After reading my previous blog entries, my irrascible office-mate weighed in. He walked in the door, shook his head and uttered, "It's not corruption." It took me a minute before I figured out what he was talking about; he went on.. "Think about it, corruption is so much less expensive to fix than a subway system that's falling apart."
And then, my urban planner friend added more, "I can't believe right after we talked that there was this article in the Times, which said that Peter Kalikow is bucking the people who hired him in a way that his predecessor never did.
So, I guess the Straphangers are making a dent - but not enough of one to keep us from the regressive taxation of another fare hike, which was ushered in by a train derailment,just for the purposes of poetic justice or something.
In the continuing selling off of anything resembling public property to various corporate charity cases, the MTA is now actually standing up a bit to the Mayor over the Jets' railyards. Juan Gonzales, whom I trust, wrote a story in the Daily News which explains what's going on now. Public pressure is finally making some kind of impact, so that the city's big corporate welfare plan for the NY Jets is looking less certain. Bloomberg continues to push for the stadium proposal, and most people continue to oppose the use of public money to finance the stadium. Interestingly, Cablevision, which is also a bidder for the railyards is running anti-stadium ads, according to this NYT article.
I find the whole situation of cities paying off businesses just to "give" people jobs so pathetic. I can think of a million bad examples, and one great success story, when Progressive Minnesota (a leftover of the New Party) sponsored a ballot initiative limiting public contributions on any stadium building plan to $10 million - which passed with overwhelming support. I went looking for articles about the campaign and found that the fight is not over. More on that particular municipal struggle tomorrow.
2 comments:
Well RedReb, I got to say I enjoy your blog. You're quite the snappy writer (and I don't mean this in some kind of sarcastic, blogger kind of way). This is David by the way, in case my Luddite tendencies keep that from being obvious.
I don't have much to add, just trying to leave my own little graffiti tag on your site. To say I've been here and perused your politics and personal turmoil. When I get myself one of these (which appears to be de rigueur for journalists these days) you'll have to do the same. In the meantime, I'll hope to see you soon at the new pad in the real world.
To continue the Pataki angle on this, you might want to look into the fact that he consistently supports more capital for improvements in the commuter rail systems of the MTA (LIRR, Metro North) than the city subway. It's analagous to the better deal SUNY gets than CUNY even though they're both financed by the state--with the exception of some city money in the CUNY community colleges.
Also like CUNY, Pataki doesn't have complete control over the MTA. The mayor gets to appoint a minority of the Board members, just as he does at CUNY.
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