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March 22, 2014- The Post reports, “City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito expressed reservations Friday about a proposal to force well-funded park conservancies to share their donations with small or neglected parks. De Blasio, who backed the controversial money-sharing proposal during last year’s mayoral campaign, called it “promising” when asked about it again Friday.”
What the progressive Robin Hood Democrats do not seem to understand is that the extra park staff enjoyed by the conservancies, such as Battery Park City, are paid for by private funds. Taking BPC PEP away to be used for Prospect Park, for example, would be like stealing landscapers from the Park Avenue BID, which keeps the fancy median looking nice, and having them landscape the Long Island Expressway.
Oh, by the way, the city has been stealing PEP from the BPC forces and reassigning them to other parks for years. Read below.
Since people in Battery Park have no elected voice, please forward this story to your friends to raise awareness. Our governor-appointed royalty who sit on the BPCA board and live in Westchester will not be looking out for your best interests.
Exclusive: BPCA pays for park staff reassigned to non-BPC parks
New City Parks Commissioner: fate of PEP Captain Falcon uncertain
PEP allow serious crime in parks to skyrocket
Not a single PEP officer to be found
PEP Captain Falcon denies reassigning his PEP to other parks
It is frustrating that the apathy among BPC residents regarding issues like this (and so many others that BatteryPark.TV covers) is unalterable. Cant really imagine an issue like this occurring in Tribeca. Is it simply because Tribeca is less transient?
Amen sister
Mr. de Blasio should understand that wishes of donors should
not be tampered just to satisfy motives of political expediency.
c
Of course, it’s hard to say that BPC is the one getting robbed when BPC pays no city property taxes but still gets all the city’s services — schools, libraries, subways, fire, police, and so on.
To “Watcher”
Thank you for your comment because it exemplifies the common misconceptions. In fact, not only do BPC residents pay their fair share of taxes, which are called PILOT charges, but the $200 Million surplus in the BPCA budget is pilfered to pay for other city expenses unrelated to BPC residents.
Building owners do pay PILOT, but those charges then go to the BPCA to use as they see fit. Only the unused surplus is given over to the city. Imagine if even the poorest neighborhoods in NYC could use as much of their property tax revenues as they wanted on their own neighborhood, their own parks, their own community management, and then give over only what was left to the city to pay for normal city services. I imagine those neighborhoods would have great looking parks too! I would hardly call BPC giving the remainder to the city (when other neighborhoods give all their revenue to the general fund) “pilfering.”
My point is that PILOT has helped provide funds to make BPC beautiful, but it does come at the expense of the kind of tax revenues that the rest of the city pitches into the general pot.
To “Watcher” you are 100% dead wrong. The vast majority of the PILOT fees collected are pilfered for wasteful spending by the city.
Also, in 2009, Governor Paterson flat out stole $800 Million from the BPCA. That caused the ground lease monthly payments by each person to go up.
The small amount of the fees spent on the BPC infrastructure and parks is only $40 some million
Can you live by the principle, ” live within your means”, and can you “not shit where you eat”. That is all I can share with most of the intended beneficiaries of this scheme. I was through rock bottom like y’all claim, and these guiding principles helped me not to ask a Robin Hood to come to my rescue.