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Restaurants Must Post Calories, Judge Affirms

Calorie counts must be posted alongside prices in some New York City restaurants, a federal judge ruled on Wednesday in upholding revised city regulations.

The restaurant association that lost on Wednesday said it would ask the judge to stay the ruling pending an appeal.

The decision, by Judge Richard J. Holwell of United States District Court in Manhattan, rejected First Amendment claims by the New York State Restaurant Association, which maintained that the mandatory labeling requirements were impermissible.

Under the rules, which the city’s health department revised after Judge Holwell struck down an earlier version last fall, any chain with at least 15 outlets nationwide would have to display calorie counts on menu boards, menus or food tags. The rules would apply to roughly 2,000 restaurants, or about 10 percent of the 23,000 in the city, the health department said.

In a 27-page opinion, Judge Holwell accepted one of the city’s main arguments for posting calorie counts — that doing so would help reduce obesity, which city officials say has reached epidemic levels.

“It seems reasonable to expect that some consumers will use the information” on menu boards and menus “to select lower-calorie meals,” the judge wrote. He added that “these choices will lead to a lower incidence of obesity.”

Some chain-restaurant outlets, among them Starbucks, have already posted calorie counts. The rules were scheduled go into effect on Monday. But the restaurant association said it was filing an appeal and would appear before Judge Holwell on Thursday to ask for a delay until after the appeal.

Chuck Hunt, a spokesman for the association, said it was disappointed in the ruling. He also said that it would cause “irreparable harm” to have to comply with the rules next week if they ended up being invalidated.

“We continue to say that each restaurant should make decisions about the best way to provide this nutritional information to their customers,” Mr. Hunt said. “Most of these restaurants that are being affected were already providing this information, but in a different format.”

But the city’s health commissioner, Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, called Judge Holwell’s decision “a victory for New Yorkers.”

“It will give people information they need, where they need it,” he said. “If you want to use it, great, and if you don’t, that’s entirely your right.”

The restaurant association maintained that the calorie rules violate the First Amendment because they force restaurants to convey a government message — “a message,” the judge noted in his decision, “with which they may disagree.”

The judge said the calorie counts required by the new rules are “reasonably related to the government’s interest in providing consumers with accurate nutritional information.” For that reason, he said, the rules do not infringe on restaurants’ First Amendment rights.

“The judge’s decision is crystal clear,” Dr. Frieden said. “They can go to court and delay us for a few more months, but if they do that, it just means McDonald’s and Kentucky Fried Chicken are desperate to keep this information out the hands of their customers.”

SOURCE: NYTimes.com Read more..

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Green Car Service Zipping Into The Bronx

Another Manhattan luxury is making its way to the Bronx - and it’s eco-friendly.

Zipcar, the urban car share service, is bringing 12 cars to the borough that will be stationed in four parking lots. It has plans to have at least 20 more in three additional lots by summer’s end.

“We think New Yorkers everywhere need access to alternative transportation,” said Joel Johnson, general manager of the company. “Traditional services like rental car companies tend to shy away from areas underserved like the Bronx. We are open to serve the entire city.”

Zipcar already operates in Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens. It has 200,000 members nationwide.

Unlike rental cars, the 12 Mini Coopers and eco-friendly hybrid Toyota Priuses in the Bronx can be reserved by the hour or day, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Members reserve the cars online or by phone whenever they want, and have automated access to the cars using a “Zipcard” to unlock the door and drive away.

The four lots to first have the cars are located at 1020 Grand Concourse, 3000 Third Ave., 1752 Morris Ave. and 250 E. 188th St.

As part of the Bronx launch, Zipcar is partnering with the Albert Einstein College of Medicine of Yeshiva University to bring cars to its Morris Park campus and provide discounted memberships and rates to students, faculty and staff.

However, Johnson pointed out that the Zipcars, unlike the few rental car agencies in the Bronx, will serve a range of areas, instead of only areas near universities.

To join, drivers need to be 21 years old, have a valid driver’s license and no more than two moving violations or accidents in the past three years and no more than one in the past 18 months.

It costs $75 to join Zipcar. Rates for renting the car include the cost of insurance, maintenance, parking and gas. Rates start as low as $7.65 per hour and $68 per day.

In other cities, Zipcar members have gotten rid of their cars, and the hassle of owning a car in densely populated areas, by using the new option.

If the service is popular in the Bronx, it could expand to more parts of the borough, Johnson said.

“That’s the whole business model,” Johnson said. “As soon as the demand goes up, we put more cars in as fast as we can find the spaces to put them in.”

SOURCE: NYDailyNews.com Read more..

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Bronx Officials Push For PCB Check

As the city struggles to come to terms with revelations in the Daily News about illegal PCBs in its schools, leadership on the issue is coming out of the Bronx.

Recent testing has uncovered alarming levels of polychlorinated biphenyls in five Bronx schools - along with two schools in Manhattan and one in Queens.

While the Department of Education has not acknowledged that the illegal contamination is a problem, Bronx elected officials are proposing solutions - at the local and national levels.

