Is The City In Effect Giving The Yankees Money To Lobby Itself?

If true*, then this seems at least mildly disturbing:

City documents newly uncovered by the Voice reveal that the New York Yankees billed city tax-payers hundreds of thousands of dollars for the salaries of team execs and high-powered consultants to lobby the city and state, thanks to the team’s sweetheart lease deal engineered by the Giuliani administration.
. . .

The Yankees are apparently taking advantage of a clause in their lease with the city that allows “planning costs” of their new $1.3 billion stadium — groundbreaking for which could take place as soon as next week — to be deducted from the team’s rent. The planning deductions date back to a lease renegotiation arranged by Mayor Rudy Giuliani in his final days in office. Under the December 28, 2001, lease deal, both the Yankees and the Mets were allowed to deduct up to $5 million apiece from their annual rent payments to the city, to be used for planning the new stadiums that Giuliani proposed to build, with city aid, across the street from the teams’ existing homes.

. . .

Until recently, the city had insisted that it had no details of how the “planning” money was spent. But a review of documents submitted by the Yankees to the parks department — pried from the city only after a Freedom of Information Law filing (a separate request has been made for Mets city documents) — shows that the beneficiaries of the city money include not just those working to design the stadium, but also those trying to extract public approvals for it as well.

For starters, Yankees president Randy Levine (a former deputy mayor under Giuliani) and the team’s chief operating officer, Lonn Trost — the two top Yankee officials working for passage of the stadium deal — received a combined $312,500 in city money in 2004. The Yankees’ justification, according to the documents: The amount totaled 30 percent of Levine’s annual salary and 20 percent of Trost’s, representing the time each spent working on the stadium project.

Even more audaciously, the Yankees in 2004 charged the city $203,055.87 for the services of Powers and Company . . . According to filings with the New York Temporary State Commission on Lobbying, Powers was hired by the Yankees to lobby the state senate and assembly and the governor’s office for permission to use 25 acres of Bronx parkland and $70 million in state money for the stadium — permission that, as the Voice has reported (“Playing Hardball,” March 15–21, 2006), was granted in June 2005 after no discussion or debate in the legislature.

The city even apparently paid the Yankees to lobby the city itself. Another recipient of city money, via the Yankees, was the law firm Fried, Frank, Harris, Shriver & Jacobson, which, according to the New York City clerk’s lobbyist database, has served as a registered lobbyist for both Tishman Speyer, the Yankees’ project managers for the stadium, and the Yankees themselves. (Tishman’s $1.9 million in 2004 was the number one billable item in the stadium planning account.)

*As if the Yankees need more money!

Is The City Using 9/11 Recovery Money To Fight First Responder Claims?

If true*, then this seems sort of mean spirited:

The city is using a big slice of the $1 billion it got from the feds post-9/11 to fight first responders who claim they got sick on the site, a lawyer who is suing the city charged yesterday.

David Worby, who is waging a suit on behalf of 8,000 WTC responders and their survivors, said $20 million has been “spent on city lawyers to deny the claims of cops, firefighters and others who were sickened.”

“That money should be used to help these people,” he said. “Take $100 million from the billion, Mr. Mayor, and set up a proper registry” to monitor the health of those who toiled at Ground Zero.

There was no immediate response to Worby’s accusation from Mayor Bloomberg, but the city contends it is allowed to tap funds from the World Trade Center Captive Insurance Company to defend itself against claims. The federally funded entity was set up after the 9/11 attacks because no commercial insurance company would take on the risk.

Bloomberg promised to look into whether the city stiffed its 9/11 heroes after being prodded to do so by hard-hitting Daily News editorials that described the plight of 12,000 ailing Ground Zero workers.

*Can this possibly be true?

Oh But You Should Have Seen This Neighborhood Before The Condo Conversions, Or Blight, Like Obscenity, Really Turns Some People On

The big question facing proponents of the Atlantic Yards project is how to convince people that an area with million-dollar homes can be “blighted”:

Of all the real estate jargon, bureaucratic buzzwords and plain old insults exchanged over the proposed Atlantic Yards project in Brooklyn, no term has evoked quite such unruly passion as “blighted.”

During the last two years, the word has hung like a scythe over the 22-acre site, most of it on the northern edge of the Prospect Heights neighborhood, where the developer, Forest City Ratner Companies, hopes to build its $4.2 billion project.

For the developer, it is a fitting description of the abandoned auto-repair shops, collapsing brownstones and gloomy vacant lots that blemish the area, and of the eight-acre railyards that slice through the neighborhood just south of Atlantic Avenue. For many of the several hundred people who still live there, “blighted” is a term of abuse, one that ignores the sleek, recently renovated buildings on Pacific and Dean Streets, the bustling neighborhood bar, and other signs of revival. Even some supporters of the project, like Assemblyman Roger L. Green, disagree with the description.

“That neighborhood is not blighted,” Mr. Green, whose district includes the Atlantic Yards site, said at a hearing last year. “I repeat, for the record, that neighborhood is not blighted.”

The long-running blight debate took a major turn in favor of Forest City Ratner last week, when the Empire State Development Corporation, the state’s lead economic agency, formally declared the project site blighted. It was the first step in a process that could eventually allow Forest City to acquire, through eminent domain, the few remaining parcels that the company has not been able to acquire privately over the last few years.

But for all the freight the word carries around Prospect Heights these days, “blighted” is a word with no fixed definition, legal or colloquial.

