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Cuomo and Christie Veto Port Authority Reform Bill. But Is It Permanent?

by BrookeV16j Posted on December 28, 2014

Mother Jones

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I’m as distant from the politics of New York and New Jersey as it’s possible to get, but I’m puzzled about today’s news that the governors of both states have vetoed legislation that would have reformed the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. Here’s a typical piece from the New York Daily News:

Rather than sign the bill supporters say would have opened the bi-state agency to much needed transparency and accountability, the two governors crossed party lines to announce they would push a reform package recommended Saturday by a panel they had created earlier this year.

….The bill’s Assembly sponsor James Brennan (D-Brooklyn) and other critics argued there was no justification for the veto of legislation passed unanimously by the legislatures in both states.

Some, like former Assemblyman Richard Brodsky, a Westchester Democrat who in 2009 sponsored a public authorities reform bill that did not cover the Port Authority, suggested Cuomo, a Democrat, and Christie, a Republican, were more interested in protecting their own power than actually reforming the agency. “It’s shameful,” Brodsky said. “They ripped the heart out of real reform in order to maintain their control and power.”

….New Jersey Assembly Speaker Vincent Prieto said the vetoes were a slap in the face to commuters who “rightly expected more from the governors after the revelations at the Port Authority over the last year.”…Cuomo and Christie say the reforms they are recommending embrace “the spirit and intent” of the legislation….But critics suggest the recommendations were meant as a smokescreen to distract from the vetoes. “Power trumped good government,” Brodsky said.

Wait a second. The bills were passed unanimously in both legislatures. It should be a snap to override the vetoes, right? And yet, none of the stories I read so much as mentioned the possibility. The best I could find was the last sentence of an AP dispatch:

New Jersey Sen. Loretta Weinberg said the decision was a “cop-out,” and Assemblyman John Wisniewski said he’s disappointed the bill didn’t become law…..Both Weinberg and Wisniewski predicted that overturning a veto would be difficult.

Can someone fill me in on the inner workings of New York and New Jersey politics? Do legislators’ loyalties to their governors really carry that much weight? I mean, everyone knew Cuomo and Christie were opposed to the bill from the start. So if the legislatures passed it unanimously to begin with, why can’t they now muster a two-thirds vote to override? What am I missing here?

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Cuomo and Christie Veto Port Authority Reform Bill. But Is It Permanent?

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Why climate rap actually improves the dreaded school assembly

by JoellenPr Posted on October 29, 2014

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Why climate rap actually improves the dreaded school assembly

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29 Oct 2014 5:07 PM

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Grist wrote about the Alliance for Climate Education (ACE) and its upbeat school presentations back in 2009, just after the program got rolling in a handful of San Francisco Bay Area high schools. The “ACE Assembly” revamps the deadly school assembly — and a deadly topic like climate change — with animation, music, and freestyle rapping to inspire students to get up and do something.

Since then, the program has spread all over the country and reached almost 2 million students. And it just got major accolades: A study published in the academic journal Climatic Change found, after surveying 2,847 students in 49 high schools, that this kind of thing works (… well, if you can measure “engagement” in hard numbers). A before-and-after survey found some impressive changes:

– Students demonstrated a 27 percent increase in climate science knowledge.

– More than one-third of students (38 percent) became more engaged on the issue of climate change.

– The number of students who talked to parents or peers about climate change more than doubled.

Mostly, though, the research underscores something teachers have known for a lonnngggg time: Make learning fun, and it’ll stick. “Exposure to climate science in an engaging edutainment format,” the researchers claim, “changes youths’ knowledge, beliefs, involvement, and behavior positively.”

I’d venture to guess that educating anybody, at any age, could fall under that rubric. There’s a reason why the adults at Grist love depressing yet adorable animations and raps about Monsanto. Just sayin’.

Source:
New Study: The ACE Program Works

, Alliance for Climate Education.

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Why climate rap actually improves the dreaded school assembly

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5 Unanswered Questions About Chris Christie’s Bridge Scandal

by GemmaHornung Posted on January 9, 2014

Mother Jones

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On Wednesday, emails and text messages surrendered by a friend and former political appointee of New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie revealed that Christie’s inner circle masterminded a massive September traffic jam in Fort Lee, New Jersey, as political retribution against the city’s Democratic mayor. The messages show gleeful Christie aides gloating that their plan had wreaked so much havoc. One text message read, “Is it wrong that I’m smiling?”

