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PRIVATE MONEY, PUBLIC PARKS NEWS Council member seeks bills that will help solve New York’s park equity problem BY DANIEL FITZSIMMONS
Council member Mark Levine wants to solve New York’s park equity problem. But before he can do that, he said, he needs to know just how deep the problem runs. New York City has more than 1,700 parks, playgrounds and recreational facilities across the five boroughs. Of those, only a handful are well-funded and maintained by conservancies, which are private, non-profit organizations that enter into agreements with the parks department on the upkeep
and programming of a particular public space. The majority of parks, by contrast, are forced to make do with the department’s limited resources and backlog of work orders. The disparity between these well-endowed parks and the less-affluent ones, especially in the outer boroughs, has led to a debate among urbanists, community advocates and elected officials about how the city’s resources, both private and public, should be distributed. To that end, Levine recently introduced a bill that would require park conservancies to detail their revenue – much of it in the form of donations - and expenditures on an annual basis to the parks commissioner, who would create a
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The High Line is one of the city’s well-funded parks; its conservancy says it would support a bill to make park funding more transparent. Photo by Mary Newman
DERSHOWITZ TRAFFIC-DEATH CASE HEADED TO TRIAL NEWS When the D.A.’s office failed to win a conviction of the driver who killed Alan Dershowitz’s sister-in-law, victims’ families say it made prosecutors gun-shy about future cases. A civil trial starting this week rekindles the debate. Families for Safe Streets staged a rally Sunday calling on New York district attorneys to take more seriously cases where reckless drivers kill or injure pedestrians. Photo by Daniel Fitzsimmons
Do you know where this is?
BY KYLE POPE
A traffic-death case that has become a rallying cry for fami-
lies who have lost loved ones to pedestrian crashes goes to trial this week in a Manhattan federal court. Marilyn Dershowitz – the sisterin-law of famed trial lawyer Alan Dershowitz – was killed in 2011 while bicycling in Chelsea with her husband, Nathan. She was struck by the driver of a post office truck, who then faced criminal charges of leaving the scene of the accident. A jury cleared the driver a year later after less than a day of
WEEK OF FEBRUARY
5-11 2015
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In Brief DE BLASIO RETURNS TO HIS ROOTS After a first year that can best be described as challenging for New York’s new mayor, Bill de Blasio’s State of the City address on Tuesday returned to the theme that got him elected in the first place. In a speech at Baruch College in Manhattan, de Blasio made quick work of the laundry list of accomplishments that usually dominate the traditional start-ofthe-year mayoral address. Instead, he spent most of his time reprising the “Tale of Two Cities” theme of his election campaign, zeroing in on the high price of housing. “While the state of our city is strong, we face a profound challenge,” he said. “If we fail to be a city for everyone, we risk losing what makes New York, New York. We risk losing the very soul of this place.” Nothing, he said, more represents the inequality gap in than soaring home prices, and the need for affordable alternatives. In one sense, de Blasio’s reemphasis on housing represents smart politics. City housing is one area of policy over which the mayor has near-complete control -- a necessity given his continuing spats with Gov. Andrew Cuomo and uncertainty stemming from the loss of city-friendly Sheldon Silver in the speaker’s seat. The mayor, for instance, said in the address that he will use city zoning laws to require that developers include affordable housing options in their plans. “We need stronger rent regulations that reflect today’s New York,” he said.
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