SHEEPSHEAD BAY'S ONLY INDEPENDENT NEWS BLOG

New York City’s Independent Budget Office (IBO), which provides nonpartisan information about the city budget and tax revenues, reported that city agencies have rung up $154.1 million in overtime costs related to Superstorm Sandy.

The large figure comes as no surprise, considering the massive devastation Sandy heaped upon our area, but it’s interesting to note the breakdown of which agencies clocked the most overtime.

The NYPD took the bulk of it, racking up 46 percent of the total overtime. Next was the Department of Sanitation, which took in 35 percent of the overtime pie. Park workers, transit workers and firefighters also took home extra chunks.

According to Mayor Bloomberg, the storm’s total price tag, figuring in city and private losses, was a whopping $19 billion. City agencies accounted for $4.5 billion of that figure, which included overtime costs, cleanup and other expenditures.

Investigators on the scene of one of Maksim Gelman’s stabbings.

New York City is safer than ever as the murder rate has plummeted 20 percent, the lowest since 1963, according to a report in the New York Daily News. The drop in murders comes alongside a drop in overall shootings, the lowest in 18 years.

A Daily News report highlights the 25 percent drop in slayings in our own 61st precinct, which covers Sheepshead Bay, Gerritsen Beach and Gravesend.

“That’s a blessing,” Isitro Bennito, manager of Bagels and Beyond in Gravesend, told the Daily News. ”I’ve seen more police this past year, I think that’s the reason. The police deserve a lot of credit.”

Mayor Bloomberg lauded the statistics at an NYPD Graduation Ceremony in Brooklyn and cited some interesting numbers as proof of his claim that New York is “the safest big city in America,”

Bloomberg compared New York’s murder rate — the lowest rate per 100,000 residents amongst the 25 most populated cities — to other famous cities in the country.

If the city had the murder rate of Chicago, cops would be investigating more than 1,400 homicides this year, Bloomberg said. If the city had Detroit’s murder rate, cops would be called to more than 4,400 killings this year, he added.

While the drop in deadly incidents is welcome news, the numbers concerning the drop in our own district are slightly misleading considering the notorious Maksim Gelman stabbing spree and other high profile killings which led to an anomalous spike in the murder rate the previous year.

Still, its encouraging that the actions of those who contributed to Sheepshead Bay’s deadliest year in a decade, were not indicative of a trend that carried forward into this one.

In what hopes to be another positive step for recovery, Mayor Bloomberg announced a new $5.5 million grant matching program aimed at getting small businesses bowled over by Hurricane Sandy back on their feet.

The grant program, funded by $500,000 from the Partnership for New York City and $5 million from the Mayor’s Fund to Advance New York City, will be run by the New York Business Development Cooperation. According to the Mayor’s press release,

The matching grants are designed to provide additional financial assistance for local businesses already seeking low-interest loans through the City’s existing Emergency Loan Fund…The new matching grants of up to $10,000 will be administered by the New York Business Development Corporation and will be available to New York City businesses in all five boroughs that have been displaced from their workplace for three weeks and are already seeking emergency loans from the City’s existing program. They are designed to provide critical supplemental assistance to what is being provided through the low-interest loans, and will be capped at no more than the amount the business receives in the loans.

The Mayor expressed his aims with the new program stating, “The capital provided through this program will help businesses purchase supplies, make repairs, and get back up and running.” In a letter to his constituents, local Assemblyman Steven Cymbrowitz joined the Mayor in expressing the importance of this program, citing the weakened shape much of Sheepshead Bay business community is still in,

“While some stores are back in business, there are many that remain shuttered, a sad testament to the unpredictable force of nature. For these businesses, today was another day of cleaning and rebuilding, getting rid of what’s unsalvageable and hoping for better days ahead.

If you are a small business owner looking more information on qualifying for loans or accessing donations click here.

Source: Spoonchen / Flickr

Mayor Bloomberg announced that the alternating odd-even licence plate system of buying gas will remain in place through Friday, according to a report in the New York Post.

The extension was enacted because 30 percent of the city’s gas stations are still closed. The mayor hopes to avoid long lines at the pump during the expected surge of motorists traveling during the holidays.

The gas rationing plan, which has been in effect since November 9, has already ended in New Jersey and Long Island.

Source: U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Kevin S. O’Brien via Wikimedia Commons

Hurricane Sandy was an unstoppable storm, affecting so many residents throughout our city. Mayor Michael Bloomberg is a figure many looked to for leadership and guidance during this critical time.

The opinions of his efforts or shortcomings, depending on any given perspective, vary greatly. WNYC asked several New Yorkers how they would rate Bloomberg in the wake of Sandy.

Interestingly, of those interviewed in the piece, the three leaders representing the private sector graded the mayor fairly high, while the two public sector leaders gave Bloomberg an “F”.

Ed Jaworski, president of the Madison-Marine-Homecrest Civic Association, was one of the interviewees who gave Bloomberg a failing grade. He said:

Sandy’s impact reflects Mayor Bloomberg’s obsession with real estate-development: seeking taller buildings and more densely packed population than other cities worldwide. Three weeks before the hurricane, he announced that he’d seek a major up-zoning on Manhattan’s East Side. Did he address all the component infrastructure consequences, including safety? How about when he encouraged dense development on the Brooklyn and Queens waterfronts? Now, because we have a Department of City Planning that doesn’t plan — it rezones — the mayor had to appoint a director of housing recovery operations and community restoration directors.

We’d like to hear your take on Bloomberg’s efforts. On your standard grammar school scale of A to F, did he do well by our neighborhood before, during and after Hurricane Sandy?

There has been a great effort in the wake of Hurricane Sandy to get kids back to school — a not so easy challenge, especially considering that many of the school personnel and teachers have been dealing with their own challenges at home.

