How About We Try A Little Experiment?

Given that special elections are so complicated and prohibitively expensive, especially in this economically fraught time, we could just go a year without a Bronx Borough President. It might prove instructive:

The Bronx borough president’s chair is still warm, and the Benjamin Franklin Reform Democratic Club is trying to figure out who’s going to sit in it next.

The Riverdale-Kingsbridge-area political club hosted beep hopefuls Assemblyman Ruben Diaz Jr. and City Council Majority Leader Joel Rivera at a meeting last week. Both men explained their qualifications for current Bronx Borough President Adolfo Carrión Jr.’s job and didn’t debate directly, according to people who attended the meeting.

Ever since Mr. Carrión’s slip of the tongue at a speaking engagement at Yale last year, it’s been widely rumored that he will go to Washington, D.C. to head the Office of Urban Policy under President Barack Obama.

. . .

If Mr. Carrión leaves, Mayor Michael Bloomberg would have to call a special election — but since no announcement has been made, Ben Franklin leaders have postponed any endorsement until their annual meeting at the end of this month.

I mean, it’s already the case that the Office of the Borough President has no real authority — a fact that even leads some legislators to look into the possibility of creating a sort of shadow borough presidency:

The leadership deal that resulted in the Democratic Party taking a majority in the state Senate for the first time in decades included a little discussed agreement that gave Riverdale and Kingsbridge lawmaker Pedro Espada Jr. leeway to lead a legislative coalition on Bronx economic development.

Mr. Espada describes it as “an active coordinating council that will really work to do the things that the borough president can’t do by statute.”

He says it will include the Bronx delegations to the City Council, Assembly, state Senate, and Congress, and will be funded by the state Senate’s Democratic majority. A spokesman for state Senate Majority Leader Malcolm Smith deferred questions about the plan’s details to Mr. Espada.

“Its ultimate goal and mantra would be to remove the designation of the poorest county in the state,” Mr. Espada said.

Borough presidents have a degree of oversight over all aspects of city government in their county, but long-term strategic planning for economic development is a special part of the job description. Mr. Espada has long coveted the borough presidency.

Among the policy ideas Mr. Espada has for the post is creating an authority, similar to the city’s Industrial Development Agency, to issue bonds for public works exclusively in the Bronx. The IDA issues bonds for big capital projects like Yankee Stadium — a controversial deal itself — and is overseen by the city Economic Development Corporation.

“Simply put, a borough president should have the bully pulpit, and that will continue to be their main job description,” Mr. Espada said. “They don’t really have any legislative authority.”

Riverdale and Kingsbridge politicians familiar with the deal aren’t sure why it’s been a stealth program. Mr. Smith’s office hasn’t made any official announcements about it and it’s still unclear whether the plan will stick.

The Telltale Feather

New York Post freakout coming in 5, 4, 3, 2 . . . blammo:

It was those damned geese!

A feather from a bird and “organic material” has been found on the engine, wings and fuselage of the US Airways airliner that crash-landed in the Hudson River, federal authorities said yesterday.

Investigators also have found that fan blades in the Airbus A320’s right engine “revealed evidence of soft-body impact damage.”

. . .

“What appears to be organic material was found in the right engine and on the wings and fuselage,” said the NTSB in a press release. Samples of that material have been sent to the US Agriculture Department for DNA analysis.

“A single feather was found attached to a flap track on the wing,” said the release, adding that the feather “is being sent to bird-identification experts” at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington.

It was the evidence of the old bird’s feather! It increased my fury as the beating of a drum stimulates the soldier into courage!

One Day Ethics Will Catch Up To Technology But Until Then We’ll Have All These Cool Maps We Can Fool Around With

Wow, that’s really cool. Who knew you could do so much with a web-based mapping application? Technology is neat:

Google’s technological expertise helped turn New York City’s main visitor center from a place to collect brochures into an interactive hub for planning a day — or a week — in the city. But the related Web site — NYCGo — proved so popular that it crashed almost as soon as it was unveiled and continued to operate slowly through Wednesday afternoon.

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and other city officials showed off the Official NYC Information Center, at 810 Seventh Avenue and West 53rd Street in Midtown, on Wednesday morning. At a cost of $1.8 million in private financing, the center was outfitted with video tabletop touch-screens equipped with Google Maps that allow users to assemble itineraries.

Mr. Bloomberg emphasized that the center was not just for tourists. “By extending these new travel resources to our residents, we are giving New Yorkers the chance to more actively take advantage of the city’s diverse and exciting neighborhoods,” he said.

The city’s tourism-promotion arm, NYC & Company, also officially unveiled a revamped Web site, linked to Travelocity’s reservations system, so that prospective visitors can immediately purchase airline tickets or hotel rooms.

Apparently NYC & Company gets 40% of its financing — and the obvious official stamp of approval — from the city. So it seems not kind of but actually really fishy that the Maps section of the site features the “7 Karaoke Bars Worth Singing About”, for example, with detailed directions how to get to each one. If I were a competing karaoke bar owner, I’d be pissed. Or a hotelier. Or a restauranteur. Or the proprietor of an “environmentally conscious watering hole” that wasn’t picked by the site’s editors. Or anyone who could benefit from the use of taxpayer money to stir up business.

Even In The Era Of Obama, People Still Unclear About “The Tempering Qualities Of Humility And Restraint”

The first rule of graft is never being improbably flashy with your loot:

An NYC Transit supervisor allegedly “living large” with luxury cars and five flat-screen televisions in her house is suspected of looting the cash-strapped agency with a bogus billing and kickback scheme, the Daily News has learned.

The MTA inspector general and the Brooklyn district attorney’s office are investigating whether Jacqueline Jackson, 50, inflated bills submitted by a Brooklyn company and then shared in the ill-gotten gains, law enforcement sources said.

The scope of the suspected fraud isn’t yet known but the early signs are alarming, sources said.

NYC Transit is believed to have used the company, AJI Records Retrieval, to do pre-trial tasks for at least a decade, paying the firm about $1.5 million, sources said.

. . .

Jackson earned $83,000 a year as director of legal support for the tort division in NYC Transit’s legal department.

Yet, Jackson had a flat-screen television in just about every room — including the bathroom — of her two-story brick house on E. 46th St. in the Flatlands section of Brooklyn, a source said.

She also had five or so fur coats in her closets, according to the source.

Outside, a Mercedes-Benz S430 luxury sedan was in the driveway. Jackson also drives a Lincoln Navigator.

. . .

“She’s living large,” one of Jackson’s neighbors said. “Inside the house is so beautiful.”

Remember The Maine, To Hell With Canadian Geese!

The Post treads a dangerousely Hearst-like line by inflaming the anti-geese passions of at least three middle-aged men in Queens:

New Yorkers clamored yesterday for flocks of geese near area airports to be killed to prevent them from taking out another plane like the US Airways carrier forced to crash-land in the Hudson.

“These geese are a blight,” said William Santos, 50, as he walked the World’s Fair Marina near La Guardia Airport, where more than 100 geese gathered. “The city has to get them out of here, just for our own safety, never mind the mess they leave behind.”

Another marina visitor, Jack Riley, 43, was more blunt: “They should have a hunting season here on these geese. Let the criminals shoot the geese instead of people.”

A collision with a flock of geese is being blamed for the engine failure of the US Airways flight.