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Tuesday, May 4, 2010

Bronx News Roundup, May 4

Adolfo Carrion, the former Bronx BP who moved to Washington last year to take a job as Obama's urban czar, is returning to New York to work as a regional director for the Department of Housing and Urban Development.  The move, which is considered a step down, has some observers scratching their heads.

Last year, jurors on felony cases in the Bronx found defendants guilty 43 percent of the time. In the rest of the city, this figure is above 70 percent.  There are a number of theories as to why this might be. 

Police have released photos of a suspect wanted in connection with the shooting of a man in Mott Haven.

A Bronx woman won the Long Island Marathon on Sunday. Lilia Britez, a 28-year-old who grew up in Paraguay, has only been running seriously for two years.

NY1 recently toured the water filtration plant that's being built in Van Cortlandt Park.  Alex Kratz of the Norwood News went on a similar tour last month

A Q & A with State Senator Eric Schneiderman, who's hoping to become New York's next attorney general.

Councilman Jimmy Vacca sat down with Streetsblog recently for a conversation about public transport and safer streets. (Vacca is the new chair of the council's transportation committee.)

Westchester Square merchants says traffic agents are taking up precious parking spots in the neighborhood.

A Bronx firehouse celebrated its 100th anniversary on Monday. 

Convicted thief Richard Izquierdo Arroyo, the grandson and chief-of-staff of Assemblywoman Carmen Arroyo, has been mocking an adversary on Facebook for being disabled.  Arroyo (the grandson, not the assemblywomen) recently pled guilty to stealing $200,000 from a non-profit.  His sentencing is scheduled for June. 

2 comments:

  1. re the NY1 filtration story: http://riverdalepress.com/full.php?sid=12172&current_edition=2010-04-29

    ReplyDelete
  2. in case the link doesn't work... here's the text of my recent letter in the Riverdale Press re: the filtration plant:

    To the editor:
    First, let’s correct an inaccuracy. The Croton Water Filtration Plant will not be financed “in part” by water rate payers, but completely by water rate payers. And as annual double-digit increases attest, the city Department of Environmental Protection’s original contention that the plant’s construction would cause only a 4.1 percent raise in rates was one of many unabashed bold-faced lies told for the purpose of getting approval to build the behemoth under a Bronx park.

    Second, propaganda tours of the fancy factory will never change the fact that this was the wrong project built in the wrong place. Had the city designed a cost-efficient filtration plant in Westchester that caused minimum disruption to the environment and Bronx communities and utilized modern, forward-thinking technology to purify New York City’s water, there would be plenty to boast about.

    But this embarrassing abomination destroyed a Bronx park, is causing historic disruption to the Jerome Park Reservoir, which is on the National Registr y of Historic Places, and unearthed tons of rock that is more than a billion years old (as reported in your article). It necessitates the digging of a trench the entire length of Webster Avenue to dump yet more waste in Hunts Point, is bleeding water-rate payers dry and utilizes outmoded chemical technology.

    Your description of the plant’s winding pipings, complex tunnels and tubing and backup systems only underscores the obscenity. Had the DEP built a membrane filtration plant, which is the industry standard, and not a chemical plant, which forever will require the trucking of dangerous chemicals into a public park, they would have needed to take significantly less land (some estimates had it down to a third), could have saved billions of public dollars, and would have put the city at the cutting edge in terms of bacteria-cleansing technology, providing New Yorkers with the most efficient protection available in this age of terrorism.

    Alas, the DEP’s priority was not to do the right thing for the public, but to keep engineers, contractors, truckers and dirt haulers happy. So, as it nears completion, let’s acknowledge the Croton filtration plant for what it is: the city’s largest public works project and its biggest folly.

    ReplyDelete

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