After a spike in his approval numbers, a newfound love for outer boroughs, and this week’s flipping of the bird at City Council, it looks like hizzoner is making a play for the now apparenly vacant title of Iron Mike.
Fixing a steely gaze on the perpetually seeming like he is running Student Council Gifford Miller, the mayor vetoed the no confidence vote — in the form of a proposed zoning change which would have obviated the proposal — the Council delivered to Bloombergs’s proposed waste management plan. Miller presented an alternate, wrapped up in the expected rhetoric that Mayor’s plan dumped trash on the poor and less white regions of the city. The operative phrase for Miller was “I don’t think it’s ideal to locate any kind of a transfer station in such a residential neighborhood in the middle of a park”. Apparently the man has never been to 145th Street. But no matter, because his wealthy, white consituents probably haven’t either. See, Bloomberg was only projecting that one solid waste transfer station — that’s a fancy name for a place for where they will empty residential garbage trucks onto barges, to be sent to a poor, rural community that will be paid to bury our trash — be located in Manhattan. Ttaking the share the pain approach, every borough got one.
The rub? The only Manhattan site was square in Miller’s (rich, white) district. Miller must have not read the entire plan, because after a day of everyone pointing out that his spirited critique was driven by pandering to his base (which, to be fair, he’s paid to do) and looking for some traction for his mayoral campaign, he relented and acquiesced to a transfer station that would only handle paper collected for recycling. He also airly suggested that the rest of our exceedlingly complex waste management problem could be solved by building a couple of transfer stations further south, and nowhere near any parks. Except for the one that lines the West Side and would seperate the proposed stations from the rest of the city.
If you were wondering if such massive logistical concerns could really hinge on narrowly self-interested posturing, let us only look across the way at the Lil’ Borough That Couldn’t, Staten Island. Having cemented Guliani’s reelection margin, he repaid their support with two massively disproportionate decisions that have wreaked havoc on Manhattan and Brooklyn. The first is the one that resulted in the current travails, the closing of Fresh Kills — the massive city-owned landfill, now best known as the site of most of the remains of the WTC. Granted, something needed to be done, since the site was on track to become on the second human-made object visible from space (after the Great Wall). But the closing was a political decision, because Guliani never got around to developing an alternative beyond “Send it to Virginia” leaving the city with far more truck traffic as trash normally barged out to Staten Island was routed over and under the rivers. The second was the change from two-way to one-way tolls for the Verazzano Narrows Bridge crossing. Done as a sap to Staten Island residents yapping about how unfair the tolls were, they were changed to favor those exiting Staten Island, resulting in a massive surge of truck traffic able to exploit a series on one-way toll-free crossings to traverse the city, ending at Canal Street and the Holland Tunnel. Though the subsequent closing of the tunnel to truck traffic after 9/11 relieved this somewhat, we shouldn’t rely on terrorist threats to drive traffic planning.
So we are awash in trucks, a clear problem (of cost, quality of life and pollution) and Miller’s plan does little to alleviate that. Lacking a more detailed presentation, such as available from the mayor, one must rely on the most detailed version given, via the Times. Most everyone who offers a comment says that there’s no there there to the alternate. Leading with the line that the city dumps its nastiest facilities on the least fortunate population (abandoning the CNG plan for city buses and refusing to relocate the disproportionately dense collection of depots in Harlem anyone?) is pretty rote for Democrats, who haven’t done much to help the situation. Miller doesn’t really say much about the propriety of transfer stations not in his district — meaning, are the poor getting screwed again or does he think the other three locations are fair? Aside from seeming to dump this plan on his leading challenger, it should be noted that Bloomberg puts his trash where his house is — East 91st street isn’t all that far from hizzoner’s ceremonial and functional homes.
The mayor deserves a little more credit for this effort than he was demanding for his misguided Stadium fetish, so Miller should not descend to knee-jerk politicking about such an important issue. It’s a mess of a issue, one that potentially encompasses major shifts in city infrastructure, reaching all the way down to the mundane of how responsible we may need to be about the trash we store in our homes. And with a tertiary relationship to other still-tabled issues, such as the Brooklyn Rail Tunnel (a plan to connect Brooklyn to the mainland via a rail tunnel, enabling the underutilized Brooklyn port facilities to be competitive with the next generation of deep water container ships and potentially providing a way to transfer large amounts of waste without carting it over land), sniping over who gets stuck with the transfer station is awfully short-sighted. We are creaking along towards the completion of Water Tunnel No. 3, an essential addition to our infrastructure that took a good half-century to realize. As long as the Midwest is mired in the economic doldrums, we can stagger along without a viable solid waste plan, but trash is the sort of thing that will cause even the most hardscrabble community to eventually turn up their nose. And once they figure out just how poorly prepared we are, it will get far more pricey to buy our way out of this mess.