The messages came from David Wildstein, who was Christie’s high school buddy and, until he resigned due to suspicions about his involvement with the bridge scandal, the director of interstate capital projects for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. Wildstein divulged the messages in response to a subpoena from a panel of New Jersey lawmakers investigating the scandal.

Wildstein is testifying under oath this afternoon about the documents before the New Jersey Assembly’s Committee on Public Works, Infrastructure, and Independent Authorities. Here are five questions lawmakers should put to him:

Is there any evidence that the “traffic study” ever existed?
As suspicions about the Fort Lee traffic jam grew, Christie and his staff said repeatedly that the governor believed a Port Authority traffic study had caused the whole mess.

In his Thursday press conference, Christie maintained that the bridge scandal may have had its roots in a legitimate traffic study, saying, “I don’t know if this was a traffic study that morphed into a political vendetta or a political vendetta that morphed into a traffic study.”

Why does Christie still think his top Port Authority aide was in the dark about this scandal?
On Thursday, Christie also expressed his confidence that David Samson, the Port Authority chairman, played no role in causing Fort Lee’s traffic disaster, saying:

Samson put out a statement yesterday that he had no knowledge of this. I interviewed him yesterday. He was one of my interviews. I am convinced that he had absolutely no knowledge of this, that this was executed at the operational level and never brought to the attention of the Port Authority board of commissioners…And so I sat and met for two hours yesterday with Mr. Samson—General Samson—and again, I’m confident that he had no knowledge of this, based upon our conversations and his review of the information.

Yet messages released on Wednesday make it clear Samson was involved in plans to close Fort Lee’s access lanes on the day of the traffic jam. When New York officials at the Port Authority reopened the lanes, reducing the traffic jam, Wildstein wrote to Kelly, “We are appropriately going nuts. Samson helping us to retaliate.”

Did Christie learn about the bridge plot in his mystery meeting with the Port Authority chairman?
During a text message conversation in which a Christie aide and a Port Authority official planned the lane closures, the pair also tried to plan a meeting between Christie and Samson.

Naturally, some have speculated that the subject of the meeting was the Fort Lee lane closures—which would explode Christie’s claims that he wasn’t aware of plans to close Fort Lee’s access lanes.

What did the traffic jam’s planners think would happen in case of an emergency?
The architects of the Fort Lee traffic jam appear to have considered its potential public safety consequences. In one text message conversation that was sent once the lanes were closed, Port Authority appointee Wildstein waved away the Fort Lee mayor’s complaints about school buses getting stuck in traffic by noting, “Bottom line is he didn’t say safety.”

But officials in Fort Lee, including two members of the borough council and the chief of police, later reported that the traffic jam had slowed down emergency responders—including police who were searching for a missing child. So what was the plan in case of an emergency?

Are there other instances in which the Port Authority and Christie staffers wielded their power for political reasons?
At his Wednesday press conference, Christie claimed he knew nothing about the lane closures that brought Fort Lee to a standstill. So it wasn’t surprising that Christie denied knowing anything about other instances in which his appointees in his administration or at the Port Authority might’ve used their positions to enact political retribution.

The messages Wildstein surrendered illustrate a close relationship with the Christie administration. If any other Fort Lee-like incidents took place, he would know.

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5 Unanswered Questions About Chris Christie’s Bridge Scandal

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Chris Christie’s Failure Shows Just How Popular He Is

by roz3edl Posted on November 14, 2013

Mother Jones

Former New Jersey governor Tom Kean is apparently pretty annoyed with Chris Christie, partly for personal reasons and partly because Christie failed to help any other Republicans get elected to the state legislature. Dave Weigel:

The full failure of Christie’s “coattails” campaign is only now being known. Christie had wanted to win the state senate, cutting ads and campaigning for key candidates. None of his challengers unseated any Democrats. The total Republican gain in the Assembly appears to be… one. That’s better than 2011, when Democrats gained a seat, but even if you factor in the gerrymander that protects Democrats, Kean and other Republicans are amazed that Christie could win by 21 points and carry almost nobody along with him.

