Mara Gay

Central Park is New York’s backyard.

So imagine the surprise thousands of people will get when they head to the park this weekend and find the Great Lawn — the heart of Central Park — closed for a private event.

That event is OZY Fest, a two-day festival of “live music, conversation, comedy and food” coming to the park Saturday and Sunday. Its organizers say they expect 40,000 people to descend on the Great Lawn each day.

The event sounds like fun. Soccer star Megan Rapinoe will be there. So will big names like John Legend and Alex Rodriguez, Stacey Abrams and Trevor Noah.

Half the tickets will be free, the festival’s organizers say. Those who want to snag a free ticket are asked to fill out an application and post about the event on social media platforms.

The other half of the tickets come at a price. Their price ranges from $79 for general admission on Sunday, to $449 for a weekend of VIP access that includes a “fast-track” entrance and front-row seating.

Think on that for a moment: Sun-seekers and parkgoers are to be displaced, on a July weekend, by an event offering VIP access to a patch of grass in New York City’s storied Central Park.

OZY Fest isn’t the first to use space in a public park, or charge admission for such an event.

Though the Global Citizen Festival, which featured Janet Jackson, rapper Cardi B and others last year, offers 80% of its tickets free, it charged admission for VIP and other access.

The Great GoogaMooga, a music and food festival, charged hundreds of dollars for VIP tickets at Prospect Park. Its organizers were denied a permit in 2013 after the city’s parks department said the event was too large and some Brooklynites complained that it overwhelmed a usually bucolic space.

For years, designers took over Bryant Park for Fashion Week, turning it into a convenient, centrally located event space. The Times will be holding a two-day food festival there in October with $25 admission, food and drinks not included.

Other events, like Shakespeare in the Park, are free but can be notoriously difficult to score tickets to.

The parks department has granted OZY Fest a nine-day, $1.5 million permit for the Great Lawn. The city says the money will cover security, cleanup and other costs. Taxpayers deserve a much better deal than that. It’s disheartening that the city would be only breaking even when renting it out to a for-profit group charging admission many New Yorkers are unable to afford.

The event’s organizers have said the space will be accessible to the public for most of that time. That’s good to hear, considering it’s owned by the people of New York to begin with.

In New York City, the most densely populated major city in the country, park space is precious.

Jane Meyer, a spokeswoman for Mayor Bill de Blasio, noted that the park was available for such events only seven days out of the entire year. She said there is a “definite public good to having these kind of cultural events that thousands and thousands of New Yorkers can access for free.”

In a city that increasingly feels like a playground for the wealthy, private events that require New Yorkers to pay for the privilege of using their own parks are worth a second thought.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/17/opinion/central-park-private-event.html" id="fc9d9157-8fc3-3d8d-aa44-1fd088ad67ce">The New York Times</a>.

(Editorial Observer)

A VIP Party in Central Park

<h1>(Editorial Observer): NEW YORK — It was a hero’s welcome for the U.S. women’s soccer team in New York, where the country’s largest city threw a ticker-tape parade that drew thousands of people to celebrate the World Cup win.</h1>

As the team rode north up the stretch of Broadway known as the Canyon of Heroes atop a parade float, Megan Rapinoe, the team’s irrepressible pink-haired co-captain, led the revelry. Gripping a bottle of Champagne in one hand and a World Cup trophy in the other, she beamed. “I deserve this!” she said.

New York City, led by its mayor, Bill de Blasio, who is running for president, went all out for the event. Homemade ticker tape filled the air.

When the team arrived at City Hall, they found a sea of cheering, ebullient paradegoers. Many wore the white jersey of their favorite player.

“This is one of the best days of my life,” one young girl told midfielder Sam Mewis, inside City Hall’s marbled rotunda. Another girl asked for a hug.

As the players took the stage outside City Hall, the crowd broke out into chants of “Equal Pay!” — a nod to efforts underway to close the pay gap between the U.S. women’s and men’s soccer teams.

After de Blasio handed the players each a key to the city, Rapinoe thanked the fans for their support. “It is our responsibility to make this world a better place,” she said.

Then she opened her arms wide and grinned.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/10/opinion/world-cup-soccer-parade.html" link="null" target="_blank">The New York Times</a>.

New York City, led by its mayor, Bill de Blasio, who is running for president, went all out for the event. Homemade ticker tape filled the air.

