Be Suspicious When A Politician Says He Or She Only Wants To Help The Children . . . Or The Environment (Or In Sheldon Silver’s Case, Both!)

So when Assembly Speaker Silver says that the health benefits of congestion pricing “aren’t clear,” what he really means is “there’s no way we’re going to allow you to collect hundreds of millions of dollars, no strings attached, like that troll Robert Moses sitting under the Triborough Bridge,” which in turn can be boiled down to the snappy slogan “Manhattan below 86th Street is not your own little private Triborough Bridge”:

Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver, in his strongest language yet against Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s plan to charge people who drive into the most congested parts of Manhattan during the day, questioned the health benefits of the proposal yesterday. He also suggested that many of the environmental goals Mr. Bloomberg has outlined could be accomplished without congestion pricing.

His comments suggested that two hours of testimony by Mayor Bloomberg at an Assembly hearing on Friday had not swayed the Democrats who control the chamber. Mr. Silver even seemed to outline new concerns, saying that the plan could actually hurt areas with high asthma rates.

“The children of the South Bronx, Bedford-Stuyvesant and Harlem, among others, are the ones who have been exposed to a lot of pollutants,” he said. Not only would those neighborhoods not benefit from the plan, he said, “some of those areas will become parking lots with people driving around the neighborhoods looking for parking spots in order to avoid congestion pricing fees.”

“There is a plan that can be put together that would obviously alleviate the environmental negativism of what takes place in Manhattan right now,” he said, but added that it could be done “with or without” congestion pricing.

. . .

But Mr. Silver’s remarks underscored that he may once again serve as the mayor’s foil in Albany. His opposition doomed the mayor’s plan to build a West Side football stadium for the New York Jets. Asked about parallels to that battle, Mr. Silver harked back to the mayor’s contention then that a Manhattan stadium would not cause undue congestion.

The stadium, Mr. Silver pointed out, would have been “right in the middle of this congested zone.”

“At that time, a year ago, there obviously was no congestion,” he added, facetiously. “We can even put this stadium to attract 100,000 people to come in right in the middle of the zone and there was no problem.”

. . .

Mr. Silver’s skepticism partly reflects the wide concern about the plan among the more than 100 Democrats who control the Assembly.

“I’m sort of torn here,” said Assemblyman Ruben Diaz Jr., a Bronx Democrat. “On the one hand, I really want to address the environmental issues,” he said, but added that he was concerned that congestion pricing could mean “that folks from other places are going to park their cars in my community” or that the toll would end up being a tax on his constituents without much benefit.

“I think in its present state,” he said, “there are too many concerns, certainly for us to rush to any judgment.”

Mr. Silver said that he was left with “a lot of questions.” But he did not say outright that he would reject the plan, and said that it was “very possible” that an agreement on some environmental plan for the city could be struck by August.

Our Keynote Speaker Today Will Be Thomas Frieden Who Will Speak On The Topic Of Raising Expectations To A Level Beyond One’s Control And Then Having To Manage Those Unrealistic Expectations

Now that they’ve taken care of trans fat and smoking, the Health Department now may be ready to take on labor issues:

Today, a piece of legislation is expected to be introduced in City Council that would give the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene more power to crack down on restaurants with labor violations. The bill was drafted with help from the Restaurant Opportunities Center of New York — a workers’ rights group — and the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University.

The bill would require restaurants to self-report any violations, which the health department would then list on its Web site. The bill would also give the department power to revoke restaurant licenses based on labor violations.

“The department of health has this already on the books in a sense — to get an operating permit you have to be in compliance with city, state and federal law,” said Rajani Adhikary, ROC-NY’s policy organizer. “We’re saying, the city has to step in, so restaurants will no longer be above the law.”

Health officials said they will review the legislation when it’s introduced.

Prince’s Cut

There’s the issue of the man who somehow stole $3.6 million from the city to buy jewelry:

In more than a year, a Brooklyn man stole $3.6 million from one of the New York City comptroller’s bank accounts, the Manhattan district attorney’s office said yesterday.

Tracy Ball, 49, made 604 electronic transfers from the bank account to a jewelry retailer, Jewelry Television, which shipped him diamond earrings, bracelets, necklaces, and watches, according to investigators.

But this is probably worse:

Even after a year, the comptroller’s office did not notice the money was missing from a fund used to pay workers’ compensation claims. Jewelry Television noticed that Mr. Ball was making multiple purchases in a day and contacted the bank, JP Morgan, which in turn contacted the comptroller, a spokeswoman for the Manhattan district attorney, Jennifer Kushner, said.

. . .

The assistant district attorney prosecuting the case, Andrew Seewald, said it wasn’t yet clear how Mr. Ball gained access to the bank account. Mr. Seewald said Mr. Ball had been arrested on a federal charge in the past, but he did not give details.

Mr. Ball worked for a homeless shelter and addiction recovery group in Greenwich Village called Project Renewal and would sometimes have the jewelry shipped to his work address on East 3rd Street in Manhattan, the district attorney’s office said.

