The “bemusement” they “engendered”? What, is this Tokio Hotel or something? No matter:

Happy birthday, Stapleton natives and identical twin brothers Randy and Ronnie Zavattieri, and enjoy it — the next one is four years away.

The Zavattieris are either going to be 48 years old or 12 today, depending on whether you count non-leap years. The brothers are the only twins in the country born on Feb. 29, 1960, and have been soaking up the attention as this year’s leap year approached — Randy Zavattieri got to read the seventh item on David Letterman’s “Top 10″ list the last leap year, and was invited with other “leaplings” to attend Martha Stewart’s show, which will air today (1 p.m., Ch. 4).

The bemusement the young twins engendered in strangers at the Stapleton Houses seems to have subsided.

“It was different then, people didn’t pay much attention to it (leap years),” said Randy, who now lives in South Brunswick, N.J., in a phone interview this week. “People didn’t understand why me and my brother were so happy to see our birthday on the calendar, but I’m not going to see my birthday again for another four years!”

By some estimates there are 4 million leaplings in the world, about 200,000 of them in the United States. The leap year occurs to correct a drift between the astronomical start of the seasons, or equinox, and regular calendar years, called common years, by inserting an extra day into the month of February once every four years.

For most of his life, Randy Zavattieri celebrated his birthday during common years on March 1, but he changed to Feb. 28 after appearing on David Letterman’s show, when he realized that much of the country’s other leaplings celebrated on that day.

*Hey, assignment desk, run down to the City Clerk’s Office to see if this is happening today . . .

. . . the rest, not so much. So now that it’s no longer necessary to keep up appearances of “successful security consultant,” they realize it’s safe to start to wrap things up at the home office:

Rudy Giuliani’s consulting firm has laid off staffers as the business is reshaped after his failed presidential campaign, The Post has learned.

The layoffs last week involved administrative staffers working for Giuliani Partners, several sources told The Post.

It was unclear exactly how many departed last week, but the sources said it was at least five staffers.

First employees to go were those assigned to the Qatar account . . .

Gypsy cab as impromptu safe haven:

A man carrying a 6-month-old girl flagged down a black car for hire in Queens on Thursday and left the baby behind after asking the driver to stop, the police said.

The driver immediately took the infant to a firehouse in Corona, the police arrived and the baby was taken to St. John’s Queens Hospital, where she was in good condition.

. . .

About 10 a.m., the driver, whose name the police did not release, was flagged down at Northern Boulevard and 106th Street by a man holding the infant. When the driver and his passengers reached Northern Boulevard and 83rd Street, the man asked the driver to stop so he could make a phone call.

The man then walked across the street to a pay phone and fled, the police said. The driver took the child to Engine Company 289 at 97-28 43rd Avenue.

The driver is an independent contractor affiliated with Tel-a-Car of New York, said the company’s manager, Rocco Sacramone.

“It was a great thing he did,” said Mr. Sacramone, who would not disclose the driver’s name. “He went out, he went to work, he did a great thing, and then he went home and went to sleep.”

Generally, only taxis are allowed to pick up passengers in the street; Mr. Sacramone said he did not know why the driver had picked up the man.

But really, doesn’t the concept of a dedicated funding stream take the state off the hook for transit improvments? That’s a good thing when New York City is trying to recoup more of the money it sends to Albany? And then there’s the question of how much of an impact 15% would even have:

Supporters of Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s plan to charge people who drive into the busiest parts of Manhattan have promoted it as a way to provide a steady flow of money to pay for improvements to public transportation for decades to come.

Trains would be less crowded. Stations would be spruced up. A new subway line would be built.

But under a new spending plan released Wednesday by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, so-called congestion pricing would cover a relatively small portion — 15 percent — of money needed for transit improvements. That would leave the authority still scrambling for money.

The authority said that it would need $29.5 billion from 2008 through 2013 for system improvements (like thousands of new buses and modernized subway signals) and expansion (like work on the Second Avenue subway).

