The future mayoral candidate, City Council Speaker Christine Quinn, said late last year that she wanted to know what priorities people from each borough had with respect to money allocated in the next city budget. Well not really, it was just a P.R. stunt to help her campaign for free. The first meeting in Queens was held in the middle of a weekday morning so that mostly senior citizens would show up and be quoted as saying how great she is in a political ad...oh, I mean a New York Times video feature about a day in her life. A second Queens meeting is scheduled for January 30th at 7:00pm at August Martin High School on Baisley Boulevard, which was probably chosen because it is not easily accessible to residents who do not own personal vehicles. There is no subway stop for more than a mile and the buses from Archer Avenue drop you off several blocks away. Why have this meeting in such an out of the way location if you are really concerned about what the common person thinks? Of course! This keeps the riff raff away. (A thank you goes out to a nasty Quinn defender for revealing this info...Looks like City Hall is logging into Queens Crap.)However, you can take a couple of minutes to type out an e-mail and send it to Ms. Quinn and see if you get a response:
budgetpriorities@council.nyc.ny.us
The Landmarks, Parks, City Planning and Buildings Commissions definitely need more staff and more money. And the sad fact that NYC did not add one new police officer last year because the starting salary for one is a meager $25,000.00 (we're talking 1986 salary levels), indicates that the NYPD needs a larger budget ASAP.
3 comments:
While the starting salary for new police officers is quite disgusting, the police union is just as much to blame for that as is the city. It's what's called "giving up the unborn," which means the people who are not yet police officers and union members suffer. The current members get slightly more benefits than if they didn't do this. The trick, of course, is to get it all back in the next round of bargaining. Which will probably happen, because the police union will spend plenty on ads at just the right time. Nothing wrong with this, other than the fact that they don't want to acknowledge their own part in this whole, "cop's starting salary at $25000" bit. They agreed to arbitration, and this is what they got.
The arbiters' decision is assinine by any standard. Certainly the union isn't blameless, but no reasonable person would have expected them to come up with that figure.
Don't quote me on this.. but I thought I heard Bloomberg say on the radio once that he didn't agree with the starting salary and thought it needed to be fixed. It seems wrong that this has to wait until the next contract negiotiation if everyone agrees it was indefensible decision.
Boob-Bug (Bloomberg) did say on the radio, that cops' starting salaries needed "....to be fixed...."! Well, talk is cheap, especially for "His Honor". (The only people who pay dearly for air time are advertisers.) He'll never deliver on this promise. He hasn't on others. The only thing that he's interested in "fixing" are things for his "well-fixed" friends!
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