Daily Archives: July 23, 2015

Neighbors stand firm on hatred of sanitation garage

Garodnick, Mendez echo residents’ concerns at meeting

Residents of Waterside, East Midtown Plaza, ST/PCV and nearby co-op buildings filled out the audience. Photos by Sabina Mollot)

Residents of Waterside, East Midtown Plaza, ST/PCV and nearby co-op buildings filled out the audience. (Photos by Sabina Mollot)

By Sabina Mollot

Residents of buildings located near the planned sanitation garage on East 25th Street took turns ripping into city officials last Wednesday at a raucous meeting that was aimed at getting public feedback.

Over 150 people attended the scoping session, which was at the garage site, the current CUNY Brookdale campus. Many of them were leaders of local tenants associations and co-op boards who’ve joined the recently formed Brookdale Neighborhood Coalition, which opposes the garage. The garage plan has been deeply unpopular since it was announced in 2013, and, just like at previous meetings, tenants voiced their concerns about potential impacts on air quality from truck fumes, odors, vermin and added traffic congestion that could delay ambulances at local hospitals. Many also argued that a garage for 180 sanitation trucks just seemed out of place on First Avenue’s science/medical corridor.

This time, however, a few elected officials also showed up to the meeting, and two City Council members, Dan Garodnick and Rosie Mendez, called on the city to be more responsive to residents’ concerns.

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Letters to the editor, July 23

Cartoon by Jim Meadows

Cartoon by Jim Meadows

Why New York needs its own state bank

Regarding Carolyn Maloney Congress Member and Council Member Dan Garodnick’s letter on “Why NY needs the Export-Import Bank,” T&V, June 25), I would like to mention the importance of having our own Community or State Bank in New York.  This is what Mr. Les Leopold, executive director of the Labor Institute in New York, an author of “How to Make a Million Dollars an Hour: Why Hedge Funds Get Away with Siphoning Off America’s Wealth” (2013), has mentioned.

He has also written other articles like “How Billionaires Use the Government as a Tool to Destroy Companies They Have Bet Against” (April 17, 2014), “Our Most Powerful Weapon Against Wall Street? The Rise of Reverse Eminent Domain” (Dec. 15, 2013), “Is Cutthroat Capitalism Pushing a Growing Number of Baby Boomers to Suicide?” (May 10, 2013), and many other articles during the last eight years.

It is my understanding that, as of June 2015, the only state of the USA that have had its own state bank is North Dakota, since 1919.  The CEO of that bank earns $250,000 a year – probably what a Wall Street bank CEO earns in one hour; hence, the student and mortgage loans there are cheap, and its main capital is probably the taxes residents pay to their own cities and state. What is more, when a business borrows money from their state bank, they are committed to create certain number of jobs with specific salaries.

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