The City Council can act fast when it wants to
Manhattan: It’s not surprising that the New York City Council acted in warp speed to approve the construction of an $800 million soccer stadium in Willets Point, Queens. When there is big money available for City Council politicians to sustain themselves in office through private sector lobbyists supplying them with campaign donations, they act with breathtaking alacrity! Not so much for City Council legislation — Bill 1099 — that would simply guarantee the right of 250,000 retired city workers to retain the Medicare-based health care benefits they were promised by the city and state many decades ago! This bill has been languishing in the council for months. At this point, it needs more than 30 members to vote for its passage. City retirees are asking Council members to get off the fence and bring this legislation up for a vote!
However, it appears that the top priority for most is not to do the right thing for city retirees who have dedicated their working lives to the service of the city, but to involve themselves in quid-pro-quo deals with traitorous public union leaders, a mayor under federal investigation and private entities that are allowed to feed at the public trough! That would be in the form of public land grants, waiving certain building regulations, tax exemptions that last for decades, access to public roads and other favors that individuals and small organizations would never be granted.
Kudos to Councilman Shekar Krishnan, who strongly denounced this stadium deal for “giving away public land worth hundreds of millions of dollars in public financing for a commercial soccer stadium.” Gerard Rosenthal