OK, but isn’t there another way of looking at this? It shows just how popular Christie is personally even in a state that shows no sign whatsoever of warming up to Republicans. That’s fairly remarkable.

I’ll admit this a slatepitchy kind of argument to make, and I don’t know if I really even believe it. Weigel is certainly right that this leaves Christie in the unenviable position of having to scrape and compromise with Democrats for the next few years, something that’s unlikely to help his presidential ambitions much. If his compromises succeed, he’s a sellout. If they fail, he’s a guy who can’t get anything done. That kind of sucks.

Still! His personal brand is obviously pretty sky high. That has to count for something.

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Chris Christie’s Failure Shows Just How Popular He Is

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Replacing poultry inspectors with factory workers might not be greatest idea, says GAO

by marekso65 Posted on September 6, 2013

Replacing poultry inspectors with factory workers might not be greatest idea, says GAO

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Let’s hope this chicken was inspected by a government worker.

Who would you rather have check factory chickens for signs of illness and smears of crap — a USDA inspector or a factory employee?

The U.S. Department of Agriculture has long stationed its own inspectors along factory lines at poultry plants. But now it’s preparing to reassign those workers to other tasks and allow the agricultural companies to inspect their own birds along processing lines, which would help speed up business operations.

Food-safety groups are raising alarms about the proposed shift, and a new government report indicates that they might well have reason to be concerned.

The USDA’s draft poultry-inspection rules are based on the results of pilot projects in which private-industry inspections were shown to be safe, the department says. But the new report by the U.S. Government Accountability Office says the USDA lacks the data needed to make such claims. The GAO report points out that the department “has not thoroughly evaluated the performance of each of the pilot projects over time even though the agency stated it would do so when it announced the pilot projects,” and at least in one case it used “snapshots of data” from limited periods of time instead of data from the whole period of the pilot project.

USDA poultry inspectors are also opposed to the changes, The New York Times reports:

In affidavits given to the Government Accountability Project, a nonprofit legal assistance group for whistle-blowers, several inspectors who work at plants where the pilot program is in place said the main problem was that they were removed from positions on the assembly line and put at the end of the line, which made it impossible for them to spot diseased birds.

The inspectors, whose names were redacted, said they had observed numerous instances of poultry plant employees allowing birds contaminated with fecal matter or other substances to pass. And even when the employees try to remove diseased birds, they face reprimands, the inspectors said.

Any chance this will all be sorted out before Thanksgiving?

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.Find this article interesting? Donate now to support our work.Read more: Food

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Replacing poultry inspectors with factory workers might not be greatest idea, says GAO

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California, Illinois lawmakers welcome frackers

by cur07jqm Posted on June 3, 2013

California, Illinois lawmakers welcome frackers

By John Upton

Lawmakers rolled out red carpets for frackers last week in California and Illinois.

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California’s Assembly rejected, by a 37-24 vote, AB 1323, which would have imposed a moratorium on fracking until state regulators issue environmental and safety guidelines. Apparently the rush to cash in on oil and gas deposits just cannot wait for such trivial matters. “Let’s unleash this magnificent potential for jobs,” Assemblyman Jim Patterson (R) said, according to the AP.

A separate bill requiring scientific studies, water testing, and public notification of chemicals used by frackers — but imposing no moratorium — passed California’s Senate and will now move on to the Assembly for a vote.

Fracking for gas and oil is well underway beneath private land in California, though there are no requirements for energy companies to tell anybody what they’re up to, meaning it’s difficult to know how widespread the practice is. (Fracking for oil on federal lands in the state, meanwhile, is on hold pending an environmental review ordered by a federal judge.)

The practice of fracking is pitting farmers against energy companies in California. From The New York Times:

By all accounts, oilmen and farmers — often shortened to “oil and ag” here — have coexisted peacefully for decades in this conservative, business friendly part of California about 110 miles northwest of Los Angeles. But oil’s push into new areas and its increasing reliance on fracking, which uses vast amounts of water and chemicals that critics say could contaminate groundwater, are testing that relationship and complicating the continuing debate over how to regulate fracking in California.

“As farmers, we’re very aware of the first 1,000 feet beneath us and the groundwater that is our lifeblood,” said Tom Frantz, a fourth-generation farmer here and a retired high school math teacher who now cultivates almonds. “We look to the future, and we really do want to keep our land and soil and water in good condition.”

