Results tagged “davidweprin”

Last night, the four Democratic candidates for City Comptroller met for a debate to show why he or she should be in charge of ensuring the city's financial health. The Daily News explains, "With just days to go before Tuesday's primary, the race to become the city's top financial official is still a nail-biter, with three of the four candidates tied in the polls. Only two would be eligible for a runoff if no one takes at least 40% of the vote."

The Daily News noticed that there were three of the four City Comptroller candidates, John Liu, David Weprin and David Yassky, trying to bring their cases to commuters at the 72nd Street and Broadway subway station on the Upper West Side—and it wasn't pretty: "'Doesn't he look like a used car salesman?' asked a Liu worker of a straphanger who'd just finished talking to Weprin. When Weprin volunteer Luther Eason loudly urged voters to support 'the honest controller' - a reference to allegations that Liu embellished a story about working in a sweatshop as a child - Liu's team told commuters that Weprin flubbed a Daily News quiz about the size of the controller's office budget." Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer, a Liu endorser, explained the appeal of the West 72nd Street subway station, "Texas has oil and the upper West Side has Democrats. It's a rite of passage. Like you go to Nathan's hot dogs out in Brooklyn, you've got to go the 72nd St. subway station." Or Fairway—we've seen Mark Green, Cyrus Vance, and countless others there on weekends!

After much hullabaloo and veiled threats from Mayor Bloomberg that property tax rebate checks would not be sent out due to the city's budget struggles, it appears that city homeowners will in fact receive them--possibly in time for the holiday season. After being called out on the idea of withholding the checks, the Bloomberg administration said that they did not have to mail them until June.

How far will Mayor Bloomberg and Speaker Quinn go in order to get term limits legislation passed through City Council? One source tells the Post that next year Quinn is considering "significant reorganizing of everything, including the Finance Comittee." Such a reshuffling might give the Speaker a convenient way give a push out the door to Finance Committee Chairman David Weprin, one of the most vocal critics of the term limit bill. That would cost Weprin $18,000 of annual salary he receives from his chairmanship.

In order to counter an expected bill from Oliver Koppell to extend term limits, Councilman David Weprin says that he will introduce legislation that only a referendum by voters should change the city's term limits law. Weprin, like Koppell, is among the majority of Council members that will be forced out of office next year, but plans to run for city comptroller. Koppell calls Weprin's proposal “a largely cosmetic attempt at publicity.” While Mayor Bloomberg and Speaker Christine Quinn have remained relatively mum as developments in the term limits saga have continued to unfold in recent weeks, yesterday former Public Advocate and mayoral candidate Mark Green wrote an op-ed for the Daily News calling his allowance of Mayor Giuliani to stay in office for 90 days following 9/11 "a mistake" and wonders why Bloomberg is "imitating Giuliani" in his play to stay in power for four more years.

You would think things couldn't get worse for Jim Dolan. After all, the Knicks stink and it seems like Isiah Thomas isn't going anywhere quick (perhaps due to Dolan's own doing). But the City Council started to look into Madison Square Garden's $11 million/year property tax exemption today. David Weprin of Queens sponsored the resolution opposing the exemption saying that "It's very unusual that you have a profitable institution like Madison Square Garden that's been profitable for quite a few years to have an exemption." If the resolution is approved by the City Council, the state legislature (and Assembly speaker Sheldon Silver) would also have to approve the change in status.

Just because the 2009 elections are over 22 months away doesn't mean some interesting moves can't happen. Adolfo Carrion Jr. (pictured, on left), the Bronx Borough President, has decided to run for City Comptroller in 2009, making it a tough field and shedding light on the mayoral contest.

As the Gothamist Newsmap noted, two construction workers fell through a sidewalk at 148 West 36th Street this afternoon. The workers had been jackhammering the sidewalk, when, as WNBC 4 reports, "the ground they were on gave way." The workers were immediately pulled from the 10 foot hole and are at Bellevue. Scary, but not as scary as the incident where a woman simply walking in Midtown fell through the sidewalk grating into an electrical transformer vault in May.