World Cup parade of joy

<h1>The teaser came in a midevening tweet.</h1>

Lynne Patton, the Trump family event planner whom the president named regional administrator for the Department of Housing and Urban Development, had a surprise for Mayor Bill de Blasio.

Oh, and for the 400,000 people who live in New York City’s public housing, too.

“Thrilled to announce that @SecretaryCarson is coming to NYC tomorrow to make a huge &amp; historic announcement that will be great news for the residents of @NYCHA!” Patton wrote on Twitter on Wednesday night. “However, whether or not this announcement will be great news for the @NYCMayor remains to be seen ... ”

That would be Ben Carson, HUD secretary, who once said that public housing should not be “a comfortable setting that would make somebody want to say: ‘I’ll just stay here. They will take care of me.’” And NYCHA is the New York City Housing Authority, the public housing system plagued with broken furnaces and elevators, mold, vermin, lead paint and about $32 billion in needed repairs over the next five years.

In New York, Patton’s tweet set off a small panic, as officials, reporters and public housing residents scrambled to find out just what the Trump administration had in mind for a system crippled by decades of neglect and underfunding from Washington and mismanagement by its city-appointed leadership.

Was HUD going to take over NYCHA? Was the president planning to level the Queensbridge Houses and replace them with a gleaming tower of Trump condos?

Patton wasn’t saying. “Maybe. Maybe not,” she tweeted to a journalist who said it sounded like HUD might take over the city housing authority.

In other words, New York, stay tuned!

The City Council speaker, Corey Johnson, who grew up in public housing, may have put it best. “Playing coy,” Johnson said, when so many residents are “living in horrific conditions — is disgusting,” he tweeted. “This isn’t a ratings ploy. This is real life. Enough with the games.”

On Thursday, Carson came to New York City for the big reveal about a new agreement with the city, NYCHA and the federal prosecutors who had threatened a lawsuit over the dismal living conditions and a lead-paint scandal.

The new agreement gives HUD somewhat more powers than a deal that a federal judge rejected last year.

The judge said that the earlier deal did not create strict enough standards to ensure problems would be solved, and that HUD had failed in its duty to conduct proper oversight of the agency.

The new plan calls for HUD and federal prosecutors, rather than the judge, to appoint a monitor at the housing authority. It requires the mayor to choose a new head of the authority from a list of candidates preapproved by federal officials, rather than on his own. And the agreement includes deadlines for resolution to problems, although it gives the agency 20 years to resolve all lead paint problems.

Shoulder to shoulder with the mayor at a news conference Thursday in lower Manhattan, Carson talked about turning public housing into “safe and clean and nurturing environments to give people an opportunity to move up the ladder,” and said he was “very excited” about the agreement.

It’s no wonder. Under the deal, the federal government commits nothing new, while the city recommits to spend over $2 billion on repairs over the next 10 years. The city is being forced to pay for the federal monitor, too. This, after the federal government starved public housing of funds for decades, leaving cities like New York without the ability to build new units or make basic repairs.

In his nearly two years in office, Carson has done little but stand by as the Trump administration proposed devastating cuts to his agency, which Congress, fortunately, blocked.

At every level of government, public housing is seen as somebody else’s problem. While the mayor and the HUD secretary put on a good show of resolve, neither has done much to earn the confidence of NYCHA residents. De Blasio has done and spent more than his predecessors, and has said repairs have been quicker. But the city’s public housing has a long way to go.

Patton has discussed showing solidarity with residents by temporarily moving into a New York City public housing unit. Thursday, when roughly 10,000 residents were left without heat on a bitterly cold January day after the authority’s boilers had failed again, would have been a good day to try it.

This article originally appeared in <a id="b1ec81a3-bc78-47da-8903-7a703d01d0c2" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/31/opinion/editorials/washington-new-york-public-housing.html">The New York Times</a>.

Washington's cold hypocrisy on New York's public housing

Oh, and for the 400,000 people who live in New York City’s public housing, too.

<h1>ALBANY, N.Y. — Democrats in Albany had something altogether new and unfamiliar to warm them in the bitter chill that marks the start of the legislative season: power.</h1>

In November, the party won real control of the state Senate for the first time in more than a half-century. This week, Democratic senators — along with colleagues who have long controlled the Assembly — began plowing ahead with reforms that Republicans have blocked for years.

