Moral: Stick To Low-Hanging Fruit

You know, traffic congestion and greenhouse gasses are important in an Arnold Schwarzenegger kind of way, but access to health insurance is an equally powerful bipartisan issue, you know. Just saying is all:

A sickening 1 million New Yorkers don’t have health insurance, even though 700,000 of them have jobs, according to a report released yesterday by the city Health Department.

More than a quarter of them are young adults ages 18 to 24. The problem is most prevalent among Hispanics: 1 in 4 of them lacks insurance, compared with 1 in 10 whites.

Men are also more likely to lack insurance than women: 1 in 5 of them has no insurance while 1 in 8 women lacks coverage.

(And there are lots of fresh fruit this time of year.)

“West Side Stadium” And “NYC2012” Sounded Appropriately Grandiose, But “Airport Village” Still Has A Ring To It . . . Right?

The problem remains that West Side plans failed, that Olympic thing was a wash, and you wouldn’t want to hitch your wagon too soon to volatile projects like Atlantic Yards or Coney Island. So where do you go for the great blank slate with which to solidify your place in history? Jamaica, Mon:

A plan to transform downtown Jamaica, Queens, into a vibrant “airport village” while preserving the quiet, low-scale character of neighboring side streets cleared an important City Council committee yesterday, all but ensuring final approval next month for the single largest rezoning of the Bloomberg administration.

Covering a 368-block area that sweeps northeast from the AirTrain transit hub, the rezoning would expand the neighborhood’s commercial core by allowing hotels and office towers to rise on underused industrial land surrounding the train station, officials said. At the same time, it would encourage new, denser housing and retail development in some areas and limit residences to one- and two-family homes in others.

“We’ve all been aware for so long of the potential of Jamaica,” Daniel L. Doctoroff, deputy mayor for economic development and rebuilding, said of the plan, intended to create a regional business center minutes from Kennedy International Airport. “You go to cities around the country and around the world and they’ve got major commercial centers near their airports. We don’t have anything like that.”

. . .

The plan, officials said, is in keeping with Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s approach to economic development of enhancing secondary business districts and creating mixed-use 24-hour communities in all five boroughs.

City officials and community development advocates have high hopes for the rezoning package, which was approved with modifications by the City Council’s Land Use Committee. The City Planning Commission must now accept those changes before resubmitting the package to the Council for final approval, expected on Sept. 10.

“It’s going to make great use of the train-to-the-plane,” said Councilwoman Melinda R. Katz, chairwoman of the Land Use Committee. “Basically, this is really an example of something that is good for the borough of Queens and good for the city of New York,” she said, but added that it was important to accommodate some of the concerns in the neighborhood that the zoning would allow for too-large buildings on Hillside Avenue.

Indeed, said Amanda M. Burden, the city planning commissioner, working to address concerns that made the rezoning effort complex and time-consuming. “This has been a marathon four-year effort,” she said. “Jamaica already is a retail destination,” she said, “but around the AirTrain you just couldn’t build.”

But with the land, now zoned for manufacturing, soon to accommodate buildings as high as 29 stories, officials envision three million square feet of commercial space bringing 9,600 jobs to the hub, as well as 5,200 new residences, 770 of them subsidized.

To accommodate that growth, officials said, they are working to bring in schools, sewers, parking spaces and other infrastructure improvements, including lighting and trees along Hillside Avenue.

Carlisle Towery, president of the Greater Jamaica Development Corporation, said that the rezoning would help attract private investment to build on other developments that are helping create a regional center. Queens County civil courts have clustered nearby, he said, while a Food and Drug Administration laboratory and a Social Security Administration office are federal anchors.

Earlier: Sure It’s A Vacant, Dilapidated Building, But It’s My Vacant, Dilapidated Building!

OK Computer!

And the best thing is that you’ll never again have to worry about the Christmas tip:

[Colin] Foster is the vice president of sales and marketing for Virtual Doorman, the top product of a security firm called Virtual Service, which promises to offer residents and managers of small buildings the services of a professional doorman at a fraction of the cost — without skimping on security or convenience.

