Revealed! Vito’s $64,000 Pension by Aaron Short • The Brooklyn Paper

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“What is Assemblyman Vito Lopez’s annual state pension” — now has a $64,000 answer.

The scandal-plagued legislator is collecting a monthly pension of $5,386.16 — or $64,634 per year — on top of his $92,000 yearly salary, according to state records that were released to this newspaper under the Freedom of Information Law.

In other words, Lopez is earning time-and-a-half while on the job as the people’s representative in Albany.

He’ll close out 2011 with an income topping $156,000.

And it’s all legal.

Lopez, 69, is one of 10 lawmakers who filed his “retirement” papers on Dec. 31 in order to collect the extra moolah — thanks to a little-known state loophole that allows officeholders over the age of 64 to legally collect their pensions while still on the job.

The cancer-stricken lawmaker defended the practice in an exclusive interview with The Brooklyn Paper last year, explaining that he applied for his pension to take care of his family if his health rapidly declined.

“I’m very comfortable with my rationale and I’ve explained that to you,” said Lopez. “My obligation is to my family and to my health.”

Lopez has been combatting a recurrence of cancer since last summer— forcing him to take a brief leave of absence to treat the illness in October.

But he came back stronger than ever introducing more than 20 bills, fighting for affordable housing, and to stave off Gov. Cuomo’s threat to close scores of senior centers.

And he’s done it all in the shadow of two exhaustive federal probes and a widening city investigation into the finances and board of the nonprofit he founded

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‘Civil’ Obedience! State Designates Wallabout as an Historic District by Thomas Tracy - The Brooklyn Paper

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A portion of Wallabout will become a new historic district, preserving Civil War-era homes like these on Vanderbilt Avenue. Community Newspaper Group / Andy Campbell

The historic beauty of a swath of Civil War-era homes in an isolated corner of Fort Greene has finally been recognized.

More than 200 properties located within five blocks of Wallabout bounded by Myrtle, Park Washington and Clermont avenues were added to the New York State Register of Historic Places this week — a pivotal step for building owners hoping to tap into public preservation grants that will help them refurbish and restore the 150-year-old structures many in the area cherish.

“[The Wallabout area] is one of the oldest communities in Brooklyn,” said resident Gary Hattem. “It’s a history and a story that we want to pass on to future generations.”

Hattem’s right to say that Wallabout has a lot of history: it’s filled with homes from early 19th-century Brooklyn as well as brownstone additions from borough legend Charles Pratt (the same Pratt who gave his name — and money — to found Pratt Institute a few blocks away). Many residences were built between 1830 and 1930.

Several Greek and Gothic Revival townhouses — replete with porch swings — can also be found along the quiet tree-lined streets that give Wallabout its charm.

The neighborhood’s addition to the state register may be a boon to those who own a historic home, but it does nothing to protect the area from out-of-scale construction — only city landmarking can do that.

If the city designates the area as a historic district, all new buildings must contribute to “a coherent streetscape [and] a distinct sense of place” — language that restricts the 10-story modern condo.

“[The landmarking] would great for the block — it means we won’t have any more of that,” longtime resident Bill Washington told us, pointing to a seven-story black and gray steel condo at 122 Vanderbilt Ave., which he considers a modern eyesore. “This block has come a long way in the last 30 years, and we want to keep it that way.”

The city has yet to make Wallabout a historic district, although a public hearing on it was held last fall and a decision is expected by the summer.

Until then, the state grant money should help the local economy.

“We see it as a job creator,” said Michael Blaise Backer, executive director of the Myrtle Avenue Revitalization Project. “This will be a huge opportunity for local laborers when these brick buildings and brownstones start getting restored.”

The Wallabout neighborhood was initially built to accommodate laborers who moved eastward to work at the nearby Brooklyn Navy Yard, which has its own unique history.

But that piece of Brooklyn’s past may soon disappear. Despite a long fought battle to get the Army National Guard to preserve two 19th-century buildings on the Flushing Avenue side of the Navy Yard, the Army has backed away from its promise.

