Letter from Westchester, NY: Education, Healthcare, Security

Westchester County has many of the same issues facing New York City such as traffic congestion, expensive health insurance choices, social security fears, increasing public transportation costs, illegal immigrant, and elderly citizen concerns. However, the three largest concerns to the majority of Westchester residents are failing school systems, a regional hospital with a huge deficit and declining staff, and a nuclear power plant that seems to extend an invitation to terrorists to attack.
“We kids are the future. That is what everyone keeps telling me, but I don’t feel that the future is going to be as good as I might want it to be.” That is what an eighth grader from a Yonkers school had to say in late 2004. Those students have a bleak future to look forward to because they are lacking the fundamental building blocks of art, music, and sports? Many also lack the help of guidance counselors with whom they could discuss their future options. The desegregation of the Yonkers school system in the early 1980’s was supposed to give all children in Yonkers equal educational opportunities, yet now these students are at a disadvantage against students from such neighboring towns as Scarsdale and Bronxville who do not lack what Yonkers does. In 2004 alone about 574 jobs, one in seven teaching positions, were cut due to a $26 million deficit. After-school activities and interscholastic sports were eliminated, with cuts targeting music, art, language teachers, guidance counselors, librarians, psychologists, and social workers. Students will not have learned the basic essential skills like teamwork, which can be learned through sports, and is an asset in the working world. The Federal Government should give aid to those school districts in Westchester that are at a disadvantage, to create a level playing field amongst all residents. The Yonkers district has been promised $6.1 million from the state legislature to fill 574 positions and for restoration of some programs. Yet, what happens the next time money promised to the city is not delivered and more positions must be cut? More children will suffer. Without sports or music how are these children supposed to receive scholarships to college? Without guidance counselors, who will fill out the paperwork for college? The Government recently highlighted the need to do more to prepare our high school students for the future. Their education proposals would ensure that every high school student graduates with the skills needed to succeed in college and in the workforce. Yonkers students, and many other students throughout Westchester will not have the skills to succeed in college and the workforce. The Federal Government proposes an increase in funding for programs for reading, math, and science of about $470 million. The Government should also direct the funds necessary for schools most in need, like Yonkers, so that they can achieve their goal of preparing all students with the skills necessary for the future.
Westchester Medical Center serves not only Westchester but also many of the surrounding counties. Outside of New York City hospitals it is the largest in the area serving thousands of children and adults. However, it is working at a substantial deficit. The hospital was expected to lose $41 million in 2004, following losses of $83 million in 2003, $69.7 million in 2002 and $6 million in 2001. Since April 2004, Pitts Management Associates of Baton Rouge, LA, a turnaround consultancy have run the medical center. They may slowly be improving the situation but more needs to be done. Since 2003 more than 300 jobs have been eliminated. Since March 2003 192 full time Registered Nurses’ were cut, almost 15% of the medical center’s RN workforce, with 220 employees out of work in late 2003 and 110 positions cut in March 2004, that time to save $8.1 million. Previous cuts did not touch staff caring directly for patients but subsequent ones did. People should feel secure in their health providers but understaffing due to budget cuts leads people to feel insecure in those they are supposed to rely on during the most serious of emergencies. One unnamed RN characterized it: “This place is ready to implode. Do they want patients to die? Medical centers are supposed to improve business by improving patient care. But that’s not where we’re headed now.” Reports of unsafe patient care conditions have increased dramatically during the past several months. New York State has provided minimal funding to keep the hospital up and running. The Federal Government needs to either take over management of the hospital or give substantial funding to allow for adequate staffing. Citizens should not be made to suffer inadequate care due to the mismanagement of this regional medical center.
Indian Point, located in Buchanan, is of serious concern, not only to Westchester residents but much of the surrounding area as well. 20 million people live within 50 miles of Indian Point. It is in close proximity to major financial centers in New York City, as well as to reservoirs which supply and store nearly all of Westchester County’s and most of NYC’s drinking water and to major sea, air, rail and highway transportation systems. Also the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, which graduates more than 900 new officers annually, representing approximately 25% of the new lieutenants required by the Army each year, is directly across the river. Residents see this nuclear power plant as an easy target for a terrorist attack and it must be protected. We urge (1) that substantial funds be provided for research into safer alternatives to nuclear energy, (2) that Indian Point be decommissioned, and if decommissioning is not a possibility in the near future then (3) an increase in protection of Indian Point through federal guards and better training. $1 million has already been obtained to study energy alternatives to Indian Point but more is needed. President Bush signed into law Project BioShield, an unprecedented $5.6 billion effort to develop vaccines and other medical responses to biological, chemical, nuclear, and radiological weapons. If $5.6 billion can be designated for the development of responses in the event that chemical, nuclear, biological, and radiological weapons are used, should not funds also be used to prevent those possibilities from occurring? Funds should be used not only for research into alternatives to nuclear energy but also for protecting Indian Point until it is made safe and for the development of an adequate evacuation plan just in case an attack occurs. Security personnel are not required to be trained to confront the following threats: more than three intruders; more than one team of attackers using coordinated tactics; more than one insider; weapons greater than hand-held automatic weapons; attack by boat or plane; or any attack by “enemies of the US,” whether governments or individuals. How safe would that make you feel? Federally trained guards should patrol and protect Indian Point. A no-fly zone should be put in place over Indian Point. If Disney World and Disneyland can have no-fly zones protecting Mickey Mouse, Indian Point should have a no-fly zone to protect nuclear material and 20 million residents. Government studies report that the radioactive material released from Indian Point can kill and injure tens of thousands of people living within 500 miles and render large regions uninhabitable for long periods. The truth is, according to www.Riverkeeper.org, even if Indian Point were shut down tomorrow there would be adequate electricity generation to power New York City, Westchester County, and much of New York State. The Government should make it a top priority to protect not just Westchester’s nuclear facilities but also those facilities across the nation as well.
The struggle to achieve Westchester’s top goals will not be easy. The funds need to be found and those politicians with the power to make changes to protect and support Westchester residents need to step up and do the right thing for the betterment of the entire Westchester community.

