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For Bronx Water Plant Being Built 10 Stories Down, a Towering Price Tag

In a city of big projects, it ranks among the biggest. New York City’s Department of Environmental Protection is building one of the largest water filtration plants in the world in a 10-story-deep hole it blasted out of bedrock in the Bronx. When completed in 2012, the plant, capable of purifying 300 million gallons of water a day, will be buried there.

But the plant, which will filter water from the Croton watershed in Westchester County, is no Bronx treasure chest. Even as construction moves forward, questions about soaring costs and delays continue to plague the project.

The cost is now estimated at nearly $3 billion, a huge jump from the $660 million city officials estimated when they announced an audacious plan in 1998 to build the plant below the surface of Van Cortlandt Park. They vowed that the park would be made as good as new, even if that meant replacing whatever was lost during construction. They now plan to rebuild a driving range on top of the buried plant.

Some officials and others fear the final tab could climb even higher, and in the process push up water rates. On April 1, the city comptroller, William C. Thompson Jr., announced that he was starting an independent audit to determine whether city officials understated the original price, to get the plant built in the Bronx rather than Westchester. Besides scrutinizing the complicated accounting, Mr. Thompson will have to sort through accusations by some residents and officials of deliberate distortions of costs, and intimations that the project has been tainted by mob influence, though nothing has been proved.

His would not be the first effort at monitoring the expenses since work on the big hole began in late 2004. The city’s Independent Budget Office examined the project and came up with a cost estimate last September of $2.8 billion, significantly higher than the Bloomberg administration’s last previous estimate of $2.1 billion. The budget office is now comparing its cost estimate with the city’s earlier projections and is expected to report on it in the next few months.

The city’s Department of Investigation hired a law firm, Stier Anderson L.L.C., last year to monitor the progress of the construction. The law firm is now affiliated with Thacher Associates, a fraud detection company. Keith Schwam, a spokesman for the department, said the firm was keeping track “of various contractors, subcontractors and personnel” at the Bronx site.

While the plant’s opponents concede that it is too late to stop the work in Van Cortlandt Park, they say that shining more light on the project’s financing will reveal whether there was any wrongdoing in the site selection process. Read more..

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Traveling Roadshow of Justice at the Bronx’s Shiny New Courthouse

On a typical day, dozens of trials, hearings, arraignments and other legal procedures take place in the Bronx court system, and often there is not a single spectator.

But on Thursday, the hottest ticket in the Bronx — aside from the Yankees-Red Sox game being played a few blocks down 161st Street — may have been the scramble to get a decent seat in the Bronx Hall of Justice.

The state’s highest court, the Court of Appeals, had come down from Albany to hear oral arguments in a few selected cases at the Bronx’s new glass-walled courthouse, and the public was invited.

More than 450 people — most of them blue-suited lawyers — stood and sat rapt, listening as intently as one might at a classical music concert to cases that were in many ways less compelling than the usual fare heard in the Bronx criminal court system.

The five cases selected by the court did, however, offer a representation of the hazards of life in New York City, circa 2008: murder, gender discrimination, terrorism, illegal eviction and a trip-and-fall episode.

It all took place in the building’s new, ornate and extremely large central jury room, with seven black-robed judges at the front and tight security all around.

“We wanted to celebrate the new courthouse and to bring the court to the community,” the state’s chief judge, Judith S. Kaye, said after two and a half hours of oral arguments ended. Judge Kaye also made an admission: that in Albany, the court’s average crowd is about 30.

“Not so many people come out, which is one of the reasons it’s good to be here,” she said.

First up was the case of Santos Suarez. Mr. Suarez was convicted of fatally stabbing his girlfriend in the Bronx apartment they shared in 2000. A jury acquitted Mr. Suarez of one second-degree murder charge, that he killed his girlfriend intentionally, but convicted him of another, killing her with depraved indifference. The jury failed to decide on a manslaughter charge in the case.

That became a crucial element of the case when the Court of Appeals concluded that the jury had erred, and that Mr. Suarez had indeed committed the murder intentionally. It overturned the conviction.

So with one murder charge thrown out and an acquittal on the second, all that stood in the way of freedom for Mr. Suarez, who had been sentenced to 20 years in prison, was the manslaughter count.

Mark W. Zeno, Mr. Suarez’s lawyer, told the judges on Thursday that trying his client on the manslaughter charge would be akin to double jeopardy. “An acquittal is an acquittal, no matter what errors go into that acquittal,” Mr. Zeno said.

Around the grand room, lawyers — many of them prosecutors from the Bronx district attorney’s office — shifted uncomfortably.

One of them looked up at the ceiling in disbelief, tapped her neighbor and nodded toward a Martin Luther King Jr. quote on a piece of sculpture that is the room’s centerpiece: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”

It was now time for Peter D. Coddington, chief appellate attorney for the Bronx district attorney’s office, to make his case. The jury, he said, had not had a “fair opportunity” to consider the manslaughter charge, and he said a trial on that charge would not be double jeopardy, but a “continued prosecution.” A pair of defense lawyers nudged one another in disbelief.

Mr. Zeno summed up his position, saying, “It’s an unpleasant result in some respects, but now the prosecutor has to live with that decision.” Read more..

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A construction worker’s bid to curse the New York Yankees by planting a Boston Red Sox jersey in their new stadium was foiled Sunday when the home team removed the offending shirt from its burial spot.

After locating the shirt in a service corridor behind what will be a restaurant in the new Yankee Stadium, construction workers jackhammered through the concrete Sunday and pulled it out.

The team said it learned that a Sox-rooting construction worker had buried a shirt in the new Bronx stadium, which will open next year across the street from the current ballpark, from a report in the New York Post on Friday.