“This mixing of farming and oil, all in one place, is a new thing for us,” added Mr. Frantz, who is also an environmentalist and is pressing for a moratorium on fracking.

In Illinois, a bill that clears the way for fracking to get rolling in the state is headed for the desk of Gov. Pat Quinn (D), who says he’ll sign it. The Natural Resources Defense Council reported last week that some fracking has already been happening in the state, unbeknownst to most Illinoisans, but many companies have been waiting for the state to establish its regulatory framework before sinking their drills. This bill imposes “some of the toughest disclosure laws in the country” on frackers, the Chicago Tribune reports, but it’s not nearly as tough as green activists had wanted. From the Tribune:

Under new regulations which would take effect as soon as Quinn signs them into law, companies who wish to frack for oil or gas … must disclose a wealth of new information to the public, which has the opportunity to appeal permits and launch lawsuits against energy firms who attempt to skirt the law.

Environmental groups who helped hash out the bill say they would have preferred a moratorium on fracking.

So, yes, some safeguards are being put in place. But overall, lawmakers seem to hope the legislation will spur an oil boom in the state. The Chicago Tribune summed up the news this way: “Let the fracking begin.”

John Upton is a science fan and green news boffin who tweets, posts articles to Facebook, and blogs about ecology. He welcomes reader questions, tips, and incoherent rants: johnupton@gmail.com.

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Bills to ban fracking in California move forward

by Christina Craig Posted on May 1, 2013

Bills to ban fracking in California move forward

By Claire Thompson

cyenobite

Could California put a halt to fracking? Some lawmakers are pushing legislation that would do just that.

On Monday, the state Assembly’s Natural Resources Committee approved no fewer than three bills calling for a moratorium on hydraulic fracturing until its environmental and health effects are thoroughly studied by the state. Meanwhile, another bill pending in the state Senate would allow fracking to continue for now but would impose a moratorium if the state fails to complete a comprehensive review by January 2015.

David Roberts recently offered a list of reasons why a California fracking frenzy is a bad idea, one of which is the lack of oversight from state regulators so far. The new proposed bills aim to address this problem. From The Sacramento Bee:

A branch of the Department of Conservation has released some draft regulations that would govern fracking, but lawmakers have criticized the proposed rules as too vague and lambasted the Division of Oil, Gas, and Geothermal Resources for moving too slowly.

“The lack of regulations in an environment that should be regulated is a recurrent theme,” said Assemblyman Richard Bloom, D-Santa Monica, author of Assembly Bill 1301. “Public and scientific concerns have increased exponentially yet regulatory oversight lags behind.”

It’s not just greens who want to keep their state frack-free. California’s powerful agricultural interests are also calling for more regulation and oversight, given the threat this water-intensive and water-polluting process poses to crops. And considering the growing evidence that fracking can cause earthquakes, every citizen of this already seismically unstable state has reason to be concerned.

The state’s fracking fight is centered around the Monterey Shale in Southern California, which holds two-thirds of the country’s estimated oil reserves. Production there had been dwindling until the recent rise of fracking and horizontal drilling made hard-to-reach reserves accessible, and now oil companies are chomping at the bit. From a February New York Times article:

For decades, oilmen have been unable to extricate the Monterey Shale’s crude because of its complex geological formation, which makes extraction quite expensive. But as the oil industry’s technological advances succeed in unlocking oil from increasingly difficult locations, there is heady talk that California could be in store for a new oil boom.

Established companies are expanding into the Monterey Shale, while newcomers are opening offices in Bakersfield, the capital of California’s oil industry, about 40 miles east of here. With oil prices remaining high, landmen are buying up leases on federal land, sometimes bidding more than a thousand dollars an acre in auctions that used to fetch the minimum of $2.

A federal judge recently ruled that the federal Bureau of Land Management acted illegally in issuing such leases on two tracts of land in central California. He didn’t invalidate the leases, but temporarily barred drilling until environmental impacts can be weighed.

If a bill to ban fracking actually passes the California legislature, environmental groups wouldn’t have to sue the BLM on a case-by-case basis to halt fracking.

But a fracking moratorium failed in the state legislature last year. Will it have more success this time around? Stay tuned.

Claire Thompson is an editorial assistant at Grist.

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