Andy Disses Vito! Cuomo’s New Housing Czar is No Fan of Lopez • The Brooklyn Paper

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Gov. Cuomo slapped Brooklyn Democratic Party boss Vito Lopez, picking a longtime rival of the powerful Assemblyman to run the state’s housing agency.

Cuomo nominated Assemblyman Darryl Towns (D–Bedford-Stuyvesant) last week to run an agency in charge of affordable housing — Lopez’s passion — in an effort to antagonize him.

He also believes that the cancer-stricken Lopez’s career as a housing advocate and lawmaker, in its fifth decade, is winding down, sources familiar with the appointment said.

Once he takes over the agency next month, Towns will control the funding spigot for affordable housing projects — including Lopez’s political base, the Ridgewood Bushwick Senior Citizens Council, which received four contracts worth $811,000 last year.

Lopez (D–Bushwick) has exerted tremendous influence over the state’s Department of Housing and Community Renewal over the years — he orchestrated the appointment of a former staffer, Deborah Van Amerongen, as its commissioner in 2007.

Publicly, everyone is playing nice — but Cuomo is known to be wary of Lopez. As attorney general, Cuomo led the audits into the Lopez-founded Ridgewood Bushwick Senior Citizens Council, investigations that briefly caused the state to freeze funding to the nonprofit.

Lopez has called allies in Albany to complain about Cuomo’s appointment of Towns, said one source, and Towns recently told one public official that he “hated” Vito and was willing to work with insurgent political clubs who opposed him.

The bad blood stems from more than a decade of political brinkmanship between the Towns family and Lopez’s clique.

Lopez recruited and ran former Councilman, now state senator, Martin Dilan against Towns in an Assembly primary 1998 and 2000 — even though Dilan was once Towns’s campaign manager.

And about three years ago, Lopez demanded that pharmaceutical giant Pfizer fire its lobbyist, Karen Boykin-Towns, Towns’s wife, because the company did not set aside the property of its former headquarters for affordable housing.

Enraged, Towns confronted Lopez in Albany demanding an apology, according to several sources.

“They argued, they confronted each other in the hallways, and Towns said, ‘What’s up with that and my wife? You crossed a boundary. How dare you?’” said a source.

Towns later said that Lopez’s demand was “an attack on the corporation,” not on his wife. Boykin-Towns was later promoted.

Debra Feinberg, a Lopez spokeswoman, said that chatter over the appointment of Towns does not change the essential fact that “Assemblyman Vito Lopez has been an outspoken voice in Albany in advocating for restorations and increases in allocations for affordable housing programs in the budget. He looks forward to working closely with Assemblyman Towns … and hopes that by working together, well-established and vital programs continue to be able to be funded throughout the state of New York.”

It’s almost as if Towns put out the same statement.

“Assemblyman [Lopez] and I have a history of being very successful when we work together,” said Towns. “There have been times when we have differed on opinions.”

Re-Writing History! Kevin Powell — Three-Time Loser — Pens Memoir by Tracy Thomas - The Brooklyn Paper

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Why is Kevin Powell smiling? He's lost three elections, but he just inked a big book deal for a memoir.

History isn’t always written by the winners, after all.

Kevin Powell, the former MTV “Real World” star turned frequent Congressional candidate, has bounced back from his three electoral failures by landing a book deal with Simon and Schuster to publish a memoir and an authorized biography of rap legend Tupac Shakur.

But in a clear case of redacted history, Powell’s memoir won’t highlight his three bungled bids to unseat Rep. Ed Towns (D–Fort Greene), he told this paper.

“The memoir’s going to end in the year 2000,” he said. “In the late 1990s, I was in a deep depression and was doing a lot of drinking, but by 2000, I had decided to change my life and get back to the community. I want to end it on a high note.”

Too bad; if Powell were to continue scribbling, he would be forced to address his recent low periods: how he was bounced from the ballot in his 2006 run for Congress, how he got only 33 percent of the vote in the 2008 bid, and how he got only 31 percent of the vote this time around.

Also probably excised from the pages will be his history of violence to women or how he owed the taxman $615,000 — chapters of his life that came out during the past two elections.