“I am deeply troubled about the reports concerning possible PCB contamination at city schools,” said Borough President Adolfo Carrión. “And while we could waste time debating PCB levels, the risk of exposure and the potential health risks, that will not address the underlying problem.”

Carrión has called for immediate action to protect students and staff from PCBs - and taxpayers from potential fines and lawsuits down the road.

Carrión’s plan calls for the Department of Education to take the following measures:

Immediate testing of the air, surfaces and caulking at all 266 at-risk schools;

An abatement plan with strict time lines for schools with confirmed contamination;

Establishing a monitoring protocol to assure parents and teachers that cleaned schools are and remain within acceptable exposure limits.

The DOE has so far said it has no plans to test for PCBs at the more than 250 other city schools built between 1960 and 1977, despite the city’s own air and dust testing turning up elevated PCB levels at schools where The News found contaminated caulk.

On a national level, Bronx Reps. Joe Crowley (D-East Bronx, Queens) and José Serrano (D-South Bronx) are taking the lead on legislation to find and remove all PCB caulking from schools, hospitals and public housing across the country.

“Like asbestos and lead paint, the presence of PCBs in our community poses a grave health threat, especially to our children,” said Crowley, whose district includes all of the Bronx schools tested.

“To effectively tackle this problem,” he said, “federal, state and local officials must work together.”

Serrano vowed not to let any inaction by the city further delay action that’s already 30 years late.

“We will be on the case until the PCBs are gone,” he said.

Elected officials from other boroughs also are taking local action. Read more..

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Developer Will Turn NYC Armory Into Retail Complex 

The developer of Manhattan’s upscale Time-Warner Center will turn the Bronx’s historic Kingsbridge Armory into a retail complex.

Related Companies calls its project The Shops at the Armory. A department store will anchor up to 35 smaller stores, restaurants, a movie theater and banquet space.

Related will spend about $310 million to acquire and redevelop the armory. The city has invested about $30 million for environmental cleanup, roof replacement and facade repairs.

The city and state historical preservation agencies still must approve parts of the design.

The New York City Economic Development Corporation says Kingsbridge is thought to be the world’s largest armory. It features Romanesque arches, vaulted ceilings, decorative brick and terra cotta, and large battlement towers.

SOURCE: NewsDay.com Read more..

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NYC Store Saves Home Supplies From Trash & Resells Them 

Brand-new porcelain toilets, some still in their boxes, stood on a pallet in the warehouse. Nearby was a pile of unused ceramic tiles. And stacked against the walls of the building were about 200 doors.

This was not the inventory of a Home Depot, a Lowes or some other big home improvement store, but of ReBuilders Source, a building materials re-use store in the Bronx.

The store sells building materials donated by demolition or construction contractors, home renovators and other hardware stores with surplus inventory. The main goal project is to offer an alternative to the landfill for building supplies that normally might get thrown into the trash.

Workers at the store have spent months creating a donor network, making cold calls and researching on the Internet. Once they know that building materials are being tossed out, they will arrange to send a truck to pick them up. Much of what they sell, at discounts between 25 and 50 percent, has never been used.

The store, which celebrates its grand opening on Monday, is the first project of Green Worker Cooperatives, an organization with the goal of creating environmentally friendly jobs and businesses in the poor neighborhood.

“We didn’t want to wait for people outside the community to decide what kind of jobs we would have in the community,” said Omar Freilla, who leads the cooperative and helped launch the store in the Hunts Point section.

The idea of re-use is not new, but it is gaining recognition around the country as people embrace the idea of green building.

There are more than 1,000 building material re-use stores in the country, according to the Pittsburgh-based Building Materials Reuse Association.

An estimate by the BMRA in 2005 found that re-use stores sell an estimated 315,000 to 360,000 tons of building materials each year, a tiny fraction of total waste from building activities.

“There’s an awful lot more room to grow,” said BMRA President Brad Guy.

In New York, thousands of tons of construction and demolition debris are thrown away each year. But there are only a handful of stores that sell salvaged building materials.

Build It Green! NYC, a nonprofit store in Queens, sold about 350 tons of building materials in 2007, according to Justin Green, the program director. It made $900 per ton, he said.

“It’s not a massive takeout,” Green said. “But New York City could support maybe 20 more of these stores because we do create so much waste.”

In the Bronx, waste is an acute community concern: The borough handles more than 8,000 tons of the approximately 45,000 tons of waste generated daily by the city, according to the Department of Sanitation. Much of that is handled in the South Bronx.

Residents in the neighborhood have long been concerned about the effects on air quality and public health of nearly two dozen waste transfer stations in the neighborhood, especially the fume-exhaling trucks that serve them. The neighborhood has one of the highest rates of asthma in the city.

The Department of Sanitation said that the amount of trash being transported for handling in the Bronx has gone down over the past 20 years, because of increased regulation. Most garbage exported to out-of-state landfills is by rail, cutting down on truck traffic, said Thomas Milora, executive assistant to the sanitation commissioner. Read more..

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