City Council

Transportation Alternatives is hosting a series of City Council candidate debates focusing on transit issues.

There's one tonight at 7 p.m. at P.S. 231 in Brooklyn for candidates in the 39th District Council race. Transportation Alternatives Executive Director Paul Steely White will moderate.

From Streetsblog:

One of the more intriguing races is shaping up in the 39th Council District, which includes parts of Carroll Gardens, Park Slope, Kensington, and Borough Park. This is the seat being vacated by Bill de Blasio -- who opposed congestion pricing last year and came out in favor of bridge tolls late in the game during the MTA funding debate this spring. The district is heavily transit-dependent, mostly car-free [PDF], and situated in prime New York City "bike belt" territory. This election should put a strong, smart voice for progressive transportation policy in City Hall.

The next one after that, for candidates in District 25, is next Tuesday, August 25, at the Diversity Center of Queens. Then there's another on Tuesday, September 1, for the District 33 race (David Yassky's seat) at Automotive High School on Bedford Avenue.

The primaries are on Sept. 15.

A few updates on the now controversial bike access bill since we filed our report before the holiday weekend:

Azi Paybarah spoke with Councilman John Liu, who bicycle activists are accusing of stalling the legislation that would require commercial-building owners to allow bikes to be stored in their buildings. (The bill was expected to be voted out of Mr. Liu's Transportation Committee last Tuesday and subsequently passed by the full City Council.)  

Mr. Liu spoke to Mr. Paybarah about the problems he has with the legislation, which happens to have been authored by one of his primary opponents in the race for city comptroller, Councilman David Yassky. Mr. Liu echoed concerns he raised during a public hearing on the bill last month. From PolitickerNY:

Transportation Alternatives

Tensions surfaced this week between members of the city's cycling community and Councilman John Liu over a piece of legislation—the Bicycle Access to Buildings Bill—that has yet to make it out of the City Council Transportation Committee, which Mr. Liu chairs.

The bill, which was first introduced back in 2003 and has resurfaced in various incarnations since then, would require office buildings to let tenants store bikes in the buildings, hence encouraging more people to commute to work by bike, hence advancing the bike-friendly, semi-car-hostile transportation agenda being pushed by Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Department of Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Kahn.

The bill was expected to be voted out of the transportation committee on Tuesday afternoon and passed by the full City Council the following day. But that didn't happen. A spokesman for Councilman David Yassky, a co-sponser of the bill and one of Mr. Liu's opponents in the 2010 city comptroller race, told Streetsblog on Tuesday: "The bill has been laid on council members' desks for eight days, which is typically what is done before a bill comes before the full council. That was done with the anticipation that it would be voted out of the transportation committee today."

Now, supporters of the bike bill are coming down on Mr. Liu because the bill remains stalled.

M.Studio

Rendering of a forthcoming green
hotel at 100 Varick Street.

Two topics we've been following lately are open data and green buildings. Admittedly, we hadn't given any thought to how these topics intersect. But Bomee Jung, founder of GreenHomeNYC, has. A Web developer turned green affordable housing activist, Ms. Jung has contributed a lengthy piece on this topic to the Web site of The Sallan Foundation, a green think tank.

"Two transformative movements of our time are poised to slam together into a concoction no less delightful than the Peanut Butter Cup (particularly to green enthusiasts of geekly tendencies): the Open Data movement and high-performance green building," she writes.

Ms. Jung's analysis becomes fairly dense and, perhaps, difficult to follow at times, but her argument seems to boil down to the idea that if there was more data out there on green buildings, more green buildings would be built.

For instance, publicly available energy performance data could be used to verify performance claims:

Open data has been a hot topic this week, with Mayor Michael Bloomberg's announcement of the Big Apps contest at PdF on Monday, and a Council hearing that same day on Gale Brewer's proposed legislation to make all city data available in a raw, development-friendly format.

Azi Paybarah reported from the hearing, where it became apparent that the Bloomberg administration "disagrees pretty strongly" with Ms. Brewer's bill, citing concerns over cost.

But if you're interested in seeing how the hearing went for yourself, NYFi reader Joly MacFie has posted video of the entire thing on YouTube. Here's part one:

And you can find the rest here.

Getty Images

Bloomberg administration officials just finished testifying at a City Council hearing at 250 Broadway on legislation that would require them to post more information online than ever.

Joe Pompeo previewed the legislation, and administration officials declined to comment on it at the time.

It is now clear that the administration disagrees pretty strongly, and views the potential requirements as a burden—the administration said complying with the legislation could cost as much as $500 million.

Here's a press release Councilwoman Gale Brewer's office just sent out on the open data standards bill we reported on yesterday:

Although New York City is one of the most energy-effiicent places to live in the U.S., because of its density, we lag far behind other major cities in the total number of LEED-certified buildings.

That may be starting to change, albeit slowly.

On Earth Day, the City Council introduced a legislation package designed to reduce emissions from the city's large commercial buildings. Today, the Council's environmental protection committee is holding a hearing on the four bills. (It was scheduled to start at 10.)

GreenHomeNYC has a good roundup of what each of the bills entails.  And after the jump, a few press releases we've received today from groups testifying at the City Council hearing.

council.nyc.gov

Brewer.

The Bloomberg administration is generally perceived as progressive when it comes to giving citizens access to municipal data. Dozens of reports and statistics from city agencies are just a click away on nyc.gov, and New York's 311 information service was a significant logistical achievement, even if the technology behind it—the telephone!—now seems a bit archaic.

But there's a growing demand among transparency advocates for a more comprehensive and sophisticated level of data sharing.

The latest sign: a new bill making its rounds in the City Council that would create unprecedented open data standards for New York City government.

The bill, which is being spearheaded by Gale Brewer, who chairs the Council's Technology in Government Committee, is up for a public hearing on June 29. It would compile all of the city’s public data on a single Web site, like data.nyc.gov, as well as making the data available in a raw, machine-readable format so that programmers could develop useful online and mobile applications out of it.

A prototype of Councilpedia.

City Council member items, the discretionary money council members can give to community groups in their districts, have come under a great deal of scrutiny in the last few years. There was the slush-fund scandal, and following that, a series of revelations about council members handing out money to organizations that employed family members (helpfully rounded up in today's Daily News). There are also several organizations that received member-item money that are currently under investigation.

These are the types of story that Gotham Gazette, a daily online news digest of New York politics and policy, hopes will be unearthed when it launches Councilpedia, its planned wiki of City Council voting records and campaign contributions that will fuse citizen journalism with reporting and fact-checking by the Gazette's editorial staff.

“Sometimes you’ll see a council member make a vote or take a position on something and you’ll wonder why this person is doing that,” said Gail Robinson, the Gazette’s editor in chief, “and sometimes the history of who his or her supporters are can inform that.”