New School in Town

January 25, 2007

By Laura Sayer

When the AMPARK Neighborhood School opened Sept. 5, it marked the end of an exhaustive effort by Amalgamated parents to bring a school to their community.

“People have wanted this school for a long time,” says Principal Betty Lopez-Towey, explaining why, in its first year, AMPARK already has a thriving PTA. “I’m here until eight at night all the time because we have so many committees.”

Members of the Amalgamated Housing Cooperative Community (commonly called “the Amalgamated”) realized they needed a school of their own because, for years, they were losing “cooperating families” to neighborhoods where progressive schools, like Central Park East, were located, says Ken Solomon, an Amalgamated resident and integral part of the push for AMPARK.

They explored several options, but went nowhere with then-Region 1 Superintendent Irma Zardoya. “The final breakthrough came when we talked to Jeff Dinowitz,” Solomon says, explaining how the Bronx assemblyman arranged a meeting with the deputy mayor and put a call through to Zardoya.

“I don’t know what he said,” Solomon says, but whatever it was, “Irma then got in touch with us.”

Tucked in the center of the block on Hillman Avenue is the fruit of their labor. Located diagonally across the street from PS 95, a white stucco building that still advertises a community center in English and Hebrew is home to kindergartners and first-graders, for now. The small, alternative school will graduate to grade five in the coming years, adding grades as its students’ progress, Lopez-Towey says.

AMPARK draws its students from the broader PS 95 zone, which includes students who live on the west side of the Concourse in Bedford Park as well as Tracey Towers and Knox-Gates residents, and the Amalgamated community. The current make-up of the school is about half and half, Lopez-Towey says. Amalgamated Nursery School, a popular, private institution, serves as a “feeder school” for AMPARK, she says, which means that children from the nursery school and their siblings get first crack at enrollment.

“But we don’t ‘choose’ kids,” she adds. “We just want parents and children to know what we do, to be well informed about education at a progressive school, and then it’s first-come first-served.”

One specific goal of this progressive school, Lopez-Towey says over and over again, is to make lessons “age and developmentally appropriate.” By way of example, she adds, “This means you don’t bring textbooks into kindergarten.”

One parent, Sharis Ingram, whose 5-year-old, Kalindra, attends AMPARK, says that part of the school’s appeal comes from teachers thinking of themselves as “guides for children’s learning, rather than experts who have all the information.”

In the principal’s words, the staff is just “trying to bring to the table all we’ve learned, read about and experienced about how children learn best.”

Lopez-Towey points to the music teacher, who imparts pre-reading skills in the guise of a song.

“If you know the words, say them in your head,” he says, and the children mouth the lyrics silently and do the hand motions once through before singing out loud.

When children need a break, Lopez-Towey says, they can play with a sand labyrinth at the exploring table, spend a few minutes with the fish tank or she’ll take them upstairs to run around for a few minutes until they can focus again. “And the children know better than to take advantage of these things, because we’ve talked about what they mean,” she adds.

Five minutes later, she asks a little girl and boy who are taking a break, “Why aren’t you singing?”

“We’re in trouble,” the girl replies, explaining to Lopez-Towey why they’re there.

“Oh yes, you’re exploring,” Lopez-Towey says, as she whisks them back to their activity.

Ingram says AMPARK’s learning style is exactly what she wanted for Kalindra. And although it’s only January, Ingram is ready to call the school a success. “She wakes up every morning and asks if it’s a school day. And when I say it is, she says, ‘Yippy!’”

Ingram likes the choices her daughter gets to make in her education and that, in the school’s curriculum, her child’s development comes before test scores. Having been on the hiring committee, Ingram says she was sure Lopez-Towey was the right person for the job.

But other parents weren’t so sure.

“Some parents were worried their children weren’t going to really learn,” and that progressive meant “wild and chaotic,” Ingram says. “But if they sit down and have a conversation with Betty, I think anyone can see how very serious she is in terms of her expectations for children’s learning.”

Just as she wants children to be vested in their own education, Lopez-Towey and her staff invest themselves and their time. “You have to make a commitment to work in a school like this,” she says. The teachers attend conferences and workshops on their own, she says. They write detailed evaluations and notes home to parents each week.

“It’s not that hard,” she says, of AMPARK’s take on education. “What is hard, is when you’re in an environment where you can’t offer children what they need.”

Ed. note: For more information on AMPARK, call (718) 548-3451.

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Board Reaches Out

January 25, 2007

By Editorial

We were pleased to learn at a recent meeting of Community Board 7, that the Board is planning to create a Web site this year.

As Long Term Planning Committee chair Paul Foster said at the meeting, “It’s impossible to be a community board [in the 21st century] without a Web site.”

Community boards were officially formed in 1975 (following other experiments like Mayor John Lindsay’s Little City Halls) to give residents a voice on local issues. In a city of eight million where City Hall is close to an hour subway ride from the northwest Bronx, it’s critical for there to be more local centers of government information and access.

The boards have several important functions, including being the first stop in the city’s land-use review process, developing the community’s budget priorities, and working with city agencies to address problem areas.

Despite these critical tasks, too few people know about the Community Board or how to use it as a tool for community improvement. The Board’s new Web site will serve as an entry point for people, who will be able to learn about the Board’s workings, its committee meetings, and current issues, all just a click away.

We surfed the Net a little and, without too much effort, found some great examples of good community board Web sites all over the city with features that CB7 may want to copy or improve upon as it develops its own.

Our neighbors at Community Board 8 (bronxcb8.org) post a calendar of committee meetings on their site, along with the status of various rezoning efforts and the minutes of all general board and committee meeting minutes going back a couple of years. You can also file a complaint electronically. Board 2 in Hunts Point has similar features, as do virtually all the boards in Manhattan. Board 4 in Manhattan distributes board news and information by zip code to residents who register on the site. Board 5 (cb5.org) has a listing of committee meeting dates and details two months in advance. That board also has a prodigious list of community resources such as senior programs, mental health services and food programs. One particularly innovative and interactive board Web site in Queens (cb3qn.nyc.gov) features discussion forums for community residents and a storehouse of board documents, like development proposals and permit applications.

