Worst FDNY Commissioner in New York City history resigns

 

NY Post

Embattled FDNY Commissioner Laura Kavanagh is quitting her $243,171-a-year post, she told The Post Saturday.

The stunning development comes amid a slew of controversies that left some members of Mayor Adams’ administration questioning her ability to lead the country’s largest fire department.

Kavanagh, who Adams tapped as the city’s first female fire commissioner in 2022, said in an email to The Post she feels it’s “time for me to pass the torch” and explore other career opportunities. She plans to stay on the job for now and help pick a replacement, Kavanagh wrote.

“My dedication to the FDNY has never and will never waver,” she wrote. “It has been the honor of a lifetime to devote the last 10 years — five as first deputy commissioner and more than two as commissioner — to advocating for the men and women of the FDNY.

 Kavanagh sent the email mere minutes after Adams gave her a huge vote of confidence and tried to squash rumors her resignation was imminent.

“I love her style — I want her in my administration, whichever she decides to do,” he told The Post following an unrelated Brooklyn event. “She sat down with me some time ago and said ‘I’m looking to do some other things in my life at this moment,’ and whenever she decides to do so, she will. As long as she wants to be my fire commissioner, she will be my fire commissioner.”

 Although Adams remains supportive of Kavanagh, she’s felt plenty of heat within the administration over a slew of firestorms under her watch.

They include rising FDNY emergency-response times, surges in lithium-ion battery fires citywide, repeated criticism from underlings and an age-discrimination lawsuit filed by department honchos she demoted.

“She was a political operative – not a firefighter – so her selection [as commissioner] was always an unusual choice, and she’s been unable to do what she was brought in to do: put out political fires,” a City Hall insider said.

Kavanagh, who began her career working campaigns for ex-President Barack Obama, ex-Mayor Bill de Blasio and other Democrats, has dealt with a series of public relations nightmares since Adams named her commissioner, in part to tackle the department’s longtime struggle to diversify. 

This woman's entire career before being anoninted FDNY commissioner was being a publicist, and she even couldn't do that right 

 Lithium Ion Laura couldn't fight a fire by blowing out a match.

 

ImpunityCity

The Habitat For Humanity Horror Has A Habitat

 

 Impunity City

It's a miracle on 126th St.  Looks like Santa Claus came to Queens early and visited The Habitat For Humanity Horror affordable housing grave and dropped a house on this corner after over a year and a half of utter negligence and indifference by the Mayors Office and district elected officials who appeared here celebrating themselves when this "Your Home NYC" program and Mayor Adams "Get Stuff Done" sloganeering campaign started.

Or maybe it was from my intrepid reporting that compelled the Mayors Office and it's (Luxury Public) Housing, Preservation and (Over)Development Department into quickly expediting the development of this new house on this lot that was negligibly forgotten and abandoned by the city and let it turn into a ungodly apocalyptic dump on a residential street corner. To signify what a disgraceful embarrassment this is, this housing went up a month after I posted this on here and "X" and it came at the beginning of Mayor Adams machete austerity budget cuts in every municipality (except DOT but that's another fucked up story).

It also got built right when Rosalyn Carter died, who co-founded Habitat for Humanity with her husband former President Jimmy Carter, so maybe they got a couple of phone calls to get this stuff done to paraphrase New York City's troubled current mayor. Here's the sign where the Habitat for Humanity logo once was, the brand got peeled off after being hung up for hundreds of days in the elements.

Lets look at the layout and "bones" of this affordable home.

 

 

 

The Habitat For Humanity Horror

Impunity City 

 

Yesterday afternoon, Mayor Eric Adams enthusiastically announced plans for the city to build 100,000 affordable apartments in the next 5 years in his “City Of Yes” program. The City Of Yes program/doctrine will make it easier for the NYC housing and building departments to expedite building permits faster with little regulation and even community input under the rubric for the need to stem the housing affordability and homeless crises in the five boroughs. While noble and necessary, it still needs to be ratified into law by City Council.

But it was only a year and a half ago when Mayor Adams and his “team” went to Southeast Queens to announce an affordable housing program initiative for to give the opportunity for lower income earning residents to own their own houses. Partnering with Jimmy Carter’s Habitat for Humanity, the city’s Housing and Preservation Department took over 16 houses that were neglected and then abandoned by the notorious NYCHA  and had them demolished so they can build new environmentally sound “green” houses in their place. During the presentation which also announced new infrastructure to mitigate constant flash flooding from extreme storms, early SE Queens native Mayor Eric Adams promised that these homes will revive the neighborhoods that were neglected by past administrations.

