AM New York

Mayor Bill de Blasio joined community leaders in Astoria, Queens, on Friday for a ride on NYC Ferry’s new extension from Astoria to the Upper East Side.

Last week, the NYC Ferry service announced it would finally expand the line to connect the neighboring boroughs, after years of advocacy from Astoria community leaders. The line will offer a direct connection from 3-10 Astoria Blvd. to 90th Street on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.

Before they embarked on what Manhattan Councilman Ben Kallos called a two-minute ride across the river, the mayor held a press conference with Kallos, Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney and Economic Development Corporation Executive Director James Wong at Astoria’s pier.

Thousands of New Yorkers bike, walk, and run over the Queensboro Bridge each day. The bridge has nine lanes for car traffic, yet only a narrow path along the northern edge of the bridge is open to cyclists and pedestrians, causing conflicts, congestion, and in the age of COVID, dangerous crowding. As the Queens and Manhattan council members whose districts border the bridge, and whose constituents depend on this critical inter-borough connection, we are calling on the city to open the South Outer Roadway to pedestrians.  

New York is set to become the first major American city to remove legal language that many believe refers to undocumented residents in a negative light.

The City Council passed Thursday legislation that would expunge the terms “alien,” “illegal immigrant” and “illegal migrant” from local laws, rules, orders, city documents and other materials. The terms will be replaced by the word “noncitizen.”

Forty-six of the 50 City Council members present at the May 28 remote stated meeting supported the legislation.

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Seven City Council members co-sponsored the legislation, including Brooklyn’s Farah Louis; Queens’ Daniel Dromm and Costa Constantinides; and Manhattan’s Ben Kallos, Keith Powers, Carlina Rivera and Helen Rosenthal.

“If I had to go out to work, I would have to pay for childcare that I normally would not have to pay for because my child would be at school,” she said. “That is an essential cost.” 

Also included in the package is a bill sponsored by Lander, with Councilman Ben Kallos and Council Speaker Corey Johnson, that would require businesses to provide just cause when firing essential workers, in the hopes that workers do not feel intimidated to speak up against workplace conditions or organize with other employees. 

The trio’s legislation comes after Staten Island Amazon warehouse worker Chris Smalls was fired by the e-commerce giant after organizing a protest of conditions at his facility. 

One bill in the package, introduced by Councilmembers Ben Kallos, Brad Lander and Speaker Johnson, proposes an expansion of “whistleblower” protections for essential workers from being fired without “just cause.”

In early April, Lawmakers planned to propose legislation to protect healthcare workers after reports of hospitals threatening to fire doctors and nurses for speaking out about personal protective equipment shortages. The legislation now protects any essential worker, like a healthcare or transit workers, and those working in any essential business like a grocery store, pharmacies, post offices or food bank.

“With the pandemic everything that is wrong with our society has been magnified,” said Councilmember Kallos. “ In many cases people who are saying that we don’t have the protection, you are sending us to war without any weapons, are being retaliated against…having these protections will mean that somebody doing the right thing is not going to lose their job.”

NYC Health + Hospitals opened an ExpressCare clinic at their Metropolitan location Feb. 3, the first of the chain of clinics to open in Manhattan, according to a press release. 

The clinic will treat non-life-threatening conditions such as colds, flu, sprains, rashes, minor cuts and lacerations and certain types of infections, according to the press release. It will operate seven days a week from 6 p.m. to midnight on weekdays and 10 a.m. to midnight on weekends and holidays. 

The clinic will provide faster treatment for these conditions than would be available in the emergency department, according to the press release. The physicians employed at the clinic will also help connect patients to primary care doctors in the NYC Health + Hospitals system for follow-up care. 

Redirecting non-life-threatening treatment from the emergency department will help reduce wait times for patients in need of immediate emergency care, said Alina Moran, CEO of NYC Health + Hospitals/Metropolitan, in the press release.

“We are excited to add a new health care option for the community we serve in East Harlem and upper Manhattan,” Moran said in the press release. 

This is the fourth ExpressCare clinic in the NYC Health + Hospital system, with other locations in Elmhurst, Lincoln and Queens, according to the press release. 