Instead, he said the memoir will focus on how he was raised in a poor single parent home, describing his story as a “hip hop version of ‘Angela’s Ashes.’ ”

“I’m a big fan of Frank McCourt,” he said.

Powell has already published 10 books, the most recent being “Open Letters to America” — his thoughts on the aftermath of Barack Obama’s “magical and historical” presidential campaign. He also published “The Black Male Handbook: A Blueprint for Life” and a book of selected poems aptly entitled “No Sleep Till Brooklyn.”

He also penned a political manifesto, “The Plan,” which was released during his failed 2006 bid.

Towns’s supporters were unfazed by the latest big-time book deal announcement.

“It only shows that you don’t have to be an expert in politics to write books about politics,” said Hank Sheinkopf, spokesman for Towns’s 2010 campaign.

Executioners Sing! New Documents Reveal Full Extent of Park Goose-icide by Stephen Brown - The Brooklyn Paper

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New documents reveal that the massacre of Prospect Park geese (like this guy) was part of a massive operation that may have been the biggest extermination project ever.

The 250 geese and goslings that were massacred in Prospect Park in July were only the tip of the goose-berg, new documents reveal.

Federal agents rounded up a total of 1,676 geese from 19 locations in the city and Nassau County — apparently making last summer’s operation the largest intentional waterfowl extermination in city history.

The birds were thrown into crates and hauled to JFK Airport, where they were gassed, bagged, and discarded, according to documents obtained through a Freedom of Information request. The goose-filled Dumpsters were then hauled to an incinerator in Garden City.

In Prospect Park, the July 8 “culling” was done under cover of darkness — and the records indicate that officials knew their efforts would be controversial.

“JFK ops will also coordinate your arrival each day to avoid any unwanted attention,” Laura Francoeur, the chief wildlife biologist for the Port Authority, wrote in an e-mail explaining protocol for the operation.

Of course, unwanted attention is what the feds got after visitors to Prospect Park noticed that hundreds of molting geese and baby goslings had vanished overnight.

Within days, the truth was revealed: that the animals had been swept up in citywide operation meant to clear the skies of geese — the same waterfowl that caused the crash landing of a US Airways flight in the Hudson River in 2009.

That harrowing incident led federal officials to kill 1,235 geese from sites within five miles of both city airports that year.

But this summer, the radius was expanded to seven miles, though federal officials exceeded that distance when they corralled geese in Prospect Park.

City, state and federal officials insisted that the culling of the goose population — which had grown to around 25,000 in the city — was necessary to reduce risk to aircrafts.

But the wide array of government agencies involved likely did not comprehend the passion of many parkgoers for the Prospect Park waterfowl. Immediately after the culling, hundreds of Brooklynites were outraged, and organized a vigil in memory of the geese.

Later, it was revealed that city officials — concerned about issues of liability — had discussed the possibility of a 30-mile goose kill zone.

And recently Tupper Thomas, Prospect Park’s top administrator,confessed that she was aware that the goose massacre was imminent, but said nothing publicly because she felt it was not her place.

Despite all these revelations, the feds remain tight-lipped about the details of their goose eradication plan, which, records show, could encompass nearly the entire city.

All 19 locations visited by Wildlife Services agents last summer remain a mystery, but documents from the Port Authority — the agency managing the city’s airports — do reveal a few of the sites in addition to Prospect Park:

• In Nassau County, agents exterminated geese in Valley Stream and Hempstead Lake State Park.

• In Brooklyn, agents killed animals at the Fountain Avenue and Penn Avenue landfills.

• In Queens, agents slaughtered geese in Alley Pond Park, Little Neck Bay and Fort Totten.

• Animals on Rikers Island and Randall’s Island were also swept up in the culling.

Some saw the stunning scale of the goose massacre as evidence that the policy needed to change.

“It is certainly the largest waterfowl [massacre] we know of,” said Patrick Kwan, the New York State director of the Humane Society of the United States. “It’s an example of why we need transparency. For 1,600 geese to be killed without New Yorkers knowing what was going on or being able to consider alternatives … it’s not the most effective, efficient or humane method.”

But gassing is the method favored by the city — and it is possible that it will be expanded to include the Jamaica Bay Wildlife Refuge next year.