One of those homes is this corner on 126th and 116th avenue.

  

Promises made, promises slept.

 

YIMBY Density Housing Development Switcheroo

 

 

Impunity City 

 While Southside Queens in the 1141 zip code areas is notorious for it’s McMansions and other ostentatiously tack developments, I never would have thought that one of these things would be coming to South Richmond Hill, an aesthetically ugly and density based apartment building that’s out of scale with the rest of the area. What was normal to see built in officially gentrified enclaves in Brooklyn under the guise (and the cudgel) of affordable housing has now reached all the way on the east side of town. (Not counting the luxury public housing building in Ozone Park and the three mammoth towers at nearby Sutphin Blvd in Jamaica).

Middle Village event space fight and drive-by shooting revisited

 

 

 Impunity City

A pleasant weekend evening in the borough of Queens devolved into another incident of the gun violence that is still persistently casting it’s shadow on the streets of New York City. This time the violence came to Middle Village, where a shuttered commercial property that once was home to a hardware store that went out of business 2 years ago.

 In recent days, or maybe longer according to area residents complaints, the vacant property has been re-appropriated as a pop-up event space for DJ and bottle parties where high end booze is consumed in mass quantities. Basically these are glorified but unregulated nite clubs, no different than the speakeasies of the last 20’s this nation went through last century. From the looks of this place, the entrance to the event space was in the back.

 The local area newspaper Juniper Park Civic immediately had the scoop, naturally because it’s base is right there where the incidents occurred. The Civic also updated their tweets to include a DOB record of a violation given for a complaint over a month earlier for illegal partying in the former hardware store.

Given that this was another incident adding to the city’s continuing gun crisis and increasing rise in unabated shootings in the face of the equal rise in gun possession arrests, compounded by the fact that a building landlord would flout regulations and violations by continuing to permit illicit parties in his space, it would be wholly inconceivable if this wasn’t picked up by all the major local newspapers and news websites and even the other Queens weekly periodical newspapers.

But it was conceivable. Because despite the severity of the crimes committed and of gun violence being a daily occurrence in the five boroughs, the NY Post didn’t cover it, the NY Daily News didn’t cover it, Gothamist didn’t cover it, QNS, Queens Chronicle, Queens Post and Ridgewood Post didn’t cover it. Hardly any local Queens blog covered it (sans Queens Crap, which my ally and original Queens Crapper dutifully posted Junipers tweet immediately with a deliciously sardonic headline). 

 

New Bad Update:

A few nights after the Queens Chronicle article about the community's complaints about the closed business cum pop up nite club, another illicit party went on with total impunity.

 

 

 

 

 

Across 118th Street

 

 Impunity City

 This scene takes place in South Richmond Hill on 118th Street and 103 Ave.

In the middle of the road yeah. 

 

 

 

All signs indicate that current mayor de Blasio’s Department of Transportation, which is run by one of his Brooklyn aristocrat city planning buddies Hank Gutman, did a major less than half ass job laying the blacktop on this. Because this is what it looked like a week before some creative type did a near approximation of Homer Simpson’s rage motivated contemporary art piece.

Truly a WTF FUBAR in process.

  

Although this is another embarrassingly abominable display of city neglect and incompetence and another example of the city infrastructure dilapidation, this will eventually be remedied with a better and hopefully more thorough renovation, because this evolving crater is not to first to infect 103rd Ave. For their were similar former and potential cave-ins discovered on numerous blocks west from this current blight.

 

The Van Wyck Garbageway

 

Impunity City

... like the cherry blossoms at the Bronx Botanical Garden, every week detritus is in full bloom in the dirty Southside Queens…

 

 

 

New Bad Days: The Boroughs Are Bleeding

 

Impunity City

 New Yorkers are vaccinated in record numbers. The Summer of NYC is here; there’s no better time to visit, and we’ll continue to cheer on our city’s recovery”

                                                        Deputy Press Secretary for Bill de Blasio, Mitch Schwartz

Here we go again, Mitch. Stupid asshole.

 In Mount Eden, a man chased another man with a gun on the sidewalk in a gang related attack. While being goaded by his fellow gangbangers to slay him in broad daylight, the gunman’s target ran directly into a 13-year-old girl and a 5-year-old boy as they were about to enter a bodega to buy candy as he tried to find a place to hide and then he fell on top of them, causing them to fall on the pavement with him. Then the gunman circled around and stood over the man and the two kids and shot at him 12 times while trying to shoot around the children as if he was doing heart surgery. Then he ran away and got on the back of a scooter and rode away with an accomplice after he emptied his clip. The gangbanger managed to hit his target on both legs and plugged him on the back. The victim was brought to a hospital by his allies in a stolen car with temp plates.

