The Blaz expands vaccine mandate for private companies despite recent judicial decisions deeming it unconsitutional.

 

NBC New York

 All private-sector workers in New York City will be subject to the mayor's vaccine mandate starting Dec. 27, affecting 184,000 businesses, while vaccine proof for indoor dining, fitness and entertainment will be required for children ages 5 to 11, according to a toughened vaccine mandate announced by Bill de Blasio Monday.

The current rule will also expand to require two vaccine doses instead of proof of only one as far as people age 12 and older are concerned, the mayor said. That excludes people who were vaccinated with Johnson & Johnson's single-dose shot.

Kids aged 5 to 11 only need to show proof of one dose when the requirement for them kicks in on Dec. 14, considering they only first became eligible for their initial doses in early November and must wait at least 21 days between Pfizer's doses.

De Blasio hinted late last week that changes to the city's vaccine policies could be coming soon, given the latest challenges posed in the city's ongoing COVID war. He says more measures may be imminent as far as vaccinations go, too.

"We’ve got Omicron as a new factor. We’ve got the colder weather which is going to really create additional challenges with the Delta variant, we’ve got holiday gatherings," de Blasio said Monday as he announced the mandate on MSNBC. "We in New York City have decided to use a preemptive strike to really do something bold to stop the further growth of COVID and the dangers it’s causing to all of us."

The mayor was also asked about his legal authority to implement such an all-encompassing vaccine mandate, especially given President Joe Biden's mandate for private employers with workforces of 100 or more employees has stalled in the courts. De Blasio said there is a "legal right of the health commissioner to keep the people of this city safe. That is something that's been proven time and time again."

"When the health commissioner believes there is a pressing public health threat, he has the ability to act in that situation," the mayor said of the "broad strokes."

His corporation counselor, Georgia Pestana, affirmed the legal authority of the city's health commissioner to implement such sweeping rules and said city and state courts have continuously upheld that concept amid a number of challenges these last few months.

Pestana said the issue the Biden administration faces "doesn't really apply here" because the injunctions were issued over the legal authority of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) to manage mandate implementation in one case and Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services in another.

"Here, I don't believe there is any question that Dr. [Dave] Chokshi has the authority to issue this mandate and it's the across-the-board nature of it that I think also makes it defensible," Pestana said.

He said the city will issue additional enforcement and reasonable accommodation guidance to support small businesses with implementation on Dec. 15, about a week and a half before the mandate takes effect. Asked about potential consequences, de Blasio says some have to be in play. He didn't elaborate but he said few businesses have had to be penalized to date because of the rules.

For the city's workforce, noncompliance with the vaccine mandate in the absence of an approved exemption comes with unpaid leave. Some smaller private businesses may not have that capacity, de Blasio acknowledged, which is why he says his administration is taking the next nine days to work out details with them.

Looks like everyone now is under the purview of Dr. Chok. A shell of a man nobody elected. 

 

Diaphragm bill found unconstitutional

From the NY Times:

In a victory for the city’s powerful police unions, a state Supreme Court judge struck down a city law banning police officers’ use of chokeholds and other physical restraints on Tuesday, saying the wording of the law was “unconstitutionally vague.”

The law, passed last summer, had been met with fierce resistance from police unions, who sued the city last fall over its passage. The language of the statute — which forbids officers from compressing a suspect’s diaphragm — was overly broad, the suit said, and made it nearly impossible for officers to physically engage suspects, even if the use of force was in good faith.

Justice Laurence L. Love agreed: “The phrase ‘compresses the diaphragm’ cannot be adequately defined as written,” he wrote in his ruling in State Supreme Court in Manhattan.

The judge encouraged the city to revise its law, and Mayor Bill de Blasio, at his daily news conference on Wednesday, urged lawmakers to move quickly to do so.

Let's hear it for Rory Lancman and company for not knowing how to pass a bill that doesn't violate the Constitution.

New state assembly bill proposal gives Cuomo more disturbing powers

 NY Senate

 

Judge rules in favor of Brooklyn homeowners against city's government program TPT plunder scheme.

Kings County Politics

In a sweeping decision, Kings County Supreme Court Judge Mark Partnow yesterday ruled that the City of New York violated the U. S. Consitution in the seizure of six central Brooklyn properties, and ordered the city to give them back to their owners, restoring millions of dollars of intergenerational wealth in the black and Latino community.

The city attempted to take all the properties under the Department of Housing Preservation and Development’s (HPD) Third Party Transfer (TPT) program, and in which KCP has been doing an ongoing investigative series. 