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Trash Talkin’.
After a spike in his approval numbers, a newfound love for outer boroughs, and this week’s flipping of the bird at City Council, it looks like hizzoner is making a play for the now apparenly vacant title of Iron Mike.
Fixing a steely gaze on the perpetually seeming like he is running Student Council Gifford Miller, the mayor vetoed the no confidence vote — in the form of a proposed zoning change which would have obviated the proposal — the Council delivered to Bloombergs’s proposed waste management plan. Miller presented an alternate, wrapped up in the expected rhetoric that Mayor’s plan dumped trash on the poor and less white regions of the city. The operative phrase for Miller was “I don’t think it’s ideal to locate any kind of a transfer station in such a residential neighborhood in the middle of a park”. Apparently the man has never been to 145th Street. But no matter, because his wealthy, white consituents probably haven’t either. See, Bloomberg was only projecting that one solid waste transfer station — that’s a fancy name for a place for where they will empty residential garbage trucks onto barges, to be sent to a poor, rural community that will be paid to bury our trash — be located in Manhattan. Ttaking the share the pain approach, every borough got one.
The rub? The only Manhattan site was square in Miller’s (rich, white) district. Miller must have not read the entire plan, because after a day of everyone pointing out that his spirited critique was driven by pandering to his base (which, to be fair, he’s paid to do) and looking for some traction for his mayoral campaign, he relented and acquiesced to a transfer station that would only handle paper collected for recycling. He also airly suggested that the rest of our exceedlingly complex waste management problem could be solved by building a couple of transfer stations further south, and nowhere near any parks. Except for the one that lines the West Side and would seperate the proposed stations from the rest of the city.
If you were wondering if such massive logistical concerns could really hinge on narrowly self-interested posturing, let us only look across the way at the Lil’ Borough That Couldn’t, Staten Island. Having cemented Guliani’s reelection margin, he repaid their support with two massively disproportionate decisions that have wreaked havoc on Manhattan and Brooklyn. The first is the one that resulted in the current travails, the closing of Fresh Kills — the massive city-owned landfill, now best known as the site of most of the remains of the WTC. Granted, something needed to be done, since the site was on track to become on the second human-made object visible from space (after the Great Wall). But the closing was a political decision, because Guliani never got around to developing an alternative beyond “Send it to Virginia” leaving the city with far more truck traffic as trash normally barged out to Staten Island was routed over and under the rivers. The second was the change from two-way to one-way tolls for the Verazzano Narrows Bridge crossing. Done as a sap to Staten Island residents yapping about how unfair the tolls were, they were changed to favor those exiting Staten Island, resulting in a massive surge of truck traffic able to exploit a series on one-way toll-free crossings to traverse the city, ending at Canal Street and the Holland Tunnel. Though the subsequent closing of the tunnel to truck traffic after 9/11 relieved this somewhat, we shouldn’t rely on terrorist threats to drive traffic planning.
So we are awash in trucks, a clear problem (of cost, quality of life and pollution) and Miller’s plan does little to alleviate that. Lacking a more detailed presentation, such as available from the mayor, one must rely on the most detailed version given, via the Times. Most everyone who offers a comment says that there’s no there there to the alternate. Leading with the line that the city dumps its nastiest facilities on the least fortunate population (abandoning the CNG plan for city buses and refusing to relocate the disproportionately dense collection of depots in Harlem anyone?) is pretty rote for Democrats, who haven’t done much to help the situation. Miller doesn’t really say much about the propriety of transfer stations not in his district — meaning, are the poor getting screwed again or does he think the other three locations are fair? Aside from seeming to dump this plan on his leading challenger, it should be noted that Bloomberg puts his trash where his house is — East 91st street isn’t all that far from hizzoner’s ceremonial and functional homes.
The mayor deserves a little more credit for this effort than he was demanding for his misguided Stadium fetish, so Miller should not descend to knee-jerk politicking about such an important issue. It’s a mess of a issue, one that potentially encompasses major shifts in city infrastructure, reaching all the way down to the mundane of how responsible we may need to be about the trash we store in our homes. And with a tertiary relationship to other still-tabled issues, such as the Brooklyn Rail Tunnel (a plan to connect Brooklyn to the mainland via a rail tunnel, enabling the underutilized Brooklyn port facilities to be competitive with the next generation of deep water container ships and potentially providing a way to transfer large amounts of waste without carting it over land), sniping over who gets stuck with the transfer station is awfully short-sighted. We are creaking along towards the completion of Water Tunnel No. 3, an essential addition to our infrastructure that took a good half-century to realize. As long as the Midwest is mired in the economic doldrums, we can stagger along without a viable solid waste plan, but trash is the sort of thing that will cause even the most hardscrabble community to eventually turn up their nose. And once they figure out just how poorly prepared we are, it will get far more pricey to buy our way out of this mess.