Turbulent Stink And Grit And Scum At Owl’s Head

Stink still not resolved. DEP on the defensive:

At a town hall meeting organized by Community Board 10, State Senator Marty Golden and City Councilmember Vincent Gentile, representatives of the Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) faced the crowd almost sheepishly, acknowledging long-standing shortcomings in their handling of the operation of the plant and the smells that have fouled the community’s air. Of all of DEP’s 14 wastewater treatment facilities, the Owls Head plant has recorded the most complaints.

“We apologize for the quality-of-life impact of the plant on the community,” Mark Lanaghan, assistant commissioner of intergovernmental relations for DEP told the crowd gathered in the auditorium of Xaverian High School, 7100 Shore Road. “It doesn’t have to be like that. It hasn’t always been like that, and it won’t always be like that.”

. . .

Said Vincent Sapienza, assistant commissioner at DEP’s Bureau of Wastewater Treatment, the agency is currently covering the plant’s primary settling tank launders, where turbulence during the first stage of treatment causes a high level of noxious odor. The covers, which are constructed of steel beams and laminated plywood, are being installed with the expectation that they will last several years till a permanent solution can be created, Sapienza said.

In addition, according to Sapienza, the agency is in the first steps of “design(ing) an odor control system” for the primary settling tanks, which also appear to be responsible for emanations of odors into the community. The first step, he said, is getting a contractor to “model” an appropriate system, then to build it.

We should assume (hopefully!) that this next part contains a typo:

Other steps the agency is taking include putting out for bid once again the $20 extension of the facility’s grit and scum building. This will enable tanks stored in the open air, to be enclosed. The contract for this work is expected to be awarded in early 2007, with containers stored indoors by late 2009.

$20?

Cold Comfort (Station)

Speak for yourself, you incontinent old kook:

Bladders may be bursting in the city’s third largest commercial hub, but currently there are no plans to install public toilets in Downtown Brooklyn.

And this was the loudest criticism at last week’s Community Board 2 transportation committee meeting, where two landscape architect firms presented their plans for a new Flatbush Avenue streetscape and revitalized Fulton Mall.

“There’s no public toilets anywhere in this downtown area. How can these people be making these plans to try to entice the public to come down and feel happy and buy when the planners don’t have the courtesy to install some toilets for people’s use,” said an outraged CB 2 member Bill Harris.

“A lot of the folks who shop here come great distances from way out in central and southern Brooklyn, and here they are stuck with bursting bladders. It’s insulting, stupid and very short-sighted, and just plain cheap,” he added.

Mom, Put Down The Dangerous Chemicals

Years from now on the couch this boy will have plenty to discuss:

A mother who tried to throw ammonia at her neighbor during a fight missed her mark and instead hit her 11-year-old son, police allege.

The fight happened inside 65 Winter Ave. in New Brighton at about 1 p.m. Tuesday, police allege.

Gina Lawson, 39, threw the ammonia at her female neighbor, but Ms. Lawson’s son was standing between them, police allege.

The fluid ended up striking the boy in the face and eye, causing “burning of the eye, an abrasion of the eye and substantial pain,” according to court papers.

Authorities charged Ms. Lawson with third-degree assault, child endangerment, fourth-degree weapon possession, for the ammonia, and third-degree attempted assault — all misdemeanors.

City To Ford: Scoreboard

The Times revisits the Daily News’ famous headline after the former President, er, passes away at the age of 93:

Mr. Ford, on Oct. 29, 1975, gave a speech denying federal assistance to spare New York from bankruptcy. The front page of The Daily News the next day read: “FORD TO CITY: DROP DEAD.”

Mr. Ford never explicitly said “drop dead.” Yet those two words, arguably the essence of his remarks as encapsulated in the immortal headline, would, as he later acknowledged, cost him the presidency the following year, after Jimmy Carter, nominated by the Democrats in New York, narrowly carried the state.

“It more than annoyed me because it wasn’t accurate,” he recalled years later. “It was very unfair.”

That view is echoed in an evolving version of historical revisionism. Only two months after saying or meaning or merely implying “drop dead” — or, perhaps, resorting to tough love by holding the city’s feet to the fire — Mr. Ford signed legislation to provide federal loans to the city, which were repaid with interest.

. . .

The Ford administration’s politically suicidal demands to city officials — raise transit fares, abolish rent control, scrap free tuition at the City University — prompted Victor Gotbaum, the municipal labor leader, to complain that Mr. Simon barely believed in government at all, except for police and fire protection, “and he’s not sure about fire.”

David R. Gergen, an assistant to [treasury secretary William E.] Simon at the time and later a presidential adviser, recalled that Mr. Ford himself “was one of those moderate Republicans who actually liked New York” — he chose Nelson A. Rockefeller as his vice president — but that “he was offended by the city’s profligate spending.”

“The president’s speechwriters whipped up one draft, and I was asked by the White House chief of staff to write an alternative version,” Mr. Gergen said. “I wrote a hard-hitting piece, assuming that if it ever saw the light of day, the White House would, in the normal course, invite me to smooth the rough edges. Instead, someone plopped a few of my rough, unedited paragraphs into the final text.”

In the speech, the president said: “The people of this country will not be stampeded. They will not panic when a few desperate New York officials and bankers try to scare New York’s mortgage payments out of them.”

The speech had a powerful impact, Mr. Gergen said. “It was a doozy of a speech, but events caught both sides by surprise,” Mr. Gergen remembered. “New Yorkers had not foreseen how tough the president would be, and Republicans in Washington had not anticipated how angry the response would be.”

Taking Exemplary Service To A Higher Level And Blowing Away The Competition

The best concierges can come through on any request, no matter how outrageous:

A six-month undercover operation, during which cops posed as out-of-town guests, resulted in the arrests of a night manager at the Park Lane Hotel, a delivery-staff member and the man who allegedly supplied them with more than half a dozen guns and half a pound of narcotics.

The sting was launched after police received a tip from hotel employees that several brazen colleagues were turning the deluxe property into a drug and firearms bazaar.

. . .

Howard Rubenstein, the spokesman for Leona Helmsley and the Helmsley hotel chain, said management “acted promptly to turn in these people. They are appalled at the thought that their employees would stoop to this terrible level.”

Acting on the tip, detectives from Manhattan South Narcotics in April went to the hotel — where rooms range from $310 to $480 a night — and started chatting up night manager Diogenes Peña, 31, who worked at the hotel for 10 years, sources said.

The “tourist” cops returned two months later. This time they arranged to buy five bags of cocaine from Peña, who sent room-service worker Luis Quinones — another 10-year hotel veteran — to room 804 with the drugs, according to a court complaint.

Over the next two months, detectives bought more cocaine in Park Lane rooms and a second-floor bathroom, and even heard Peña telephoning his supplier and ordering him to “bring the doughnuts now.”

On Aug. 7, an undercover officer upped the ante and asked for guns, a request Peña allegedly fulfilled. During that transaction, Peña said his partner was waiting downstairs, which allowed cops to get a glimpse of Cesar Victorino, 34, his alleged cocaine distributor.

After two more buys, one of which yielded four guns and more drugs, police swooped in on Peña and Quinones and arrested them at work. Victorino was later arrested outside his Inwood home, police sources said.