 

In Times Square, a man with a gun ran down the sidewalk and shot at a group of men and missed, causing the bullet to ricochet off a building wall and hit a man in the arm who was standing outside of a hotel with his wife and relatives.

Because the unwitting victim is a Marine and the son of a retired military officer/intelligence official and being that it was the second shooting incident in less than a month in the Square, The Blaz and Chief Harrison wasted no time and decided to “flood the zone” with another deployment of 50 cops in the biggest and most precious tourist attraction in the world. 

Despite the bigger and redundant police presence, tourists are cognizant of the predominant crime wave and even more wary of walking on the streets in the vicinity. Although if there’s any consolation for the Blaz, some tourists seem to find the disturbing rise of violent criminal activity as a new novelty attraction.

 

New Bad Days 85

 

 

 Impunity City

 Mayor de Blasio’s recovery for all of us since spring started has not gone as well as he planned. Because the only recovery that has occurred since the temps got higher is the recovery of felonious crimes and wanton senseless violence. None more pronounced than the steady and now daily rises in random and intentional crimes on the subway, now up by 93%, and the plague of shootings on the streets of New York, now up by 73% from last year.  While it is a massive difference because of the “perfect storm of COVID, it’s now worse while the city is in recovery and all social distancing bans are lifted and people are gathering on the streets and commuting more.

While subway crime and shootings have been getting more and more local media attention as the Blaz continues not to acknowledge it (which will need a whole thesis or even a long form post to cover it), other felonious crimes that also rose 20% or more over the year have fallen off the radar, like burglary, robbery, grand larceny, rape, assault and battery and auto theft. The only crime that didn’t go down (but still stayed steady) was homicide, although that’s mostly because these people can’t hit their targets for shit, which is the only good news that’s going on these turbulent new bad days.

New Bad Days 83: The Ides Of March bring more violent hate towards Asians and gun, gang and subway violence to NYC

  

Impunity City

 Has de Blasio, Speaker Cojo and the NY Council fauxgressive cronies ever given the thought that the reason Rikers is making C.O.’s work triple shifts is because solitary confinement has been cancelled and the only way to tamp down violence and keep order is to keep C.O.’s on duty for every minute and second that way they can justify these new supposed progressive policies? Even though it’s clearly not working? Even Jeff Bezos lets his Amazon FFC employees go home.

And while this FUBAR management is going on at Rikers, where is the NYC Jails Commissioner? Whose conspicuous absence after de Blasio put her on medical leave following the release of a fugitive killer that’s still on the loose has made her virtually unobtainable for comment?

Open letter to a twitter algorithm

Impunity City

Dear Twitter Algorhitm,

Why did you do it?

Why did you suspend my account? How can you determine that what I wrote was directed as a threat to a newspaper? How is it possible that you cannot distinguish between a sardonic joke and an actual threat?

Most of all, how can you determine that I made a direct threat at a corporate news website when they were the ones that printed the actual threat and have my only social media account repressed when they were the one’s who actually tweeted the inflammatory threat in whole first. Clearly to get clicks and RT’s.

 

AOC has forsaken political courage

Impunity City

This has been quite the new beginning for re-elected wunderkind Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. After easily winning the primary and the general election last November along with Trump falling to a guy who didn’t make any effort to win, AOC became the most culturally powerful figure in Congress with a massive social media following bigger than most celebrity figures in movies and pop music. With this much status and power in presumably good hands, it seem the iconic Latinx from the Bronx had solid momentum to get progressive policies and programs for the working people and working families ratified into laws.

Then all of sudden, a jagoff comedian dared her to back her words and foment change…

The luckiest man on the face of the earth

  

Impunity City

Finally. America fires Trump and she has a new president in former Senator and Vice President Joe Biden. Finally for Joe Biden, he has fulfilled his destiny following nearly 50 years of government service and after countless failures in his quest to be commander in chief in the last 30 (except in 2016 when he deferred to Manifest Hillary and stood down).

