Earlier this week, while Council Member Sara Gonzalez was out on a Sunset Park pier with Council Speaker Christine “Oink, Oink” Quinn announcing new ferry service that most Sunset Park residents will never use, (Sara’s gift for voting in favor of congestion pricing) the Daily News was reporting about her refusal to name the recipients of some $269,000 of our hard earned tax dollars that she’s funneled through a local nonprofit.

If she can’t name these groups and offer why they received this money, she should resign immediately.

According to “EPL/Environmental Advocates”, which publishes “New York’s Only Environmental Scorecard for State Lawmakers”, the “Bigger Better Bottle Bill” (BBBB) expands the definition of “beverage” in the current bottle deposit law to include non-carbonated drinks other than milk and liquor, and to direct unclaimed deposits to the Environmental Protection Fund.

EPL classifies BBBB as one of its five “Super Bills”, a term it uses to describe their legislative priorities, chosen by their “Green Panel”, which includes representatives from New York State’s leading environmental groups. “Super Bills” are deemed by EPL to be so important that they are counted in their legislative ratings, even if they were not voted on---a phenomenon all too common in Albany.

Due to Vito Fossella's personal problems, the battle for the 13th congressional seat is now very competitive.

Steve Harrison based on his performance in 2006, where he did better against Vito Fossella than any other candidate and his non-stop effort to build name-recognition within the district over the past two years, has earned him the support of the vast majority of Democrats within the district.

As I reported here, in 2007 total private employment in New York City, based on re-benchmarked annual average non-farm wage and salary employment data from the New York State Department of Labor, was slightly higher than at the peak in 2000, but below the all time peak in 1969. If you think this might understate the boom in the city’s economy you are right, because a rising share of those working in the city’s private sector are not wage and salary employees at all; they are self-employed business owners, freelancers, and independent contractors, and thus not captured by the Current Employment Survey data cited above. Based on recently-released data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis, which includes the self-employed, the number of private sector workers working in New York City roared past the 1969 peak in the late 1990s and has remained there ever since. It is a stunning boom hidden from the most commonly cited economic statistics, centered initially in Manhattan, spreading to Brooklyn, and moving on to the Bronx and Queens.

The exciting contest for the Democratic nomination for President has created millions of new Democrats.

 

Tuesday, the Associated Press reported on this

 

http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5iyCjg56QEYy3r8Gz2X09TnpaWOMwD90FSOB00

To judge by the press and popular perception, Brooklyn is rapidly evolving into a very different kind of place. Actors and celebrities are moving into Brownstone neighborhoods, now mostly populated by parenting yuppies. Artists and fashion models have moved into Williamsburg. Tourists from Europe and Asia vacation in Prospect Park. And natives who are too good for mass transit continue to reside in neighborhoods represented by Anthony Weiner and Lew Fidler. The wave of affluence spreading out from Manhattan has even pushed into formerly poor neighborhoods such as Bushwick and Crown Heights, brining fears of displacement and hordes of real estate developers in their wake.

Recently released Local Area Personal Income data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis, however, tells a different story. The per capita income of Brooklyn, which equaled the national average in 1969, the first year of the data series, and was 92 percent of the national average (8 percent below average) as recently as 1990, fell to 82 percent of the national average in 2000, the peak year of the previous economic boom. In the second-to-peak year of this economic boom, 2006, it was still just 82 percent of the national average, a loss of 18 percent from 1969. While different neighborhoods may be subject to different trends, it hardly seems as if the affluent are rushing into Brooklyn and washing everyone else out.

An interesting academic study, for local politics geeks like me: Harvard Law's David Schleicher argues that the real reason local elections are so uncompetitive is because people are distracted by their national party affiliations.

His solution: Bar the national parties from local elections.

"To attack the problem head on, a state could repeal the unitary party rules that are not constitutionally mandated, refusing to guarantee local ballot places for parties based on statewide votes and passing a law opening local primaries to all voters. 30 This may result in a local party that is in the minority reconstituting itself for the purposes of local elections as a broader coalition. If this did not work, a state could also take a more dramatic step: it could bar any party that chooses to register for national and state elections from getting a place on the ballot for local elections.31 Only purely local parties could compete. These policies would spur the rejiggering of local voters among existing parties or the creation of new parties without reference to their membership in national parties."

Vito's challenger, Steve Harrison, embraces the political gift the congressman just gave him:

Driving while intoxicated is a very serious charge. Over 17,000 people die every year as a result of such irresponsible and illegal action according to Mothers against Drunk Driving Only 2 days ago MADD held a luncheon at which I was represented. I stand shoulder to shoulder with MADD in its quest to rid our society of this scourge and I certainly hope that all candidates and elected officials from all parties and all places would do the same.

The congressman from Staten Island got arrested for DWI in Virginia, where they take this stuff seriously.

Not helpful in an election year.

If you read my prior post you know that the school finance situation was grossly inequitable in FY 1996, as the Campaign for Fiscal Equity lawsuit got underway. The personal background of many of New York City’s children would have made education challenging enough, but the under-funding was at least a major contributing cause to the city’s unconstitutionally bad schools. So were the contract provisions the teachers’ union had obtained, allowing a lower level of effort by the teachers in exchange for lower pay (which obviously did nothing for teachers who made a real effort despite that pay). If you look at the change from FY 1996 to FY 2006, however, one thing the CFE lawsuit achieved was an increase in education spending. The New York City schools already had enough money three years ago as a result, it seems to me, and have since received more.

But education spending increased in places where it was already high, not just in places where it was low. New York City residents, which had been cheated out of a fair share of school aid for decades, ended up paying local taxes for much of the increase in spending inside the city and state taxes for much of the increase outside the city. And while the gap between the city’s education resources and that of other parts of the state did decline, it remained large. The Campaign for Fiscal Equity achieved higher spending but not fiscal equity, so it is not unreasonable to expect that now that its lawsuit is over New York City’s schools will fare even worse in the next fiscal crisis, and some of the gains will be lost.

ALL OF YOU ARE FULL OF CRAP!!

If you read my last post and downloaded the data, you might be wondering why the Campaign for Fiscal Equity sued New York State on school spending, and why the courts ever ruled in its favor. To find the answer one cannot look at New York’s school spending in FY 2005-2006. One has to look back a decade earlier to the FY 1995 to FY 1996 school year. In June 2005, the New York State Court of Appeals ruled that the Campaign for Fiscal Equity lawsuit was legitimate, and could go forward. The context was a state and city budget crisis that came to a head several years after a recession had begun, when costs could no longer be deferred to the future and revenues no longer stolen from it, at least to the same extent. The resulting sacrifice would be targeted at those who mattered least. The following post will show what the city’s school finance situation was that year, the year the Campaign for Fiscal Equity lawsuit was launched; the next will review what the CFE got for its effort, and how much it cost.