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.

A Billion Here, A Billion There, Pretty Soon It Adds Up To Real Money

Senator Dirksen no doubt would have been pleased that the combined contribution of the city, state and MTA for Yankee Stadium is actually over $500 million and the total cost to the public for both Yankee Stadium and Citi Field is over $1 billion:

With two days until the city is slated to approve a fresh batch of more than $500 million in tax-free bonds to finish the Yankees and Mets’ new stadiums, the city’s Independent Budget Office has released numbers calculating subsidy, adding a bit of clarity to a somewhat murky debate.

Between the new Yankee Stadium and Citi Field, IBO estimates the total cost of various city, state and M.T.A. subsidies at $762.3 million — $528 million for the Yankees and $234 million for the Mets. That’s about 35 percent more than the $499 million that the IBO calculated in 2006 for the two projects (costs, particularly on infrastructure and parks for the Yankee project, increased significantly). Taken with federal subsidy on tax-exempt financing for the structures, the total cost to the public is estimated at $1.2 billion, according to the IBO.

Brushback Pitches Are Just Part Of Baseball

And after getting beaten up in the press — “This $1 billion-plus pavilion and park financed with a lot of taxpayer help is beginning to sound like something fit for the Wizard of Oz” — Yankee Club President Randy Levine should quit whining and take it like a man. After all, the team is getting $362 million in public financing — sorry, “infrastructure improvements” (what is that for, gold-plated sewers?) — for a stadium that is supposedly completely privately financed. To put this in perspective, Citizens Bank Park — home of the 2008 World Champion Philadelphia Phillies — cost $346 million total. And when did the Yankees last win a World Series? Oh, never mind:

Club President Randy Levine, speaking at a state Assembly hearing in Manhattan, called the project’s main critic “disgraceful.”

And the city’s economic-development chief, Seth Pinsky, accused the critic, Westchester Assemblyman Richard Brodsky, of “deliberately misrepresenting the facts.”

Brodsky, in turn, lashed out at Levine and Pinsky, challenging both to a “civil, in-your-face fistfight” over public financing of the stadium.

The angry club president replied, “In these tough times, you should be encouraging us to create jobs, instead of engaging in political grandstanding that discourages it. Your behavior in trying to hurt the people of this city is disgraceful.”

Alright Then, So Explain It To The Millions Of Us Who Aren’t Running For Mayor How This Is A Great Deal

It cheapens our sense of righteous indignation to say “Yankee Stadium Burdens Mayor’s Campaign” like it’s just a case of political posturing when the larger story is that much more egregious:

On Tuesday, the comptroller said the city had made a bad deal, a complaint that the mayor’s office dismissed as “political posturing.”

Without a doubt, politics is part of the invisible cost benefit analysis of the Yankees and Mets stadium deals — not only for those who now criticize them, like the comptroller, William C. Thompson Jr., who approved them in 2006, but also for those few who champion them, like Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg.

Such political values may not turn up on any public balance sheet, but it would be unwise to ignore them simply because they are invisible.

Suppose you are Mr. Bloomberg, your hopes of becoming president or vice president all but vanished. You have to step down as mayor in 2009 because a law that you unequivocally supported says you only get two terms.

How handy, then, to have powerful allies, like the developer, Jerry I. Speyer and the lobbyist, Howard Rubenstein, to convince other influential people that term limits will deprive the city of an essential leader during an era of financial crisis.

Mr. Speyer is building Yankee Stadium. Mr. Rubenstein represents the Yankees. Their stated case for Mr. Bloomberg never rested on the mayor’s support for the stadium, but on his qualities as a manager and their view that he would be the most capable steward of the city during hard economic times.

Mr. Bloomberg not only abandoned his own emphatic support for term limits, but his own opposition to corporate welfare for professional sports. After canceling deals made by his predecessor, Mr. Bloomberg has gone on to subsidize the most expensive baseball stadiums in the country.

. . .

There is far more to building a stadium than simply its construction. To replace the 22 acres of parkland the city turned over to the Yankees, to build sewers and roads that will support the stadium, the city will spend $325 million — money that will be borrowed by the taxpayers, leaving that much less for other public projects.

With interest, that $325 million could come to $700 million, an aide to Mr. Thompson said. The city must also pay to tear down the old stadium, a cost now put at $27 million. It is contributing $39 million toward a new Metro North station. (The Metropolitan Transportation Authority is paying another $52 million.)

Both Mr. Bloomberg and his predecessor, Mr. Giuliani, even gave the Yankees and the Mets a $5 million annual rebate on rent the teams were paying to the city for their old stadiums — money that could have restored at least some music programs to public schools, but instead was turned back to the baseball teams for the explicit purpose of planning ballparks that the public is paying for.

. . .

The city is proud of the deal, officials say, because it will create “1,000 permanent new jobs.” If you scratch into the official filings, it turns out that there are actually only 22 new full-time jobs expected. The rest are seasonal positions — valuable, certainly, but only if they really exist.

Location Scout: New Yankee Stadium.

The Bad Old (Dog) Days Are Back

Last we left “dognapping,” it was serving as a soft and cuddly reminiscence about dire economic conditions in East Harlem during the tumultuous summer of 1977. But now that we take out our monocle and inspect more closely it seems to have become one of today’s leading economic indicators:

[S]everal weeks ago, dog-napping terror hit the Upper West Side. E-mails began circulating (one subject line: “DOGNAPPING attempts in NYC with RAZOR and RANSOM — get dogs ON LEASHES — happening on West Side”), and flyers were posted at dog runs and veterinary offices and pet stores (“COMMUNITY ALERT: DOGNAPPING attempts on the West Side”). Dog owners, particularly women with small dogs — said to be the prime target — began to panic.

A survey of Upper West Side dog runs and pet stores turned up various versions of the same story. “There’s a two-man team, with one in a gray hoodie on a bicycle who comes by and slices the leash with a razor, then goes away with the dog. The other guy calls you up later on and says, ‘Hey, I found your dog! What’s it worth to you?’ ” said Charlie Allen, the owner of Gotham Pups pet services, who was glumly watching two of his charges (Beezus, a mutt, and Delta, a yellow Labrador) romp across the dog run on West Eighty-first Street the other day. “It’s completely unpleasant.”

Most people were saying that the dognappers made their ransom demands by calling the number on a stolen dog’s tags. Either that or they waited for a reward sign to be posted. “I think maybe in this neighborhood there would be more purebreds and more people who would pay a ransom,” Jason Frix (Billy Bob, bullmastiff) said. “Crime increases in tough times.” People said there’d been dognappings in other nice neighborhoods. “I heard Chelsea,” someone said. “Also Battery Park City.”