It tentatively identified $20 billion in potential sources of funds, including $4.5 billion that could be raised by borrowing against congestion pricing revenue. But officials were unable to say where the remaining $9.5 billion would come from at a time of city and state budget tightening. They planned to ask the governor’s office and the State Legislature to come up with a financing formula to make up the shortfall.

Elliot G. Sander, the authority’s chief executive, said that unless its plan is financed in full, the transit system risked sliding back into the disrepair of the 1970s and 1980s.

. . .

Under the plan, the $4.5 billion in borrowing that would be made possible by congestion pricing accounts for just 15 percent of the authority’s infrastructure needs through 2013.

. . .

Mr. Bloomberg, who first proposed congestion pricing in April, said in a statement that it provided “one of the only reliable sources of funding” for the authority’s capital program “and without it, the projects in this plan will not happen.”

But the spending plan also exposed lines of tension between the authority and City Hall over how congestion revenues would be used.

Aides to Mr. Bloomberg said revenue from the system should allow for a total of $6 billion in borrowing — $1.5 billion more than the authority proposed.

The authority said it came up with a lower number because some congestion revenue should be set aside to cover operating costs, which would rise as it adds service to accommodate people who switch from cars to public transit once the system goes into effect.

The mayor has said that all congestion revenue should go to support capital spending.

The majority of money under the plan would go for the upkeep and modernization of the current system. It calls for the purchase of 590 subway cars, 2,976 buses and 440 commuter rail cars. It includes rehabilitation plans for 44 subway stations and the modernization of signals in parts of the subway system.

*As per PlaNYC 2030 Transportation Report (.pdf)

. . . the City Council sees a need to limit the size of for sale signs:

The slumping housing market is presenting a new wrinkle in the city — oversized “for sale” lawn signs that one Staten Island city councilman has made his latest quality-of-life target.

Michael McMahon (D-North Shore) yesterday introduced a bill that would limit the size of such signs throughout the city.

Claiming the signs have a “detrimental effect on the aesthetic value of New York City’s residential neighborhoods,” the proposed legislation limits “for sale” signs on residential properties to a maximum size of 4 square feet.

“While traveling in my district, I have noticed what seems to be an explosion in the size of real estate signs on front lawns to a degree that is practically obnoxious,” McMahon said in a prepared statement. “Real estate companies have the right to advertise, but let’s keep it tasteful.”

. . .

The measure is also catching flak from one Realtor, who said his signs must be large enough to attract buyers.

“If you have a property, you have to bring it to the public’s eye,” said George Wonica Sr., president of Wonica Realtors. He said the 2-by-2 foot signs McMahon is proposing are not large enough to lure business. “You might as well not have anything there. I agree with bringing it down, but I don’t think 2-by-2 is the proper dimension.”

Now that he’s a lame duck, other initiatives seem to be stalling:

A growing number of Assembly members say it’s extremely unlikely their house will support a revised congestion plan backed by Mayor Bloomberg, with at least two dozen now backing a different alternative that doesn’t charge to drive into parts of Manhattan.

“It’s not going to happen,” said Assemblyman Mark Weprin (D-Queens) of the Bloomberg-backed congestion pricing plan.

Assemblyman Joseph Lentol (D-Brooklyn) added, “I never say never, but I think it’s pretty unlikely given the feeling of the [Democratic] conference.”

Either that or apparently women don’t take to beauty pageants like they used to:

The Miss Brooklyn pageant — a stepping stone to the Miss America crown — reappeared after a 16-year absence last week and was plunged immediately into controversy because the winner is a queen who’s not from Kings.

Leigh-Taylor Smith, 22, captured the sparkling tiara Saturday afternoon and promptly whisked it across the East River, forcing the borough to wait at least another year before it can crown one of its daughters with top honors.

. . .

. . . Smith, whose main qualification for being Miss Brooklyn — other than her looks, talent and charm — is that she is a parishioner at the Brooklyn Tabernacle on the Fulton Mall in Downtown.

Plus, she’s made the hajj to Junior’s and the Coney Island Boardwalk since moving to New York after graduating from the University of Virginia last year.