We congratulate community Board 7 for embarking on this important project and we are certain it will attract more people to getting involved in their community.

Member Item Series

In this issue, we begin a multi-part series exploring the role of our state legislators in distributing your taxpayer money in the form of “member items.”

The amount of this money that your elected representatives allocate to local community groups has long been kept under dark cover – unless a particular politician felt like disclosing the details to his constituents (most did not).

It wasn’t until this year, following a gathering drumbeat from editorial boards and good government groups — and more recently a lawsuit from the Albany Times Union and the indictment of local State Senator Efrain Gonzalez for allegedly stealing member item money — that the information began to see the light of day.

We do not oppose member items themselves. In most cases, a local elected official is more in tune with what groups deserve and need public funding than someone working at a state agency almost 200 miles away in Albany. But by mostly keeping the details under wraps, New Yorkers have been unable to see if their communities have been given a fair and equal shake under this system. Now that the veil has been lifted a little, it’s quite clear that there are gaping disparities in what various legislators bring home to their districts each year.

In the next issue, we’ll take a look at how our communities have fared under this system.think!

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Money Well Spent? A News Series

January 25, 2007

By Alex Kratz

Reform is the buzz word hovering over the New York state legislature. Playing a vital role in any kind of reform movement will be how the state deals with member items – funds distributed by state senators and members of the Assembly for local projects in their districts. Through this series, the Norwood News will examine how member items are distributed by local lawmakers, how these funds assist local organizations, and what happens when they are distributed improperly.

In this first installment, we explain the recent history of member items and discuss how the system may or may not be changing in Albany.

Part 1: Show us the Money
Disclosure of Pork Gains Momentum

For the first time in eight years, the New York state legislature – by all accounts one of the most dysfunctional lawmaking bodies in the country – has made public how it spends $200 million dollars in funds distributed by lawmakers for local projects, otherwise known as pork-barrel projects or member items.

Lawmakers use member items to fund vital local projects and programs such as little leagues, senior services, graffiti removal, cultural parades, even dances at your local community center.

But those member items have also infamously funded obscure ventures like fixing the roof of a hunting club near Albany and building a cheese museum in upstate Rome. In other instances, member items have snaked their way back into the pockets of the very representative who gave them out.

Since 1998, that $200 million was distributed by lawmakers without oversight from the public, media or any kind of budget review process, making it a system ripe for abuse. Where hundreds of millions in taxpayer dollars was spent remained Albany’s little secret.

But in late October, a judge ordered both houses of the state legislature to disclose its member items immediately, following a lawsuit filed by the Albany Times-Union.

The decision, coupled with an outcry over corruption scandals involving member items (including the indictment of Bronx State Senator Efrain Gonzalez) and the arrival of a new Democratic governor, appears to have spurred a reform movement in Albany. How far the reforms will go remains to be seen.

The Darkest Corner
Up until 1998, member items were listed in the state budget, but without individual lawmakers’ names attached to them. Though the public and media didn’t know who sponsored the allocations, at least they knew where the money was going.

That changed for the worse in 1998 when Republican Gov. George Pataki vetoed all of Democratic Assembly Majority Leader Sheldon Silver’s member items. Furious, Silver eventually pounded out a back room deal with Pataki and Republican Senate Majority Leader Joseph Bruno.

According to the terms outlined in the deal, which was put into practice without debate in the legislature, a $200 million lump sum would be placed into the budget for member items. Each majority leader would receive $85 million and the governor would get $30 million to divvy up as they desired. The member items would not be listed to protect them from the governor’s veto and, at the same time, public scrutiny.

In a larger sense, $200 million is peanuts when you consider that the state budget runs into the tens of billions. But over the past year, the secrecy surrounding member item allocations had become a symbol of legislative problems.

“It’s become a symptom of what’s wrong with Albany in a broader way,” said Bob Port, senior political editor of the Times-Union. “It’s a drop in the bucket, relatively speaking, but it’s a very important drop because it is money that’s being spent without any accountability and the potential for abuse is so much greater.”

Liam Arbetman, a research associate for Common Cause, a public interest group that advocates for better government in New York and nationally, echoed Port’s assessment.

“It was clear these funds weren’t going to projects of merit or to the community,” Arbetman said, adding later, “It was the darkest corner of state spending.”

Abusing the System
State Senator Efrain Gonzalez, who has represented the northwest Bronx for the past 16 years (after taking over for his boss and mentor, Israel Ruiz, who went to prison for lying on a bank loan), became the local symbol of member item abuse in October when he was indicted on federal mail fraud charges.

In December, those charges expanded and the senator now faces allegations that he pocketed for personal use half a million dollars in member item money. According to the indictment, Gonzalez began funneling member items to himself through a variety of non-profits in 1999, soon after member items were hidden from the public eye.

During an interview over the summer, Gonzalez refused to divulge how he spent his member items. A Democrat with close ties to Republicans, Gonzalez received more member item money – some $250,000 a year – than most Senate Democrats.

Port says equal distribution of member item funds is another flaw in the system. The minority parties in both houses receive less than 20 percent of the total pot, he said. After a preliminary analysis of the member items listed for the 2006-2007 budget, the Times-Union found no “formula” to how they are distributed. But it appears, Port said, that “the more powerful the person, the more money they get.”

The Senate majority leader himself is currently under federal investigation for allegedly funneling member item funds to a for-profit company run by a friend.

Signs of Reform
Few lawmakers have been willing to speak out against the system – probably for fear of being penalized when the member item pie is divvied up. But that may be changing.

