Caption these Sucker M.C.'s

           The Blaz decided to use city tax dollars to have a shirt and kangol recognizing the Boogie Down designed with the Mets colors. You know, because he hates the Yankees so much. 

Such an obnoxious and petty troll.

We just can't have nice things

From the Daily News:

The city announced Wednesday it’s pulling the plug on the kiosk’s web browsing capabilities after a slew of complaints about people using them to check out smut sites.

The kiosks, which replaced outdated pay phones, will continue to grant users free phone calls, and access to maps and 311 services. And people can still use the hundreds of kiosks — sprinkled throughout Manhattan, the Bronx and Queens — as a hot spot for Wi-Fi for their own devices.

“There were concerns about loitering and extended use of LinkNYC kiosks, so the mayor is addressing these quality-of-life complaints head on,” said Natalie Grybauskas, a spokeswoman for Mayor de Blasio.

Some predicted that they would be a problem even before the first kiosk went up earlier this year.

Raymond Sanchez, the general counsel for Borough President Ruben Diaz Jr. who was involved in the franchise deal, said worries about “misconduct” were brought up in the contract talks.

At the time, he said City Bridge, the private company that partnered with the city to turn old pay phones into high-tech kiosks, said they could add firewalls to block inappropriate sites, and would have timers so people couldn’t sit all day and watch videos.

The company did install safeguards to try to block porn, but it appeared that many users found ways to get around them.

DeBlasio defends green space-to-housing plan

From the Observer:

Speaking at a press conference celebrating the start of an $87 million roof repair project at the Queensbridge Houses—the largest public housing project in the nation, according to the administration—the mayor pushed back on attacks on his housing authority Chairwoman Shola Olatoye and the “NextGeneration NYCHA” plan she commissioned for him. Critics, including Bronx Borough President Ruben Diaz Jr., have argued that NextGeneration’s development provisions could cost NYCHA residents precious green space and badly strain city resources and infrastructure.

Mr. de Blasio repeatedly emphasized that 13,500 of the new apartments would rent for below-market-rate, and that the city would plan construction in concert with residents—two things he said were missing from former Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s proposal for “infill,” which would have focused mostly upscale development on NYCHA space. The liberal mayor also stressed that new construction would create revenues that would other wise be unavailable to the authority, which currently runs deficits of hundreds of millions of dollars each year, and has a $17 billion backlog in repair work.

The mayor even promised that any parking or recreational space sacrificed to new construction would be restored in some form to residents.

“We’re going to make sure any facilities that people have, whether it’s parking, playground, whatever a development, are made whole, even if it means someplace else in the same development. We’ll make sure people have the same amenities,” he said. “We obviously will account for any infrastructure needs.”

He did not elaborate on the details of how such adjustments would work.

Of course he didn't because there's no place to put that stuff.

Willets Point business owners got nothing but broken promises

Photo from WilletsPoint.org

From the Times Ledger:

A group of auto-shop owners in Willets Point led an unsuccessful hunger strike protesting the eviction.

The strike ended on June 5, just four days after almost a dozen auto shop owners swore off food. The strike was led by the coop’s president Marco Neira. Since then, Molina and others in the area are being barraged with tickets for working on cars on the street that they cannot pay for as the city increases pressure for the mechanics to leave the area.

In March, the city gave the group about $5.8 million to relocate their operations from Willets Point to the Hunts Point Section in the Bronx.

But according to Neira, the 17-auto repair shops were supposed to have been fully constructed in Hunts Point by July 1, but so far nothing has been built. According to the city Department of Buildings, construction has not started because the Sunrise Coop has not filled out the necessary paperwork to get things moving.

Bronx Borough President Ruben Diaz Jr. at a meeting of editors for Community News Group, parent of the TimesLedger, said the Bronx could not proceed with the Hunts Point project until Queens completed the certificate of occupancy application and other requirements.

But none of this really matters – or makes any sense – for the dozens of auto shop owners who were forced to close down their businesses June 5.

The agreement specified that the EDC would pay $4.8 million and the Queens Development Group, the site developers, would provide $960,000. The Sunrise Co-op was expected to contribute $143,000 and the group would have to leave the site by June 1.

“The group got a raw deal,” Diaz said. “The city should have given them more resources—sizable subsidies.”

Now members of the Sunrise Coop will move to Hunts Point early next year, according to Neira but for the time being, the mechanics have nowhere to go nor do they have any place to store their hefty equipment.

He's certainly no Helen Marshall

From the Bronx Times:

Borough President Ruben Diaz Jr. may want a soccer stadium for the Bronx, but forget about sacrificing any parkland for it.

“I do not think that using public parkland is such a good idea,” said Diaz, who would still love to see an arena built in the borough for the NYC Football Club, a Major League Soccer franchise still vying for a home in Flushing Meadows-Corona Park.

Wow. Why is it that on this side of the water elected officials think that building stadiums on parkland is a great idea?

It's good to be Borough President!

From the New York World:

They have grandiose titles, but the city’s five borough presidents are actually invested with little power by the city charter. Blame the U.S. Supreme Court, which 24 years ago said it was undemocratic for tiny Staten Island and massive Queens have equal voting power, and forced the end of the once powerful Board of Estimate.

Candidates are nonetheless swirling to replace the four beeps who are being term limited out of office this year, in Queens, Brooklyn, Manhattan and Staten Island. So far they’ve convinced donors to throw more than $5.3 million their way, and are poised to qualify for nearly $1 million in public matching funds.

Why would anyone want a job whose power appears so slim? Maybe it’s because borough presidents have grown highly creative in finding ways to wield what relatively little they’ve got. Sometimes, they’ve accomplished great things for their communities. And sometimes for themselves.

The new crew can learn from the moves of veteran masters:

1. Make nice with developers
2. Clean up Sin City
3. Bank on the capital budget
4. Be king or queen of your own nonprofit
5. Nerd out
6. Why show up at all? Just take a vacation!

Each motive is explained in the article.

Bombers' garage debacle is a Bronx bummer

From A Walk in the Park:

The Bloomberg and Pataki administrations allowed 25.3 acres of public parkland to be seized in the South Bronx in order to accommodate the building of a new stadium for the New York Yankees, including the building of thousands of additional parking spaces in the asthma capital of America. As predicted the Yankee organization's insistence of building more parking is turning into a nightmare for the city. The developer warned bondholders in an Aug. 18 letter that it currently has "insufficient funds" from operations to pay a $6.8 million interest bill due Oct. 1, and another $6.8 million due next April. Bronx Parking has failed for three years to pay its annual rent tab of $3.2 million to the city. It also has yet to pay any property taxes for the 21 acres of publicly owned land it is leasing to operate the parking system. The Bloomberg administration selected Bronx Parking in 2007 to build and run the garages after the Yankees demanded a minimum of 9,000 spaces to stay in the Bronx.

Adding insult to injury, Bronx Borough President Ruben Diaz Jr. is floating a plan to convert Parks Department managed parking lots into additional development instead of public parkland.