“Living in Manhattan, it’s nice to come to a low-key place like Brooklyn,” she told The Brooklyn Paper.

Before Brooklynites take umbrage at Smith’s victory, partisans should remember that it might never have happened had more genuine Brooklynites signed up.

“We only had a few committed girls from Brooklyn,” said Kim Thomas, executive director of the Miss Brooklyn Scholarship Program. “We couldn’t have a contest with only three girls.”

. . . because this means that we officially no longer have to pay attention to Bloomberg.

I understand why it’s wrong to make cracks about the silverware:

Moving to close the books on a long and ugly chapter in New York’s employment history, the city has agreed to pay more than $20 million to settle a federal class-action lawsuit charging that the Department of Parks and Recreation systematically discriminated against black and Hispanic employees in awarding jobs and setting salaries, lawyers for the plaintiffs said Tuesday.

In announcing the agreement, lawyers and the plaintiffs painted a portrait of an agency that under its long-serving commissioner, Henry J. Stern, routinely rewarded a handpicked coterie of inexperienced white workers with plum assignments at the expense of experienced black and Hispanic employees.

In addition, the plaintiffs charged, white employees earned more than black and Hispanic workers performing the same jobs, and those who complained faced punishments like being reassigned to dusty basement desks or to an office far from home.

. . .

According to court documents, statistics show that in 2000, 92.9 percent of employees earning less than $20,000 a year were black or Hispanic, while only 14.2 percent of those earning between $50,000 and $60,000 a year were black or Hispanic.

And, according to the papers, Mr. Stern and senior parks employees routinely made derogatory, racially charged remarks. Mr. Stern told one former employee, Tanya Bowers, who is Jewish and black, that although she looked black, he knew she was Jewish when he heard her talk.

“I can bring you home and know that the silverware will still be there when you leave,” he said, according to her deposition.

But what does that have to do with swimming (”Wasn’t that a requirement?”)?

The Bloomberg preoccupation with productivity goals continues to result in abuses of the system:

Alan Weiner, a 64-year-old amusement park manager, charges that after he got hit with a legitimate ticket on Queens Blvd. last spring, his car was then slapped with three bogus tickets in the same area over the summer while he was working in Maine.

A judge last month threw out the allegedly phony tickets after seeing Weiner’s proof that he and his car, which has Maine plates, were out of town at the time.

. . .

Weiner’s saga began last April when his Jeep Cherokee, registered to the Maine amusement company where he works, was hit with a well-deserved ticket on Queens Blvd. after he failed to get back to the meter in time.

Weiner said he paid the ticket and thought nothing more about it — until last month when the city sent him a letter saying he had three more outstanding tickets.

All three summonses turned out to be issued by ticket agents in the same Queens command that wrote the first ticket, T-402.

Earlier: At Some Point Isn’t It Just Easier To Simply Do Your Job?

The MTA buttresses the penny lobby with its latest fare hike:

The MTA is rolling out a 10-trip, pay-per-ride MetroCard — with a peculiar price: $17.39

And the agency will soon start selling a 30-trip pay-per-ride with a $52.17 price tag.

The move is intended to provide an easy-math option for riders wanting to buy cash-based bonus MetroCards with a specific amount of trips — and no spare change in value.

Another reason: MetroCard vending machines can provide only limited types of change.

But one transit worker dubbed the options “wacko.They just look odd.”

Another worker quipped, “This is going to put the Board of Education to the ultimate test.”

Under the scheme, the $2 fare remains the same but the easy-math 20% bonus — buy five trips and get a sixth free — is being reduced to 15%.

That means a rider who gives a token booth clerk $8 will get a card with four trips — and $1.20 remaining toward the future purchase of another ride. MetroCards can be refilled at vending machines and booths.

The 10-trip oddball card — providing 10 subway or local bus rides, and free transfers — equates to $20 in value for $17.39.

The 30-trip oddball amounts to $60 in value — for $52.17.