The chief of resource management at the Gateway National Recreation area, Dave Avrin, said a study was underway to determine how to control the goose population in the area. Previously, Jamaica Bay, which is part of a National Park, was off-limits to Wildlife Services.

“We are going through an Environmental Impact Statement at this time,” said Avrin. “One of the alternatives is to cull them next year, another is not. We’ll determine which one at the end of the process.”

Tupper Knew! Park Administrator Objected to Goose Slaughter - Yet Said Nothing! by Stephen Brown - The Brooklyn Paper

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When they came for the geese, she said nothing.

Prospect Park’s top administrator Tupper Thomas opposed a federal decision to massacre close to 300 Canada geese in her park this summer, but she chose not to cry fowl because the program was orchestrated by Mayor Bloomberg and federal agencies, a spokesman revealed this week.

“Tupper wasn’t the one who gave permission, but she did know [the feds] were coming,” said the spokesman, Eugene Patron. “As for when and what time and how many geese [would be killed] — she was not in the loop.

“Personally, Tupper was not for the culling,” Patron added.

Thomas, who is retiring at the end of the year from running both the Prospect Park Alliance as well as day-to-day operation of the park for the city, faced a barrage of criticism in her silent response to the goose slaughter in July. Nine days after the operation, the under-fire Thomas finally issued a letter addressing the issue, though one that did little to quiet critics.

“A lot of people were angry about this, and she was silent,” said Tony Chiappelloni, the president of FIDO, a dog walkers advocacy group.

Chiappelloni added that the geese massacre had made Thomas’s final year as the boss of Prospect Park a difficult one.

“Look, she put her heart and soul into that park, she’s done a lot — but we didn’t know what was going on [after the slaughter]! I couldn’t say whether she authorized it or not, I didn’t know, I had no idea!”

Patron said that one of Thomas’s last major decisions before she retires from her job early next year will be to define a new wildlife management plan for the park and present it to the public.

“If successful it could be implemented elsewhere,” said Patron, who added, “I’m sure it’ll be called her ‘swan song.’ ”

Rudy Giuliani Still: A Noun, a Verb and 9-11 at Cyclones Game...

The Brooklyn Paper mentioned on MSNBC's Countdown with Keith Olbermann...


This video from The Brooklyn Paper lets you in on the fun...



Brooklyn Paper reporter Stephen Brown asked Rudy Giuliani the tough question at a Cyclones game last week — was he rooting for the hometown Cyclones or the visiting Staten Island Yankees? Well, Rudy’s answer earned Brown a mention on a subsequent telecast of “Countdown with Keith Olbermann.”

New ‘Signs’ of Life Along Downtown Brooklyn’s History Trail by Gary Buiso - The Brooklyn Paper

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Between hope and history: Salvatore “Buddy” Scotto of the Brooklyn Preservation Council, state Sen. Daniel Squadron, Bob Furman of the Brooklyn Preservation Council and designer Paul Singer show off their signs.

Finally, there are signs that Brooklyn once had beautiful old buildings downtown.
The Brooklyn Preservation Council means that quite literally, in fact, as the non-profit group has begun installing historic markers in and around Borough Hall and Cadman Plaza to commemorate a rich architectural past that was razed in the name of progress.

“In Brooklyn, Robert Moses basically tore down everything that was old,” said Bob Furman, president of the council.

Urban renewal projects led by Moses began in the 1930s and lasted until the 1960s — and though the Master Builder accomplished great feats, a good deal was lost, Furman said.

The sign initiative, called the Borough Hall Area Historical Commemoration Project, is in its very early stages of development. It recently received a $1,500 grant from state Sen. Daniel Squadron (D–Brooklyn Heights) — but will need about $60,000 more to be fully realized. Two model signs were showcased this week in Borough Hall, an effort to engender support for the project.

The signs will point out such historical tidbits such as:

• Back in the 1860s, an area that is now Korean War Veterans Plaza, between Cadman Plaza West and Washington Street, was Brooklyn’s department store district.
• The Hall of Records and the County Courthouse — whose Manhattan twin, the Tweed Courthouse, remains standing — were torn down after the new Supreme Court Building on Adams Street opened in 1959. Part of the Hall of Records site was utilized for widening Boerum Place into Brooklyn Bridge Boulevard.