It is not unlike Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart’s famous remark about pornography — “I know it when I see it” — said Joseph M. Ryan, a land-use lawyer who has consulted for the development corporation before but has no involvement with the Atlantic Yards project. “Usually it’s a high crime rate, debilitated buildings. Often you’ll have pollution, or inadequate usage of land.”

Under past court rulings, for example, an area can be declared blighted even if particular parcels within it are not. Similarly, a given plot of land can be declared “underutilized” if what is built there is smaller or shorter than zoning laws would otherwise allow, even if the building in question is not dilapidated. Moreover, it is largely up to government officials to decide how prevalent a condition must be — how much crime, for instance — in order to label an area as blighted.

“There are no hard and fast rules regarding blight,” said Jessica Copen, a spokeswoman for the development corporation. “There’s a large area of subjectivity in evaluating the indicia of blight.”

It’s More Or Less 2,000

The 2,000 customers without power in Astoria is actually about 100,000 people:

The number of people who have been without power in Queens for five days now is actually closer to 100,000, not the figure of 2,000 customers that officials of Consolidated Edison had cited in previous days.

At a press conference in Queens, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg called the discrepancy annoying, and said that Con Edison apparently based its earlier count on the number of customers who complained to the utility company that they had no power, and not on any systematic assessment of the power outage.

“I think what is annoying is that their first estimate was done based on phone calls,” the mayor said, saying he should have directed them earlier just to drive around the area to get an actual count of the number of people whose power was out.

. . .

The mayor said that he suspected on Thursday that the utility company’s estimate of 2,000 customers without power — a ‘customer’ could be one person or one building with many residents — was probably low.

“They cannot tell from their computers,” Mr. Bloomberg said on a radio call-in program earlier today. “Their estimates at the beginning were based on how many people called up and said, ‘My power’s not working.’ You can question whether that’s an intelligent way to do it.”

The only way to tell, he said, would be to actually see which buildings had no power, he said, so on Thursday, he “demanded that they take a look, and they drove down almost every street.”

“It got so late that, apparently, at that point, they said, ‘Well, everybody’s gone to bed, you don’t know whether people have power, you can’t tell from looking,’ and they tried to actually look,” he said.

“If it was one house in a block that didn’t have lights on, you assumed that there’s power there because typically everybody in that block would be out, or nobody,” he said. “If all of the block is dark, they assume that all of those people are without power.”

Based on that survey, they concluded that 25,000 customers were without power. At the news conference in Queens, the mayor said that meant around 100,000 people.

Not to worry, power should be back on by Sunday barring heavy rain . . . whoops.

Russian Bookstores Zhirinovskied

Some Russian bookstores around town are caught selling anti-semitic literature. How charming:

Maybe it was all the rabbis gathered out front, but Vladimir Trainin looked downright panicked yesterday morning as he ran out of his Russian bookstore on Brighton Beach Avenue and worked his way toward the trash can by the street. The crowd of people outside his store, which sells imported Russian books and movies to local immigrants, had shown up to protest the anti-Semitic Russian literature in Mr. Trainin’s history section — literature Mr. Trainin swore he did not know his store had been carrying as he demonstratively placed a copy of “The Jewish Question in Russia” by Oleg Platonov into the garbage.

Platonov’s book, which claims “Jews do everything in their power to undermine Orthodox Russia and destroy the Russian church,”according to a translation, is just one of many anti-Semitic books that Assemblyman Dov Hikind, who organized yesterday’s event in Brighton Beach, has asked Russian stores to stop selling.

“These books poison the minds of people,” Mr. Hikind said at yesterday’s gathering, which attracted a priest, a number of local rabbis, Councilman Michael Nelson, and a camerawoman from the Russian Television Network. But it was no joke — the books Mr. Hikind had on display were unambiguously anti-Semitic and readily available for only $5 or $6.

In addition to “The Jewish Question,” titles included “What We Don’t Like About Them,” “Why America is Dying,” “The Myths and Truths of Jewish Pogroms,” and “Jewish Society Coup.” “Why America Is Dying,” according to a statement from Mr. Hikind’s office, “declares that at the very base of American psychology lies the Talmudic principles of greed, with the right to rob and kill all others to acquire land and possessions.”

In an interview, Mr. Hikind said he sent letters to a number of bookstores in Brooklyn and Queens asking owners to remove the books from their shelves. Although none of them has responded, at least two — Mr. Trainin’s store, Mosvideofilm, and the nearby RBC — have already gotten rid of the offending material.

“Everything is put into garbage,” Mr. Trainin said.”I am a Jew! I am upset by these books.”

Mr. Trainin said all his books are shipped to him by a Russian distributor, and he had no idea they were anti-Semitic until the group of critics arrived at his door yesterday morning (he said he had not received Mr. Hikind’s letter). Mr. Trainin said he would throw away all the anti-Semitic books he could find in his store — Mr. Hikind said there were more than 20 — starting with Platonov’s. After initially throwing the book into the trash himself, Mr.Trainin noticed a photographer and decided to let a nearby elderly Russian woman do the honors.

Then again, the purge generated a slight problem — now there is no more Russian history:

Mr. Hikind went into Mosvideofilm after Mr. Trainin made his announcement to make sure the books were gone. “There is nothing left!” he confirmed, pointing towards a large gap in the history section.

(Now that’s ironic . . .)