You mean you don’t know who the Committee on Contract Compliance is? Pay up:

[T]wo thoroughly modern shakedown artists have been successfully looting hundreds of construction sites around the city — using little more than a pair of hardhats, a couple of official-looking clipboards and a cellphone, prosecutors said yesterday.

“These guys were pretty sophisticated,” Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau said as he announced the indictment of alleged enlightened extortionists Anthony Lewis and Kyle Correll.

The alleged scheme started back in 2005 for Lewis, 38, of Brownsville, Brooklyn - an ex-con swindler weighing some 400 pounds — and his accused sidekick Correll, 36, of Far Rockaway, Queens.

That’s when the two decided to incorporate themselves as “The Committee on Contract Compliance.”

They had hardhats lettered — in blue — with the bogus but important-sounding name. They carried clipboards and video cameras.

Thus outfitted, prosecutors said, the hard-hatted hoods would show up at small construction sites around town, targeting mostly Asian and Middle Eastern operations, tooling around in Lewis’ Lincoln Navigator and hitting as many as a dozen a day.

“We’re the Committee on Contract Compliance,” they’d allegedly announce to the site foreman. “You have serious safety violations. Hand us some cash, and we won’t shut you down.”

Some forked over a couple of hundred dollars immediately, to make the nuisance go away. Go jump in a lake, many of their other targets would respond, easily realizing the pair had no governmental affiliation.

That’s when Lewis would allegedly get on his cellphone and start dialing city and federal agencies.

Lewis and Correll had learned the right vocabulary, how to report just the kind of false violation that would get a firetruck, a cop car or a regulator to descend on the site immediately, said DA investigations chief Daniel Castleman.

The resulting inspection would shut down the job at a ruinous cost. That’s when Lewis and Correll would show up again, prosecutors said — asking the frantic victims if they had thought things over. More likely than not, the victims had.

Victims forked over anywhere from $300 to $10,000, prosecutors said.

Do the police need something to do? Because doing the fashion industry’s dirty work seems like it has little to do with public safety*:

Cops launched a massive predawn raid on counterfeiters in Chinatown yesterday, seizing about $1 million in phony brand-name apparel.

Sunglasses, watches and handbags with fake Coach, Prada and Rolex labels were taken from 32 stores in what Mayor Bloomberg called “one of the biggest takedowns ever of trademark counterfeiters.”

“It has been one of the most notorious knock-off shopping malls in the five boroughs,” Bloomberg said of the three-building strip along Canal Street.

*And this link to public safety seems like a stretch for the NYPD to make.

The question remains how you get trains off an island:

They were a vision in disco-era orange and yellow when they debuted in the 1970s, subway cars to put a smile on the face of the most jaded New York straphanger.

A bunch were delivered in 1973 to Staten Island, where they became the workhorses of the railway.

They’re still reliable and mechanically sound. But all this time later, the cars are as dowdy as leisure suits and as passe as The Hustle.

To buy more time before new cars are purchased some five to eight years from now, the 64-car Staten Island Railway fleet is scheduled for an upgrade.

An $11 million mini-overhaul is planned to spruce up the floors and seats, repair leaky ceiling panels to prevent soaked bottoms, and beef up the climate-control system.

Later this year, the cars will taken two at a time to New York City Transit’s Coney Island maintenance shop in Brooklyn. Each pair will stay in the shop for about a week, and the entire fleet should be rehabbed over 12 months.

If it’s such a good idea then of course you’ll need a $500,000 ad campaign to get the word out:

Supporters of the plan to charge drivers entering Manhattan below 60th Street launched a $500,000 ad blitz yesterday.

Congestion-pricing backers are posting 15,000 advertisements in subways and launching print and television campaigns, all promoting a pledge that the revenues raised will be used for mass transit.

Oh lord:

With 36 members of the City Council being forced out of office next year due to term limits, the election of 2009 could be the biggest and most expensive to hit New York.

At least 45 New Yorkers already are amassing campaign war chests to run for council seats and many more are expected to enter races in the coming months. One political consultant who is advising council candidates says he has identified more than 300 candidates he expects to run in 2009.