State Senator José M. Serrano (D-Manhattan/Bronx), for one, has been candid about his own beneficiaries, even publishing an itemized list on his blog www.r8ny.com/blog/137.

The young senator has also been a vocal supporter of making every lawmaker’s items public. “To use a well-known phrase, ‘Sunlight is the Best Disinfectant,’” Serrano said in a telephone interview last week, “and if we can shine some light on member items then elected officials will be a little more careful about who they give money to.”

Serrano, a former Council member whose father is Bronx Congressman José Serrano, said it was common practice for City Council members to publicize grants they distributed to local organizations. “It was something I was proud of and something the community should know,” he said.

So when he was elected to the Senate in 2004, Serrano was surprised to find this wasn’t routine procedure. “I couldn’t understand why elected officials didn’t want to disclose their items,” he said. “[Disclosure] is a way to show your constituents you’re at the wheel. You’re showing you’re providing economic support to organizations that need it.”

These choices, Serrano said, are often good indications of a politician’s priorities. Serrano, for example, is a strong believer in the arts as an economic engine and as a vehicle for change, something reflected in the groups he has chosen to support.

Last October, when a judge forced Senate and Assembly leaders to reveal each legislator’s items, many good government advocates applauded the decision. Unfortunately, the information “was disclosed in such a fashion that it was impossible for the average person to decipher,” Serrano said.

The search process has been made easier – users can now search an on-line database using “key words” such as a senator’s name (see sidebar).

According to Democrats, however, the Republican majority is still dragging its feet, and in a bitterly fought battle on the Senate floor early last week, they dismissed the Democrats’ 8-point reform package. The package included measures to make the full disclosure of member items standard practice.

“They [the Republicans] pulled every trick in the book to defeat our rules agenda,” Serrano said.

Still, there are signs of progress. Investigating the abuse of member items is on the top of new Democratic Attorney General Andrew Cuomo’s 2007 agenda. He says he will review all suspicious allocations from the 2006-2007 budget, but not delve into previous years.

On Jan. 16, behind closed doors, new Gov. Eliot Spitzer, Bruno, and Silver hashed out an agreement to publish member items in this year’s state budget. This is a step forward, but really just puts the state legislature back to where it was before 1998. The names of sponsoring lawmakers will still not be attached to member items and it remains unclear how much advanced notice the public will have to review them before items are approved for the budget.

Nevertheless, Serrano says, those resisting reform are becoming more marginalized, and with a sympathetic governor, he’s hopeful that Albany and its murky, dysfunctional legislature will continue to change.

In a recent entry on his blog, Serrano wrote, “Transparency works for just about everything but business envelopes and bedroom curtains.”

Mapping the Moolah

Want to see how your local senator chose to distribute their member item money? It’s not exactly easy. Just follow these instructions. Go online to http://www.senate.state.ny.us, then click on “Senate Reports” in the left hand column. Several reports will come up. Member items are listed in the “Community Projects Fund” links going back to the 2003-2004 fiscal year. The only report that is both comprehensive and searchable is the most recent report from 2006-2007. If you click on that, you should be able to type in your senator’s last name after clicking on the binoculars icon (the search button) in the overhead tool bar.

For the Assembly members, go to http://assembly.state.ny.us/ and then click on “Legislative Reports” in the left hand column. From there, click on “2006 Ways and Means Committee Reports.” Several reports will come up. You can click on any of the “Legislative Initiatives” from the past four years, including two separate reports 2006-2007. Once you’ve clicked on a year of reports, you can search the documents using the last binocular button we talked about in the previous paragraph.

Exhausted? The Albany Times-Union is hoping to make things easier come spring. The Hearst publication is planning to create a Web site where visitors can simply type in their zip code or a lawmaker’s name and find out how member items were distributed in their area.

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Bids Are In For Armory

January 25, 2007

By Alex Kratz

The race to redevelop the Kingsbridge Armory into a massive mixed-use facility is now a three-way contest.

While the city’s Economic Development Corporation (EDC), the quasi-public entity spearheading the Armory’s development, remains tight-lipped about which developers submitted proposals, the Norwood News learned that three candidates have thrown their hats in the ring.

The Atlantic Development Group and the Related Company have each submitted detailed proposals on how they would develop the Armory if given the opportunity. The third candidate remains a mystery.

Atlantic, headed by prolific affordable housing magnate Peter Fine, signed on with the Richman Group last year and worked closely with the Kingsbridge Armory Redevelopment Alliance (KARA), an umbrella group of community organizations, to create a detailed Armory proposal, which was presented to the community in late May.

Fine made his presentation to Community Board 7, which was generally well-received by KARA, in hopes of bypassing the Request for Proposals (RFP) process. Atlantic even took the extra step of securing a new location for the two National Guard units currently housed in the Armory’s annex buildings. In the RFP, the EDC maintains that the relocation of the Guard units will not be a factor in its decision making process.

If Fine’s new proposal looks anything like the one he presented in May, it will include 1,000 parking spots, a movie theater multiplex, large and small retail stores (including a big chain such as the home improvement giant Lowes or the department store Kohl’s), a National Guard recruiting station, and community space for youth and seniors. At the time, Fine said the YMCA was interested in opening a branch at the Armory and that he would like to identify a bookstore chain as well.

“We worked closely with local residents, civic leaders, clergy, education advocates and elected officials to create a community-oriented plan that would deliver schools, jobs, athletic facilities, entertainment, retail and community space,” Atlantic officials said in an e-mail statement through its public relations company.

Atlantic has completed several affordable housing developments in the Bronx and recently won the contract to build a new Boricua College campus in Melrose. In addition to classrooms and other school facilities, the plan for the private bilingual college, which also has campuses in Brooklyn and Manhattan, will include retail space, a high school, and 700 units of affordable housing.

