SHEEPSHEAD BAY'S ONLY INDEPENDENT NEWS BLOG

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City Councilman Lew Fidler is questioning the decision-making behind bike lane implementation in his district and across the boroughs, leading the city to re-evaluate proposed lanes in Canarsie and opening the door for challenges elsewhere.

In a letter to Department of Transportation Brooklyn Commissioner Joseph Palmieri, Fidler said it was “imperative that community feedback be factored into any proposed changes.”

The request came following months of outcry from Canarsie residents to the city’s plan to install bike lanes from Avenue D on East 95th Street to the Canarsie Pier, and from the pier to Ditmas Avenue on East 94th Street. The lanes would connect bicyclists to the Shore Parkway Greenway, which extends from Sheepshead Bay to Queens. Neighbors in Canarsie say the city is bike crazy and it doesn’t suit residents’ needs.

Fidler agrees that the plans, devised more than 10 years ago, are flawed and outdated.

Find out what’s wrong with the city’s bike plan, and what Fidler proposes to help.

Source: council.nyc.gov

New York Post is beating up on City Councilman Lew Fidler after discovering that he’s involved with a company profiting from police brutality cases.

Fidler serves as the general counsel for LawCash, a company that gives cash advances to people it believes will win a lawsuit, and then takes a hiked-up interest rate after a winning verdict. According to the New York Post, LawCash’s roster of clients includes many high-profile police-brutality suits, including Joseph Guzman, a victim of the hail of bullets that killed Sean Bell, and Abner Louima.

UPDATE (8/24/2010): Fidler contacted Sheepshead Bites with additional information about LawCash and the criticism from a Supreme Court Justice. See his response at the end of the post.

The councilman is well taken care of by the firm, which he said pays him between $60,000 and $80,000 – a nice part-time gig to supplement his $127,500 salary as a council member.

But is it a conflict of interest for a city legislator to be “betting against the city,” as the NY Post labels it? Not according to Fidler.

“There is no contact with the city of New York,” Fidler told the newspaper. “What possible conflict would there be, as I do no business with the city?” Fidler added that he doesn’t have any choice in which plaintiffs to invest in, and that decision is left to the company’s underwriters.

Keep reading to see other reactions to Fidler’s involvement with LawCash, and weigh in on the topic.

From City Hall News:

At a contentious July Council hearing on consumer rights, Council Member Lew Fidler argued that consumers of cable television are the victims of stalled negotiations between broadcasters and cable service providers and they don’t even know it.

“Consumers will be seated at the table when the big boys fight,” Fidler said to broadcast industry lobbyists at the hearing. “You will not decide how much you can suck out of our pocket without our participation. You operate under a public license on public airwaves and the public will not be damned.”

Fidler and fellow committee members warned broadcasters they would fight to change lax, decades-old federal rules governing cable service agreements that allow networks to cut service and allow screens to go dark when their demands are not met.

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At their June 27 rally, mosque opponents targeted politicians for their silence on the issue. Now they respond.

Brooklyn Paper has a pair of updates on the mosque issue, fueled by the deluge of comments they received from their initial report.

First up, they got in touch with most of the politicians with districts located near the mosque, getting their reading of the situation. The verdict? Freedom of worship is a constitutional right, and any attempt to stop the mosque from being built is an invasion of that liberty.

Keep reading to find out what the local politicians had to say, my thoughts on it, and what other developments have emerged surrounding the planned Sheepshead Bay mosque.

Left to right: Ed Jaworski, Joe Dorinson, Lew Fidler

Madison-Marine-Homecrest Civic Association – our rabble-rousing neighbors to the north – finally won an appointment to Community Board 15, with the group’s executive vice president, Joe Dorinson, to sit during the upcoming term.

Community Board members are appointed by Borough President Marty Markowitz on the recommendation of the area’s City Councilmembers. Councilman Lew Fidler recommended Dorinson, a Long Island University history professor.

“He’s been a community guy for as long as I’ve been around the neighborhood,” said Fidler. “He’s a smart guy that understands government … I was happy to have the chance to recommend him.”

Members of MMH Civic, though, are saying the appointment is a victory after a long, hard-fought battle to get members of the group appointed to the board. MMH is known for taking adversarial roles on development issues in the neighborhood, battling out-of-character home enlargements, zoning variances and condominiums.

Continue Reading »

Courtesy of Yeshiva World News

Sheepshead Bay’s representatives to the City Council joined more than 100 advocates on City Hall’s steps yesterday to fight a proposed slash in childcare funding.

City Councilmen Mike Nelson and Lew Fidler were among a slew of Brooklyn’s Council representatives that came out to rally alongside educators, childcare advocates and labor organizers. The group – led by City Councilman David Greenfield – is fighting the elimination of Priority 7 childcare vouchers as well as the closure of 16 ACS-operated daycare centers. The Brooklyn delegation is claiming the cuts disproportionally hurt the most populous borough, since 10 of the 16 centers targeted for closure are in Brooklyn. Additionally, the majority of the more than 1,000 families receiving priority 7 vouchers are Brooklynites.