The early start to council campaigning and fund-raising efforts mirrors the early start to this year’s presidential race, with local candidates saying they want to put fund raising behind them so they can focus on campaigning as the city election nears.

. . .

A race to replace Council Member Alan Gerson in Lower Manhattan is providing political junkies with an early dose of campaign intrigue, with a fight over Internet domain names under way between a likely candidate who is chairwoman of Community Board 1, Julie Menin, and a retired firefighter and former police officer running for the open seat, Peter Gleason.

Mr. Gleason purchased the domain names juliemenin.com, juliemenin.net, and juliemenin.org and plans to post information about his anticipated opponent on them, prompting Ms. Menin to hire an attorney to help her get control of the sites. The dispute was first reported in the Villager newspaper.

“These kinds of things shouldn’t happen,” Ms. Menin said in an interview with The New York Sun. “It’s just not an honest way to do things.”

Mr. Gleason said Ms. Menin should have known to purchase her own domain names.

The vaunted Bloomberg terminal, applied to health care records, makes the health commissioner gush:

After two years of planning and a public investment of more than $60 million, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said on Monday that New York City was ready to equip doctors with computer software that can track patients’ medical records in order to provide better preventive care.

. . .

The new system, a software package developed with $30 million from the city and roughly $30 million from the state and federal governments, would let doctors do much more than is possible with paper charts by integrating a patient’s medical history, lab results and current medications into one electronic interface.

Among its important advances, city officials said, the system will give up-to-date information to doctors through a series of alerts, like overdue dates on prescriptions or cholesterol checks. It will share data with other doctors and provide information about the current best practices for treating illnesses. City officials hope that the system will help reduce overall costs by eliminating expensive and repetitive tests.

Two hundred doctors with 200,000 patients have committed to use the system, and the city hopes to have 1,000 doctors with one million patients using it by the end of the year, said Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, the New York City health commissioner.

Dr. Frieden said the system would provide more finely tuned information to doctors quickly than anything now available.

“This can do for health what the Bloomberg terminal did for finance,” he said in an interview.

Stoop culture, alive and well and un- and underemployed:

Last summer, two young girls appeared on Charles Street between Bleecker and West 4th Streets. They perched themselves on the front steps of the brownstone at No. 90, and they’ve stayed there, nearly every day, chatting and smoking and playing with their dogs from late morning to early evening, even in the bitter cold. Block residents are used to celebrities — Sarah Jessica and Matthew live there, after all — but they’ve been flummoxed by these new ladies of leisure, who’ve inspired a flurry of intra-block e-mails with titles like “The Girls” that report sightings as late as 4:30 a.m. Few Charles Streeters seem to know who they are or why they’re there.

You can learn a lot by asking. Haley, the brunette, is 23 and from Alabama; blonde Rebecca is 22 and from Pennsylvania. (They declined to provide their last names.) They grew up spending vacations together with their best-friend grandmas before moving to New York last year, basically for kicks. Haley, who dropped out of premed in Alabama, just started English-lit classes at Hunter. “I don’t like to write, but I like grammar,” she says. Rebecca basically does nothing, nor does she know what she wants to do. They share an apartment a few blocks west; their parents paid months of rent in advance. But even in the dead of winter, they prefer the stoop to their living room — although they chafe at their status as block icons. “We’re not into the fame thing,” Haley says. “But this is what we do.”

Finally, a politician concerned with the amount of hot air his campaign generates:

City Council member Eric Gioia of Queens is challenging New York’s political candidates to put their money where their mouths are on environmental issues and run “carbon-neutral” campaigns. Mr. Gioia, a likely candidate for public advocate, said yesterday that his campaign would purchase carbon offsets, use hybrid vehicles, send fewer mailers and more e-mail, and take other steps to make up for the greenhouse emissions produced by his run for office.

“You have to be the change you want to see,” Mr. Gioia said yesterday. “I certainly hope others will follow my example.”