Meanwhile, Related, which has close ties to Deputy Mayor Dan Doctoroff, is currently developing the Bronx Terminal Market into a massive million-square-foot mall just south of Yankee Stadium. While Atlantic primarily operates without much publicity in the New York City area, Related is a multi-faceted national company with offices in Miami, Los Angeles and Chicago in addition to its Manhattan offices.

Related’s portfolio includes $10 billion in developments, according to its Web site (Atlantic, by contrast, doesn’t have a Web site). In total, Related has developed or acquired 35,000 apartment units and four million square feet of commercial space.

Dean Vanderwarker, one of Related’s associate vice presidents, said that he couldn’t go into the details of his company’s proposal, but that it was “still very interested in becoming the Armory’s designated developer.”

Related boss Stephen Ross and Doctoroff are longtime friends and former business partners. When Related was pursuing the Bronx Terminal Market project, residents and merchant advocates complained that they were shut out of the negotiating process and that penalties weren’t steep enough if Related did not come up with the goods stipulated in a Community Benefits agreement, such as a provision that BJ’s Wholesale Club accept food stamps, and invest $3 million in job training and referral programs. Elected officials hailed the benefits agreement, however.

“This agreement should serve as the benchmark for doing business in our borough and throughout the city,” said Bronx Borough President Adolfo Carrión at the time.

While Related appears to enjoy the support of City Hall, Fine and Atlantic have increased their ties with several prominent Bronx politicians through tens of thousands of dollars in political contributions over the past few election cycles.

Many of those same Bronx politicians, including Assemblyman and Bronx Democratic boss Jose Rivera and his son Joel, the City Council majority leader, among others, are represented on the Armory Task Force, an advisory group that helped craft the RFP and will be reviewing the proposals and providing input.

One member of the task force, Greg Faulkner, who chairs Community Board 7 (which contains the Armory), says he’s looking forward to reviewing the proposals at the next task force meeting on March 1. Task force members will be asked to sign a confidentiality agreement before seeing the proposals, which will be presented without the company names listed, kind of like a blind taste test.

“I’m going in with a completely open mind,” Faulkner said when asked if Fine’s earlier proposal would give Atlantic a leg up on the competition.

Faulkner said he’ll be looking at several different aspects in each proposal. “I want to see what kind of businesses are going in. How creative is the community space? How do you take advantage of the retail venue? Can you sit in an area and read a book?”

Community Board 7 will have a chance to review the proposals soon after the task force. The board will also be involved once the developer is selected in June through the ULURP, a land review process mandated by the city charter, during which time the community will have another chance to express its opinion.

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Nowhere Left to Turn

January 11, 2007

By Alex Kratz

Not so long ago, when times were good for Alham Mastafa, the Baghdad-turned-Bronx housewife would travel from her apartment in Bedford Park to Jersey City to buy jewelry from an Indian dealer she came to know well. A Sunni Muslim growing up in a wealthy section of Baghdad, she was accustomed to the finer things in life – world travel, fine dining and, of course, jewelry.

Nowadays, when Mastafa, 51, needs food or electricity, she returns to the Indian jeweler in Jersey City. He remembers her and takes pity, giving her as much as he can, and more than he has to, for the rings and bracelets she’s been forced to sell.

Since her husband died from stomach cancer three years ago and left her penniless, Mastafa’s situation has grown increasingly desperate.

With four children (three of them adults, one a minor) living at home, Mastafa’s tragic tale took a wicked turn when she ran smack into the unforgiving social services system. Earlier this year, the checks from her late-husband’s Social Security fund increased by $4, putting her $2.50 over the income limit for welfare recipients. For the income excess of a Big Mac, Mastafa’s welfare, which she used to pay rent and put food on the table, was immediately cut off.

Her attempts to gain employment and recoup welfare blocked, debt piling up and her kids struggling, Mastafa’s hope for a better future is fading.

“I don’t know what else to do,” Mastafa says softly in her dimly-lit apartment.

She is running out of jewelry and options.

From Baghdad to the Bronx

Mastafa never wanted to leave Baghdad in the first place. She enjoyed a good life under Saddam Hussein’s Sunni-dominated regime. Her family was well-off and she had just married Mahamed, a successful entrepreneur, twice her age, who would care and provide for her. They lived together in a big house with a lush garden.

Mahamed owned several successful enterprises, including a restaurant, an auto repair garage and a clothing store. Restless and outgoing, Mahamed often traveled to the United States. On one of those trips, in 1981, he called Mastafa and told her to pack up their two young sons, Arkan and Ahmed, and join him in America. Just try it out, he said, we can always return to Baghdad. A month later, the young family headed to the northwest Bronx, New York City, USA. She packed for a month.

Now an American citizen, Mastafa’s children have Bronx accents.

What Mastafa saw in the Bronx was “unbelievable,” she says now. Youth hanging out on the streets at all times. Black teenagers carrying blaring boom boxes on their shoulders. Everyone spoke Spanish. Everyone fought and yelled constantly. This wasn’t the United States she saw in Baghdad movie houses.

At first scared to venture out of her Mosholu Parkway apartment, Mastafa slowly adapted. She watched a lot of television. As her four children (Mastafa had two more daughters, Rema in 1984, and Tara in 1993) moved through the public education system, Mastafa learned English along with them.

A protective man, Mahamed refused to allow his wife to work. But in the 1990s, she volunteered for the Iraqi United Nations contingent, the head of which was a friend of Mahamed’s. The walls of her apartment are adorned with Arabic stained glass and mementos from her UN work.

Mahamed’s Baghdad business sense didn’t translate into New York success. Accustomed to sealing deals with a handshake, a business acquaintance took him for $45,000, the Mastafas’ entire savings. In between failed ventures, Mahamed worked as a gas station attendant for a Palestinian man.