On Monday, the Legislature moved to update archaic election laws by approving bills to enact early voting, to mandate that primary elections for state and federal offices be held on the same day, and to let 16- and 17-year-olds preregister to vote.

Hours later, they acted to close a loophole that let shell businesses called limited liability companies avoid limits on corporate donations by treating them like individuals. This long-overdue measure should help curb the influence of dark money, particularly from real estate interests, in politics.

Finally, the lawmakers went home, with Democrats, some seeming slightly dazed, posting celebratory tweets about their sudden good fortune.

The next day brought more action. On Tuesday, taking up more legislation years in the making, they voted to revise the state hate crime law to include protections for transgender individuals. Lawmakers moved to ban conversion therapy, signaling an end to a bogus technique that purports to make gay people straight but ruins lives instead.

Encouragingly, some Republicans joined their Democratic colleagues to support some of these measures.

Not too shabby for their first two days in business.

After years in the political wilderness, the state’s Democratic senators are letting the good times roll. Their leading bon vivant is Sen. Andrea Stewart-Cousins, the newly minted majority leader who has seemed to relish every minute.

At a news conference Monday, Stewart-Cousins thanked those around her and then, in a plea she had made countless times while in the minority, urged Senate Republicans to begin consideration of Democratic proposals.

Slight pause. Sly grin. “I’m just kidding!” she said.

The members of her caucus cracked up, releasing years of frustration, their heads swinging back with joyous laughter. Stewart-Cousins threw up her hands like a champion, clapped and shouted, “Yay!”

These heady times at the Capitol have some of New York’s liberals pinching themselves. Susan Lerner, the executive director of Common Cause New York, a reform group, said she was recovering from shock after watching Democrats in the first hours of the new legislative session pass voting reforms that had been stymied for years.

“It’s whiplash,” Lerner said. “Is there more to do? Yes. But today, we’re celebrating.”

On an Amtrak train taking chattering lobbyists, aides, journalists and lawmakers to Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s annual budget address Tuesday, the progressives on board were giddy, a strange feeling for them on a trip to Albany in January. “I’m jazzed,” said the New York Civil Liberties Union’s executive president, Donna Lieberman. She joked that in previous years she’d often felt like she needed to take a shower after spending time in the State Capitol.

Less jazzed were Senate Republicans, who after decades of uninterrupted power, now seemed vaguely lost. On Tuesday, for example, they suggested that if marijuana must be legalized, any revenue should go to a tax cut. Good luck with that.

For some Republican lawmakers, a vote for a bill that would treat violence against transgender individuals as the hate crime that it is seemed particularly hard to take. From their seats in the back of the room, a couple of the Republicans rolled their eyes and snickered.

At one point, state Sen. Jessica Ramos, one of six members who won primaries against turncoat Democrats who had caucused with Republicans, said lawmakers should go even further to help transgender New Yorkers, leading state Sen. Frederick Akshar, a Republican, to exclaim: “Jesus Christ! Further?”

Even for Democrats, though, it hasn’t been all fun and reforms.

In the Assembly, Speaker Carl Heastie marred an otherwise banner start to the new year by engaging in a legal maneuver to try to keep a $50,500 pay raise for lawmakers while eliminating limits on outside income set by a special committee that enacted the raise. No doubt he has better ways to spend his time.

In the months ahead, bigger battles loom, like approving a congestion pricing measure to pay for an overhaul of the New York City subway, which could prove to be one of the toughest political fights in the state this year, and the most important.

Many of the greatest challenges and opportunities will lie with Cuomo, who is likely to sign the measures. In unveiling a $175 billion budget proposal Tuesday, he presented an ambitious agenda, but few details.

For years many felt the governor might be more comfortable with a divided Legislature that he could blame for failing to enact legislation that some voters might find controversial. But on Tuesday he said Democratic control of the state Senate left him feeling that the state had been “liberated.” He suggested it would help deliver much-needed change for New York.

This article originally appeared in <a id="9134e933-3209-4200-a6d8-da4b48115afd" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/16/opinion/democrats-in-albany-let-the-good-times-roll.html">The New York Times</a>.

Democrats in Albany let the good times roll

In November, the party won real control of the state Senate for the first time in more than a half-century.

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Mara Gay

Articles written by the author

A VIP Party in Central Park

World Cup parade of joy

Washington's cold hypocrisy on New York's public housing

Democrats in Albany let the good times roll