

In today's NY Times the paper, in what has become oh so predictable, editorializes in favor of the Bigger, Better, Bottle Bill. We say predictable, because it is another example of the paper's anti-business animus, and their scorn for the concerns of NYC's neighborhood retailers. Make no mistake about it, the bottle bill puts a tremendous strain on retailers, particularly in the space-strapped city.

The Times, however, makes the opposition consist almost entirely of "powerful forces from the beverage industry," who, it argues, "have been working against it for years because they earn millions of dollars when consumers fail to redeem their bottles and cans." The paper never discusses the opposition of the Food Industry Alliance, our own Neighborhood Retail Alliance, or that of the Bodega Association, arguing that the concerns of smaller retailers are addressed by an increase in the handling fee and the limitation on customer redemption numbers.

Gee, why is it that the stores themselves don't see that these concessions obviate their objections to expansion? Could it be that expanding the kinds of included containers may be more costly to the stores than any handling fee hike, especially since the room for reverse vending machines is simply unavailable in the majority of city stores?

And why is it that the Times can't understand the hidden tax implications of expansion? It inveighs against the bottlers for wanting to keep the nickels, but doesn't address the fact that the unredeemed deposits help to defray the cost of redemption. If the nickels are escheated the cost of redemption will rise, and inevitably passed on to the consumer in the form of higher beverage prices, i.e., a hidden tax.

If the Times is in favor of expansion simply for its own sake, why does it get hooked into the NYPIRG scheme of stealing the nickels out of the system? Does it believe that the redemption system pays for itself out of recycling revenue?

What is really needed here is for the NY Times, Newsday, The Journal News, and all of the other papers around the state that cheer lead for bottle bill expansion, to support the placing of a deposit on their papers. And why not have the papers brought back to their distribution centers for redemption, or NYC newsstands? These bottle brains are always quick to burden other businesses with costs that they themselves are unwilling to bear. That's what's known as hypocrisy in our book.

Ministry of Taxation and Finance

The city's DOH continues in its effort to try to cover up the embarrassment it must feel from the Taco Rat incident. The agency is now closing local restaurants at a rate that is three times greater than it was before Templelton on his pals went wild in the Village. In today's NY Post columnist Steve Cuozzo makes a very important observation about this Commissioner Frieden-led crackdown.

Cuozzo points out that "Frieden was stung up the wazoo by public and press outrage," but goes on to make the more important point that "Despite the well-publicized points system, the decision to close a place is more arbitrary than most realize. Many violations criteria are useless for safeguarding customers' health-like a missing 'no spitting' sign or a jar of olives left on the floor, as happened at the Coffee Shop."

The regulatory jihad is costing local eateries close to m$30 million a year, and the decision to force calorie posting will cost an additional $46 million. Very little of the department's activities has any good impact on protecting the health of New Yorkers. It does, however, directly imperil the health of the city's restaurants, a sector that employs hundreds of thousands of our folks. Just another reason why the expansion of government often means trouble for the industrious among us-and the average citizens who depend on their enterprise.

Taxing Credulity

We are continued to be amazed at the failure of some of the brightest political observers to see that the high level of taxation faced by New Yorkers is the biggest barrier to the maintenance of the city's middle class. In yesterday's NY Daily News Errol Louis weighed-in on the Drum Major Institute's focus on the vanishing NY middle class, and highlighted the absence of affordable housing.

Now, Louis is absolutely right that the emphasis on affordable housing up until this time has been on the very poor, with formulas that exclude the folks being squeezed in the middle. He is also correct to point out that, "the soaring cost of housing and other necessities makes it harder than ever" for the middle class wannabes to attain the coveted status.

What's missing is precisely what the IBO has underscored: the high cost of living in the city that is driven by the astronomical levels of taxation. And the last thing that the gurus seem to want to propose is tax relief. Why? Because it would interfere with all of their expensive-and quixotic-educational and welfare schemes that are going to need cash on the barrel in order to move forward.

What's instructive here is that the leading cheerleader in all of this, DMI's Andrea Batista Schlesinger, has never met a tax she doesn't like or a tax cut that she approves of. When last heard from she was writing in the Wall Street Journal about the need to keep the estate tax. Her focus there was on billionaires, and by doing so she missed the point that the billionaires have more kinds of ways to protect there wealth than Snoop Dog has misogynist rap lines. She doesn't quite see that the average person wants the opportunity to do well in this country, and to pass on some of this bounty to her children. And why should people be taxed twice on the money they earned?