It used to be that small walkups were second-class buildings,” Foster said. “They did not fetch the same pricing as a doorman building. Now, small buildings can offer those same amenities.”

Virtual Doorman is a standalone, computerized system that integrates with a building’s own computers while linking its high-end color video monitors with the building’s existing intercoms, Foster said.

The electronic system is manned remotely 24 hours a day by a third-party agency that is linked directly to the building’s local fire department, police and medical services.

The system is monitored constantly, and can perform all the tasks of an old-fashioned, human doorman, Foster said, including screening guests, accepting deliveries and laundry, and unlocking doors for tenants who lost their keys.

Foster insists man and machine can co-exist. It is written into their policy that Virtual Doorman will not replace any members of 32BJ, the union that represents workers including New York doormen.

. . .

Still, the union thinks there’s no substitution for old-fashioned manpower. “The experience and training of doormen, combined with their familiarity of residents cannot be replaced by electronic services that control building access from remote locations,” according to a 32BJ statement.

“The safety of New Yorkers living in condominiums and apartments belongs in the real-life hands of diligent doormen who can maintain on-site control of their buildings.”

Backstory: Here’s A Tip . . .

Let’s Just Get Takeout Instead

In the end the pot meatball defense failed to keep an NYPD detective from losing his job:

Police Commissioner Ray Kelly has fired NYPD anti-terrorism cop Anthony Chiofalo, who claimed he flunked a drug test because his wife spiked his meatballs with marijuana, sources told The Post.

Chiofalo was able to convince an administrative judge in his departmental hearing last November that his wife Christine used pot instead of oregano in her meatball recipe, so he’d be forced to retire from the force.

Although the judge bought into the meatball defense, Kelly had the final say.

Police prosecutors had strongly recommended the commissioner overturn the verdict and Kelly decided last week to send Chiofalo’s career up in smoke, the sources said.

. . .

Christine Chiofalo claimed she feared her husband would die in the line of duty like his firefighter brother Nicholas, who lost his life on 9/11.

“I was afraid he was going to be killed,” she told an Internal Affairs Bureau investigator, a police source said.

Two of Chiofalo’s former partners from his days in the 75th Precinct, Michael Curtin and Joseph Vigiano, also died in the terror attacks on the World Trade Center.

The 22-year veteran had been assigned to the joint terrorism task force when he flunked the drug test in 2005. He was suspended without pay, and requested the departmental trial.

His wife passed a polygraph test and said she thought her husband would be allowed to retire with a full pension if the pot was detected. A defense expert testified that marijuana ingested with food could turn up on a drug test.

The Ones That Got Away

If it were up to them they would have held out for the fish:

NYPD scuba divers pulled four fishermen to safety yesterday after an angry Atlantic Ocean swamped the stone jetty they were casting from in Queens.

A school of bluefish proved too tempting for the friends to turn their backs on – even as the waters rose around their feet and stranded them about 2:30 p.m., said one victim, Javier Rodriguez, 46.

“They were all over the place, the bluefish,” he said. “We got about 30 fish with four guys. We stopped fishing because the waves were so high. And they were banging against the rocks.”

Rodriguez said the crew planned to cling to the jetty while they waited for the tide to drop after nightfall and for the waters around Breezy Point to calm.

Then they saw an NYPD helicopter hovering above them.

“We didn’t call for help. Someone called for us. We were okay,” the proud fisherman said. “We were waiting for the tide to go down. We had special boots. We had all that fish, so we had to get that fish out.”

. . .

Two divers were dropped from the chopper. They grabbed the fishermen, swam them to lift buckets and the police flew the men out of the chop in pairs, police said.

But the pals had to leave their fish and tackle behind.

“They had a good catch,” the sergeant said. “They had some big [fish], but it’s not worth it. The rocks are too slippery when the tide comes in. They couldn’t move their feet without being swept to sea.”

To Rodriguez, a laundermat worker, and his pals, those bags of fish meant dinner.

“Everybody has family here, and we were taking the bluefish to eat,” he said. “I’m diabetic. I always go to catch fish for me. I don’t do it for sport. I do it because I eat it. It’s very expensive at the fish market.”