The local paper for the Upper East Side
WEEK OF OCTOBER THE BRESLINIZATION OF EAST 42ND STREET
25-31 2018
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Born-again Republican Pete Holmberg, a former Democrat, collects signatures at the corner of Madison Avenue and 87th Street in his long-shot bid to topple East Side Democratic state Senator Liz Krueger in the Nov. 6 general election.Photo: Courtesy of Holmberg for New York
THE HOLMBERG CONUNDRUM POLITICS Or how a diehard Republican became a true-blue Democrat — only to return to the party of his youth 25 years later to take on a liberal-left pillar of the state Senate
I got a lot less grief for coming out gay than I did for coming out as a Republican.” Pete Holmberg, state Senate candidate on the East Side
The Department of Education fielded nearly 130,000 complaints about bus service in the first month of the 2018 school year. Photo: Chris Sampson, via Flickr
COUNCIL TAKES AIM AT SCHOOL BUS WOES STUDENTS Bills under consideration would make real-time bus GPS location data available to parents, expand DOE disclosure requirements on delays
BY DOUGLAS FEIDEN BY MICHAEL GAROFALO
The political odyssey of Pete Holmberg began when he was a 13-yearold Chicagoan who volunteered in the losing GOP primary campaign of George H.W. Bush in his race against Ronald Reagan in 1980. A dyed-in-the wool Republican, he hugely enjoyed the nitty-gritty of the electoral process — canvassing and phone-banking, knocking on doors, licking envelopes, even fetching drinks at the local sweet shop. It was also around this time that Holmberg first started to realize, as an eighth-grader, that he was gay.
By 1992, along with legions of other gays who trod the same path, he had become both a Democrat and a Manhattanite. “I was 25, and my friends told me, ‘If you want to be relevant in this town, you’ve got to be a Democrat,’” he recalled. “And I thought, ‘Well, if I had wanted to stay irrelevant, I would have stayed in Chicago.’” Of course, there was another pivotal factor that informed his political calculations: “If I hadn’t been gay, I
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Following a bumpy start to the school year for the 150,000 NYC public school students who rely on buses to get to class each day, city legislators are pushing a package of bills intended to improve the struggling pupil transportation system. Complaints of no-show buses, late arrivals and drivers getting lost on their routes abounded during the opening weeks of the school year. In September alone, students experienced over 27,000 bus-related delays, according to Department of Education data, which cites heavy traffic and mechanical problems as the most common reasons
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for delays. The agency fielded nearly 130,000 complaints through its school bus helpline in September — 20,000 more than during the same period last year — many from worried parents in search of kids on tardy buses. The City Council is weighing a bill would address these concerns by requiring DOE to implement GPS tracking on each of the 9,000 yellow buses that transport public school students and giving parents access to real-time location data. The GPS legislation is one piece of a seven-bill bundle — known as the Student Transportation Oversight Package, or “STOP” — aimed at increasing the transparency and efficiency of the bus system. At an Oct. 16 hearing on the STOP bills, Council Speaker Corey Johnson noted that delays have been a chronic problem with the start of each school year and attributed recurring issues to DOE “mismanagement.”
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NYC SCHOOL BUS DELAYS Students experienced
27,082 delays in September 2018
STOP
On average, delayed buses run
26.9 minutes late in Manhattan (Citywide, students on delayed buses arrive 28.1 minutes
behind schedule on average)
60 percent of delays are attributed to heavy traffic
71 percent of reported delays occur in the morning Sources: NYC DOE, NYC Council
Jewish women and girls light up the world by lighting the Shabbat candles every Friday evening 18 minutes before sunset. Friday, October 26 – 5:42pm. For more information visit www.chabaduppereastside.com
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