Yankees President Randy Levine said team officials at first considered leaving the shirt where it was.

“The first thought was, you know, it’s never a good thing to be buried in cement when you’re in New York,” Levine said. “But then we decided, why reward somebody who had really bad motives and was trying to do a really bad thing?”

On Saturday, construction workers who remembered the employee, Gino Castignoli, phoned in tips about the shirt’s location.

“We had anonymous people come tell us where it was, and we were able to find it,” said Frank Gramarossa, a project executive with Turner Construction, the general contractor on the site.

It took about five hours of drilling Saturday to locate the shirt under 2 feet of concrete, he said.

On Sunday, Levine and Yankees CEO Lonn Trost watched as Gramarossa and foreman Rich Corrado finished the job and pulled the shirt from the rubble.

In shreds from the jackhammers, the shirt still bore the letters “Red Sox” on the front. It was a David Ortiz jersey, No. 34.

Trost said the Yankees had discussed possible criminal charges against Castignoli with the district attorney’s office.

“We will take appropriate action since fortunately we do know the name of the individual,” he said.

A woman who answered the phone at Castignoli’s home in the Bronx on Sunday said he was not there. Read more..

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 The floor of a 99-cent store in the Bronx collapsed in August 2006, killing two firefighters. A report blamed rotting columns.

 Lt. Howard J. Carpluk Jr., left, and Firefighter Michael C. Reilly were killed in an August 2006 blaze.

2006 Fatal Fire Cause Focuses on 82 Year Old Engineer & Perjury Claim 

The Bronx district attorney’s office has decided to pursue criminal charges against an engineer whose failure to fully inspect a Bronx construction job was cited in a Fire Department report on the deaths of two firefighters, according to a person who has been briefed on the investigation.

Firefighter Michael C. Reilly and his boss, Lt. Howard J. Carpluk Jr., were fighting a fire in a Walton Avenue discount store in August 2006 when rotting support columns gave way, the floor collapsed and they were trapped, a Fire Department report concluded.

The engineer’s lawyer said on Sunday that the Fire Department’s conclusions about the construction were wrong, and that there was no connection between the plans approved by his client, Jose D. Vargas, and the fatal collapse. The lawyer, Armando Montano, also said that in bringing criminal charges alleging that his client lied to investigators, prosecutors were taking advantage of the lapsed memory of an 82-year-old man.

The charges represent the most significant law enforcement action taken against a professional involved in a program that gives engineers and architects the authority to approve construction projects without city oversight.

The program is essentially an honor system in which the city has transferred many of its inspection responsibilities to architects and engineers and relies on their integrity to ensure building safety. But the city has found widespread abuses in recent years and is working to increase oversight and penalties.

“We are focused on infusing integrity back into the professional certification program,” said Robert LiMandri, New York’s deputy building commissioner.

The engineer, Mr. Vargas, is scheduled to be arraigned in State Supreme Court in the Bronx as early as Monday on perjury charges stemming from allegations that he lied to investigators studying the fatal fire, the person briefed on the case said. Mr. Montano confirmed that his client had been indicted on a perjury charge.

Several months ago, the Fire and Building Departments concluded in investigative reports that Mr. Vargas had approved plans to renovate the building without conducting a final inspection of the work, as required.

In fact, the reports said, the building had rotten support columns, shoddy repair work and alterations far more extensive than listed in the plans that Mr. Vargas approved in 2001. The Fire Department also criticized Mr. Vargas for what it said was a failure to inspect the building carefully.

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Hate Crimes Decrease In The Bronx Through Education

Hate crimes rose by 52 percent against blacks and 35 percent against Jews in New York City last year, according to statistics provided by police at a Bronx forum Tuesday.

In the lone bit of positive news, anti-gay crimes dropped, though only by 2 percent.

Experts attributed the increase in part to the economic downturn and to racial unrest following last summer’s Jena Six incident, as well as recent events such as the Howard Beach assaults and the Sean Bell shooting.

However, police and prosecutors emphasized their efforts to combat bias attacks. “We want to make sure we send a message that if you commit a hate crime in the city of New York, you will be prosecuted,” said Sgt. Ronald Lynch of the NYPD hate crimes task force.

He spoke at a forum sponsored by the Jewish Community Relations Council of New York, which brought together community activists, social workers and educators to discuss ways of combating hate crimes in everyday life. A hate crime is defined as a crime committed explicitly because the victim is of a particular race, ethnicity, gender or sexual identity.

“It is always your actions, coupled with your thoughts or your words,” said Michael Cooper, a Bronx assistant district attorney who heads an anti-hate crime unit. These crimes have become “more prevalent,” he said.

Indeed, the city saw 144 anti-Semitic crimes in 2007, up from 107 in 2006. Racially motivated attacks against blacks rose from 23 in 2006 to 35 in 2007. Hate crimes against whites increased from six incidents in 2006 to eight last year, while attacks motivated by sexual or gender identity dropped from 51 to 50.

Noah Feldman, representing Bronx Borough President Adolfo Carrion, said that his borough is the only of the five to report a decrease in hate crimes; he said there has been a 43-percent drop since 2003. The reasons, he said, included after school programs that preach tolerance and interaction between groups. Carrion, trying to model that behavior, is currently in Israel learning about Jewish culture.

Bronx District Attorney Robert Johnson, who created the first bias crime unit in New York State, stressed education and prevention. The attitudes that underlie hate crimes, he said, begin in the home. Only education and interaction between communities can bring progress.

“Our time, our dollars are better spent dealing in the area of prevention rather than prosecution,” he said.

SOURCE: AMNY.com

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