by Kim Savino

TRANSPORTATION/ URBAN ISSUES PLATFORM

A Return to Civic Responsibility and Civic Pride

This American generation must achieve a major reconfiguration of the American landscape. This is a necessity for environmental, social, economic and spiritual reasons. It is also essential to our national security.
America accounts for 4 percent of the world’s population but uses 24 percent of the petroleum consumed every year. This unsupportable addiction has left us dependent on massive petroleum importation from volatile regions. It has drawn us into regional conflicts in Africa, the Middle East and South America. Often the U.S. has been unable to confront dictatorial, human-rights-violating, and terrorist-finacing regimes because we need them to keep the oil flowing, even as they shovel protection money to the terrorists who seek to do us harm.
This massive outflow of American income to foreign nations has also amounted to a regressive tax on our economy. Poor people suffer the most when gasoline prices rise, and economic activity is slowed. Finally, and most importantly, our massive annual carbon emissions contribute to global warming and atmospheric pollution that threatens to flood our cities and devastate our farms with the effects of global climate change.
The suburban lifestyle that this profligate use of oil allows is also detrimental to our social, environmental and spiritual well-being. Low-density development gobbles up valuable land. So natural land is deforested, swamps are drained and deserts are paved. The result is physical and environmental deprivation: American farmers are forced off their land by rising property values, threatening the continued existence of American rural and small-town lifestyles, endangered species deprived of their habitats, and future generations deprived of the natural beauty and biodiversity that is one of our greatest national assets.
Furthermore, the conformity, segregation and loss of a public sphere had a deleterious effect on American social life and democracy. The physical layout of the suburbs eliminates an important public sphere: sidewalks. In so doing it inhibits the creative energy that infuses urban culture, often leading residents of American suburbs to feel spiritually and culturally bereft. Further the lifestyle of driving everywhere and never walking has spawned an epidemic of obesity whose health, economic and social costs we are only beginning to measure. There is no reason for us to continue subsidizing this environmentally unsustainable lifestyle.
The American addiction to gasoline is not a matter of choice. It is the product of government policies that have forced the population to live and travel in low-density neighborhoods, even though millions suffer depression and withdraw from society (see Putnam’s “Bowling Alone”) as a result. The outcome has been to tear our cities apart under massive highway construction, to segregate our society along socio-economic and racial line and to devour our national landscape for construction and oil drilling. We oppose drilling in ANWR. But we recognize that we cannot do so in a vacuum. We must also seek to change the underlying circumstances that have created our oil dependence in the first place.
To reconstruct our landscape in a manner that will be economically and environmentally sustainable does not require innovative solutions. It merely requires undoing the damaging governmental policies of the last fifty years and reversing them. Those policies include but are not limited to: our massive subsidy of auto travel through the federal highway program, local zoning codes that require a minimum amount of parking for homes and businesses, setbacks from the street and segregation of uses, our disinvestments in mass transit, our failure to raise fuel efficiency standards to keep pace with improving technology, our failure to raise gasoline taxes to an appropriate level, the federal government’s policy of federally insuring home buying loans but not loans for renovating old homes, thus encouraging people to buy newly constructed homes in even farther flung suburbs rather than higher quality more socially valuable and ecologically efficient urban homes in need of renovation, the federal tax policy that makes mortgage interest payments tax deductible but not rent, thus favoring home owners (suburbanites) over apartment dwellers (urbanites).
We oppose all of President Bush’s proposals to make these problems worse, including his proposal to revoke the status of state and local taxes as exempt from federal income tax as that will create yet another incentive for people to move from the cities to the suburbs because cities tend to have higher income taxes.