The signs, roughly 15 in total, will refer to the past, but also remain relevant, Furman said.

“Urban renewal and gentrification are still controversial. The question is, ‘How do you renew cities? Do you tear everything down, or do you preserve?’ ”

Towns, Longtime Congressman, Will Run Again by Gary Buiso - The Brooklyn Paper

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Rep. Ed Towns is hoping 15 is his lucky number.

Surrounded by family, friends and lawmakers, Towns (D-Fort Greene) this week announced his re-election campaign on the steps of Borough Hall, his 15th such announcement in a decades-long political career.

At the event, presided over by his son and heir apparent, Assemblyman Darryl Towns (D–Bushwick), the refrain sounded straight out of 1982 — the year America fell in love with an alien with a taste for Reese’s Pieces.

“We want ET! We want ET!” the crowd chanted.

But the cheers were for a more human ET — Towns, who began his first term as representative of the 10th Congressional District just one year after the sci-fi blockbuster, a career critics charge has been largely unremarkable, but boosted most recently by his selection as chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, a role that has given him national visibility.

On Monday, Towns was energized under a hot sun in a light gray suit and pink tie, pledging to unite a district that is home to the borough’s richest and poorest residents.

“We must come together!” Towns said.

Specifics were in short supply, but Towns said he planned to focus on promoting job growth, and pressuring banks that were rescued during the Great Recession to begin loaning money to businesses and individuals.

“Through this working-together-process, we can do better,” the lawmaker said.
Towns was introduced by former borough president Howard Golden, clad in a comfortable T-shirt and sweatpants. Back in 1976, Golden hired Towns to be his deputy borough president.

Colleagues heaped praise on the longtime lawmaker.

“He represents core Democratic ideals,” said Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-Coney Island), who pointed to Towns’s “fighting for the most vulnerable” of his district by working to preserve affordable housing. “Change is a wonderful thing — sometimes,” Nadler said to laughs.

But his 2008 opponent was less generous.

“I am sure there was a time that Mr. Towns was an engaged leader in Brooklyn,” said Kevin Powell, the former MTV-reality star and community organizer who pledged to take on Towns again this fall. “He is still operating in an old paradigm of machine politics — that he will [one day] pass the seat long to his son. That is not acceptable and that is not democracy.

“He has been purposefully invisible in the district, except to the handful of voters he needs to get elected every couple of years,” Powell continued.

In 2008, Towns defeated Powell in the primary with 67 percent of the vote compared to the challenger’s 33 percent.

“You can’t be invisible for 25 years in a district and expect to be elected again and again — that’s just insanity,” scoffed Towns spokesman Julian Phillips, who pointed to Towns’s support of a $60-million renovation of the Brooklyn Navy Yard, support of health care reform, and gun control as proof of his boss’s keen ear for his constituent’s concerns.

Supporters said they appreciated Towns’s everyman quality.

“He is a congressman you can speak to,” said Bedford-Stuyvesant resident Cecil Bruce.

BREAKING: Feds Kill Hundreds of Prospect Park Geese! by Stephen Brown - The Brooklyn Paper:

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Dead, they’re all dead.

Federal agents slaughtered more than 250 geese and dozens of babies in Prospect Park after corralling the adults and their young into a small pen early Thursday morning, boxing them up, and tossing them in a gas chamber.

The horror-movie-style measure was part of the city’s ongoing effort to exterminate the feathered creatures within a seven-mile radius from both LaGuardia and JFK airports — a radius that was expanded last year to include Prospect Park, putting all its birds in the path of a federally mandated massacre.

Carol Bannerman, a Department of Agriculture spokeswoman, confirmed the grim reaping that federal Wildlife Services staff executed on the fateful morning of July 8.

“Free-ranging waterfowl like this can be gently herded, then individually picked out, put into crates, moved into a nearby location and euthanized using carbon dioxide,” Bannerman said.

She said that the geese were buried, but would not reveal the location of the feathery mass grave.