Under the TPT program, the city seizes properties they deem “distressed,” and give them to the public/private non-profit Neighborhood Restore, who in turn give the property for a nominal fee to a qualified non-profit or for-profit developer. The program was created in the late 1970s, when the city had a large number of abandoned and neglected buildings.

However, with gentrification, these properties, and others in the same program, are now worth millions of dollars in market value. Almost all were completely paid for with no mortgage and located in traditionally black and brown neighborhoods, which are becoming increasingly gentrified.

When the city takes property under TPT, they give no equity to the property owners, who in many of the cases paid thousands of dollars in back taxes and water bills to the Department of Finance, which was never registered as being paid.

Much of the properties taken by the Third Party Transfer (TPT) program are located in rapidly gentrifyingng neighborhoods in Brooklyn.

Partnow rulings were on six separate property cases that came before his court. Two of the properties – 25 McDonough Street in Bedford-Stuyvesant and 19 Kingsland Avenue in Williamsburg/Bushwick were the subject of several of the KCP stories. The other properties Partnow ruled on were 1055 Bergen Street in Crown Heights, 972 Rutland Road on the Brownsville/Crown Heights border, 315 Harman Street in Bushwick and 463 Classon Avenue in Clinton Hill.

“The City has particularly targeted properties that are owned by minorities. The court recognizes that home ownership is an important means for families to build intergenerational wealth. While the Third Party Transfer Program was intended to be a beneficial program, an overly broad and improper application of it that results in the unfair divestiture of equity in one’s property cannot be permitted,” wrote Partnow in his ruling.

Partnow found several problems with the taking of all these properties including a lack of process in serving property owners that their property was being taken, and that the properties in questions never met the definition of being distressed.
But time and again, in each of the cases Partnow noted the city took properties worth millions of dollars without giving any equity/compensation to the owners.

“The transfer of the Kingsland property to Neighborhood Restore is also unconscionable and shocking in the conscience of the court based on the amount of the City’s lien versus the substantial value of the Kingsland property. In addition, since the Kingsland property is not a distressed property, the taking of it through the Third Party Transfer program would constitute an unlawful taking of private property without just compensation in violation of Kingsland’s HDFC’s constitutional rights under the Takings Clause of the Fifth Amendment of the United States Consitution and article 1, section 7, of the New York State Constitution,” he wrote.

Anyone seen the former HPD director Alicia Glen lately? Because her dirty vampire calimari hands are all over this. 


Admin note: if anyone is not familiar with her background, she previously worked at Goldman Sachs in their Urban Investment Group dept., which this neighborhood would certainly meet it's qualification for "urban" and it's gentrification as "investment". As for my description, she sardonically replied in a Vanity Fair article about Rolling Stone writer Matt Taibbi's description of GS as a Great Vampire Squid by saying that her former employer are actually nice little calimari.

Long story short, this woman should be indicted and arraigned on punitive charges for what she did to these homeowners while running HPD.

Part of Vision Zero deemed unconstitutional

From NY1:

A Queens judge has ruled that a key portion of Mayor Bill de Blasio's Vision Zero plan is unconstitutional, a ruling that threatens to upend the mayor's pedestrian safety program. NY1's Grace Rauh reports.

Are sign regulations unconstitutional?

From Capital New York:

The Second Circuit Court of Appeals will allow a constitutional challenge to city zoning laws that regulate what kinds of signs can be displayed in a person's window.

The order on Friday stems from a federal suit filed by Brigitte Vosse, a fashion designer who owns a condominium in the Ansonia, an apartment building on Manhattan’s Upper West Side.

Vosse constructed an illuminated peace sign to hang from her 17th floor living room window in December 2010. In court filings, she claimed that the sign was part of her opposition to war and American military policy abroad and that the regulations violated her First Amendment rights.

In September 2011, Vosse was fined $800 and forced to remove the peace sign by the city’s Environmental Control Board, which found that it violated a zoning regulation banning signs at heights of more than 40 feet. The E.C.B. refused to rule on the constitutionality of the law.

Vosse then sued the city in federal court, arguing that the zoning policy “disparately preferred some groups of displayers to others,” since flags, banners, and pennants are allowed at the same height, according to Zoning Resolution Section 32-62.

The case against the city was dismissed in November 2013 by federal district court judge Jed Rakoff, who ruled that Vosse had no legal standing to sue. However, Rakoff did not rule on the constitutionality of the underlying zoning regulation.

Friday’s appellate court ruling upholds Rakoff’s dismissal of the case, but a three-judge panel ruled that the lower court must review whether the zoning laws are in violation of the First Amendment.