Which brings us back to our friend Errol. He's on point when he talks about middle class housing, and even when he hits a nerve with us on discount box stores, but affordable middle class housing also means reducing the city's real estate taxes so that homeowners aren't squeezed out into the suburbs. It also means reducing the cost of doing business for smaller neighborhood retailers so that it is possible for them to compete on as level playing field with some of the big boys (And by the way, making it easier for these entrepreneurs is another way to create a path to middle class status, since so many store owners also own homes in the city).

For us, it all comes back to your view of the role of government. Too many Drummmers and their elected acolytes want to expand the role of government. We remain greatly skeptical of the benign nature of the expansion effort. The role of government, in our view, is to help to create the conditions by which the citizenry can utilize their skills to the greatest effect, A helpful government needs to know when to step aside and let the folks do their thing.

DMI: More Taxes Please

We are constantly bemused by the persistence of the Drummers on the need to tax more "wealthy" New York City residents. On today's blog Andrea Batista Schlesinger goes after Nicole Gelinas for her editorial in today's NY Sun. What we'd really like to know is how this old fashioned liberal policy approach will play well with the very middle class voters that the Drummers say they are looking to save.

We guess that this will depend on how we define middle class, since the Drummers see a family of four earning $135,000 as on the way out of the category. Which says to us that this family, and the many more like it, will become the target of all of the new tax initiatives supposedly directed at the billionaires. We still remember how the mayor's real estate tax boost in 2002 sent many Staten Islanders packing off to Jersey.

The key variable here is making the new homeowners able to afford the houses they have just been able to get the down payments for. Remember the Blooomberg tax increase was over 20% and, with the rise in assessments, the monthly nut got really difficult to handle.

What was really instructive in today's DMI post was its citation of a letter from one Gary Brubaker who inveighed against the "i-bankers" with an envious scorn that says much about this entire point-of-view. We're going to be interested in seeing just which of the Democratic mayoral candidates jumps aboard this losing bandwagon, after all, we need to place our bets early for 2009.

Columbia Espectorates Stringer Zoning Plan

In the current Columbia Spectator, the paper takes a look at BP Stringer's West Harlem re-zoning plan, and finds a number of locals deeply skeptical. In particular, the criticism focuses in on the failure of the plan to deal directly with the Columbia development and to focus instead on the after shocks.

As one CB #9 member told the Spectator, the Stringer plan is "too narrow," and should include the 18 acres in the eye of the university's expansion project. In addition, "Some believe that the zoning proposal inappropriately assumes that Columbia's expansion will go forward as planned." This is precisely the criticism that we have leveled at the plan, and we did so because we feel that the concerns that Stringer makes public are not sui generis, but stem inexorably from Columbia's grand vision.

It is this vision itself that needs modification, and the effort to do so will go along way towards preserving the affordability that the BP wants to see preserved in the West Harlem neighborhood. It is noteworthy that the Spectator finds that, "Perhaps the most intriguing part of the plan, particularly for West Harlem residents, is the proposal's inclusionary zoning plan."

Yet, as we have said before, if this kind of zoning works well for the outlying areas why shouldn't it be applied to the the central 18 acres, the precipitating cause of all of the concern? We believe that this will be a crucial issue once the Columbia application is certified.

Middle Class, Muddled Thought

The Drum Major Institute recently concluded a forum on the disappearing middle class in New York City. The Institute also released, at the same time, a survey and report of what it described as the attitudes/remedies of New York leaders on the problem. The survey, as well as the approach of DMI to the issue, is a predictable mixture of liberal bromides that, if adopted, would likely only exacerbate the disappearance that the Institute is lamenting.

The sharpest critique of the DMI can be found in today's NY Sun, where columnist and Manhattan Institute scholar Nicole Gelinas breaks down the fallacies in the DMI report. As she points out the report "is a bleak reminder that the city's leadership elite continues to embrace the kind of stale big government ideas that hurt the middle class instead of helping it."

