Will The Outages Ever Cease?

Con Ed can’t get a break as the power goes out in Staten Island, affecting 16,000 “customers”*:

The latest power failure occurred as the utility and the city braced for a second summer heat wave that could endanger a fragile electrical network in Queens that is still being repaired.

The power failure on Staten Island began at 4:15 p.m. when three overhead lines were damaged — just 12 hours after Con Ed announced that electricity had been restored to the last customers in the Queens blackout. Around 10 p.m., Con Ed said, power was restored to all of its customers on Staten Island. The term “customer” includes residential and commercial buildings as well as households.

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg canceled plans to visit Queens last night to go instead to the affected areas of Staten Island. “The good news is the temperature is reasonably cool and we do expect to get everybody back very soon,” the mayor said last night in a news conference at Dongan Hills.

The mayor further noted the difference between above-ground and underground power lines:

He took care to distinguish between the power failure on Staten Island, which uses overhead lines, and the blackout in Queens, which relies mostly on underground networks.

“This is a very different situation than existed in Queens,” Mr. Bloomberg said. “Here, when a cable is out, they know that everybody downstream is not getting power, so their estimates are very good. In an underground system, there are multiple paths to every house, so they don’t have a way of knowing.” In Queens it took Con Ed four days to correctly estimate the number of customers without power.

*And don’t let the terminology fool you — 16,000 customers could turn out to be a lot of people.

Community Leadership: Investigate, Federalize And Technologize To Solve All Problems

On the topic of grandstanding, Council Member Peter Vallone, Jr. shows us how it’s done:

Astoria and Western Queens are slowly emerging from a hellish nightmare. We have stepped out of the Dark Ages. But of course Con Edison still remains outside the age of reason. Just like Baghdad Bob, they continue their laughable public misinformation campaign by trying to grossly minimize the extent of the damage they caused. First, they insisted that it was a minor problem with only a few hundred “customers” without power, then they raised that number to 1,800 and finally five days into the crisis they admit that 25,000 are without power.

That is why, my fellow citizens, I am calling on the district attorney to investigate the matter, requesting federal oversight of the utility and urging the power company to “use technology” to prevent this from happening in the future:

On Tuesday night I stood and watched electric power lines burn and fall to the ground. The fact that this was caused by two hot days in the summer is outrageous. I’m frightened to see what will happen in the hot summer days of August. Con Ed has assured us that they will be conducting their own investigation into this calamity. If this isn’t a case of the fox watching the henhouse I don’t know what is. That is why I along with Assembly Member Michael Gianaris and Council Member Eric Gioia have called for an investigation by District Attorney Richard Brown and will be conducting hearings at the City Council and the Assembly. Hopefully the “Con” in Con Edison will take on a new meaning.

Additionally, I am working with Congressman Joseph Crowley to get a federal monitor placed over Con Ed. The next few months will be crucial to rebuild our fragile network and ensure that this doesn’t happen again. I think we have all learned we can’t trust this irresponsible corporate neighbor, which provides us with stray voltage in the winter and no voltage in the summer, to do the right thing.

I am also demanding that Con Ed, like every other major utility provider, use technology that can show where service is down. It is embarrassing that in the 21st Century our utility provider must ride through the streets like a modern day Paul Revere looking for lights to see if power has returned.

That Was 40 Pounds Of Filet In My Fridge, Honestly

Mayor Bloomberg announced that Con Ed will reimburse customers for lost food and medicine without proof of receipts:

People who lost food or medicine because of the Queens blackout will be able to submit compensation claims of up to $350 without having to provide receipts or other itemization, Mayor Bloomberg said Wednesday, the day the last of the tens of thousands of affected residents and businesses had their electricity restored.

At a news conference in Queens, Bloomberg said Consolidated Edison would also be waiving a requirement that people fill out a specific form, and would instead accept written letters sent from a legimately affected address. Small businesses may apply for up to $7,000 in compensation, but will have to submit documentation.