“In other states [the goose meat] can be donated to food pantries, but that process hasn’t been set up in New York State,” Bannerman noted.

Among the dead include such avian celebrities as Beaky, the adored and deformed goose that was missing the top part of its beak after surviving an encounter with a fish hook; and Target, the resilient goose who not only survived being shot through with an arrow, but mesmerized the borough for days.

Park-goers were crying fowl over the weekend, when several bird lovers gave

The Brooklyn Paper a tour of the crime scene, a mysterious, feather-covered area where the birds had apparently been corralled. Plastic handcuff-like ties were also littering the site.

“It’s like a crime scene that they forgot to clean up,” said Ed Bahlman, a regular park watchdog.

The birds entered the city’s crosshairs after Capt. Sully Sullenberger pulled off the “Miracle on the Hudson” and landed an airplane in the Hudson River after flying into a flock of geese.

This latest episode likely means that the mysterious animal-related violence in Prospect Park has reached its nadir.

First, gory piles of animal entrails were found by the lake. Then, dozens of chicken heads were dumped in the water. As the weather heated up, dead animals began appearing in startling numbers. Around that time, park-goers mourned the death of John Boy, one of the park’s beloved swans.

Privatizing Parks is a Bad Idea - Op-ed by Geoffrey Croft in The Brooklyn Paper:

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The newly opened first section of Brooklyn Bridge Park and Tupper Thomas’s pending retirement from Prospect Park have shed a light on Brooklyn parks — in particular the future of how they will be funded. Unfortunately, the future of park funding does not look bright under this administration.

Despite a $3-billion surplus this year, Mayor Bloomberg’s budget allocates only a fraction — just $ 239.1 million — of the money desperately needed to hire the skilled laborers, park enforcement, qualified managers, gardeners and recreation workers among other positions that every neighborhood deserves.

This is a $40-million cut in expense funding from budget from last year. As a percentage of the city’s budget, this would represent only 0.37 percent to maintain and operate parks. It’s a historic low for the agency responsible for 14 percent of the city’s land.

For decades, the public has been told that funding is not available for our public parks. This proposed budget is an unfortunate and constant reminder of how in both good economic times and bad, public funding for parks is simply not a priority. Our elected officials refuse to allocate adequate funding. The political will simply does not exist.

Until 1960, the Parks Department regularly received 1.4 percent of the city budget or greater. However, due to a drastic shift in priorities over the last 45 years, the department’s share of the city budget from tax levy funds has rapidly declined.

With increasing regularity, parks with permanent employees are those that benefit from significant private funds or alternate funding schemes. Unwilling to accept its Charter-mandated responsibilities for the care of its parks, the city has instead turned to the private sector.

In city parks today, adequate maintenance, programming and dedicated park enforcement now depends on what ZIP code you are in, and the willingness and ability of its citizens to raise and leverage private funds. With increasing regularity, the public is being asked to shoulder the municipal responsibility of managing and maintaining what is supposed to be a basic, essential city service — services for which we already pay taxes.

The city’s increasing reliance on these public/private partnerships has resulted in a vastly unequal distribution of services. It has quickly become “a tale of two cities.” Experience with public/private partnerships over the last 20 years has proven that private subsidies to individual parks has created an enormous gap between the haves and the have-nots, while ignoring the real problem — that our parks are not funded as an essential city service.

At the opening of the first section of Brooklyn Bridge Park last month, I asked the mayor to comment on the enormous disparity between the amount of maintenance that park is receiving and others.

“In terms of disparity,” the mayor responded, “the city does not have the money to have new parks and fund them.”

The mayor is able to get away with such statements in part because the public is not holding our electeds accountable.

Unless our elected officials and the public begin to speak up the future of park funding will be a combination of decreasing municipal funds and what ever funding schemes the administration is able to get away with.

Brooklyn’s more than 4,500 acres of parkland and its more than 2-1/2 million people deserve a lot more.

Geoffrey Croft is the president and founder of NYC Park Advocates, a non-profit, non-partisan watchdog group dedicated to increasing park services and expanding open space and public recreation.

Roofus: Harold Ford is a Snake — Literally! - Cristian Fleming - The Brooklyn Paper

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