Results tagged “lmdc”

The much-maligned Lower Manhattan Development Corporation is in the news again with charges from the Post that Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver has turned it into "his own multimillion-dollar piggy bank." The LMDC is the Ground Zero rebuilding agency whose closing has been called upon at various points by former Governors Pataki and Spitzer and most recently by Mayor Bloomberg this summer. While funding for the agency has gone down overall, the amount of grants that have gone out to groups supported by Silver has allegedly tripled in the last two years. One anonymous critic tells the paper, "The allocations look more like [Silver's] 'member items' these days." Spokesmen for both Silver and the LMDC defend the grants as all going to groups vital in the rebuilding process and wh have all been approved by a board of directors put in place by Bloomberg and Spitzer.

He said that the process was "more of a mess than you know" with more details expected in a forthcoming report. He reiterated the impracticality of shutting down the LMDC, but said that he would like to speak to Mayor Bloomberg directly about the mayor's suggestion that it be disbanded. Paterson said that one of the things he could bring to the rebuilding process was "willingness, perhaps, to make a mistake" and that his biggest surprise since becoming governor was "how little people who have authority want to exercise it.”

Governor Paterson says that he has no plans to disband the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation. Earlier this week in a Wall Street Journal op-ed, Mayor Bloomberg suggested that the governor break up the agency, calling it "one redundant layer of bureaucracy." But Paterson does not think that the mayor's idea is an option, saying, "The way the LMDC works is there are resources that would be coming available that we would have to give up to shut the LMDC down." He also said that it may not even be legally possible to get rid of it.

The sister of the 23-year FDNY veteran who died during the Deutsche Bank building last August is suing city agencies and contractors, citing their "wanton, willful, and reckless conduct" in his death.

Yesterday morning's rain caused a recently installed sewer main to burst, flooding the basement and parking garage of a Battery Park City luxury apartment building. Water levels reached up to 20 feet. Not only were car owners greeted with news that their vehicles were either submerged or floating on top of sewer water, hundreds of tenants at 90 West Street were evacuated. Fire officials explained that, per WNBC, "rain flooded a re-routed sewer pipe,...