Some People Have All The Luck

Man, why can’t I be on a Staten Island Ferry:

Within hours of the Staten Island Ferry crash last weekend, Court Street lawyer Sanford Rubenstein was on the national news discussing the possibility of litigation ensuing from this accident.

Because I certainly wouldn’t want to be a patient at St. Vincent’s:

The closing of St. Vincent’s Hospital has left yet another wounded group in the lurch — hundreds of New Yorkers who are suing the hospital for medical malpractice.

More than 260 people pursuing malpractice and negligence claims against the bankrupt hospital are in legal limbo.

With St. Vincent’s assets going to Bankruptcy Court, the victims may never see a penny in damages, sources told the Daily News.

Location Scout: Staten Island Ferry, St. Vincent’s Hospital Manhattan.

Maybe We Can Call It Third Term Park

The Great Economic Engine of Willets Point seems more like an idealistic pet project, but oh well, what does this guy care anyway — by the time it’s really humming along (and hopefully not just with the roar of engines from planes in and out of LaGuardia) he’ll be long gone (in Bermuda, perhaps?):

Under Mr. Bloomberg’s proposed budget, the city would need to reduce its workforce by more than 10,000 jobs; teachers would be fired; firehouses would be shuttered — the kind of things people really don’t like, and the kinds of things that draw noisy protests to the steps of City Hall.

What also stood out were the things that did not get cut. . . .

. . .

But the administration’s approach also has some serious drawbacks, most pointedly with the timing — this year’s capital budget, at about $10 billion, is the highest ever, just as the city’s finances are the worst they have been in years. Since capital spending is generally borrowed, directing money to these projects will increase the city’s hefty debt load, and mean higher debt service for years.

. . .

But with the city, it’s significant that for the largest projects — Coney Island and Willets Point — much of the money currently budgeted is for acquisitions, buying up property that the city doesn’t even own.

Given that the money goes into the pockets of a few landlords and businesses, it’s not stimulating much immediate economic activity. Instead, the city is relying on the hope that the projects will be carried out, eventually.

“New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg Plans Surveillance Trip To London”

Read: The mayor probably wants to host a dinner at his Kensington pad or something.

Faisal Shahzad Versus The UFT

So using the mayor’s logic that the bomber was “[h]omegrown maybe a mentally deranged person or someone with a political agenda that doesn’t like the health care bill or something” perhaps attention now can be turned toward the PBA as the real culprit:

One area that will be spared, however, is public safety. Mr. Bloomberg has decided that the police force, which dropped to 35,641 last year from 40,285 in 2000, cannot absorb any more cuts, especially in the wake of the Times Square bomb scare.

So he will scrap his original plans, as sketched out in his preliminary budget address in January, to reduce the police force by 892 officers through attrition, city officials said.

Look At It This Way, It’s Not Nearly As Wasteful As The 7 Train Extension

Time was, NYC-TV served up glossy commercials for Manhattan businesses, er, attractions to entice potential visitors to visit our fair city (and before that there were the city council hearings!). Now it seems the mayor wants to take the channel in a different direction:

After his speech on environmental reform, reporters and photographers literally chased him through the conference center halls. His words and picture ran in more than 100 publications. New York’s dailies sent reporters who relayed hourly dispatches back home.

Despite this wall-to-wall coverage, the mayor’s office insisted that the city have its own camera crew on hand to record him. On December 12, a couple of days before the mayor flew out on his private jet, a pair of technicians from the city’s TV station, NYC Media, grabbed their camera equipment and took a taxi to Newark Airport. They paid an extra baggage charge to stow their gear, flew overnight to Copenhagen, put up at decent hotels, rented a car, and followed the mayor around, grabbing a bite when they could.

All told, the five-day trip cost $11,220. You can add another $1,500 for a week’s worth of wages for the hard-working cameramen who had to hustle through airports and foreign streets. Net benefit to the city? Their video footage ran for awhile on Channel 25’s “City Scoop” program. Then it went on a shelf in the archives, where it remains today.