Investigators charged that Mr. Ball would at times make purchases in bulk. On March 11, for example, he ordered 10 pairs of diamond earrings, 15 diamond necklaces, and 15 gold necklaces in the span of 12 minutes, the district attorney’s office said.

When police came to Mr. Ball’s house to arrest him, he was watching Jewelry Television on a plasma screen, Mr. Seewald said. Officers recovered $30,000 in cash and about 100 pieces of jewelry.

We Are All Taco Bell Now

After the Great Rat Uprising of 2007, many restaurant owners are noticing stricter health department inspections:

The owners of the Coffee Shop, a popular cafe on Union Square, say they had never failed a city health inspection in 17 years of business. So when inspectors came last week and shut them down — citing a number of violations that the owners say would have earned them a slap on the wrist in the past — they could think of only one thing: the KFC/Taco Bell rat video.

“We’re a clean operation,” a co-owner, Charles Milite, said in a news conference yesterday to announce that the violations had been corrected. “It’s clear to us we got caught in the cross hairs of this unfortunate Taco Bell situation.”

The “situation” is the widely seen news video of rats swarming inside a KFC/Taco Bell on Avenue of the Americas in Greenwich Village. It was broadcast Feb. 23, one day after the fast food restaurant had passed inspection.

The New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene has been closing down restaurants at a furious pace ever since. Between Feb. 26, the Monday after the rat video made its debut, and last Saturday, the department closed 94 restaurants and take-out outlets.

Health department statistics show that closings have been on the rise for more than a year and spiked in October, when 58 restaurants were shut. Another 68 were closed in November, and in January, 75 were shuttered, the most since at least March 2005, the earliest numbers available.

Department officials say inspectors may be making visits with a more watchful eye since the KFC/Taco Bell rat video. But they say the increase is not part of an organized crackdown and is not intended to “save face or make examples,” as Mr. Milite wrote in a sign he pasted to his cafe windows after it was shut down last Wednesday.

So what is a restauranteur to do? Hire a public relations firm, of course:

The owners of Coffee Shop, the chic eatery here, decided to call in a high-powered PR firm — the Marino Group — and hold a press conference yesterday to announce that health code violations have been remedied and they’re open for business. They also coyly mentioned “several of our celebrity friends” are expected to dine there today to show support.

“We’ve always had inspections,” said co-owner Charles Milite, who has been running the establishment for 17 years. “This inspection was tough.”

. . .

Milite believes he was caught in the fallout of the rat infestation at a Greenwich Village KFC/Taco Bell.

“Obviously, that was a big awakening for the city. Obviously, they have tightened up a bit,” Milite said, though the city has denied these allegations. Since the KFC/Taco Bell incident last month through March 10, the health department closed 94 restaurants.

“People will see those stickers and put us in the same category as Taco Bell,” said Milite, explaining the press conference was “our chance to at least defend ourselves and say, ‘We are not Taco Bell.'”

What’s that about repeating the negative?

Is John Liu Fast Becoming The Asian Al Sharpton?

Apparently Councilmember John Liu’s constituency includes low-rent Chinese takeouts:

The scandal started when a patron of the restaurant called CW11 on Monday, January 29, claiming to have gotten a fried mouse in her take-out, according to [reporter Chris] Glorioso, who has been acting as the station’s spokesman on the matter. He said he received the assignment upon getting to work at 3 p.m., and was out inspecting the grisly morsel at the woman’s house by 5 p.m. He then went over to the restaurant to confront the cook, who maintained the meat was just a mouse-shaped piece of chicken.

Glorioso said he picked up the meat in a plastic-gloved hand and showed it to “at least a dozen people” standing around the restaurant who agreed that it looked awfully rodent-like.

Nevertheless, he said his assignment desk did make a few attempts to get a laboratory back up to the woman’s claim — including calling the city’s health department — before News at Ten’s deadline, but no lab was open at that hour. He said there wasn’t a great deal of debate about what the right thing to do was, and stressed how guilty he would feel if someone got sick eating at the restaurant — which had been cited for “evidence of mice” three times in the past three years — while the station waited to get a second opinion.

But just what constituted “common sense” — and indeed, knowledge itself — was the subject of the screaming match during Sunday’s icy protest. Liu considered it unforgivable that the station would have run the original story without getting laboratory confirmation first. But he stepped into a debater’s trap when he said, “The reality is, all you needed to do was stick a fork in that piece of chicken to determine there was no hair, there was no skin, there were no bones,” since this implied that regular folk, not just trained biologists, are capable of figuring out what kind of animal was fried beyond recognition in the oil vats that day.

Liu and the restaurant’s lawyers are disputing the biologist’s report, claiming it was “rife with spelling errors” and that the station did not follow proper forensic procedure in the chain of handling the evidence.

Evidence aside, the real crime in Liu’s mind was the little quip about “fried mice” — a play on fried rice — in the introduction to the original piece, which he said made the whole segment racist.