Patel's thinking twice about homeless hotels

From PIX11:

Avella, along with Grodenchik and Nassau County Assemblywoman Michaelle Solages, announced Friday that the owners of the controversial the Quality Inn in Bellerose, targeted for most of the summer to become a shelter, are looking to end their relationship with the homeless agency and scrap plans to house the homeless, effective Jan. 1. This is the second hotel owned by the Patel Group that has promised no longer to serve and house homeless people.

Coincidentally, this is the same hotel that PIX11 News exposed last December. Back then, homeless services was booking rooms for $175 a night — yet PIX11 was able to book them on their corporate site for significantly less.

Homeless services leadership has not responded to numerous requests for comment during the past month.

Patel has 2 hotels on Jericho Turnpike that he converted into shelters. A protest today will visit two of them.

Will Meeks' decision kill jobs?

From the Politicker:

A group of state and city legislators from Queens today released a letter to Congressman Gregory Meeks urging him to flip his current stance and vote against the Trans-Pacific Partnership—a free trade agreement backed by the Obama administration but opposed by numerous labor and environmental groups.

State Senators Joseph Addabbo, Tony Avella , James Sanders and Leroy Comrie, along with Assemblywoman Michaelle Solages and Councilmen Daneek Miller and Donovan Richards—all Democrats representing districts that overlap with Mr. Meeks’—co-signed the missive attacking the deal, which would ease trade barriers and a host of regulations between the United States, Australia and several Asian and Latin American nations. President Barack Obama and Democrats and Republicans supportive of the deal in Congress have pushed a bill that would grant “fast-track” authority to the administration.

Such power would permit the president to present the trade package to Congress as a purely yes-or-no vote, with little debate and no possibility of amending the arrangement.

“We are writing to urge you to oppose fast track for the Trans-Pacific Partnership,” the letter reads, going on to criticize the closed-door dealings that have forged the TPP. “The agreement is being negotiated with a lack of transparency, but we know that the TPP will affect jobs, environmental protections, prescription drug prices, financial industry regulations, internet freedom, food safety and much more.”

Most Democrats oppose the deal, but Mr. Meeks is a co-founder of the bipartisan four-member “Friends of the TPP” caucus, and recently joined Republican Congressman Paul Ryan of Wisconsin on a trip to Singapore promoting the pact. However, the state and city politicians alleged that the partnership’s impact would mirror that of the North American Free Trade Agreement signed in the 1990s with Mexico and Canada, and lead to the outsourcing of as much as 20 percent of American jobs—many of them from Queens.