We also advocate the following alternatives:
An immediate and permanent decrease in federal and state highway subsidies, to be replaced with a public-private initiative to return privately-operated high-speed passenger rail to the American landscape. This framework will copy what has been instituted with the Airline Industry. AMTRAK will be relieved of operating passenger trains, and only remain to maintain track and the stations. That will be the federal investment in the system. Private companies practicing free market competition will conduct actual rail service, but with regulations to ensure that coach-class tickets remain affordable and adequate service will be provided to corridors that might be less profitable. With AMTRAK relieved of the burdens of rail operation, it will do a much better job of maintaining and straightening track that is necessary for high-speed rail, and probably save government money in the process. This will bring a great boon to the American manufacturing sector, revitalize older urban cores, reduce traffic, and increase inter-city travel efficiency, making inter-city travel possible at speeds of 180 miles per hour instead of the 60 mph that highway travel is constrained by. It will also reduce fuel dependency and make the nation less vulnerable to the after-effects of another airplane-based terrorist attack. A program like this will especially serve as a revitalization strategy for the older industrial cities of the Great Lakes, and the midwestern agricultural towns that have been in a decline parallel with that of American passenger rail.
An immediate increase in federal fuel-efficiency standards for cars to 40 miles per gallon.
Immediately closing the loophole that allows SUVs to be classified as light trucks instead of cars; from now on they should have to meet the same fuel efficiency standards as cars.
A revision of the tax code, making money spent on renovating pre 1945 dwellings tax-deductible for individuals and businesses and creating a new federal program to guarantee loans to renovate older homes.
Creating federal guidelines for large tax-deductions, to be implemented on the state and local level, by following a loose framework of new zoning codes for every community. These would be in accordance with the principles of new urbanism, chiefly: mixed income housing, mixed use housing (commercial and residential together), all streets must have ample sidewalks, street-side parking, and follow a logical, efficient grid whenever possible, buildings must be built out to the property line or close to it, buildings must be close together, parking garages will not be allowed, or will only be allowed behind houses rather than in front of them, business districts will not have surface parking lots, rather, they will have constructed or underground garages; businesses and residential developments shall not be required to have a minimum number of parking spaces, but they will be allowed no more than a certain maximum number; streets will have strict maximum widths, in accordance with the height of the buildings that line them, of no more than 1:1. Also where possible: bike lanes shall be created, sidewalks shall be lined with trees, and wherever possible highways remodeled in the style of a Parisian boulevard (exterior buffers and lanes added).
We also advocate a federal grant program to plant trees on sidewalks in depressed urban areas.
We also advocate a program where the federal government will pay the entire cost if a city or state government decides to replace a highway or portion of a highway with commuter or light rail.
We call on state governments to create regional governments so that suburbs can no longer continue to plunder the wealth of cities while starving urban school districts and other needs. Rather, entire metropolitan regions should be governed together, even when they cross state boundaries. These new regional governments will have integrated school systems, so that children in the suburbs and cities will get an equal education. In addition to the obvious benefits, this will have the added effect of reducing the incentive for families to move to the suburbs.

We recognize that this will not be an entirely easy sale politically. What we hope is that the Democratic Party will find politicians brave enough to tell the American people that they must make some changes in the way they live for the good of the country and the planet.

by Ben Adler and Rich Boatti