Where have all the benefits gone?

Columbia Daily Spectator (The Eye)
Feb. 17, 2011

More affordable housing, a new public school, plentiful jobs for local residents: These were among the perks Columbia offered to the West Harlem community to offset the impact of its Manhattanville campus expansion and make good on its promise that the neighborhood makeover would be for the better.

These promises were codified in a so-called community benefits agreement, or CBA, which was signed in May 2009. But since then, the group tasked with overseeing it has fallen into disarray, jeopardizing the benefits that the CBA was supposed to guarantee. It has no headquarters, no contact information, and no tax-exempt status, and even some local officials are in the dark about its operations.

The University reports that it has already paid $1.5 million into a fund controlled by the West Harlem Local Development Corporation, an ad hoc group of local representatives and politicians that was formed in 2006 to negotiate the terms of the CBA with Columbia officials on the community’s behalf. So far, the LDC has not distributed any of the money to the projects specified in the agreement, though members say they are close to establishing a new organization to administer the funds.

In other words, for nearly two years, while all eyes have been on the legal battle surrounding the state’s use of eminent domain to turn private properties over to the University, another battle has fallen through the cracks: the fight to secure the $150 million in benefits that Columbia promised to the community.

U.S. Supreme Court to consider hearing M’ville case

Columbia Daily Spectator
Dec. 10, 2010

With Finn Vigeland

The U.S. Supreme Court will meet today to discuss whether to re-evaluate the legality of eminent domain for Columbia’s 17-acre Manhattanville campus expansion.

If the court decides to grant certiorari—the official term for agreeing to hear a case—it will throw the expansion into legal limbo once again. If it denies certiorari, the state will be able to seize private properties on the University’s behalf. Typically, the court, which has officially scheduled this case for “conference” today, grants just one percent of all petitions for certiorari, so the odds are in favor of Columbia’s project.

At stake are the only properties in the expansion zone—from 125th to 134th streets, from Broadway to 12th Avenue—that Columbia does not yet own: Nick Sprayregen’s four Tuck-It-Away Self-Storage locations and two gas stations owned by Gurnam Singh and Parminder Kaur. Under eminent domain, the state would turn the properties over to the University in exchange for market-rate compensation for Sprayregen, Singh, and Kaur.

“The significance is huge,” Norman Siegel, who is Sprayregen’s attorney and the former director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, said on Thursday. “If they decide to hear our case, then the issue will be front and center before the Supreme Court of the United States.”

New home for Floridita on 125th

Columbia Daily Spectator
Oct. 22, 2010

After years of on-and-off negotiations with the University, popular Cuban restaurant Floridita will reopen in April 2011 at a new location on 125th Street.

Owner Ramon Diaz said he has signed a lease on a Columbia-owned building at the corner of 12th Avenue and 125th Street—just two blocks west of his former location on 125th and Broadway, and right next door to the newly relocated Dinosaur Bar-B-Que. If all goes according to plan, the restaurant will reopen almost exactly a year after Columbia, Diaz’s landlord, shut down the original location, citing emergency repairs needed to the kitchen floor.

According to University spokesperson Victoria Benitez, Diaz signed the lease for the new space in May, but Diaz said his own plans were not certain until this month. He said he had wanted to reopen by now, but logistical delays made that impossible.

Months after closing, Floridita Restaurant to reopen at 125th Street

Columbia Daily Spectator
Oct. 5, 2010

The popular Cuban restaurant Floridita will reopen in a new location after having closed last April, the University said Monday.

Owner Ramon Diaz “has signed a new lease for an attractive relocation space on 125th Street,” University spokeswoman Victoria Benitez wrote in an email Monday afternoon. She did not specify the exact location or the date the lease was signed.

“I should have some better information on how I’m going to proceed by the end of the week,” Diaz told Spectator in an email.

Diaz has spent more than two years in off-and-on negotiations with Columbia over his longtime premises on 125th Street and Broadway. The University owns those buildings, which are part of the Manhattanville campus expansion plan. Columbia closed Floridita in April, citing emergency kitchen repairs. At the time, Benitez said the closure would be temporary and that a relocation deal was in the works.

In student call, Obama talks loans, dining hall food

Columbia Daily Spectator
Sept. 28, 2010

In a conference call from the Oval Office on Monday, President Barack Obama, CC ’83, spoke to college journalists on “the issues important to young Americans”—everything from the financial crisis to the food at (presumably) John Jay.

The United States has fallen from first to 12th in the world in college graduation rates, the price tag for a college education is skyrocketing, and graduates are hard-pressed to find jobs. Obama tied each of these challenges to two overarching needs: to repair the economy, and for youths to participate in the political process.