Until the end, when he was diagnosed with terminal stomach cancer three years ago, the gregarious Mahamed always managed to provide for his family.

A Series of Unfortunate Events

Alham took news of Mahamed’s imminent death with denial. Doctors gave him a month, but Alham stretched that month to 10 through sheer determination. She destroyed her back and shoulders lifting and shifting her husband, taking him for walks, feeding him and administering medication. She tapped out the last of their savings trying to prolong his life.

Since Mahamed’s death, the Mastafas have encountered what can only be described as an epic string of misfortune.

Her oldest son, Arkan, endured a disastrous breakup with his wife in Queens and moved home. He remains unemployed. Rema dropped out of Manhattan College because she couldn’t afford tuition; she works at a Brookstone store in Manhattan. Alham, who became a certified phlebotomist before Mahamed’s death, couldn’t find employment at any hospital, she said, reeling off the names of a dozen institutions in the New York area.

Mastafa’s age, 51, lack of experience and Iraqi heritage make her a less than desirable candidate, she said.

The family survived on the Social Security checks and welfare assistance. When welfare stopped, the bottom dropped out. Her attempts to have it reinstated were met with swift rejection. “Tough luck,” one welfare official told her.

“It’s all math,” said Esperanza Colon, a lawyer from Legal Aid Services who represented Mastafa in March.

Susan Bahn, a public assistance expert from Legal Aid Services, says the system is stacked against Mastafa and that rent assistance in New York is inadequate. Much of the city subsidies go to those already on welfare and being sued for eviction. Section 8, a federal program that provides rent subsidies, currently has a waiting list of more than 100,000, Bahn says.

“It’s a horrible case,” Bahn said of Mastafa’s situation. “Unfortunately, there are a lot of people being left out in the cold.”

It gets worse. In July, Ahmed, the younger brother, tried to join the U.S. Army. That plan hit a snag when Ahmed’s whole body shut down just days after receiving a meningitis vaccine. After being bounced from hospital to hospital, doctors told him he suffered from a rare disorder called Guillain Barre Syndrome, which attacks the nervous system, causing severe muscle pain and numbness.

“I took it as a sign,” Ahmed says.

Ahmed still struggles to sleep at night. And Social Security won’t give him disability unemployment benefits for reasons that remain unclear. Doctors told him not to work for another six months, but because of the situation at home, he feels obligated to help his mother.

“She’s at that age where we should be taking care of her,” Ahmed says after returning home from a job interview in Manhattan. “She spent her entire life taking care of us kids.”

Earlier this year, Mastafa finally found a job working as an interpreter for a private U.S. company, called SOS, which helps U.S. military forces with security and logistic work in Iraq. She says the dangerous job would have paid her $175,000 a year.

“I don’t care about myself,” she says, adding that she’s certain insurgents would have killed her as a traitor. “It’s for my children that I would do it.”

The job fell through because she couldn’t find a way to care for her youngest, Tara. Her sons have their own problems and Rema is too busy with work to help out, Mastafa said. She tried to get her sister in Baghdad to help out, but she couldn’t secure a U.S. Visa.

Now, Mastafa is back to square one. She hasn’t paid rent in three months. She’s putting all expenses – food, pain medication, school supplies – on a handful of credit cards, some of which require $200 minimum payments. She’s exhausted and her back hurts. She has no where else to turn. She’s sold everything of value, all the jewelry, all the trinkets.

The only thing left is a broken family and a fading glimmer of hope.

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11 Stories That Shaped 2006

January 11, 2007

By Alex Kratz

Gonzalez Indicted
News of longtime State Senator Efrain Gonzalez’s indictment on mail fraud charges rocked the northwest Bronx at the end of summer. That lone charge proved just the tip of the iceberg when, on Dec. 13, federal prosecutors piled on an additional nine charges alleging that Gonzalez conspired with three other co-defendants to bilk the state for half a million dollars from 1999 to 2005.

The previous indictment did not stop local voters from re-electing the Bronx lawmaker. He received nearly 90 percent of the votes in a landslide victory over virtually unknown Conservative party candidate Ernest Kebreau.

In an interview two months before the first indictment, the Norwood News pressed Gonzalez to divulge where and how he allocated his member items (discretionary funds that senators and members of the Assembly dole out to local institutions each year). He refused to say where the money was going or which organizations he had given money to in the past.

It is those member items (Gonzalez reportedly was allotted $290,000 per year) that federal prosecutors say the senator funneled through non-profits into his own pockets.

Gonzalez maintains his innocence and political colleagues have said they hope it’s not true.

Update: In the wake of the Gonzalez indictment, not to mention other corruption scandals and a lawsuit by the Albany Times-Union, the state legislature agreed to make all member items public from now on.

A trial date for Gonzalez and the three co-defendants will be set at a pre-trial conference on March 23. Just last week, the senator stepped down from a legislative leadership position that paid him an additional $8,250 because, his staff said in a statement, the indictment will take up too much of his time.

Filtration Jobs Battle
When Greg Faulkner took over as chair of the Croton Facility Monitoring Committee (CFMC) early in 2006, he wanted to first sit back and observe. Faulkner, who also chairs Community Board 7, he says wanted to give the benefit of the doubt to the city agency responsible for building the massive new water filtration plant in Van Cortlandt Park.

As the year wore on, however, Faulkner and the rest of the community found it harder and harder to ignore that the Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) was not delivering on one of its chief promises to the community: more well-paying jobs for local residents.

In 2003, former DEP commissioner Chris Ward, union leaders and several Bronx elected officials sold the project to skeptical Bronxites by promising jobs to a borough starving for them. While Bronx unemployment has steadily decreased since it reached 11.2 percent in January 2003, it still boasts the highest jobless rate in the state – 5.5 percent – which is more than a percentage point higher than the national rate of 4.4 percent.

