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.

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."

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

At his arraignment in a lower Manhattan federal courthouse on Friday, Dec. 15, State Senator Efrain Gonzalez, who has represented the northwest Bronx in Albany for the past 16 years, looked calm and collected, like he had been there before. It’s probably because the embattled Democratic lawmaker actually had just been there, four months prior, to face mail fraud charges claiming he had swindled $37,412 from a non-profit called the West Bronx Neighborhood Association (WBNA).

Responding to increasing pressure to create more jobs in the northwest Bronx during the construction of the Croton Filtration Plant in Van Cortlandt Park, the head of the city’s Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) said the agency would fulfill promises it made to the community and find ways to place more local residents in construction unions.