DA ordered to stop trying to trick people

From the NY Times:

New York’s highest court ruled on Tuesday that a script prosecutors in the Queens district attorney’s office had read to criminal defendants before they were arraigned so undercut the Miranda warning that it violated their constitutional rights.

In a 6-to-1 ruling, the Court of Appeals found that the way pre-arraignment interviews were conducted in two cases gave the message to the defendants, “for all intents and purposes, that remaining silent or invoking the right to counsel would come at a price — they would be giving up a valuable opportunity to speak with an assistant district attorney, to have their cases investigated or to assert alibi defenses.”

The ruling was a milestone in a long-running fight between the Queens district attorney, Richard A. Brown, and civil libertarians over the office’s practice of interrogating people accused of crimes one last time before they appear before a judge and are assigned a lawyer.

Mr. Brown, in a statement, said that to satisfy the court, his office had already cut the lines from the script used at the interviews. But he defended the program, saying it had been successful not only in winning convictions, but also in weeding out weak cases. He vowed to appeal the decision to the United States Supreme Court.

Writing for the majority, Judge Susan Phillips Read said that statements in the script like “give me as much information as you can,” “this is your opportunity to tell us your story” and “you have to tell us now” directly contradicted the later warning that they had the right to remain silent.

“By advising them that speaking would facilitate an investigation, the interrogators implied that these defendants’ words would be used to help them, thus undoing the heart of the warning that anything they said could and would be used against them,” Judge Read wrote.

You have the right to remain silent

From the Huffington Post:

A New York appeals court ruled last week that Queens prosecutors' violated the constitution through their interrogation program, which identified people without counsel to interrogate before reading them their Miranda rights. The Brennan Center filed an amicus brief in March of last year on behalf of the defendants, arguing that the interrogation program violated constitutional rights set forth in the Fourth and Fifth Amendments.

Through this program, the Queens District Attorney (DA) tried to exploit people in their final moments without an attorney. Choosing only indigent defendants, prosecutors would take suspects in for interrogation and read them a script just before arraignment (their first court appearance where they are assigned counsel). The script prosecutors read to people contained statements such as "This will be your only opportunity to speak with me before you go to court on these charges," "If there is something you would like us to investigate concerning this incident, you must tell us now so we can look into it," and "If you have an alibi, give me as much information as you can, including the names of the people you were with."

Importantly, prosecutors read the statements to the suspects before they were Mirandized. In other words, people were not told until after the statement that they had the right to remain silent, their statements would be used against them in court, and they had a right to an attorney.

Judge rules that porn is ok

From the NY Times:

A Manhattan judge on Thursday ruled that a 2001 city law was unconstitutional in seeking to reduce the number of stores and clubs that offer a mix of sexual content and other material in neighborhoods where X-rated establishments are banned.

The law sought to plug what the city considered to be a loophole in the 1995 zoning change that banned “adult establishments” from residential neighborhoods and from being within 500 feet of another such establishment, a school or a place of worship.

The 1995 law defined an “adult establishment” as any business where more than 40 percent of its material was sexually oriented. By the end of the 1990s, the city came to believe that many of the so-called 60-40 establishments were shams that kept a few shelves of innocuous material to disguise the true nature of their business.

So in 2001, the city broadened the definition to include criteria that would have required most of the 60-40 establishments to close or move to industrial areas.

On Thursday, Justice Louis B. York of State Supreme Court ruled that the mixed-use establishments were not shams and did not create a public nuisance in their communities, and that the city had sufficient tools to close any establishment that skirted the 40 percent rule.

Judge's decision may hurt straphangers

From AM-NY:

Transit officials and advocates on Thursday blasted a state judge's ruling that an MTA tax is unconstitutional, saying it could lead to "devastating" service cuts and "radical" fare hikes if it is not reversed.

MTA chief Joe Lhota called Judge R. Bruce Cozzens Jr.'s decision to strike down a payroll tax "flawed," saying he expected it to be overturned on appeal. But he warned that if the state's appeals court upheld the ruling, it could lead to an annual $1.8 billion hole -- a 15% reduction -- in the fiscally challenged agency's budget, requiring service cuts and larger than anticipated hikes.

On Wednesday, Cozzens said the Payroll Mobility Tax, which charges employers 34 cents for every $100 of payroll, was unconstitutional because it "does not serve a substantial state interest." He said state legislators should have gotten the OK of local municipalities to pass the law, or get two-thirds approval, which didn't happen.

On Thursday, Gov. Andrew Cuomo said, "we believe the ruling is wrong and we believe the ruling is going to be reversed."

The decision was received warmly by businesses in counties, towns and villages in suburbs outside of New York City, which had argued that they did not directly benefit from MTA services.