New York’s linguistic heritage isn’t necessarily threatened but it does seem to be changing:

Hollywood gangsters planned rub-outs in a city where hoodlums said “Toidy Toid and Toid.” Archie Bunker confused “terlet” for “toilet” and called his long-suffering wife “Edit.”

Does anybody really speak that way anymore? Did anyone ever, really? In the New York of 2008, where small shops and whole blocks meet the wrecking ball at every turn, is the New York accent on the way out, too, shamed into obsolescence as each generation adopts a kind of speech Ralph Kramden wouldn’t recognize?

You can take that concern and just fuggedaboudit.

The New York accent is very much alive, linguists will happily tell you, but like all dialects — and that’s what our accent is — it’s changing. To be sure, it’s been a long time since anyone called a toilet a “terlet.” But many of us still drink “cawfee” and call our “fathas” on Father’s Day. What’s also true is that fewer of us, especially younger New Yorkers, are speaking this way in our increasingly mobile and diverse city. That said, you’d be mistaken to conclude that means New York talk is going the way of the Third Avenue El.

. . .

The New York accent is part of a broader East Coast way of speech, with major distinctions in places such as Boston and Philadelphia. Our accent fits like a glove in between these two geographic zones, and the forces buffeting it include immigration waves, the city’s transient young population and New Yorkers’ tendency to clean up their speech. So it should come as no surprise that if indeed any part of the city is sounding less like New York, it’s Manhattan.

“New York more than a great many other places is subject to homogenization,” Jochnowitz said, “And I think that has already happened in Manhattan, where kids growing up in most of the neighborhoods in Manhattan don’t have New York accents anymore.”

What they’re hanging on to in Manhattan, Jochnowitz said, are certain pronunciation distinctions he feels are worth preserving.

“New Yorkers who may be losing their accents are not losing the distinction between Mary, marry and merry. That really seems to be very much alive,” Jochnowitz said, speaking of the distinctions (cot and caught is another one) that are rarely seen outside the East Coast.

Things that make me never ever want to eat oysters again include . . . this, for example:

Hendrix Creek, flowing for just over a mile in Brooklyn through East New York, passes under the Belt Parkway and between two dormant landfills before it empties into Jamaica Bay. The creek, once fed by a natural stream, now starts at the output pipe of a wastewater treatment plant.

It is the perfect kind of place, said John K. McLaughlin, an ecologist for the New York City Department of Environmental Protection, for an experimental project that would establish oyster beds, not for harvest, but as living water filters.

. . .

Even if the initial change in water quality is not significant, he said, the creation of a self-sustaining habitat in Jamaica Bay — where oysters and other species can survive and spread — would be an achievement. That process, Mr. McLaughlin said, would be the first step to restoring something close to the bay’s original ecosystem.

But if the Hendrix Creek oysters thrive, the city may well face another challenge: keeping away adventuresome gourmands who might be tempted to help themselves to the delicacies.

“There’s a worry that if you have oysters that sell for a dollar apiece, people will steal them and sell them,” [Gaia Institute executive director Paul] Mankiewicz said. “We want them for habitat, not edibility.”

The market for fruit is cutthroat and possibly dangerous, resembling something you might see on The Wire:

Perhaps more than any other civic rivals, street vendors and brick-and-mortar stores seem to play a zero-sum game. The stores are wary of the vendors, whom they see as nimble nuisances undercutting their prices, unfettered by regulation or rent. The vendors see the stores as competition-hating Goliaths.

The city stepped briskly into the fray in December, when it proposed licensing a fleet of fruit and vegetable carts to operate in poor neighborhoods where people were eating little fresh produce.

Reaction was swift and noisy.

Richard Lipsky, a lobbyist for small retailers, said the proposal, known as the Green Carts bill, would “cannibalize existing business.”

. . .

Kangchul Park, director of the Korean Produce Association, acknowledged that few Korean grocers were in Upper Manhattan and the Bronx, two areas that would be affected by the legislation. But he predicted that licensed vendors would stray into forbidden areas with a higher demand for fruit. “Eventually,” Mr. Park said, “they’ll find out the reason why there are no grocery stores where they are. And sooner or later, they’ll be tempted to move to where there are other grocery stores.”