Uncle Joe’s road to the White House started off as rocky as a lunar landscape and ended up as smooth, protected and gilded like an award show red carpet.Normally if something like this happened to a regular Joe it would be considered a classic Comeback Story, but this is Political Establishment Joe. It sure helped when about 20 people decided to run with Joe in the primary and about half of them plus two billionaires would drop out simultaneously and endorse him, fulfilling the DNC collusion to destroy Bernie Sanders second run for president. Even Joe had no platform and no promises for people to give him their vote and he couldn’t even articulate what they were or even a complete sentence, he still was able to win a lot of states after Sanders narrow loss in Iowa and wins in Nevada and New Hampshire where Joe wound up near or at the bottom in the bottom of the vote tallies.

But when COVID-19 came, all bets were off. The states were primaries were held had low turnouts (even after the Biden campaign recklessly encouraged people to vote despite the risk of contagion) and the next primaries had to be rescheduled. Plus Sanders sappy performance at their last debate enabled Biden’s dominance at the polls in late Spring. While turning the nation and the primary election upside down, the novel virus managed to put Joe over the top and win the nomination with ease...

The lying monument of de Blasio's "Affordable Housing" program

 

 Impunity City

As everyone is aware now, Mayor William de Blasio Wilhelm has resuscitated his Housing New York program to provide way overdue affordable housing for your city’s most lower income earning residents in the niche, upper upper class towns of Soho and Noho (the latter of which is about 4 square blocks tops). Actually, only about 25% of 3200 apartments that are projected to be constructed will be earmarked for them. Which still doesn’t correlate with the hundreds of thousands of people who live check to check with 50 to 60% of that check going to rent and the near 70,000 people who don’t have a home at all.. 

But that’s going to be for the next post in process here. What this post is about is basically a spoiler alert for it and what de Blasio’s HPD plans will actually accomplish. Because this is unbelievable.

The building on the right from a picture taken in April last year is on 111 Varick St., which is also in Soho. Last year it gained local news attention when a construction worker got killed by a massive 7 ton concrete structure that snapped off a crane and crushed and dismembered his body while working in the early morning hours. For months it laid dormant because of building and worksite violations. Then passing by there back in January there was a peculiar site. A big banner for de Blasio’s HPD’s Housing New York was draped over the scaffolding. 

 

 

 

Cuomo's COVID comedy is not pretty

 

 Impunity City

Governor Andrew Cuomo  has been in quite a blue mood lately. Although it’s not over New York elected officials bipartisan calls and congressional and senate demands from DC calling for an independent investigation into the motives behind his mandate demanding nursing homes accept COVID19 patients and the immunity law he gave the owners and financial holders of them. It’s also not over the MTA’s running out of funding to maintain and operate the transit system to go along with maniacs breaking train windows for the fuck of it. It’s also not over the mass exodus of the state’s richest people from the big hollow apple and especially those he’s groveling to so they stay put…

No it’s all these young and youngish adults who are flouting the pandemic protocols he put in place back in April (which he did very late) that mandated mask wearing and social distancing while shopping indoors and mingling outside at bars and restaurants. Even though this consensus flouting as been going on since the outbreak began and reaching the tipping point in summer’s eve with people partying down on an Astoria street, Cuomo decided that the only way he could get the narrative through to these maskless party obsessive punks would be through, um, comedy.

Now Cuomo is the last person who should delve into this genre, although as his massive ego and megalomania plainly shows, it’s safe to say that he probably thinks he knows funny more than anyone else who happens to be in his surroundings. Even that COVID 19 mountain grave poster he commissioned to make and is selling now has little side jokes (the boyfriend cliff).

What’s truly interesting about Cuomo’s sudden interest in resorting to humor is that because of his emergency executive powers that Albany’s legislators gave him in order to prevent contagion to keep the curve going back up the mountain is that he won’t let people who are actually funny and rely on comedy for their livelihoods do their jobs...

 

You're welcome Governor

Like Chuck D once said, Some biters I know are damn devils...

Cuomo's colon is in the wrong place on his Daily Fact prop

Cuomo's Lethal Ill-Logistics

Impunity City

Where does one begin to discuss the current global pandemic induced phenomenon and cult of personality that is the governor of New York, Andrew Cuomo? Since he locked down the state back in mid-March as coronavirus cases grew by thousands and thousands and thousands, Mario’s son had become the chosen one; elder statesman of all things COVID-19 and the default rebuttal warrior against Donald Trump’s consistent, insistently brazen and meta-comical errors of the novel disease and how to fight it. (Bleach and sun anyone?)

Like the spiky red-pockmarked handball looking pathogen, Andrew has become quite the pop culture icon himself with his daily afternoon government issue polo shirt press briefings on the outbreak. It’s become as much national institution as the Price is Right used to be at 12 p.m. every day as snippets of his videos and images have gone viral; thoroughly giving his constituents and viewers across the country and the globe essential information about the contagion’s spread and the status of his state.

