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Council Member Keith Powers, pictured here speaking at his Jan. 21 inauguration at the CUNY Graduate Center, will serve as chair of the City Council’s criminal justice committee in his first term representing District 4. Photo courtesy of Keith Powers.
POWERS AIMS FOR QUICK, SAFE CLOSURE OF RIKERS JUSTICE A Q&A with Council Member Keith Powers on the city’s steps toward closing the jail complex BY MICHAEL GAROFALO
City Council Member Keith Powers, who this year took office as the representative for District 4, will serve as chair of the Council’s criminal justice committee in his first term. In this role, one of Powers’ chief responsibilities will be overseeing the closure of the notoriously violent Rikers Island jail complex. Last year, Mayor Bill de Blasio laid out a plan for closing Rikers and moving the city’s jail population to borough-based facilities within ten years. Some activists and Council
members have advocated for a more aggressive timeline. The administration says it needs to reduce the city’s jail population to 5,000 from its current average of roughly 9,000 to be in a position to transition from Rikers to borough-based facilities. The mayor’s office announced in January that it plans to close the first of the nine jails on the island this summer. In January, the city awarded a $7.6 million contract to an architecture and design firm to conduct a 10-month study of the design and location of borough-based jails that will replace Rikers Island. Powers joined Straus News to outline his priorities for the criminal justice committee, which he said extend well beyond the key objective of closing Rikers Island.
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1-7 2018
Unsightly trash, sawhorses and construction debris mar the streetscape on the south side of East 86th Street on Sunday, January 28th. A business improvement district that is taking shape in the corridor would provide enhanced street cleaning, maintenance, vendor enforcement and public safety services. Photo: Douglas Feiden
A BID BLOOMS ON 86TH STREET EXCLUSIVE After three decades of false starts, a business improvement district finally advances in a 20-block area between First and Park Avenues in the East 80s BY DOUGLAS FEIDEN
It was 1988 when a group of Upper East Side merchants and property owners seeking to combat crime and grime first proposed the YorkvilleEast 86th Street Business Improvement District. Peddlers, pushers and panhandlers haunted the then-seedy commercial corridor, and the prospect of asking businesses to pay an extra levy to fund safer, cleaner streets seemed like a slam-dunk. Guess again. Three major commercial property owners balked at the assessment. Some residential own-
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ers objected, too. And for the next 13 years, the founders of the would-be BID struggled to gain traction. They rewrote its mission, changed its scope, mapped and remapped its boundaries, added to its budget, subtracted from its budget – even dropped the word “Yorkville” from its name. Nothing worked. Faced with insurmountable opposition, the steering company formed to create the BID finally threw in the towel and withdrew its application from the city’s Department of Small Business Services in May 2001. Now, 30 years after the launch of that initial effort and 17 years after its collapse, a campaign to organize a new BID anchored by East 86th Street has reached critical mass, according to people close to the process. If multiple city approvals are secured, the proposed BID — in a 20-block, rectangular-shaped area bounded by First Avenue and Park Avenue and East 84th and 88th Streets — could become a reality later this year.
Designed to lift the area’s quality of life, the BID would be a nonprofit public-private partnership providing sanitation, street maintenance, public safety, vendor enforcement and homeless outreach. It would supplement, not replace, city services, drawing on funding from a special property assessment akin to an additional tax. The BID’s initial annual budget would be $900,000, according to the proposal from its steering committee, which includes seven property owners, three civic groups, local elected officials, small business owners and the nonprofit Doe Fund.
CONTINUED ON PAGE 16 Jewish women and girls light up the world by lighting the Shabbat candles every Friday evening 18 minutes before sunset. Friday, February 2 – 4:57 pm. For more information visit www.chabaduppereastside.com
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