Gustavo Rivera, a state Senate candidate, talking to potential petition signersEarly yesterday morning, State Senate candidate Gustavo Rivera and a handful of his volunteers worked the rush hour crowd on the downtown platform of the Fordham Road 4-Train station.
Angel Franco’s photography of the 46th precinct is featured today in the New York Times’ Lens blog. Franco documented the west-central Bronx from 1979 through 1984, when the area was known as “The Alamo.”The police are asking for the public’s help finding a man who’s wanted in regard to an incident of forcible touching on a 13-year-old girl on June 17 in the Bronx. The Village Voice has the details.The Times reported that Dennis Derryck, a 70-year-old mathematician and professor at the New School for Management and Urban Policy, has developed a commercial community-supported agriculture plan (C.S.A.) for the South Bronx. The plan allows residents to pay farmers for weekly deliveries of produce from an upstate farm and eventually own shares in the farm.The management of the Bronx’s Co-Op City met with 500 porters, janitors, handymen, and other building workers yesterday to draw up a tentative, four-year contract. The contract will provide salary adjustments, secure health care for the workers and their families, and, best of all, keep them on the job.
Flanked by union reps, fellow Bronx pols and residents holding photos of burning buildings, Borough President Ruben Diaz, Jr. warned that the mayor’s plan to cut firehouses could bring back the dark “Bronx is burning” days. Bronx politicians, union leaders and firefighter representatives gathered at Engine 96/Ladder 54 in the South Bronx yesterday to oppose the closing of firehouses in the Bronx and throughout the city.In an effort to balance the budget, Mayor Bloomberg has proposed closing 20 firehouses citywide. It’s still unclear specifically which firehouses will be slated for closure, but Bronx Borough President Ruben Diaz, Jr., the Bronx’s Council delegation and Council Fire committee chair Elizabeth Crowley wanted to remind the mayor of what happened last time the city cut fire companies in the northern borough. “Last time the City closed fire companies in the 1970s, 25 percent of the Bronx burned down,” Crowley said.In the 1970s, the Bronx was literally burning. Engine 96, where the rally was held, was one of the busiest fire companies in the world.
District Leader Eric Stevenson is running for Assembly in the 79th A.D.
The city budget fight is headed to a new venue: U.S. District Court. On Tuesday veteran AIDS activists at HousingWorks filed a motion for a restraining order to halt Mayor Bloomberg’s plans to slash funding for the city’s AIDS services agency. Justice Cheryl Pollak of the Eastern District will hear arguments in the case Thursday morning. Bloomberg’s budget – currently in the home stretch of negotiation with the City Council – calls for a $10 million cut to the HIV/AIDS Services Administration, which would translate to 248 fewer case workers for very poor, very sick people who get help with housing, food and medical care through HASA. “Those benefits save lives,” Leroy Rose, a HousingWorks client who has AIDS and receives HASA benefits said in a statement.
At its last full meeting on June 9, the New York City Council dealt with legislation on taxi licenses, property taxes and health insurance for spouses of prison guards. But what dominated its agenda was land—deciding what could be built on it and how it could be used.There was an application for a sidewalk café in the west forties, a measure creating an urban development action area in the Bronx’s Belmont section and a special zoning permit on Kosciuszko Street in Brooklyn. With a rapid set of votes, the City Council executed its role in the city’s multilayered land-use process.What’s wrong with that process? A lot, according to both developers and the community advocates—the belligerents in many land use battles. On Thursday evening both sides will pitch their ideas for reform to the city’s Charter Revision Commission, which is considering changes to the city’s 400-page constitution.Thursday’s meeting—to be held at 6 p.m. at the Flushing Branch of the Queens Borough Public Library, located at 41-17 Main Street in Flushing—is the last of five “issues forums” that the commission called to study parts of the charter that might warrant change.
AIDS activists claimed victory Thursday afternoon after the Bloomberg administration scrapped plans to cut $10 million from the HIV/AIDS ServicesAdministration. The budget ax would have eliminated 248 caseworkers who help poor people living with AIDS get assistance with health, food and housing. The caseworkers’ positions are apparently safe now. On Tuesday, the advocacy group Housing Works sued to stop the cuts. Attorneys for the Bloomberg administration on Thursday morning told U.S. District Court Judge Cheryl Pollak they were withdrawing the cuts, according to Housing Works’ Senior Staff Attorney Armen Merjian.
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