He reiterated a promise made in this year’s State of the Union address: that, starting in 2014, college graduates will be able to cap monthly payments on federal student loans at 10 percent of their income. For students who go into public service, such as becoming teachers or police officers, remaining loans would be forgiven after 10 years if they kept up with payments in the meantime.

But colleges must also address rising costs, he said. “If I keep on increasing Pell Grants and increasing student loan programs and making it more affordable but … higher education inflation keeps on going up at the pace that it’s going up right now, then we’re going to be right back where we started.”

Harlem residents torn on new housing

Columbia Daily Spectator
Sept. 15, 2010

In Central Harlem, a row of buildings between Frederick Douglass and Adam Clayton Powell boulevards has divided neighbors over an affordable housing development.

On one side are residents of the Ennis Francis Houses on 124th Street, who say they just want decent housing. Their apartments are deteriorating, and they would be relocated to new units on 123rd Street. On the other side are residents of brownstones on 123rd, who say the eight-story building would be out of context with the neighborhood.

The project, proposed by the Abyssinian Development Corporation, cleared a hurdle on Sept. 1 with near-unanimous approval from Community Board 10. It awaits City Planning Commission and New York City Council votes, and ADC hopes to begin construction in January.

Pot crops pop up in plain sight

The Record & Herald News
Aug. 31, 2010

It’s been great weather for gardening, and police in two Highlands communities say the summer’s Jersey Fresh has included nice, tall marijuana plants.

And, surprisingly, the pot’s been sprouting right in suburban homeowners’ yards.

Late summer is peak growing season, and in Ringwood and Wanaque, some residents’ pot plants apparently enjoyed August’s ideal combination of sun and rain a little too much: They grew so big, they were readily visible from the street. So just this month alone, police in the two mountainous boroughs have made three substantial discoveries and consequent arrests.

While homegrown marijuana is nothing new, that residents were tending plants out in the open is startling. And so were the locations: suburban neighborhoods.

“We’ve had grow operations before, but normally they’re indoors and small,” said Wanaque Capt. Ken Fackina. “I don’t know if you’d call two a trend, but it’s certainly different.”

Cops’ pre-holiday crackdown again targets endless DWI problem

The Record & Herald News
Aug. 26, 2010

In theory, it’s simple: Drive intoxicated, go to jail. Yet there are always plenty of drunken menaces to be corralled, say the cops focusing on pre-Labor Day road safety.

Through Sept. 6, police are adding road patrols and running checkpoints to screen drivers at random for alcohol and drugs. It’s all part of the state Division of Highway Traffic Safety’s intensively publicized “Over the Limit, Under Arrest” campaign. Dozens of police departments in Passaic, Bergen, Morris and Hudson counties are participating.

The goal is to deter drunken drivers through education and visible enforcement, but these crackdowns typically result in arrests and summonses for all manner of moving violations, from speeding to driving without a seat belt.

It is already apparent that some people still need the campaign’s basic message.

Passaic attorney cited for contempt of court, disputes it

The Record & Herald News
Aug. 24, 2010

PASSAIC — The defense attorney for a city man accused of domestic violence was held in contempt of court Tuesday after a verbal confrontation with Municipal Judge Xavier Rodriguez, but she says she was just doing her job.

That morning, attorney Alexis Enderle of Passaic had made a motion for her client’s case to be dismissed after a witness — the alleged domestic violence victim — failed to appear in court and could not be found at her house. Rodriguez granted the motion but told Enderle that if her client was found to be “in cahoots” in the witness’s failure to show, the case would be reopened.

Enderle “began to argue and scream that her client was not a witness tamperer,” Rodriguez said in a certification read in a continued municipal court hearing on the matter Tuesday afternoon. He said Enderle refused to stop speaking despite being asked to do so several times.

But Enderle told Rodriguez the implication that her client was involved in the witness’ disappearance was “slanderous,” and testified, “I felt as though I was protecting my client’s best interest by defending his integrity.”

Age of Dinosaurs may disappear beneath Woodland Park condos

The Record & Herald News
Aug. 21, 2010

WOODLAND PARK — By day, workers plow through the former UBC quarry off Valley Road, readying it for the homes of the future.

But by night, scientists sift the newly dug up earth for treasure from a barely conceivable past: fossils, from the first age of dinosaurs.

Developer K. Hovnanian Homes will build condominiums on the privately owned site. But scientists and history buffs have petitioned officials to absorb part of the quarry into a park, thus preserving a sandstone wall imprinted with dinosaur tracks predating an ancient mass extinction and showing effects of climate change.

But time’s running out as the county review takes its course. And now, with tractors atop the cliff already having pushed a shroud of soil over the wall, those scientists have turned their efforts to salvaging what fossils they can for museum display.