A New York Daily News report spotlights two Southern Brooklyn teachers who, in spite of having their homes rendered uninhabitable,  have made it their mission to get back to work teaching as soon as possible.

Trudi Heatherly, a Gerritsen Beach native and public school teacher at PS 253, 601 Oceanview Avenue, saw four feet of water flood her home, ruin her furniture and force her and her family to flee to the safety of a friend’s house. Despite her displacement, and the stress of her damaged home looming over her, Heatherly found her way to work last Friday. She navigated the crippled mass transit system, with the hope of returning a semblance of normalcy to her life, telling The Daily News that, “It was a disaster. But we will come back.”

Elaine Cohen, an Oceanside, LI resident who teaches at McKinley Junior High School in Bay Ridge, also put her teaching profession front and center despite crippling damage done to her home. Sandy flooded Cohen’s house, car, and cut her power, also forcing her family to relocate to a friend’s home. Despite this, she made it to work this past Friday.

“That’s what you do, if you are a teacher. You teach,” Cohen told The Daily News.

Cohen also went to considerable trouble in managing to find transportation to and from work during the disaster. “It would be nice if the Mayor would understand a little bit more,” she said, referencing the mayor’s plea for all city and public workers to return to work as soon as possible.

Despite the considerable trouble that local teachers such as Heatherly and Cohen are going through, their efforts in teaching kids and keeping the schools open are critically vital to the restoration of normalcy needed in our area, and we thank them for their efforts.

Generators sit, unused, in Central Park. Source: AP

Mayor Bloomberg’s decision to cancel the New York City Marathon may have been the right one, but his delayed action in doing so has shown to have further repercussions than merely inconveniencing thousands of runners who dropped thousands in travel expenses, or even the expected $340 million dollars in revenue that the marathon brings to the city each year.

Scores of  generators, blankets, food, water, and clothes were all left stranded in Central Park, far out of the reach of people in desperate need of emergency supplies, including many in Sheepshead Bay, Manhattan Beach, Brighton Beach, Gerritsen Beach, Coney Island and Sea Gate.

The city had been preparing for the marathon full speed ahead, until Bloomberg cancelled the event at the last minute. According to a report in the Post, “[T]he city left more than a dozen generators… 20 heaters, tens of thousands of Mylar ‘space’ blankets, jackets, 106 crates of apples and peanuts, at least 14 pallets of bottled water and 22 five-gallon jugs of water” in Central Park in preparation for the big race.

Blame for the reasons as to why these precious resources were left in Central Park instead of servicing disaster victims was evenly spread.

“Once we found out they’d still be running a marathon, we had to call all the towing vendors and tell them they couldn’t come,” a Central Park security guard told The Post, effectively blaming the runners’ desire to hold an impromptu makeup race in lieu of the real thing.

Runners blamed the city for not taking action.

“I’m sure they could have asked the runners to pause to remove the things,” runner Scott Hawley told The Post. “It shouldn’t take long, and if any of us knew this, we would want that to be the priority.”

The city, for its part, blamed the company that owns the generators.

“We reached out to all vendors but many were unable to fulfill our requests due to lack of large generators, lack of trucks and lack of personnel,” said Bloomberg aide Julie Wood. She also claimed that “many of the generators being used for marathon events are not the types of generators most in need for hard-hit areas in New York City. Their power output does not match the levels we are looking for.”

Bloomberg himself seemed unsure on the reasons as to why the valuable resources were left in Central Park and insisted that the stranded Central Park supplies were “not a story.”

While the reasons the city provided might all be valid, the “pass the buck” mentality surrounding the issue seems to reflect the overall stalling involved in Bloomberg’s delayed reaction in cancelling the marathon, a decision that seemed like a no-brainer for the millions of New Yorkers living without adequate power, heat, food, and other essentials.

A customer buys ice cream from a Mister Softee truck — one of the very few options New Yorkers had to try and keep cool during the sweltering Northeast Blackout of 2003. Source: StructuresNYC / Flickr

BETWEEN THE LINES: Where were you when the lights went out on August 14, 2003?

A recent partial power outage in my apartment jogged my memory to that night. When the power went out and the air-conditioner stopped shortly after 7:00 p.m., I was annoyed, thinking it was gonna be a repeat of that long, hot night nine years ago. But, when I went out to the hallway, I realized it wasn’t a total blackout. Most of the hallway ceiling lights were still on and the elevators were operating. I looked out my window and saw most apartments had lights.

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If Neil Friedman had his druthers, “cancer sticks” would go the way of the Dodo bird. Source: SuperFantastic / Flickr

BETWEEN THE LINES:

The place: Times Square, New York City.

The time: High Noon, the present.

The scene: Two men slowly walk towards each other. A few passersby anticipate a showdown and seek nearby cover.

The players: The Villain and The Hero.

The Villain, clad in basic black from head to toe, advances from the left. The Hero, dressed in stylish off-white, approaches from the right.

As they get close — at the intersection of Broadway and 42nd Street — the villain strikes a match and lights the unfiltered Camel dangling from his lips, then rudely exhales the smoke into the Hero’s face.

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BETWEEN THE LINES: Seven years ago New York City was in the running to host the Summer Olympic Games, which are currently underway 3,500 miles east of here. We made it to the final five before London was selected.

Though I’ve yet to hear about any major problems for the games, with the exception of too many empty seats early on, or hassles getting around London, if the 2012 (pronounced “twenty twelve” — not “two thousand and twelve”) games had been held here, more than likely it would have inconvenienced many city residents. Besides the congestion and the temporary population explosion, the cost to build new or renovate existing venues, including a proposed $2 billion stadium near the Lincoln Tunnel, the plan would have been prohibitive considering the city’s traditionally strained budget.

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