For instance, Gelinas highlights the fact that the Drummers are continuing to march to the same rent regulation beat that has led to the shortage of affordable housing that they are concerned with. In addition, they are calling for a huge increase in the public funding of health care, a policy that would lead inevitably to the kind of tax increases that are driving middle class folks out of the city.

Oh, and yes, what would a forum like this be without the genuflection to increased educational funding, unmindful of the fact that school spending has increased in the Bloomberg term by 42% without any real appreciable increase in educational successes. In fact, only 27% of the survey's respondents thought that charter schools might help generate better educational outcomes.

Of course all of the DMI bromides come with a huge price tag, and that can only mean higher taxes in a city that is already reeling from the highest tax rates in the nation, 50% higher than the next highest city. It is this tax rate that is preventing the middle class job growth that we need to cultivate this demographic sector. Why else would our large financial houses look to locate their back office jobs elsewhere? It is simply too expensive for those workers to live and work here.

This tax burden is something that stale thinkers keep wanting to ignore Gelinas, however, hits the nail on the head when she points out that, "New York must make itself more attractive, not less so, to middle class employers. And it must attract entrepreneurs to start businesses here." Yet the DMI survey of leaders endorsed a tax hike on the wealthy and the closing of "loopholes" on businesses, ideas that will make things worse for the middle class.

And than there is the inevitable "tax on the wealthy." Well, since the Drummers feel that once a family of four earns over $135,000 a year it is no longer middle class, we can see where this tax increase is going to come from-and where the taxed-to-death folks are going to go as soon as they can afford the down payment on a house in the suburbs.

Why are we not surprised that cutting income taxes for everybody is the group's lowest priority. These are the same folks who see the entrepreneurial retail class, not as job generating economic engines in the neighborhoods of the city, but simply as cash cows to be exploited to feed a bloated government bureaucracy.

Which is why Gelinas ends her piece with the thought that "Voters had better hope that there's a mayoral candidate lurking out there who's willing to buck the worn-out ideas proposed in the Drum Major report. Otherwise New York's middle class, facing even higher taxes to pay for all this new spending, inevitably will give up and leave."

NY Times on Blomberg's Food Policy

In today's NY Times the paper focuses in on the Bloomberg administration's effort to craft food policy in the city. As the paper says, "From a policy perspective, Mr. Bloomberg has taken on more food issues, and provoked more controversy, than any New York mayor before him." And yet, in the entire article there only one critical comment from anyone who has a problem with the mayor's overbearing health/food policies.

Take the paper's first quote, from that recognized public policy expert Tim Zagat, who told the Times that, "A lot of what he's doing is going to be happening nationally over time...The government involvement in what we're eating is going to be increasingly visible as a way to make {force?} people healthier." Is that a fact? And if so, how does Zagat see any trend developing before the impact of some of the Bloomberg food initiatives are even evaluated?

Te Times continues blithely on to point out, in what is truly a non sequitur, that the city's Health Department (pre-Taco Rat) made 15,000 more inspections last year than it did for years ago. The Times obviously feels that this is somehow related to some overall food policy, but makes no effort to connect any of the dots if they in fact do exist. The reality is that the inspections are a result of a overbearing enforcement policy that reflects a disdain for the city's small businesses that are viewed as a cash cow by the vaunted anti-business Department of Unhealth.

The Times goes on to discuss the city's efforts to use food policy for generating better eating by New Yorkers and finds, well, incoherence. Food advocates find that the Bloombergistas have not "embraced the full connection on food." Maybe we should be glad for the incoherence since, if it were left to some of the advocates an even greater nannyism would be the rule.

As the paper points out there is a trend around the country to set up "food councils" in order to advise governments on matters of food. These councils "usually include anyone who may have a stake in the urban diet," and include, among a host of other advocacy groups, grocers.

Well, we have reached out to the city's food policy czar, Ben Thomases, and we are hopeful that he will begin to involve all of the industry stakeholders so that a realistic understanding of how food is distributed and sold can leaven the policy efforts of city government. The danger here is that policy will be driven by folks with no business acumen and who are hostile to free market forces.

The Times finally gets around to discussing the role of Dr. Frieden, a person who sees all of the city's efforts, from banning trans fat and mandating calorie posting, as "relatively restrained." Heaven help us if this is true. The paper does point out that the city's "Healthy Bodega" initiative "has not gotten very far." Which is only true because it has not found the proper ways to yet work with the city's grocers in a collaborative manner. This takes time and effort and is less sexy and media provoking.

