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.
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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.