The DEP said that during the first phase of construction, which consisted mostly of digging and demolition, 25 percent of the work force came from the Bronx. But many of those local workers were either already in unions or employed as security officers.

Faulkner and other community activists weren’t satisfied. What about all the unemployed young adults who want good jobs but can’t get into unions, or those who want more than minimum wage security positions? And now, with the next billion dollar construction phase set to begin early in 2007, the community is demanding more union apprenticeship programs to be set up by the DEP.

In other important filtration news, the Norwood News reported in November that cost of the filtration project doubled to $2 billion, drawing further attacks from residents and activists who have long charged that the DEP didn’t accurately present the details of the project before it was approved.

Update: The DEP recently set up a 20-week pre-apprenticeship program, through Bronx Community College’s Project HIRE, for 33 people who have signed up at the DEP outreach office. Plus, new DEP Commissioner Emily Lloyd showed up at a Monitoring Committee meeting on Dec. 21 (where she was greeted by a handful of protesters demanding more programs) and promised to create more job opportunities.

“This is good first step, but we need to do more,” Faulkner said.

Schools Get ‘Empowered’
In the fall, more than a dozen local public schools were granted more autonomy from regional Education Department administrators by joining Schools Chancellor Joel Klein’s ambitious new empowerment program.

The program gives principals more freedom in hiring, curriculum and professional development. It also gives them more discretionary funding. In return, student performance and achievement at empowerment schools are assessed throughout the year, rather than just once at the end of the year. Schools individually determine assessment practices.

It’s all part of the Klein/Bloomberg educational reform plan to create schools that can tailor themselves to the needs of its students and community. At the same time, it puts more pressure on principals.

While some local principals were excited about the opportunity for more freedom, others, such as PS 340 Principal Deirdre Burke, expressed “skeptical optimism.”

Update: While there has been a period of adjustment, Scott Goldner, the principal of Discovery High School on the Walton campus, says: “It has been great – a bit overwhelming with the testing and accountability, but very supportive. It has allowed us to have had our best semester yet.”

Via e-mail, Goldner reported no major problems with the new program, but admitted the experience has been “just challenging in the first year as we learn together what it means to be Empowerment. A few glitches with testing. It’s a learning process, so these kinks are understandable.”

Controversial Developments
While the redevelopment of the Kingsbridge Armory was perhaps the biggest story of the year, there were other, less ambitious, developments that drew strong community criticism.

Two new proposed motels on Webster Avenue, a Best Western and a Comfort Inn, were adamantly opposed by community leaders and local officials who feared the two developments would become havens for illegal activity, as they have in some other parts of the borough.

Residents near Villa Avenue in Bedford Park also worried a decline in quality of life would come along with another proposed development project, designed by the non-profit group Project Renewal, which would provide housing for homeless and low-income families.

Update: While the Best Western proposal appears to be dead, the five-story Comfort Inn, which the Buildings Department approved over the summer, is still in the works, according to Community Board 7 Chair Greg Faulkner. The developers of the project didn’t return calls from the Norwood News.

Meanwhile, there have been no signs of progress on the Project Renewal proposal. Faulkner says the project has run into funding problems.

Fight for School Seats
In November, the city announced it was slashing 1,500 new seats from the Department of Education’s (DOE) new 5-Year Capital Plan for District 10 in the northwest Bronx. Parents and local activists were incensed, saying the district is already suffering from severe overcrowding.

The DOE countered that despite the cuts, the new capital plan would be enough to alleviate overcrowding. When projecting how many seats would be needed, however, the DOE used a 36 percent high school graduation rate. Because of this number, parents, students, politicians and activists all said the DOE was “planning for failure.”

Update: The Northwest Bronx Community and Clergy Coalition rallied to protest the cuts and to ask that more high school seats be added to the plan. The coalition is pressuring the city to site two new small high schools, an additional 1,000 seats, on the property of the Kingsbridge Armory, which will be revamped into mixed-use development in the coming years. The School Construction Authority is planning to build space for 1,000 middle and high school seats at the Armory site, but the coalition and other community leaders want more.

Library Center Opens
Though it happened early in 2006, the opening of the new Bronx Library Center must be counted as one of the highlights of the year.

A modern, environmentally-friendly building made of glass and shiny steel, the new library (located on Kingsbridge Road, just north of the bustling Fordham Road commercial corridor) offers more than just aesthetic beauty. Almost a year later, it’s now a hub for enrichment classes, business conferences and local meetings as well as a showcase for literary, musical and cultural events. And you can check out books there, too.

Update: The Bronx Library Center celebrates its first birthday on Saturday, Jan. 20. See Out & About section for more details.

Death of Quachaun Browne
The most notable, heartbreaking and tragic death of the year in our community was that of 4-year-old Quachaun Browne on Jan. 30. The Norwood toddler died in his mother’s apartment, directly across the street from North Central Bronx Hospital, after suffering a severe beating, allegedly at the hands of his mother’s 18-year-old boyfriend, Jose Calderon. When paramedics arrived to treat the child on a Monday morning, they discovered the child had already been dead for several hours.

The case garnered even more media attention because it came just two and a half weeks after the highly-publicized brutal murder of 7-year-old Nixzmary Brown of Brooklyn.

Update: While Calderon faces murder charges, Browne’s mother, Aleisha Smith, who has five other children, has been charged with manslaughter for failing to seek medical attention for her son’s injuries. The case goes to trial on Jan. 18.

Monroe College Win Streak
Following a defeat in the Junior College Division III championship game in March of 2005, the Monroe College women’s basketball team didn’t lose again for almost 22 months.

During that span, the Lady Mustangs punctuated an undefeated 2005-2006 season with a national championship this past March and reeled off 47 consecutive wins before losing to a high-caliber Division I opponent in Florida on Dec. 28. While it was going, the winning streak was the longest in all of college basketball. The University of Connecticut holds the women’s college basketball record with a 70-game win streak that ended in 2003.