The clinic will operate in a shared space with the Geriatric Outpatient Services until construction on the permanent location is complete in several months, said Noel Alicea, the public relations representative for NYC Health + Hospitals/Metropolitan.

NYC Council Member Diana Ayala, the representative for District 8, helped secure the $1.6 million for the construction of the clinic. 

Councilmembers Ben Kallos and Carlina Rivera’s bill banning the use of chemical pesticides in city green spaces is gathering community support. 

Manhattan’s Community Board 5 Parks and Public Spaces Committee, which covers a center slice of Midtown from 59th to 14th Sts., unanimously passed a resolution in favor the legislation on Monday Feb. 3. 

“It’s a very dangerous chemical,” said spokesperson for Councilmember Rivera Jeremy Unger. “This is long overdue.” Under the bill, the Parks Department would be prohibited from using pesticides with glyphosate, the active ingredient in the popular weed killer Roundup. In 2013, Parks sprayed Roundup 1,300 times. Since 2014 the agency has cut their use of glyphosate-based weed killers by 70 percent, a spokesperson said. When Parks does use glyphosate, it does not spray the chemical inside of playgrounds, dog runs or “when the public is in the immediate vicinity” the spokesperson added. 

At the meeting, Unger cited a 2015 World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research of Cancer (IARC) study which linked glyphosate to cancer as evidence to do away with the synthetic weed killer. But there is not a complete consensus in the scientific community on the effects of the compound on humans which some members of the community board brought up. 

“There is substantial debate and controversy and it’s not settled,” said committee member Tod Shapiro. He then asked Unger if the “feel good legislation” was sort of a liberal “hobby horse political thing, divorced from actual substance?”

Two years after the WHO study, the European Commission reauthorized the pesticide until 2022. And earlier this year, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) reiterated their 2019 stance on the chemical stating that there are “no risks of concern to human health” when glyphosate is used in accordance with its current label.  The EPA decision comes a year after high-profile case were a California couple claimed they got non-Hodgkins Lymphoma after using Roundup for years. 

“Universal access to after school will increase and equalize educational opportunities, keep kids out of the criminal justice system, and make life easier for parents whose jobs keep them at work until at least 5 p.m.,” said Councilmember Ben Kallos, at an oversight hearing on after-school legislation on Tuesday. The Upper East side pol sponsored a bill in 2018 requiring that the city provide free after-school programs to every public school student between the ages of three through 21.

Kallos was joined by other members of the Youth Services committee including Councilmember Treyger who touched on his own after-school legislation proposed in 2018. Treyger’s bill would require annual reports by the Department of Education and DYCD on the demographics of the students at each after-school program including whether the student has special needs or is an English language learner. The report would also require that the agencies note the eligibility criteria for each program and the amount and source for program funding. 

The annual event, called Homeless Persons’ Memorial Day, was hosted by the nonprofits Care For the Homeless (CFH) and Urban Pathways (UP) at the Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church, at 7 West 55th St.

This year, 153 homeless people were honored, and each name was read aloud as a bell tolled and a candle was lit. Several elected officials spoke, including City Council Speaker Corey Johnson, Assembly Member Richard Gottfried, Assembly Member Andrew Hevesi and City Council Member Ben Kallos.

A eulogy was also given for the four Chinatown victims who were beaten to death one night in early October. There were six other eulogies given at the event, and 15 people read the names of all those who had died in 2019.

In a bid to root out so-called tenant blacklisting, the city may expand its list of protected classes to include people who have been involved in housing court cases.

At a hearing Wednesday, Mayor Bill de Blasio's administration indicated it supported a bill that would empower the city's Commission on Human Rights to investigate when New Yorkers believe a landlord opted not to rent to them because of their history in housing court.

Earlier this summer, the state banned this practice, often referred to as tenant blacklisting. Lawyers who represent renters have long spoken out against owners that reject anyone included in databases of people who have been involved in any housing court action — even in cases that tenants win — over the past seven years.

The state's prohibition, however, exclusively tasks the attorney general with enforcement and does not allow renters to take owners to court with their own attorneys.