His briefings have managed to even produce a spin off show via Fredo’s Chris Cuomo’s prime time “news” hour program on CNN. It’s quite a big ratings grabber despite the huge ass conflict this comes with as his kid brother “interviews” him about his brah governing the response and recovery while gushing about him in dreams and blatantly egging him to run for President.

 About that. Because of all this attention, social media had dubbed and trended Andrew as #PresidentCuomo and corporate news grabbed onto to that to fill their webpages and hyperlinks with blanket speculation and suggestions about the COVID19 superstar to run for the white house too. Not to mention dozens of articles proclaiming how the suddenly hunky Cuomo is the boyfriend of America, but that’s just icky and gross so I’ll end it there.

Since this is supposed to be a devastatingly serious column,(note the header photo) but all that shit had to be prefaced to illustrate and elaborate how the goddamn Governor Cuomo does not deserve all these adulation and accolades or should still have a job right now regarding the consequences of his inaction and very suspect actions to stem the spread of the novel virus in his state besides lamely ostracizing people to wear masks.

As the days counted down to the cruelest April of our lifetime and humankind, Cuomo continued his daily briefings as a salve to his constituents and a reassurance to the nation following them as an alternative to Trump’s alternative facts.

Immediately at the start of the month the plague really came in. Yet here was the resilient and virile leader on the dais every afternoon in front of the camera, an exhibition of transparency reading out the morbid death tolls while quite oddly talking about flattening the curves as casualties started to mount. Yet the veneration levied to him by social and news media continued to shower on him…

…until he weaponized that veneration and adulation to shield himself

NYC's First Lady is a tax boondoggle.

Impunity City

Mayor de Blasio is in quite a pickle. He hasn’t been able to get aid from the state and because congress couldn’t agree to a goddamn stimulus, the Blaz can’t get federal funding despite all his pathetic begging and pleading and probably compounded by his asinine decision to paint Black Lives Matter in front of the President’s luxury tower. So the city’s budget ax is going to come down on a lot of administration departments and city services.

Except for one…

Andy Byford quit his job with the MTA

Business Insider


Andy Byford, a globally renowned transit expert hired in 2017 to help reinvigorate New York CIty's aging subway system, has resigned.

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority, a state agency responsible for city subways, buses, and commuter rails, confirmed his departure in a statement. 

"Andy Byford will be departing New York City Transit after a successful two years of service and we thank him for his work," Pat Foye MTA chairman and CEO, said in a statement. "Andy was instrumental in moving the system forward, enacting the successful Subway Action Plan and securing record capital funding with the Governor and the Legislature, and we wish him well in his next chapter."

Before New York, Byford previously worked in London, Toronto, and Australia. His arrival in New York largely signaled a seismic shift for the aging subway system following decades of underinvestment.

During his tenure as transit chief, New Yorkers were treated to improvements in subway communication as well as several high-profile projects designed to speed up commutes and replace aging parts of track, signals, and more.

Byford also became a popular figure among New York transit aficionados, earning the nickname 
"Train Daddy" after an anonymous resident began posting stickers of Byford's face superimposed on a subway car with the text "Train Daddy loves you very much." A photo of the sticker quickly spread on Twitter, and the moniker became widely used across social media. The MTA seemingly embraced the term for its subway chief, with Byford himself joking about the title.

 I don't have time to write about what I saw coming two years ago, so enjoy my prophecy from Impunity City for now.

 Andy Byford may have just realized he is in way over his head and out of his league in his well-paid state service leadership position (yeah it’s redundant, I’m writing about the MTA again so fuck off).
 
President Byford is trying really hard though. He did come up with that budget study assessing that it would take $37 billion dollars to overhaul the mega-shitshow mass transit system, despite having no current idea or plan how to pay for it. I mean, he is not a bad bloke, he kind of resembles a mixture of Moby and Thom Yorke and he is a big fan of legendary new wave band The Smiths, so big that he thought it was prudent to mention and discuss fave tracks by them during a live social media style town hall with frustrated commuters complaining about consistent shitty service a while back (my personal fave by the way, is the WLIR extended remix of “This Charming Man”), but at least he has been apparently honest and straightforward.

It didn't take long for Mr. Byford to realize that the worst fucking transit system in the universe couldn't be fixed with that moron tyrant Governor Cuomo up his ass.

Just walk away, Train Daddy

Last crap post of 2019: Separated at birth

Smell ya next year crapiteers!