Priority 7 vouchers assists families who are below the poverty level and are in special need of child care.

“Cuts to daycares and Priority 7 vouchers hurt families, and make parents choose between working to pay for family expenses and their children,” Councilman Fidler told Yeshiva World News.

Advocates say that the cuts will not only put pressure on families, but closures to ACS schools will displace hundreds of students.

City Councilman Lew Fidler is in his final term, and recent fundraising victories are spurring politicos to speculate about his future.

According to NY Observer’s Azi Paybarah, Fidler packed a star-studded fundraiser last Thursday. The councilman is increasingly portrayed as the foe to Mayor Bloomberg and Democratic County Leader Vito Lopez. The growing distance between those unpopular public nuisances, his swelling war chest, and his impending departure from the council are creating a perfect storm for educated guessing.

The result? City Hall News toys with the idea of a run for Brooklyn district attorney, bolstered by his close association with current D.A. Hynes.

The Observer contacted Fidler, who responded by e-mail:

I don’t know Azi. I really don’t. I have a philosophy about these things. If you do your current job and do it well, opportuniites present themselves. I am not going to spend the next three and a half years running around the City trying to fit a round peg into a square hole. There are a lot of ways to serve. I do not intend to ride off into the sunset. I guess I am proud of my record, proud of the nice array of core support that I have as evidenced by the Club dinner, and maybe even especially proud of the diversity of that support.

Whatever his intention, the Observer’s Payharah intones, Fidler’s star is rising. What that means for his district, which includes parts of Sheepshead Bay, Marine Park and Gerritsen Beach, remains to be seen.

Here’s a little political trivia for you: did you know Councilman Lew Fidler is a fantasy baseball heavyweight?

In fact, the councilman managed the business of the Rotisserie Baseball League’s Founding Fathers as the “Official Stat Service” during the late 80s and early 90s. For his role, interviews with Fidler will be aired on ESPN as part of a a tongue in cheek history of the original Rotisserie Baseball League.

“I can’t say that I play a starring role, even though I filmed about five hours of interview and historic recreation,” Fidler said in a press release. “Only a bit of it made it in, but at least I made the cut.”

The docu-drama, titled A Silly Little Game, is scheduled to air on ESPN Tuesday evening, April 20, at 8 p.m. The movie premiered last Monday at the home of the Tribeca Film Festival and is part of the ESPN series “30 for 30” in celebration of the 30 years of ESPN sports broadcasting history.

The Rotisserie Baseball League was founded in 1980 by sportswriter Daniel Okrent and his New York City friends. The first fantasy sports game based on real-time stats and conditions, the Rotisserie League blossomed throughout the 80s and 90s spreading across the nation and inspiring fantasy leagues in all other major sports.

The film will air six times in the next two weeks: Tuesday, April 20, at 8 p.m. (ESPN) and 10 p.m. (ESPN 2); Thursday, April 22, at 10 p.m. (ESPN Classic); Friday, April 23, at 2 a.m. (ESPN 2); Tuesday, April 27, at 9 p.m. (ESPN); and Thursday, April 29, at 8:30 p.m. (ESPN 2).

Betcha didn’t know that, did you?

From Courier-Life:

Still fuming from the WABC–Cablevision fiasco of two weeks ago that caused southern Brooklynites to miss Academy Awards’ slam-bang opening number, Fidler said he’s putting forward two City Council resolutions he hopes will change how cable companies haggle with networks in their continuing price war.

Every 10 years, cable companies re-negotiate their contracts with television networks. While the negotiations were supposed to take place in 2008, they were postponed to this year, explained Fidler, who said that the average viewer is the one who misses out when two titans like these clash over pricing.

“Over the last number of months, myself and other viewers have gotten increasingly pissed off with how the cable industry is running,” Fidler said. “They seem to hold viewers in a low regard. We’re being held hostage.”

…

In his resolutions, Fidler calls upon the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to pass a regulation that would ensure that any television company that broadcasts on the airwaves — like WABC or any other network television channel — cannot charge a cable provider any more than the cost of linking the channel up to the cable system.

What do you think? Should the city government be looking out for our entertainment interests? Or is this something that market forces would rectify on their own?

Councilman Lew Fidler reported to Community Board 15 that he helped spearhead an effort to save the city’s volunteer ambulance corps. The city’s volunteer emergency services were barred from accessing the emergency dispatch system following an October decision from the FDNY, a move seen by some as an attempt to phase them out completely from the emergency medical response.

“I was kind of nonplussed that at a time when the president of the United States is hailing volunteerism, and the mayor of the City of New York has a volunteer action center, that we would cut off volunteer ambulances from serving the public,” Fidler told the Community Board at their February 23 meeting.

Read more about the FDNY blockout of volunteer services and Fidler’s remarks