As the clock is counting down the time Albany has to approve Mayor Bloomberg's ambitious - and controversial - congestion pricing plan in order to qualify for $500 million in federal funding, Westchester Assemblyman Richard Brodsky is getting ready to explain why Albany shouldn't. He is releasing a report that calls congestion pricing "un-enactable". He suggests that the Mayor's plan is very different from what's before the Legislature. From the NY Sun:

While Mr. Bloomberg has assured Manhattan vehicle owners that they would likely not pay to move their cars within the tolled zone to comply with alternateside parking rules, Mr. Brodsky charges that such an exemption is not in the bill. The legislation also doesn't identify locations or standards for residential parking permits that have been put forward as a possibility for neighborhoods surrounding the tolled zone.

Continue reading "Congestion Pricing Showdown: Bloomberg Vs. Brodsky"

The Politicker posted this video of Mayor Mike going after both Republican and Democrats during a Crain's Business breakfast. Specifically, when questioned by WNYC's Brian Lehrer, Mayor Bloomberg said, "I don’t think I disagree with what any national party stands for because I don’t think either national party stands for anything." Cue the cheers!

The NYPD decided not to appeal a judge's decision that the NYPD should declassify its surveillance documents from the 2004 RNC, so it has set up a special NYPD RNC Documents website with the documents. Of course, you have to scroll down to the very bottom for a zip file of the 600 pages of documents. And what's above the documents is the NYPD's rather thorough explanation/ defense justifying why it did such extensive surveillance of disparate groups and people, listing various terror incidents between 2001 and the convention as well as other incidents of protest. Here is Police Commissioner Ray Kelly's statement:

“I think a close examination of the documents is going to show that the New York City Police Department did an outstanding job in protecting the City during the Republican National Convention. People wanted to come here and shut down the City, to replicate what happened in Seattle, Montreal and Genoa. We simply didn't let that happen, and I think it'll just underscore the outstanding work of the men and women of the Department. In terms of gathering information, the vast majority of information that was gathered was open-source information. It was gathered from the Internet; these groups that were coming here were advertising what they were going to do — bragging about what they were going to do. It wasn't particularly difficult to get the vast majority of this information.”

Good to know that the NYPD is watching all of us, including MSNBC and the Sierra Club. The NY Times has all the documents plus highlights which people and/or groups were mentioned in the documents. Here are but a few:

ACT UP, Sierra Club, City Council members (Charles Barron, David Weprin, Bill Perkins), Sept. 11 Families for Peaceful Tomorrows, Johnny Cash Bloc, MSNBC, A31 Coalition, NYCLU, NOW, Planned Parenthood, New Yorkers Against Gun Violence, Stuyvesant High School Students, Westboro Baptist Church, Indymedia, Democratic National Committee, Coalition of Fire and Police Unions, Grandmothers Against War, Falun Gong, Arab Muslim American Foundation, Time's Up, Billionaires For Bush, United for Peace and Justice, The Surveillance Camera Players, ACLU, Hip Hop Summit Action Network, The Federation of East Village Artists, Poor People's Economic Human Rights Campaign, Restaurant Opportunity Center of New York

The NYCLU's executive director Donna Lieberman said, "These documents paint a picture of a surveillance program that was broad, clumsy, and often unlawful. The NYPD failed to differentiate between unlawful behavior and behavior that is not only lawful but should in fact be cherished and protected. Today the public can finally bear witness to that failure." The NYCLU also offers an index of the groups monitored as well as the documents released yesterday, plus others previously released.

New York City's Off-Track Betting, or OTB, the "largest legal gambling operation in the entire country" could be "on the verge of going broke" according to City Councilman David Weprin in the Daily News.

Try your hand at figuring out how well you could manage New York City's finances by playing Gotham Gazette's Budget Game. Newsday looks at the game:

- Money will go toward summer youth jobs ($12.5 million). [NY1]

Accusations that Mayor Bloomberg favors Manhattan more than the other boroughs aren't that surprising, but politicos are taking advantage of Bloomby's missteps. Prompted by the Mayor considering rethinking the reduced garbage pick-up proposal - but only in Manhattan - city officials are up in arms. Especially City Comptroller William Thompson, who has been the most vocal about the apparent favoritism, who said, "We must not engage in borough warfare." That makes some others think Thompson has other things in mind, like the city's Democratic Finance Committee chair David Weprin who said Thompson's words "sounded like a mayoral candidate's statement."