Finally, as the long and winding read winds down, the Times gets one criticism of the DOH's overreach, with a local chef calling the department a "division of tax and finance." But the really cutting critique is left to former mayor Koch who tells the paper that; "You don't want to leave food policy to a doctor...Because a doctor cuts out everything."

And so we count the days until Dr. Frieden takes his traveling food circus to other venues where, hopefully, he can pontificate to his heart's content without doing any practical damage to local eateries and food stores. Unfortunately, it will be up to the next mayor to unravel the weird schemes that the doctor has foisted on a gullible and passive public.

Columbia's Gredo: "This Land is My Land"

In today's NY Post the Manhattan Institute's Julia Vitullo-Martin lashes out against the greed exhibited by Columbia in its effort to expand into the West Harlem community. In particular, she wonders why the university needs to exercise the use of eminent domain in its expansion; "The school should back off on its stubborn insistence on retaining eminent domain as an option..."

What Vitullo-Martin points out here is the unwillingness of Columbia to develop any kind of shared vision, an unwillingness that threatens to transform what is on balance a good thing for the city, into something quite less so. As one local eviction-threatened resident told the Post, "Columbia moving in is a bad thing because Columbia isn't willing to share."

Which gets right to the heart of what is wrong here. Columbia is moving ahead in its typical mind over matter approach-"I don't mind, and you don't matter." They haven't proactively and inclusively looked to develop any kind of shared vision plan that would address some of the critical issues put forward by BP Stringer in his recently released zoning proposal.

The last word in the Post piece goes to the "ferocious" Nick Sprayregen who vows that he will not be moved by Columbia's greed. As he told Vitullo-Martin, "But Columbia wants it all-100 percent of everything. They have no desire for nuance, for compromise, for diversity." Which leaves us with the clear impression that the Columbia expansion plan can easily be improved through a more carefully woven shared vision.

Stringing Columbia Along

We have gotten the chance to review the "West Harlem Special District" zoning proposal that was put forth this week by Manhattan BP Scott Stringer. The report makes for interesting reading, and should act as a cautionary tale for all of those who are poised to uncritically jump aboard the Columbia expansion bandwagon.

What the proposal does is to emphasize the fact that "skyrocketing real estate pressures will price longtime Harlem residents and businesses out of their communities...And new development pressures are likely to encourage a staggering amount of displacement and change to community character." A great deal of displacement is already underway, and will only increase if there is no active governmental intervention.

Which, in the best of all possible worlds, should generate an active concern among all of the area's elected officials. In this regard, the Stringer report is certainly a call to action. The challenge, as Stringer sees it, is to act to prevent an extreme makeover of the entire community and to ensure that "certain physical features of the neighborhood remain in place."

The report goes on to laud the community's "remarkable diversity of ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds," a diversity that is already being threatened by rising rents. In response, the Stringer zoning plan calls for the promotion of "inclusionary housing" bonuses that would encourage developers to build more affordable housing.

The fear here is that the entire corridor, all the way up to 145th Street, will become "dominated" by Columbia, as the continued pressure to expand drives more and more local residents and businesses out. Exactly so! What's missing, however, is a greater focus on Columbia's responsibility to mitigate the community impact of its plan.

Stringer gets it just right when he advocates forcefully for affordable housing through the use of the so-called inclusionary housing bonuses. But shouldn't this be a mandatory trade-off in order for Columbia to obtain the necessary zoning approvals for its campus expansion? And wouldn't the inclusion of a significant affordable housing initiative- as a central feature of the development plan itself - be exactly the kind of needed inclusion necessary to mitigate the "long term secondary impact" of the Columbia expansion?

The Stringer plan, by clearly underscoring the dangerous secondary impacts of the university's growth, sets the stage for the larger debate over the Columbia development. The school is asking a great deal from the city. In return, Columbia needs to give more back to the neighborhood that it has neglected over the past three decades.

Carrion Luggage

In today's NY Times the paper reports on the DMI conference on the middle class, a forum that acted as somewhat of a preview of the 2009 mayoral race. What stood out for us in the report was the exchange between Anthony Weiner and Adolfo Carrion on the issue of box stores like Wal-Mart. Carrion, defending his disingenuous support for the BJ's that he helped midwife for the graveyard of the BTM, called the entry of Wal-Mart, or something just like it, as "inevitable."

