I've noticed the swaying on NJT's double deckers, but you can always sit on the lower level.

I'm going to flip that around on you. You as a taxpayer don't deserve less than I, a public-sector union worker. You should have a union too and neither of our unions should have to fight for healthcare.

For the record though, I pay just as much of my salary as you do. We live here, we pay taxes too.

As a public sectir union member it's infuriating to me that my union opposed universal healthcare. The union officers are constantly complaining about how expensive our benefits are to the union. Well guess what, jackasses? You wouldn't have to pay all that if there was universal healthcare. You wouldn't have to negotiate for it either.

DC37 needs a (lot of) change.

Apologies on the misattribution.

However, "having an in-house team" really elides the fact that the in-house team that is under 8% of what it used to be, staffing wise. And before you say "that's not the same team," it doesn't actually matter if that team is the specific team in question or not - it is indicative of a general and deliberate trend of downsizing knowledgable government bureaucrats that leaves public service with serious brain drain and manpower issues. It is not incompetence to have to hire consultants to manage consultants when there is no one left. It's making the best of what you have when given an otherwise impossible task. That is how government is forced to work these days. It doesn't matter how competent your people are if you don't actually have people.

It is borderline tautological that if you want functioning government agencies you have to actually have those government agencies instead of... no one.

Tell me, who is going to manage the consultants on capital projects when there is no one left to manage the consultants on capital projects? Would it perhaps be other consultants instead of your "incompetent bureaucrats who have little expertise in their field"? Why yes, yes it would.

From the OP article: >By 2011, the MTA had trimmed its in-house capital projects management group of 1,600 full-time employees (circa 1990) to just 124, tasked with steering $20 billion in investment.

From your own quote: >Specifically, we were told that instead of being handed design guidelines at the start of the project, it was the consultants who developed those guidelines first, sometimes in conflict with NYCT standards

I would also point out that as the OP article touches on, incompetence and a lack of experience are not the same thing, especially where these decades-long megaprojects are concerned, but I feel like that fine a distinction might be lost on you.

Bloomberg was a disaster for the very concept of civil service in this city.

Ah yes, let's ignore the systemic issues and blame the underpaid, overworked, and inexperienced people who are left after decades of budget cuts with the aim of trying to replace them with private sector contractors.

Thank you. People don't understand what losing a significant part of your civil service actually means. Then they turn around and ask why the city takes so long to do shit.

People in here bitching about the added cost but ignoring the fact that they're putting them in new locations and parks are not just blanketed in usable water and power lines.

>Parks Department spokesperson Meghan Lalor said the budgeted Portland Loo price tag included costs for running new electric and water lines to the units, along with prep work, foundation work and other construction needs. >...

>“We are installing Portland Loos in one park in each borough, in areas specifically chosen because they did not previously have bathrooms,” said Lalor.

Of course that shit's going to inflate the cost, you need to tap into water and electric from either inside the park or from the street. That's going to likely require digging a new trench, buying and laying new pipe and conduit, pouring a concrete pad and nevermind what might be in the way of all that work now.

Good luck with Greenstreets!

Lol dude if you died from a heart condition that was exacerbated because of covid, covid is absolutely responsible. If you died because you didn't get care because the hospitals were overwhelmed and you had to wait for emergency care, covid was responsible. If you had a scheduled procedure cancelled and your condition worsened to the point you died because of it, covid was responsible.

You can fuck all the way off with your bullshit hairsplitting. Excess deaths are still way up and covid is responsible.

What do you do? I work in tech and would like to be able to afford that.

I wouldn't agree with that. De Blasio's admin was just as interested in cutting Parks' operating budget in exchange for more police OT as Adams' is. Parks has consistently been the agency that is just cut to the bone on operations money every cycle and then cut some more. Even those programs were accompanied by drops in staffing.

Even at pre-pandemic-staffing-cut levels Parks had nowhere near enough staff to pick up all the tree work that is cintracted out. The backlog on tree inspections, for example, was enormous when I left. That's not a knock on Forestry, there's just too few of them for the whole city... just like the rest of the Parks department.

"I don't care if people die who didn't have to." -you

I suppose the effect is of the same nature, but this is a complete abrogation of the agent's responsibility. This is the union saying "yeah, even we don't care about the benefits you're promised." It is entirely reasonable to not expect your agent to pull that shit.

1, There are explicit exemptions for government retirement plans in ERISA. I'm not an expert, but surface level research says that state/local government plans have more leeway in accounting and reporting practices and are not insured by the pension benefit guaranty corporation.

2, central to the point of this is that the union leadership is telling members to encourage their representatives to change the law to allow for reduced benefits. Even if there are ERISA protections from members now the union leadership is attempting to remove them in the future.

The issue in this case is not the viability of the investments, it's "will the union give away my rights to the pension I paid into at some point in the future?" Because that is the precedent they are setting here.

Recruitment and retention problem. What the hell is my incentive to stay? Is my pension next? Are they going to take the money I've paid into that and tell me to fuck off?

You can have a union any time you want it, man. They don't form out of thin air.

I recognize you're playing devil's advocate here to some extent, so please don't take this as trying to jump on you. I'm just a teensy bit angry about the way the discourse has shaken out in the media.

I think it's disingenuous to suggest that the ~80,000 NYC employees who could work from home make that much of a difference. First, those employees are spread throughout multiple locations across the city - yes, there's a few major offices at Metrotech and in FiDi, but the city has office buildings all over. Just having city employees back is not going to save much of anything because the difference is so small. Second, Most of them would still have to live within the city anyway, so the city is still getting property and sales taxes from them.

"But city employees set an example to private industry" say de Blasio and Adams, to which I say bullshit. City employees are universally looked down on by private industry and public discourse. I would argue that is unjust in most cases, but I challenge anyone to find an example of a hot shit tech firm or a major bank saying "I wish our employees were more like city employees." You'll never find it. Instead you will find countless stories of how city employees are lazy and incompetent. The banks and investment firms and other private employers were always going to do their own thing and whether or not city employees were working from home was never going to make one iota of difference to their managements' decisions.

It kills me that for a brief minute workers in non-union office jobs had that moment of "Fuck you I'm not going back" and it's not turning into a massive labor movement, but here we are.

Edit: 100% on board with your housing suggestion. That's (among other things) one way to make the city more affordable and keep tax revenue up. Hell, I would go even further and suggest public housing that actually has the funding to stay maintained. Fold taxes and rent into a single income stream - you can keep the rents relatively low and the city gets more money out of it to pay for maintenance.

+1 for Pulaski. Been my family's go-to for 30-odd years.

You get substantial efficiency gains in centralizing the combustion and transmitting energy as electricity over combusting in hundreds of small, old boilers and furnaces. It's also a lot easier to deal with the emissions from a single (or at least fewer) source(s).

Edit: this presupposes you have an electric grid that can handle the increased load, which is not a given.