Reforming New York Vasos Panagiotopoulos New York is not an employment guarantor for middle class municipal union members. Wherever better services can be provided by the private sector, they should. Subsidised clinics that make hospital visits unnecessary for most doctorless patients are an example. Private collectors could sort recyclable trash better than harrassed taxpayers do. Corporate tenants should be allowed to repair subway stations under their buildings without union interference. Real estate management companies should be asked to run the larger subway stations. Private bus lines that lease buses from the Transit Authority should also be asked to run competing subway lines on existing city-owned tracks. The Hunts meat and Fulton fish markets should be privatized, as should the lottery and gambling operations, although franchised the way competing private bus lines are. Unions should not block workfare at their sites. Able-bodied welfare receipients should be required to work on public works projects, including schools, transit, roads, bridges, and tunnels. CorCraft (corrections industries) products should be sold by competitive bid to larger wholesalers so as to not put private New York firms out of business and if this is successful, CorCraft should also be given opportunities to organise factories for workfare as well. Whereas private ambulances respond ten times faster than EMS, 911 should be encourged to route calls to them where appropriate. Monopolistic taxi medallions should be abolished. Public housing tenants who take good care of their apartments for seven years should be allowed ownership by adverse posession. The airports, convention centers, and World Trade Center should be sold or franchised out. Small businesses should be given a single unified permit, with the responsibility of contacting all the relevant government agencies left to a Unified Entrepreneurship Agency. As an emergency, temporary one-year policy, any firm normally employing between five and fifteen employes that employs additional people should be given a tax exemption equal to the minimum wage for each additional person plus half the mandatory retirement and compensation insurance payements for each additional employe. If you look at the Silicon Valley, you wonder why it wasn't in New York State to begin with. That question bugs me a lot. GE and IBM were already here. If you look at how the initial Silicon Valley (Palo Alto, Menlo Park, San Jose, Santa Clara) firms developed, it was firms like HP that ran their own venture capital outfits and did a lot of outsourcing that encouraged the Silicon Valley to form. Japan succeeds along similar lines. Also, a solid university like Stanford was right in the middle of it all. Sand Hill Road, where the big VC firms are, is to Stanford what Massachussetts Avenue is to Harvard and what Broadway is to Columbia. Columbia is stuck in a politically correct mode to kiss up to Harlem politicians and avoid military or industrial projects. Only recently did Columbia start to pull off Audubon Park. And yet Columbia's 1988 ten-year plan mentioned the possibility of moving to Westcester. Look at Long Island's hi-tek area: meager little degree mills like NY Tek, LIU CW Post and Hofstra, which no major firm I worked for took seriously for top job postings. New York firms like IBM of Poughkeepsie, GE of Schenectady and Kodak of Rochester are too monopolictically anal retentive to outsource or to encourage regenerative small firms, and then they run to the cuomotose statists to protect them from small local firms by giving them state R&D grants and tax abatements. It is better and probably less expensive to simply reduce everyone's taxes than to selectively bribe slow, behemoths into becoming slower and lazier. Laws should favor efficiency, not one size or another. If New York State is to survive defense conversion, we have to radically rethink the way things are done. Instead of doling out government moneys willie nillie, we should use the government as a bully pulpit to radically redesign the way New York State does science and technology. We should even consider bullying (admittedly a dangerous precedent) Polytech and Adelphi and Cold Spring to merge into an Ivy-quality university for Long Island, as well as strongly encourgaing LIU, NYIT and Hofstra to merge into a strong second-tier university. Meanwhile, we should introduce a Regents degree program at the vocational and junior college level. The various Regents exams should be divied up between the Princeton ETS and Iowa ACT in order to be privatised. No NYS private or public institution should be allowed to issue a baccalaureate to students who have not performed well on the specialised GRE examination of their chosen major. In order to encourage innovative improvements in universities, USNY (not SUNY) should issue external degrees via GRE and other examinations. Also, professional certification at the internship level should be open to examination (without any degree requirements) in order to encourage instructional competition; Test results should replace degrees as measures of educational value. Also, if a firm or trade group can guaranty jobs to a certain portion of graduates, it should also be allowed to fund and shape the local schools to meet its needs. It seems that current development policy intentionally encourages a stagnation at the 1930s level of technology, namely construction based on New Deal notions of labor. Labor peace has been bought with economically useless work in ways that encourage certain students to ignore educational opportunities so much they even lack the basic high school trigonometry skills needed to operate modern factory robotics. In this way, today's construction worker, who ignored opportunities, is very different from yesteryear's, who used this work as a way to pay for his or his children's education. In Manhattan, it sometimes appears as if there are more construction workers renovating offices than office workers working in those offices because of the perverse incentive system. Even economic statistics are wrongly biased towards 1930s standards (ie ignoring advanced alloys and attaching too much importance to raw steel). In this way, the systemic biases that reinforce New York's backwardness are widespread and even common in GOP circles. Also, sadly, only when people get laid off does the need for change of old habits sink in. Since ghetto children do not have summer vacations or after-school activities, they should be kept in school more hours and months - so they may graduate sooner instead of dropping out. Those who need to drop out should be offered the night schools Lindsay abandoned. All of this should be within a