Well, AC has an interesting operational definition of inevitable. Something that you dissemble about for months in public while you work assiduously behind the scenes to support has no relationship to our definition of inevitability. It appears that Carrion's definition of the process is a guise to disguise his role at facillitating the anti-union box store, all the time that he was denying that it was coming into the new mall.

All of which will be played out strongly in 2009 when AC finds that labor, small business and local neighborhood groups don't want any part of his vision for the city. By that time one thing will be certain: Carrion's ascension to the chief executive's chair will be the farthest thing from inevitable.

Not Cairing About New York's Security

The NY Sun is reporting this morning that the lawyer representing the "Imams on a Plane" is none other than the city's own Human Rights Commissioner, one Omar Mohammedi. If you remember back when this character, now the current president of CAIR, a Islamist advocacy group masquerading as a civil rights organization, was appointed a number of folks protested the elevation of someone from a group whose mission has gone far beyond any simple civil rights agenda.

The critics of the appointment were characterized by the mayor's press spokesman as "extremists," an irony considering the fact that CAIR has well documented links to groups that would be happy to see the United States destroyed (or transformed into a society ruled by Sharia, which is the same thing). Now, however, the lunacy of this appointment has been exposed with the revelation that Mohammedi is representing the imams who are suing the airlines for their removal from a US Airways flight last year.

This is lunacy, particularly for New York City, because we are a target of Islamic extremists. The pernicious nature of the lawsuit lies in the fact that the targets of the litigation are not just the airlines but actual passengers who were disturbed enough by the imams behavior to report it to authorities. The lawsuit, whether it is successful or not, will have the intended impact of chilling the active, and essential, intervention of citizens in the zealous protection of homeland security. Who's going to intervene if they can be threatened by legal action that may result in the loss of a life savings?

Mayor Bloomberg needs to act immediately and fire Mohammedi from his post. The most precious human right is the right to life and the security that insures a long a prosperous one for us, individually as well as collectively. Mohammedi is hooked up with the folks for whom human rights and civil rights are simply tools, different kinds of weapons in the overall jihad directed at our open and tolerant society.

Everyone has a right to use the legal system to seek redress. This does not mean that the lawyer who represents enemies of this country in the legal action needs to be enshrined in a position of honor and authority in a city that has suffered the most from the malignancy of a retrograde ideology that is smirking right behind this legal attack on the passengers of the Us Air flight out of Minnesota last year.

What's mindboggling here is the first response of the city to all of this. A spokeswoman for the city's Human Rights Commission told the Sun that Mohammedi's legal work "does not conflict with the work of this commission." Representing people who would do New Yorkers harm, in what amounts to a politically inspired lawsuit, is a threat to our human rights and the person who is leading the action needs to be removed immediately. It is a position that Peter King and Rudy Guiliani would understand viscerally, but a viscera is precisely what Blomberg seems to lack.

Columbia: Free Speech for Me But Not for Thee

In today's NY Post the paper editorializes against the wrist slap that the university gave to students who disrupted the Minuteman speech last winter. The ironic fact that President Bollinger, an alleged free speech expert, is the man in charge was not lost on the paper, nor was the irony of the Washington Post appointing the Bollinger to a position on its Board, citing his "expertise on a combination of free speech and education issues."

Apparently Bollinger's expertise is entirely theoretical. When it comes to the defense of the practice of speech he doesn't approve of Bollinger weasels out of his supposed principles. So we now have a president who really has no solid grasp of the first amendment, and one who appears hell bent on depriving any property owner who stands in the way of the university's expansion of their constitutional rights as well.

The Post is certainly right to question Columbia's good faith as it seeks to expand into the West Harlem community, saying that the university is "something less than the good neighbor it now pretends to be." Perhaps Bollinger feels that once the university removes all of its neighbors Columbia will finally reach the good neighbor status that it currently pretends it has.

Bottling Up the Governor

As we commented yesterday, the "Bigger, Better, Bottle Bill," was excised from the governor's executive budget. What needs to be recognizes here is that, yes a nice labor/industry lobbying effort was waged against the proposal, but all of the effort would have been for nought if not for the stalwart support of Senator Joe Bruno.

