DEPARTURE
The fight to keep one of the airport sculptures in its
original location is over.
Construction on the new business center where Nancy Jurs’
“Triad” once stood is proceeding, and Jurs says she was notified last month
that her sculpture had been removed and stored. The notification came after she
sent a letter to Airport Director David Damelio in late August and — miffed
that she hadn’t received a reply — began calling the airport administration’s
offices. She didn’t hear back from Damelio, but got an e-mail from Jennifer
Dobson, spokesperson for the airport.
“In addressing the questions you had relative to your
artwork — yes, the artwork has been professionally taken down. It has been
crated and is being stored in a secure, climate controlled location on airport
property,” Dobson wrote. (The e-mail doesn’t say where Triad is stored, and
Jurs says she hasn’t been told. Her husband Wendell Castle’s clock tower was
dismantled and stored earlier, also in an undisclosed location.)
“The Airport Director is in receipt of your letter,” the
e-mail continues. “At this time, the Airport is continuing to explore possible
alternate locations, within the airport’s terminal, to display your artwork. We
will continue to stay in touch with you as we continue to move forward.”
That was in mid-October.
“That’s the last contact I’ve had,” Jurs said early this
week. “They have not proposed any reasonable site to me or Wendell at this
point.”
Still, she hasn’t given up hope that she and the airport
will reach a resolution, she says — even if that only means having the
sculpture returned to her.
— Krestia DeGeorge
LEGISLATING OFFLINE
The
United States Congress does it. So does the New York State Senate. And the
Assembly.
But
don’t expect Monroe County Legislature to put proposed legislation online
anytime soon. At a legislature committee meeting on Monday, Republicans voted
down a Democratic plan to put the proposals on the county’s website.
CountyLegislator Steve Eckel,
who represents parts of Irondequoit and the City
of Rochester, submitted
the proposal to create a legislative database. Citing the county’s
award-winning website, he suggested that the database would make the site more
useful to the public. It would increase the average person’s access to
information and would enhance debate about county issues, he said in his
proposal. And, said Eckel, making county government more accessible could help
soothe a public that has grown tired of scandals in government.
What’s
not to like?
Apparently,
the price tag. The Brooks administration sent the county’s chief information
officer, Nelson Rivera, to Monday’s committee meeting. Rivera countered Eckel’s
claim that his proposal wouldn’t create additional costs.
“We
would have to develop this database from scratch,” Rivera told the committee.
That would cost about $10,000, he said. The county would also need a new
scanner and some new software, each a couple of hundred dollars. Finally, he
estimated, it would cost about $20,000 in additional staff time to operate and
maintain the system.
Legislature
Clerk David Barry said that paper copies of proposals are readily available
from his office, and that no one’s been denied copies since he started work in
January. His office’s phone number is posted on the web.
In
a budget of over a billion dollars, $31,000 might seem like a bargain if it
buys a little more open government. But that may not be the only factor at work
here.
CountyRepublicans, who control
the legislature, may have seen Eckel’s move less as an attempt to promote
openness in government and more as way to embarrass them. Legislature
Republicans have used all manner of procedural tricks to keep Democrats from
getting legislation passed.
Usually,
proposals from Democrats don’t even make it to the full legislature. Instead,
they get tabled or voted down in committee. Or they get referred to the Brooks
administration (from which they never seem to return). A proposal to televise
legislature meetings on local access cable was referred to the legislature’s
clerk, for example. The clerk’s office responded with a detailed letter to the
effect that the idea was too difficult and too expensive.
—Krestia DeGeorge
WATER AUDIT DELAYED
Remember that second audit of the Monroe County Water
Authority? The one in which State Comptroller Alan Hevesi
was going to address “the authority’s policies and procedures to address
conflict of interest issues in authority contracting”? The one that was going
to be released by this fall? It’s not.
A spokeswoman for the Comptroller’s office confirmed to City
Newspaper last week that the audit wasn’t going to make deadline.
“Based on current scheduling, it’s looking like it’s
probably going to be early 2007 when that final report is done,” says
spokesperson Jennifer Freeman.
But don’t blame the delay on politics, or the recent
campaign, or even on Chauffeurgate, Hevesi’s own personal scandal.
The delay is strictly the function of bureaucratic slowness,
says Freeman.
“It’s just administrative stuff: getting it finished,
finalizing things,” she says.
The first audit was bombshell enough. It found that former
Executive Director John Stanwix and five other former
employees received lavish benefits to which they weren’t entitled. The audit
sparked public outrage and shook up the way the authority conducts its own
business. But there’ve been no allegations of criminal wrongdoing. Will an
audit of the authority’s contracts change that? And even if it does, will Hevesi’s office, still tainted by the Driving-Mrs.-Hevesi episode, be taken as seriously this time around?
— Krestia DeGeorge
CLEARLY CHICAGO?
As the daily newspaper industry continues to have problems,
and some of the biggest names are put up for sale, the locally-grown Gannett
chain has been considering expanding. It’s been named as a possible buyer for
the Chicago Tribune.
Commented media critic Michael Miner, writing in the
alt-weekly Chicago Reader: “Handing the Tribune to Gannett would be like
turning over the New York City Ballet to Radio City Music Hall.”
This article appears in Nov 29 – Dec 5, 2006.