At some point it may make more sense just take your chances:

Law enforcement officials have major concerns about security weaknesses in the planned World Trade Center complex, a Daily News investigation has found.

The potential problems expressed to the Port Authority and others involved in the most high-profile development project in New York City history include:

* A row of three mostly glass towers positioned too closely to city streets, increasing their vulnerability to attack.

* Difficulties in inspecting some 2,000 delivery trucks and sightseeing buses that will enter or leave the site daily.

* A vehicle security center that hasn’t been fully designed and relies on vehicle inspection technology that hasn’t even been developed yet.

. . .

Towers 2, 3 and 4 — which will rise between Greenwich and Church Sts. to 79, 71 and 64 stories, respectively — contain too much glass, sources familiar with the issues said.

They also are not set back far enough from the two streets — where uninspected trucks will whiz by — to meet the most rigorous security standards, the sources said.

. . .

Another concern: The buildings do not meet Department of Defense or Department of Homeland Security blast standards. That means they can withstand certain types of explosions - but not more powerful blasts.

The DOD blast standards — rarely applied to U.S. skyscrapers — are typically used in U.S. embassies and missions abroad, sensitive government facilities and military bases.

. . . but you can’t make Staten Islanders stop wanting to dump. They just can’t seem to get away from their past:

It’s been seven years since the Fresh Kills landfill closed, but it’s being replaced by miniature dumps that are springing up in neighborhoods across the borough — and the Sanitation Department is being slammed for not doing enough to stop it.

Despite the Island comprising nearly 20 percent of the city’s acreage — and more open spaces and wetlands than any other borough — only 7 percent of the fines issued by the Sanitation Department for illegal dumping in the last five years were given out here, according to an Advance analysis of Sanitation statistics.

. . .

As an Advance reporter and photographer sought out hotspots for dumping across the borough recently, neighbors marveled in disgust over people who don’t think twice before throwing garbage on remote dead-end streets, into wetlands, or along highway ditches.

“I’m astounded,” said Rossville resident Frank Lettiere, who said he often sees people driving to the corner of Woodrow Road and Veterans Road East and kicking trash and household items into the wooded hill that leads to a drainage ditch. “You can’t give people a conscience who don’t have a conscience.”

. . .

Other dumping hot spots the Advance visited include Wild Avenue by East Service Road in Travis, along Chelsea Road in Chelsea and the Graniteville Quarry off Forest Avenue.

Joanne Redhead, who lives across the street from the Elm Park site, said she’s disgusted by the frequent dumping into the lot covered by high weeds and trees.

“They come with their trucks and their cars and they dump their trash there,” Ms. Redhead said, pointing to the lot which harbors tires, several bags of trash and an old boat. “If I knew this was a dumping site, I wouldn’t have bought this house (four years ago). It’s just very nasty people. That’s really messing up the environment.”

You know things have turned around in New York when instead of the bad old days you have “You don’t expect this . . . especially not in front of Starbucks”

A brazen robber pistol-whipped a man yesterday on a Midtown street, wrestling a black duffel bag filled with $150,000 cash out of his hands as dozens of pedestrians looked on in horror.

Investigators are looking into the possibility that Seton Ijams, 50, was a victim of an inside-job robbery, and that someone may have tipped off the thief as to what time he would pick up the cash, a police official said.

Ijams, a vice president at Columbia Artists Management Inc., had just withdrawn the money from a Chase Bank branch on West 56th Street at Sixth Avenue shortly after 2 p.m., police said.

As he walked west along 56th Street, a young man followed Ijams and tried to grab his money bag.

When Ijams resisted, his assailant — described as a black man in his 20s and wearing a black coat — dragged him along the sidewalk while hitting him in the head with a silver pistol.

While he continued to whack Ijams in the head, the pistol went off, witnesses said.

. . .