When asked if there were concerns about possible fraudulent claims, Bloomberg said, “I would hope if people didn’t suffer a monetary loss they would not try to scam the system. New Yorkers are fundamentally honest.” At the height of the blackout, which lasted for 10 days, about 100,000 people went without lights, air conditioning and refrigeration.

Randy Cohen aside, how many customers — especially ones without power for ten days — do you think will hesitate to collect the full amount? And do you blame them?

While The Limbo Is Over For Queens Residents The Mayor Dances The Electric Slide

Con Edison announced that power has been restored to the last of the Queens customers without electricity:

Consolidated Edison said early this morning that had restored electricity to all the customers who endured a blackout in an eight-square-mile chunk of northwest Queens for more than a week.

. . .

Some awoke Tuesday to discover that they had hot water and air-conditioning for the first time in eight days. By the evening, only about 100 customers were still entirely without power, and their service was restored overnight, Con Ed said. But anger lingered over how long it had taken Con Ed to reconnect everyone.

Meanwhile, the mayor glibly responds to those who were troubled by his thankfulness — basically, “it’s a free country”:

He declined to respond directly to criticism from Queens officials and residents who were upset by his praise of Con Ed and Mr. Burke. “We live in a country where you have the First Amendment,” the mayor said. “You have the right to say anything you want. What I’ve got to do is focus on what’s right for this city.”

Is The City In Effect Giving The Yankees Money To Lobby Itself?

If true*, then this seems at least mildly disturbing:

City documents newly uncovered by the Voice reveal that the New York Yankees billed city tax-payers hundreds of thousands of dollars for the salaries of team execs and high-powered consultants to lobby the city and state, thanks to the team’s sweetheart lease deal engineered by the Giuliani administration.
. . .

The Yankees are apparently taking advantage of a clause in their lease with the city that allows “planning costs” of their new $1.3 billion stadium — groundbreaking for which could take place as soon as next week — to be deducted from the team’s rent. The planning deductions date back to a lease renegotiation arranged by Mayor Rudy Giuliani in his final days in office. Under the December 28, 2001, lease deal, both the Yankees and the Mets were allowed to deduct up to $5 million apiece from their annual rent payments to the city, to be used for planning the new stadiums that Giuliani proposed to build, with city aid, across the street from the teams’ existing homes.

. . .

Until recently, the city had insisted that it had no details of how the “planning” money was spent. But a review of documents submitted by the Yankees to the parks department — pried from the city only after a Freedom of Information Law filing (a separate request has been made for Mets city documents) — shows that the beneficiaries of the city money include not just those working to design the stadium, but also those trying to extract public approvals for it as well.

For starters, Yankees president Randy Levine (a former deputy mayor under Giuliani) and the team’s chief operating officer, Lonn Trost — the two top Yankee officials working for passage of the stadium deal — received a combined $312,500 in city money in 2004. The Yankees’ justification, according to the documents: The amount totaled 30 percent of Levine’s annual salary and 20 percent of Trost’s, representing the time each spent working on the stadium project.

Even more audaciously, the Yankees in 2004 charged the city $203,055.87 for the services of Powers and Company . . . According to filings with the New York Temporary State Commission on Lobbying, Powers was hired by the Yankees to lobby the state senate and assembly and the governor’s office for permission to use 25 acres of Bronx parkland and $70 million in state money for the stadium — permission that, as the Voice has reported (“Playing Hardball,” March 15–21, 2006), was granted in June 2005 after no discussion or debate in the legislature.

The city even apparently paid the Yankees to lobby the city itself. Another recipient of city money, via the Yankees, was the law firm Fried, Frank, Harris, Shriver & Jacobson, which, according to the New York City clerk’s lobbyist database, has served as a registered lobbyist for both Tishman Speyer, the Yankees’ project managers for the stadium, and the Yankees themselves. (Tishman’s $1.9 million in 2004 was the number one billable item in the stadium planning account.)

*As if the Yankees need more money!