voucher choice system, also incorporating innovations from East Harlem and magnet schools. Local firms should be allowed to influence (and fund) course selection to enhance employability on a German apprenticeship model. Public colleges should be allowed to become voluntary, non-profit institutions where their faculty find greater professional freedoms. The state should instead be in the business of subsidising poorer students and encouraging tuition competion between institutions. When the state is both a provider and regulator, the quality of the regulation suffers because of the inherent conflict of interest. Stronger emphasis should be put on testing and licencing, including a greater use of Regents examinations, even at the collegiate and graduate levels. Testing would allow students to seek better and cheaper forms of education with which to meet the new, higher standards, instead of watering down existing public systems. An underground highway linking the UN,Grand Central,Times Square, Penn Station,and the Javits Center will do more to cut traffic (hence smog) than any restriction on vehicles. The 48th St Rockefeller Ctr underground should gradually be linked to the 45th St Grand Central underground but bridging over Fifth Avenue then gradually building up the north ends to include Carnegie Hall, Citicorp Center and Trump Tower; This could be done by merging the Business Improvement Districts or by encouraging a cooperative agreement between them. The old underground pedestrian tunnel between Penn Station and Times Square was closed because the city was too cowardly to control crime and filth there. The JFK-LGA line should run along the old LIRR Forest Park freight lines and the highways, eliminating the need for new land acquisition. Moreover, it should be extended from LGA (possibly via G subway line) via Woodside and the AmTrak HellGate Bridge to Fordham Station in the Bronx, then to Ft Lee, PATH and back via Wall Street (instead of just extending Brooklyn LIRR to Wall Street) and Staten Island to JFK,to form a Yamanote-like loop. But this should be done by a private contractor who would be allowed to recoup their investment over fifty years. Since the overhead for duplicate repair crews for each type of technology repairs would kill any initial cost benefits, only existing subway technology should be used. Cuomo's Shoreham adventurism risks leaving New York without power in the coming decade; one fifth of a LILCO's bill comes each from Shoreham and taxes. Extensive initiatives should be offered for private firms to develop their own power sources and feed their excess back to the grid. Telephone, power and cable television firms should be forced to compete and use their lines for alternate purposes; meanwhile in exchange for this competitive freedom, they should be required to put more of their lines underground. Deinstituionalization, rent control and zoning cause homelessness. Rent control can be immediately repealed (with no effect) in Queens and Staten Island, but gradually in other boroughs - zoning back SROs where many homeless used to live. Alternatively, rent control will continue only in state senatorial districts where it applies to more than two thirds of the residents, with the income threshold being gradually reduced to the lower-middle class level. Tax and use zoning should be simplified to no more than ten classifications with absolutely no (corruptioneering) variances. Gambling, pornographic and alcoholic establihments should only be allowed in ungrandfathered industrially zoned areas and in low densities. It is ridiculous to have quake codes in New York, but not only for the obvious reasons. New York City is in an area where quakes occur every century and a half. The next one is due very shortly. Quake codes will effect buildings hit by the quake that will occur a century and a half from now, but not many new buildings will be built under the new code to matter for the upcoming quake. Now, New York is indeed relatively quakeproof because we are on bedrock.. except where Robert Moses was involved! You see, he did a lot of landfilling, and the greatest damage in Kobe and San Francisco occured over landfills that liquified. It may very well be that even there, the quake will be too minor (Richter five or six) to have any effect, and indeed building codes dealing with hurricanes essentially deal with the same issues. Instead of creating stupid rules, it is wiser to just have the city publish copies of 1920s (ie, pre-Moses) US Geological Survey maps, so people can make informed decisions on their own without being treated like babies. That's not the only place were Moses messed up. A year ago in the Columbia Engineering Alumni magasine, I read of an attempt to set up locks in the East River so sewage water won't stagnate. If Moses didn't reroute the Flushing River (it used to go from Forest Park to Flushing Bay), the waters wouldn't stagnate. Five blocks from me, there's a place that always floods in rainstorms (and home ownership turns over yearly); well, I found out that a piece of the river was piped underneath that area and the pipe is obviously too small! (Gosh, I'd almost dare to think that a quake would be GOOD for this city.) Again, publishing maps would be a good idea, if everyone behaved like adults. People do not create litter or crime, government does. Well designed trash baskets, allocated curbside dog potties, and pidgeon-proof lamp posts do what fines can never do. Empowered neighborhood elders and police from the same community provide a moral infrastructure before youth become criminals - ruling neighborhoods from City Hall denies this infrastructure. Devolving tax and spend authority to community boards (coterminous with city council, school and police districts) builds such a moral infrastructure as well as allowing for spontaneous enterprise zones. Instead of invading privacy in the war on drugs, let us penalise outcomes: if there can be mandatory, stiffer sentences for crimes with guns, then let us also strictly penalise crimes committed while on drugs or alcohol, as if they were premeditated and unmitigated; If someone knows they will hang for a traffic accident, they will think twice before getting "high". Likewise, the death penalty would be most effective against recidivists, so if someone is responsible for the intentional loss of life in three independently tried and separate cases, let the death penalty be imposed with highly restricted appeal. - - - - - Vasos Panagiotopoulos is an NYC conservative activist and businessman. A Columbia alumnus and former NY Federal Reserve analyst, he is listed in Marquis' Who's Who in Finance & Industry. His columns used to appear in the 1990 NYC Tribune.