“It’s a nice thing,” Monroe head coach Seth Goodman said about the win streak. “Everyone around the school was excited about it. And a lot more people knew about it than I thought.”

Update: Goodman’s team lost two in a row in Florida, but salvaged the road trip with a victory in the team’s third game in three nights. The Lady Mustang’s focus is still on defending its crown, Goodman says. The playoffs begin at the end of February and Monroe remains the team to beat.

Armory Open for Development
In May, following a decade of community meetings, rallies, and hearings, but little official action, Deputy Mayor Dan Doctoroff toured the Kingsbridge Armory with local activists and proclaimed that a request for proposals – the starting pistol of the redevelopment process – would be issued by August.

It wasn’t actually issued until the end of September but no one seemed to mind – the road to redeveloping the facility for the community’s use was under way.

Anticipating the RFP’s release, developer Peter Fine sought an advantage by presenting his redevelopment plan to Community Board 7 last June. The Board liked what it saw, but decided to hold off judgment until the RFP process was complete.

Though the years of inaction were frustrating, the work community residents put into it, with the organizing help of the Northwest Bronx Community and Clergy Coalition, appeared to pay off. Fine’s plan and others that have surfaced since the failure of a Giuliani plan for an athletic and retail complex, conformed to the community’s vision of transforming the building into a mixed-use complex featuring entertainment venues, stores big and small, athletic facilities, community space and, most importantly, public schools.

The only bone of contention now is the RFP’s stipulation that there will be 1,000 public school seats. The Coalition and the Kingsbridge Armory Redevelopment Alliance, an umbrella group of interested parties the Coalition formed, wants 2,000 seats.

Update: The city’s Economic Development Corporation set Dec. 14 as the deadline for submitting an RFP, but then postponed it to Jan. 4.

An EDC spokesperson told the Norwood News that proposals were received by the deadline, but would not say how many there were or who submitted them. “Once a developer is selected, we will proceed with negotiations to finalize the details of the project,” the spokesperson said in an e-mail. “The developer will [then] begin [an] environmental review which will lead to the public review process.”
–JORDAN MOSS

Fordham Radio Tower
Another long battle – this one over the radio tower Fordham University began erecting on its campus in 1994 for its public radio station, WFUV – came to a resolution at the end of 2005. That’s when Fordham and its aggrieved neighbor, the New York Botanical Garden, came to an agreement, brokered by Montefiore Medical Center, to place the antenna on a Montefiore-owned apartment building on Wayne Avenue in Norwood.

But the definitive end of the controversy came last April, when Fordham began dismantling the half-built tower.

Update: As the acrimony dissipated after the deal, Fordham and the Garden, along with Montefiore and the Bronx Zoo, began meeting to discuss ways the institutions could collaborate on improving area thoroughfares.

The Garden-Fordham thaw also led to creative collaborations. WFUV hosted special evening concerts at the Garden during the landmark Chihuly glass sculpture exhibit.
–JORDAN MOSS

Chihuly
After showing his unique glass blowing creations all over the world, northwest artist Dale Chihuly finally brought his wildly successful talents to New York City for the first time this summer with a massive sculpture exhibit at the New York Botanical Garden.

Update: “Chihuly at the Garden” was one of the most successful exhibits in the history of the Botanical Garden.

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Area Crime, Murders Drop in 2006

January 11, 2007

By Alex Kratz

Mirroring the rest of New York City, the 52nd Precinct experienced a significant overall drop in crime this past year. Unlike the city, however, the Five-Two also enjoyed a sharp decline in murders after a homicide-heavy first half of 2006.

Crime in the Five-Two, which is contiguous with Community Board 7 and the Norwood News readership area, dropped 8 percent overall, compared to 5 percent citywide.

The 52nd Precinct’s commanding officer, Deputy Inspector Joseph Hoch, attributes much of his squad’s success to an influx of foot-patrolling rookie cops, who were assigned to three heavy crime areas as part of the city’s Impact Zone initiative last July.

Hoch is especially happy about the drop in murders, which went from 17 in 2005 to 13 in 2006. That’s a 23 percent decrease from the year before and a welcome development for Hoch, who watched the murder rate double in 2005, following the previous low of only eight homicides in 2004.

“I’m happy because I really gauge myself and my performance on the homicide numbers,” Hoch said.

Homicides in New York City spiked 10 percent in 2006 from the year before.

It wasn’t so much the murders, but the sharp increase in shootings that prompted the return of the Impact initiative in the five-two this past summer after a year’s hiatus. There were 19 shootings by mid-year 2006 (21 before Impact arrived) versus just seven by mid-year in 2005 (when Impact was in place). In total, shootings jumped from 27 in 2005 to 35 this past year.

Bill McDonald, a former police detective and federal agent who is now head of Monroe College’s Criminal Justice school, says manpower-intensive initiatives like Impact zones are effective because they make criminals think twice about carrying a gun around.

Much like a motorist will not speed if he sees increased police presence on the streets, McDonald says, a criminal will not carry his gun for fear of being stopped and searched. If a criminal leaves his gun at home, McDonald says, he won’t be able to react to confrontational situations by simply brandishing his weapon. A bad drug deal, for example, will then result in a fistfight rather than a gun fight.

Impact will continue in the 52nd Precinct for the first half of 2007 (as part of a citywide plan to implement more Impact zones), Hoch said, but the zones will shift. There will be two new Impact zones, he said. One will be on the Fordham Road corridor from University Avenue to the Grand Concourse. The other will exist between 183rd and 184th streets stretching from Jerome Avenue to University Avenue.

After losing 20 officers from the previous Impact initiative, the Five-Two recently gained 40 new academy graduates for the new Impact zones.

