Your quick-hit guide to the November 3 general election.
John Liu, the Democratic and Working Families Party nominee for comptroller who will take office in January unless one of his three challengers scores an epic upset in the general election, visited the Norwood News on Aug. 18 and talked .
The New York City Planning Commission approved the Related Companies’ proposal to develop the Armory into a giant shopping mall on Monday. But in an 8 to 4 vote, Bronx Borough President Ruben Diaz, Jr. secured key support in opposing the project from two other borough presidents and the public advocate. Each borough president has an appointee to the commission.
With the winter months looming, the city is preparing to tackle one of the season’s principal ailments, the flu. But this year, it’s not just the seasonal vaccination being offered. After causing widespread illness in New York City last spring, infecting an estimated 750,000 to 1 million residents, according to the of Health Department, the H1N1 flu (Swine Flu) vaccination is expected to be widely available by the end of the month.
James Alles had a feeling the time was coming. But the longtime cop didn’t know for sure until he dropped his oldest son off at college in Massachusetts and watched him fade away in the rearview mirror as he drove off.

"It was very emotional," said Alles of the trip earlier this fall. It also led Alles, 48, the commanding officer of the 52nd Police Precinct for the past two and a half years, to decide to retire from the NYPD after 28 years on the job.
The committee created to oversee the construction of the Croton Water Filtration Plant, the largest municipal capital project in the history of New York City, has not met since June, leading to more criticism of the agency in charge of the project, the Department of Environmental Protection.
Community Board 7 had a quality-of-life hearing last week at Our Lady of Refuge Church and too few people came. If you don’t include members of the board, elected officials and police, there were probably only about 10 residents there.

This, sadly, is not surprising given how often people complain about community problems to no avail and then give up. Nevertheless, as others have noted, showing up is most of the battle. So we want to highlight what the people who actually showed up think about quality-of-life issues.

The top issues people felt the community needs to work on were: noise; drug dealing in the streets; outdoor drinking; illegal clubs; and dog droppings.

Please note the emphasis above on "community needs to work on." For those who haven’t noticed, Glenda the Good Witch is not flying in from Oz to solve these problems, nor is Mayor Bloomberg or anybody else.

Improving quality of life is essentially the mission of this newspaper and the organization that publishes it – Mosholu Preservation Corporation. The last time we were involved in a meeting about quality-of-life issues, dog owners not cleaning up after their pets was tops on the list of complaints. Since then, we have initiated a Cut the Crap campaign with help from Bedford Mosholu Community Association, Fordham Bedford Housing Corporation, as well as merchants, landlords and dog owners. We think it has made a difference.
While much fuss has been made over whether State Senator Pedro Espada Jr. actually lives in the Bronx, there is no doubt that his district, which covers much of the northwest Bronx, is comprised primarily of rent-stabilized apartment buildings. The west Bronx’s share of the city’s stock of stabilized units is increasing every year.

This spike is primarily due to a rapid loss of rent-stabilized apartments in other parts of the city, mainly through a provision known as high rent vacancy decontrol.
Re: "Norwood Going Downhill" letter in [the Norwood News]Sept. 24 issue, I’ve never had much use for naysayers, and in the almost 40 years I’ve lived in this community, I’ve heard a lot of them. When I first moved into the neighborhood, it was changing from a mostly Jewish middle-class neighborhood to a mostly Irish working-class neighborhood, and folks were saying, "There goes the neighborhood."