Ijams, bleeding profusely from the head, fell to the sidewalk in front of a Starbucks as the robber got lost in the crowd carrying the bag filled with wads of bills.

“I saw the guy running” after leaving the victim on the ground, said Amado Delacruz, 34. “You don’t expect this — not on 56th Street, and especially not in front of Starbucks.”

And way to squeeze one off, asshole! If you’re going to beat someone over the head with your piece, try keeping the safety on . . .

Why is he starting to sound like he’s running in the Democratic primary? If you say “vice president” or even “president of the World Bank,” I will be upset:

If the Board of Elections isn’t reformed, it’s “not beyond the realm of possibility” that voters will lose confidence in the entire electoral process as they did in Kenya, Mayor Bloomberg said yesterday.

On his WABC radio show yesterday, Bloomberg went on a tear against the city’s Board of Elections after unofficial tallies in the Democratic presidential primary showed Barack Obama implausibly received no votes in 82 districts.

But the mayor backed off on his charge of election “fraud.”

But bitching about not being acknowledged is rather unbecoming:

The Villager was the source of last week’s hottest international business news story, though one would never have known it from the many media outlets that failed to give the newspaper a mention.

I mean, really . . .

He’d fix the toilet if only he could get the f - - - over his anger:

Bay Ridge handyman Richard Martin is known as the “Crazy Sign Guy” for the scathing notes he leaves his tenants, attacking their reading skills and threatening to kill them for trashing his Christmas decorations.

“Dear scumbag” the 71-year-old crank wrote after the decorations were torn down and unceremoniously dumped on his doorstep. “If I catch you, I will kill you where you are. You don’t want to f- - - with the Irish.”

Most of his tenants are from the Middle East, and Martin doesn’t hide the fact that he’d be happy if they went back whence they came.

In another note, Martin wrote, “To all tenants. If you don’t know how to read, there are 3 airports, pick 1 and keep going and don’t come back.”

“He’s crazy,” one tenant said. “He’s nuts.”

Standing outside the four-story building at 278 91st St. holding his cuddly Pekinese dog, Pretty Girl, the potty-mouthED senior told The Post that most of his notes are geared toward tenants’ inability to follow orders on how to throw out trash.

“They’re Arabs, they don’t give a f- - -,” said Martin, sporting a Ground Zero memorial baseball cap.

. . .

Martin, a former transit employee who became a super in 1994, said he started writing the notes a few years ago because the building regularly received summonses for trash collection.

He said in the past week, he’s received two summonses worth $125 in fines. That led him to post new notes, telling tenants to “put garbage inside the cans and not on top of [trash can] covers,” adding, “This is the last warning.”

“They don’t listen. They write back, ‘F- - you, get a life,’ but they spell my name s-u-p-p-e-r, not super. They’re so dumb,” he said, pointing to mounds of trash piled illegally near the curb.

If you’re out and about Monday night:

A football-size chunk was the biggest detectable piece of a malfunctioning spy satellite smashed to smithereens by a Navy missile, but there remains a small chance that dangerous pieces could still fall to Earth, a Pentagon general said yesterday.

If it follows the orbit, the debris field would pass over the city on Monday at 11:37 p.m. on a northwest-to-southeast track, according to heavens-above.com.

Marty Scorsese has blood on his hands:

A wiseguy wannabe who killed for the mob apologized yesterday to Italians everywhere for being a living, breathing stereotype — and blamed Hollywood for turning him into one.

“Although I made all my drastic decisions on my own, Hollywood intensified my love for that life and in the process blindsided what being Italian meant,” Bonanno crime-family informant Francesco Fiordilini said at his sentencing for killing a drug dealer in 1993.

“The mob is a gang. It’s made up of individuals with very low self-esteem who together feed on the weak — and most of the time their own,” Fiordilini told Brooklyn federal Judge Nicholas Garaufis.

After apologizing to the drug dealer’s family, Fiordilini offered a sweeping apology to Italians everywhere for “conspiring and utilizing our culture in the same manner the entertainment industry does with its stereotypes.”