He’s
out
Add
one to the list of victims in the US War
on Terrorism:Ansar Mahmood. The
26-year-old Pakistani is being deported after spending close to three years in
a Batavia detention facility. Barring any miraculous last-minute appeals, it appears
Mahmood will be heading back to Pakistan as soon as his travel papers are in
order.
“I don’t know how the government and
congressmen interact. You always hear of these last-minute deals… I guess
that’s what we’re hoping for,” says Rajesh Baranabas, a local activist who has
taken to Mahmood’s cause. “But that’s a shot in the dark at this point.”
After winning a green-card lottery,
Mahmood moved from Pakistan to the city of Hudson, where he was delivering
pizzas for Domino’s. One day in the fall of 2001, Mahmood took a break from his
deliveries to take pictures of fall foliage along the Hudson River. What he
didn’t realize was that he was standing right next to a municipal water
treatment facility. And that’s when the trouble began.
Mahmood was eventually cleared of
any terrorist activity. But subsequent searches of his apartment revealed that
he’d helped a Pakistani couple, here illegally, by co-signing their lease for
an apartment and registering their car in his name.
Mahmood was then charged with
harboring illegal aliens, which is a felony. Following the advice of his
court-appointed lawyer, he pleaded guilty, which automatically subjected him to
deportation and detention.
Barnabas has worked with the Chatham
Peace Initiative to lobby on Mahmood’s behalf. And the group had obtained
signatures from 20 members of Congress — all Democrats — pleading for
Mahmood’s release.
“The Homeland Security folks
probably just thought it was another political ploy,” Barnabas says. “Had we
gotten some repubs on board, maybe it would have been different. But they got
him… They got him on a technicality, even thought they lost every other
argument.”
Info: www.chathampeace.org.
Another
Kodak moment
Drive
along Lake Avenue until you get to the George Eastman Monument. Park. Walk to
the monument, go up to the fence, and look in. On the opposite end of the
courtyard you’ll find building 26, where George Eastman’s office used to be. To
the right, you’ll see a brick building. That’s Building Two — the second
building that was built in Kodak Park, in the early 1890s.
Building Two will be torn down in
August as Kodak’s three-year
restructuring plan unfolds. Kodak’s plan, as announced in a January press
release, is to reduce its worldwide footprint by a third.
Like Building Two, many of Kodak’s
older buildings have become too inefficient to maintain, says Kodak Spokesman
Jim Blamphin. The operations or materials within them, he says, can be moved
out into Kodak’s more modern facilities.
Kodak officials call their ongoing
re-shaping of Kodak Park “revitalization,” and many members of the
surrounding community agree that the area will change for the better in years
to come. More than 60 buildings have already been taken down over the past five
years, Blamphin says, and landscaping has already begun to paint the land they
once occupied.
Whether unused or underused parking
lots will be removed is another story. Residents complain that attractive
residential homes used to line the streets where near-empty parking lots now
sit. Blamphin can’t say for sure whether revitalization plans will remove any
underused lots in coming years, but knows that they don’t at the moment. Teams
are working on landscaping in and around Kodak lots, Blamphin says.
“We’ve put in a lot of trees,
grass, flowers, shrubs, that kind of thing,” he says. A team of building
managers, he says, take periodic walks around Kodak Park to see “what the
public sees” and help improve that view.
The landscaping is necessary — New
York State requires it around parking lots. But landscaping won’t make the lots
any more useful.
“My concern is what happens
then with the parking areas that won’t be utilized after all this downsizing
and taking down buildings?” says Maplewood Neighborhood Association
President Cindy Kaleh. “Will they be developed? Could they be re-developed
back into housing?”
Unused or underused lots are
partially the result of Kodak’s local layoffs. And now they’re affecting local
tax rolls and aesthetics.
“What the heck is Kodak, the
city, Maplewood going to do with the acres of parking lots that are no longer
used, that in most cases were once neighborhood tax-producing residential
houses?” asks Tom Kunz, a member of the Maplewood Neighborhood
Association.
“Hopefully, the ‘full-circle’
principal will prevail and investors will rebuild the barren asphalt expanses
to what they once were,” Kunz says.
Stealing
from schools
NEC
Business Network Solutions Inc. pulled a reverse-Robin Hood recently. The
company pleaded guilty in May to abusing the Federal Communication Commission’s E-rate Program — violating
anti-trust laws and defrauding schools, among other things — and it now owes
$20.6 million in criminal fines and restitution. And it’s not the only company
that’s recently been accused or convicted of intentionally misusing the
sprawling program since it started up in 1998.
The E-rate program, part of the
FCC’s Universal Service Fund, was established to help under-funded schools and
libraries across the nation connect to the Internet. Now, most schools and
libraries across the country, including almost all of Greater Rochester’s
schools and libraries, receive some aid from the program. The discounts —
which range from 20 to 90 percent on telephone service and Internet access —
are based on the National School Lunch Program. So, a higher percentage of
free-lunch students attending a school means a higher level of funding.
In Rochester, the biggest user of
E-rate funds is — not surprisingly — the Rochester City School District. Nearly $900,000 was given in 2003,
and a total of $7.5 million has been distributed to the district in the past 6
years. The Rochester Public Library and Hillside Children’s Center School
received the next highest levels of funding.
A press release issued by the U.S.
Justice Department says that an investigation of fraud and anti-competitive
conduct in the E-rate program is ongoing.
This article appears in Jul 7-13, 2004.
