From the NY Observer:
There’s a common tactic that accompanies most development fights: packing a public hearing.
Usually this is carried out by a variety of groups fighting or supporting a given project—advocates, unions, angry neighbors, wary businesses—who enlist (ideally) scores of people to testify at a hearing in favor of their position, filling a room with sign-holding supporters and making it seem like their argument has more support than the opposition's.
But for a City Council hearing on Coney Island on Wednesday, the Bloomberg administration bused in supporters of its own plan, only to provoke sharp criticism from the Council, as members alleged a misuse of taxpayer funds.
Mr. Felder and Councilman Robert Jackson, questioned why city funds should go toward lobbying the Council for the administration’s own proposal, particularly as the members said they are barred from using their own discretionary money to fund similar acts. The CIDC promoted the hearing, urging its supporters to testify in its favor.
“Why should a city agency be spending taxpayers’ money to bus people in, in order to try to get their proposal?” Councilman Jackson, who was in attendance, told me Thursday afternoon. “Basically, you have the dealer stacking the deck.”
You folks just figured this out?
Let's continue:
The CIDC, which is also a local community development organization, has spent considerable time and resources trying to publicize the city’s plans for Coney Island. In addition to organizing the buses, it’s enlisted the lobbying and community outreach firm Yoswein New York, and has rounded up mailing lists and signatures in favor of the plan at Brooklyn events. When another controversial project, the proposed mega-development for Willets Point in Queens, came up for public review last year, the Bloomberg administration committed $250,000 in funds to a group set up to effectively lobby community members, elected officials, business leaders and others in favor of the controversial project.
3 comments:
And his administration will fall like a house of cards...all jokers!!!
Now, now, now....be good little Lemmings and jump off the cliff.
Your dinner awaits you at the bottom!
And don't forget to vote for Bloomberg on your trip down.
The only glimmer of good news in this is that the Commissar is finally getting to understand - way too late - that he has put quite a few City Council members in reelection danger.
The members who voted to give themselves and him a third term without consulting us, and who looked the other way as he has seized private property and destroyed jobs, are now likely to be booted.
So, to frighten them (an easy enough job for so many of those miserable morons) he brings in his rent-a-mob who think they benefit from association with the Commissar.
Surprise! Commissar! You hurt the very folks you still need to continue your kickback money flow, and they are now like drowning people. Panicked, thrashing, and out to save only themselves.
You're alone except for your purchased lickspittles.
Have your speech ready for September 15. You can deliver it in your usual nasal, whiny, boring tone that night.
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