Borough presidents: Who needs 'em?

Letter to the editor (Times Ledger):

The old city Board of Estimate included the five borough presidents and, as a result, they possessed to some degree legislative power. The board was declared unconstitutional because the numerical populations in each borough were not the same.

A borough president in a borough with less population than another should not have the same legislative power. The Board of Estimate was disbanded and the legislative authority now rests with the City Council, where it belongs. The mayor, as chief executive, has some power, but the Council runs the show.

Since borough presidents no longer had any legislative authority, there was no basis to retain the office. Politics being what it is, the public foolishly retained the office, not realizing it had no such power. The office was given some limited land use authority subject to being overruled by the Council, which has the last say. The office was given some discretionary authority to disburse some funds in terms of the city’s budget.

The funds are disbursed by the borough president. In the final analysis, the office of borough president, which costs taxpayers tens of millions of dollars annually, has been nothing more than a useless patronage mill.

I take issue with former Borough President Claire Shulman’s claim that without the office, most of the important resources would go to Manhattan. Each borough has Council members who outnumber those in Manhattan, so there is no way they could be disenfranchised by Manhattan members. Shulman’s claim is political nonsense.

Equally nonsensical is the claim she made that the office is a powerful voice for the county. I doubt she can point out a dozen important changes she accomplished in all her years in office that significantly changed the lives of Queens residents for the better. Her reference to a sewer system in southeast Queens ignores the fact that she sat by and watched Willets Point property owners being charged sewer rent despite the fact that there were no sewers and she made no effort to have sewers installed and infrastructure repaired.

Her boasting about Flushing Meadows Corona Park, except for a possible playground, falls flat. She did not oppose a grand prix race track in the park or more than 40 acres of parkland given to the United States Tennis Association and its current application to expand. She never objected when her successor, Helen Marshall, urged the construction of a New York Jets football stadium in the park.

Her claim that she saw cultural institutions rise in the park demonstrates a lack of understanding about what urban parks are about. Parks are for passive use, not huge cement, brick and steel structures. In all the years from Donald Manes through Shulman and Marshall, except for structures that do not belong there to begin with, there has been no significant help for Flushing Meadows, and a walk around the park demonstrates its abysmal condition.

We have a Council. We do not need a borough president. Its budget could be spent more wisely.

Benjamin M. Haber
Flushing

Board of Estimate survives on paper

From the NY Times:

Of the 150 references to the board [of estimate] in the administrative code alone, some describe actions that had been taken by the board before it was abolished and others refer to the board “or its successor.” But many read as if the board still existed.

Complying with a United States Supreme Court ruling that the board violated the one-person, one-vote principal (since the borough presidents, representing counties with divergent populations, had equal votes), a charter revision commission recommended the board’s abolition. In 1989, the voters agreed. Most of the powers were transferred to the City Council. References to the board still exist in the City Charter itself, although the revised charter’s abolition of the board presumably takes precedence legally.

Amending the administrative code of city rules and regulations is the Council’s job. The Council has been doing just that, but on a case-by-case basis as legislation on a particular subject is drafted. When two local laws on recycling were amended in 2010, for example, references to the Board of Estimate were removed.

Peter F. Vallone, the former Council speaker, recalls that in 1990, legislation was drafted to remove all anachronistic references to “the board” and replace them with “the Council” or another relevant agency or body. For reasons nobody seemed able to explain, that legislation was never approved.

So 22 years after the last vote on its 580-item calendar — a proposal to expand a United Parcel Service warehouse in Lower Manhattan — and Frank New, sitting in for Mayor David N. Dinkins, gaveled the board into terminal adjournment, it survives on paper.

The return of Robert Moses

From City Limits:

Restaurants, stores, and a 200-room hotel would go up on the Willets Point side of 126th Street, just east of Citi Field, though the city does not entirely own the property. The proposed shopping mall west of the stadium may face a larger hurdle: The parking lot is part of Flushing Meadows Corona Park. State law requires the alienation of parkland before it can be used for non-park purposes.

To meet that requirement, Bloomberg has reached back to a law passed 51 years ago, summoning an uncertain ally in the ghost of Robert Moses. But questions surround this curious piece of legislation, setting up the latest in a string of disputes over city-sponsored developments on public parkland.

"Yes, this area is parkland," says Benjamin Branham, a spokesman for the city's Economic Development Corporation, "but development is permitted under the 1961 law that authorized the construction of Shea Stadium—known as Administrative Code 18-118—which also allowed for additional uses to be built on the parking lot. It's important to be clear the authorization comes from this law as opposed to a contract or other agreement of some kind."

Yet, as recently as 2001, New York's highest court ruled parkland can't be taken, even for temporary use, without an explicit act of alienation passed by the state Legislature and approved by the Governor: "[O]ur courts have time and again reaffirmed the principle that parkland is impressed with a public trust, requiring legislative approval before it can be alienated or used for an extended period for non-park purposes."

Moses presided over the 1961 groundbreaking for Shea Stadium. He had originally offered to build the municipal arena in Flushing Meadows for the Brooklyn Dodgers and resurrected the plan when the city pushed for a new National League franchise.

The state Legislature approved his building of Shea Stadium in the park, but its 1961 legislation was primarily aimed at granting the city authority to issue bonds to finance construction. It loosely laid out the permitted uses for the stadium and grounds, listing "recreation, entertainment, amusement, education, enlightenment, cultural development or betterment, and improvement of trade and commerce." The law even allowed the city to use the site for "any business or commercial purpose," so long as this activity "aids in the financing of the construction and operation of [the] stadium, grounds, parking areas and facilities" and "does not interfere with the accomplishment of the purposes referred to" above.

"The bill reads like a Robert Moses special," says Geoffrey Croft of the watchdog group NYC Park Advocates. The broad powers it conferred were a hallmark of the Power Broker, who was so well-practiced in the black art of political legislating that Al Smith once called him "the best bill-drafter I know." The Parks Commissioner could enter into agreements to use part or all of the stadium grounds, but any agreements lasting for more than a year had to be approved by the Board of Estimate, which included the mayor, the comptroller, the City Council president, and all of the borough presidents.

In 1989, the U.S. Supreme Court found the Board of Estimate unconstitutional, because it violated the “one man, one vote” rule—for example, the borough president of Brooklyn (the city’s most populous county) had no more power than the borough president of Staten Island (the least populous county). With the elimination of the Board of Estimate, the city's Law Department says, the power of site approval under the 1961 Shea Stadium law now rests solely with the mayor. A shopping mall may not offer the "enlightenment" referenced in the text, but a Bloomberg administration spokesperson describes the new project as a "retail/entertainment complex" benefiting “trade and commerce.”

Don't you love how the city has no money for needed services for existing neighborhoods, yet has tons of cash to throw around in an attempt to justify park alienation in order to realize a Bloomberg legacy project? Why doesn't the billionaire pony up his own cash and buy out the Willets Point property owners? Then he can build whatever the hell he wants.

Leave the damn park alone.