To continue Impact-like practices in the old zones, or O.Z.s, Hoch will keep a smaller amount of foot patrols going. Before, when Impact would shift or stop, he would simply augment the O.Z.s with car patrols, which proved ineffective.

In any case, the murder stats would look even better, Hoch said, but an incident that happened two years ago was reclassified as a murder this year. There were 38 such reclassified murders added to the homicide toll in New York City, which accounts for much of the city increase.

Hoch points to three unusual deaths registered in his command. In the death of two children at the beginning of the year, parents were charged with murder, for abuse, negligence, or both.

In domestic cases especially, a police force is only as good as its informants, Hoch said, adding that a phone call from a family member, neighbor or friend may have prevented deaths in both of those cases, Hoch said.

Another murder happened in Yonkers, but the body was dropped in the Five-Two, making it Hoch’s responsibility, he said.

Drugs continue to be a major obstacle for Hoch’s crew in its struggle to keep murders down.

“Most of our murders are narcotics related,” Hoch said.

In 2006, drug arrests were up 9.3 percent from the year before. Marijuana, heroin and crack are the drugs of choice in the 52nd precinct, Hoch said.

Shootings, murders or drug arrests aren’t always the best indicators of how effective a precinct is or how bad crime has become, McDonald said.

The two best statistics to accurately gauge crime in a given area are auto thefts and robberies, McDonald said. Both crimes are traditionally reported accurately by victims mostly because of insurance considerations.

Using this logic, crime statistics in the Five-Two paint a murky picture. While obberies are up 7.2 percent, car theft is down an astonishing 28 percent.

Hoch couldn’t point to any consistent or specific trends to explain the increase in robberies, but said the drop in car thefts could probably be attributed to the busts of two citywide car theft syndicates.

By any measure, the city and the northwest Bronx are much safer than during the crack-fueled violence of the early 1990s, Hoch and McDonald said. In 1993, there were 43 murders and 82 shootings in the Five-Two. Robberies then were triple what they were in 2006.

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Slaying of Beloved Doc Shakes North Fordham

January 11, 2007

By Alex Kratz

Every morning since the brutal slaying of her 3-year-old twins’ beloved pediatrician, Dr. Leandro Lozado, Sofia Nivar hopes she’s waking up from a nightmare.

“We still can’t believe it,” Nivar said almost a week after Lozado, 46, was found dead in his Yonkers home with several bullet wounds, including two to the head.

A doctor born and educated in the Dominican Republic, Lozado made a point of opening his medical clinic, Hispanic Pediatrics, in a mostly Latino, low-income neighborhood: on Kingsbridge Road in North Fordham.

“He worked very hard for his practice,” Nivar said. “He could have opened it anywhere, but he wanted to have his practice here where he knew people needed him.”

When Nivar gave birth prematurely to twin baby girls, doctors told her that one of them would probably never walk. But when she took the child to see Lozado, the optimistic pediatrician gave her hope, saying the child showed signs of increasing intelligence and strength. Now, at age 3 1/2, the little girl isn’t just walking, she’s running.

“He’s very positive and comforting,” Nivar said, briefly slipping into the present tense. “He wasn’t just a doctor, he was also a counselor.”

Maria Quiles, a receptionist at Hispanic Pediatrics, said Lozado was so multi-faceted, “you could make a dictionary out of what he was.”

Lozado gave each child personalized attention and care. “He didn’t have to look at his charts to know what was going on,” Nivar said. “He knew your child’s name. It wasn’t mechanical, he knew everyone by name.”

Last week, New York metro area newspapers were filled with comments from patients, friends and colleagues echoing Nivar’s sentiments.

“Sometimes, if you didn’t have money, he would say ‘no, that’s okay,’” said Carmen Salgado, whose daughter used to see Lozado, as she stopped to look at a memorial of flowers, letters and candles outside of the clinic. "And it’s so sad, because we’re not going to get someone like him again.”

His goal as a physician, Lozado wrote in a personal statement on the State Department of Health Web site, was to “give something back to society by serving my community, which is in need of good and culturally sensitive medical care.”

Nivar and others are still baffled and “paranoid” about the circumstances surrounding Lozado’s death. Staffers at his clinic at 229 Kingsbridge Rd. said they are not releasing any more information about Lozado to protect themselves and their office. A week later, mourners continue to stop by to offer hugs and condolences to those who work at Hispanic Pediatrics, which will remain open despite the tragedy.

A man with no known enemies, Lozado failed to show for work last Wednesday at the clinic he set up a decade ago. Because the doctor is usually punctual, worried colleagues at the clinic called Lozado’s girlfriend, who works nearby as a pediatric surgeon at Montefiore Medical Center. She later told police she found Lozado’s body at his Yonkers home, at 43 Brendon Rd., just before 3 p.m.

Initially, Yonkers police were perplexed by the apparently targeted murder. But last Saturday, police arrested Samuel Saunders, and the Yonkers district attorney charged the 59-year-old Bronx resident with second degree murder in the Lozado case.

According to media reports, Saunders used to own Lozado’s home and police say he killed the doctor for money. Lozado bought the house on Brendon Road after the bank foreclosed on Saunders’ loan. Police said a roll of cash was missing from Lozado’s home and that they found blood-stained clothing in Saunders’ residence.

Some 200 friends, family, colleagues and patients, including Nivar, attended a memorial service for Lozado on Saturday evening in Washington Heights.

Everyone in attendance was still terribly shaken by the brutality and inexplicable suddenness of Lozado’s murder, Nivar said.

While people often have nice things to say about people who have died, Nivar said everyone said the same wonderful things about him when he was alive as well.

Nivar, who lives near Lozado’s clinic, said she still hasn’t figured out how to tell her twins that the only doctor they’ve ever known was killed. “They know nothing,” she said. “He always gave them stickers. They liked going to the doctor. It was always, ‘Mommy, we want to go to the doctor.’’”

Laura Sayer contributed to this article.