What the state senate did, as the NY Times' Michael Cooper points out in his analysis this morning, is to reject "some of Governor Spitzer's pet projects...They rejected his call to require a deposit on cans and bottles of non carbonated drinks." Without Bruno's firmness the bottle bill mess would have been worsened in local markets, and the bottlers nickels would have gone to the state for environmental spending. The industry owes the senator a huge debt.

Zoning in on Columbia

In today's NY Times the intrepid Charles Bagli writes about the proposal by Manhattan BP Scott Stringer to re-zone areas around the Columbia development footprint in order to forestall the "fear that Columbia's project will draw other developers to the surrounding area and displace even more people." The fear is certainly justifiable, but we wonder whether it would make more sense to address the cause of the fear rather than to look for ways to mitigate the development after it is allowed to go forward unimpeded.

As the Times points out, rising rents are already forcing out long time residents, yet there is nothing in the Columbia plan that in any way addresses the evictions that the college plans for hundreds of low income tenants; nor for the reverberations that its $8 billion investment will have on the neighborhoods around the project. It is precisely this myopia that the borough president needs to meet head on if he is going to successfully mitigate the aftershocks of redevelopment.

There is, however, an interesting comment from Columbia in the story about the tenants that it will seek to evict: "The university said that it would relocate the tenants living in 132 apartments within the 17 acres to comparable housing." When we first read this comment we thought that it meant that there would be housing for the displaced within the 17 acres. When the sentence is re-read, however, it becomes clear that these displaced families will be relocated away from the 17 acre campus where they won't threaten to despoil its genteel ivyness.

What is curious here is that Stringer, unlike BP Markowitz in Brooklyn, has not chosen to champion an affordable housing initiative as part of the Columbia campus expansion. Markowitz, while supporting the AY development, made sure that the project contained the maximum amount of affordable housing. A similar policy response would enhance the credibility of Stringer's concern about gentrification.

Therefore the promotion of affordable housing, the more the better, would be the best approach to any effort to mitigate the gentrification impact of the Columbia development. Its absence, in the plan itself and in Stringer's response to it, means that whatever is done ex post facto will be no more than an ineffective palliative or, as one property owner told the Times, "the Stringer proposal is the equivalent of 'throwing the community a bone so that Columbia can bulldoze the neighborhood.'"

The Times gives the last word to Nick Sprayregen, the largest property owner in the line of fire. Nick continues to wonder why the university needs to take every one's property when they already have enough acreage to build a beautiful and spacious campus. As he point out, "If they only end up with 90 percent of the property, they won't build the campus?"

Bottles Returned

At the eleventh hour the "Bigger, Better, Bottle Bill" fizzled, and was removed from the executive budget in negotiations between the governor and the legislature. Which is, according to our friends over at Urban Elephants, good news indeed. As Scott Sala points out, "...it would have amounted to a tax on consumers..."

And we concur in this analysis. The executive budget is no place for this kind of legislative initiative and the inherent problems in expansion should be thrashed out in legislative debate in both houses.The focus on unclaimed deposits was a particularly transparent effort to simply tax beverage consumers and transfer the tax money to pet environmental projects at the DEC.

Now we have been involved in this issue for the better part of twenty five years (having served as the chairman of the industry/labor coalition that fought the original bottle law). The issue of the unredeemed is not insignificant. By allowing franchise wholesalers and bottlers to initiate the deposit the state created a powerful disincentive to redeem.

This disincentive allowed these deposit initiators to abuse the system and exploit the retail redemption points. Willingness to redeem became a weapon that was used to coerce independent distributors to purchase exclusively from the wholesalers. Retailers who became container sheds and over redeemed were given a hard time and were never adequately reimbursed for their costs in the over-redemption of containers.

So the nickels are the linchpin in the faulty redemption structure. Escheating them, however, only exacerbates the problems in a system that is badly in need of an overhaul. The redemption process must be separated from the sale process, and the money that is left from non-redemption should be channeled back into making redemption more efficient. Finally, handling fees should be raised and an infrastructure of redemption centers set up so that the deposit system, the most capable recycling method available, can be expanded without crippling spaced-out retailers.