Press Coverage

The basic philosophy behind the Solid Waste Management Plan is to establish a more equitable -and less impactful- waste processing system, with infrastructure in every borough. Not surprisingly, communities targeted for new and/or upgraded waste infrastructure facilities are responding with bitter opposition.

Opponents to the 91st St Marine Transfer Station say that, besides taking DSNY trucks off the road, the station will not contribute to a more environmentally sustainable waste management system in New York City. "It [the transfer station] harms residents," said Council Member Ben Kallos, who represents the area.

"Instead of being located in an industrial area, it is being placed...between an Olympic training ground serving 30,000 children from all five boroughs and a public housing development with 1,173 units, and within feet of 6 schools and 22,056 residents."

Opponents like Kallos argue that the City should be focused on reducing the actual waste stream, and not on large capital projects.

During the meeting Friday, she said she was surprised at how just staffers' participation "demystified [Wikipedia] for them" and illustrated how "it was simple and not scary." That kind of conversation should happen in every congressional office, she said, to move beyond using Wikipedia as a reference tool, spread awareness of concepts such as open source and civic technology, and also help staffers access institutional knowledge better. "It's not shared in a way that's useful," she said, adding that the role of a wiki-like platform could be " helping Congress access its own support system more effectively," sharing knowledge between district offices, communications offices, policy offices and committees, which could draw on stack-exchange like platform to get real-time input during hearings. In many ways, her vision echoes local efforts, such as open and participatory government pushes by New York City Council member Ben Kallos.

Despite U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) scientific findings that the misuse of antibiotics in farm animals threatens human health from “superbugs,” business will continue as usual.

The practice of feeding low doses of antibiotics to healthy livestock on factory farms is contributing to an increase in antibiotic-resistant bacteria, or superbugs, which is a growing public health concern.

While the appeals court decision is disappointing to those working to keep antibiotics effective, their efforts continue. New York City Council Member Ben Kallos yesterday introduced Resolution 353 calling for a New York State and national ban on non-therapeutic use of antibiotics in livestock.

A bill before the New York City Council this afternoon would require the timely posting of film and television production locations and times, in a searchable format, to the city's website.

The Mayor's Office of Media and Entertainment currently requires productions to distribute letters notifying local residents and merchants at least 48 hours in advance of a shoot, an agency spokesperson said in an email. Productions are also obliged to post "No Parking" signs with a contact number 48 hours before a shoot begins, and residents are encouraged to contact the Mayor's Office with their concerns immediately via 311.

But bill sponsors Manhattan borough president Gale Brewer and Council member Ben Kallos think these measures aren't giving residents enough warning. The proposed legislation is one part of Kallos and Brewer's larger effort to make more public data freely available online and the city government more transparent.

The New York City Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications plans to publish more than double the amount of datasets this year than it published to the portal last year, new Commissioner Anne Roest wrote last week in an annual report mandated by the city's open data law, with 135 datasets scheduled to be released this year, and almost 100 more to come in 2015.

But what what matters more to New York City open data advocates than the absolute number of the datasets is their quality and values: creating a transparent process of releasing the data, making the data machine-readable and prioritizing release of data sets in high demand. As preparations are underway for City Council hearings on the law, New York City's open data progress and challenges are both a model and reflective of open data efforts across the country.

"I think New York City is doing an amazing job with Open Data. I think that the city is not taking nearly enough credit for a lot of the datasets involved with the Mayor's Management report," said City Council member Ben Kallos, chair of the Government Operations Committee, referring to datasets related to a mandated annual public report card of city services. "It may appear like it's only one dataset here and there but the underlying data is so rich and contains so many hundreds of other datasets that the administration is releasing so much more information than anyone expected by this point."

Councilwoman Julissa Ferreras, who chairs the finance committee and requested the data during a budget hearing earlier this year, said she will introduce legislation in October with Councilman Ben Kallos that would require E.C.B. to report quarterly to the Council on fines that are issued by city agencies and adjudicated by the E.C.B. The information would also have to be made available to the public.

"As we have learned through nearly 100 hours spent in budget hearings, transparency is of the utmost importance when it comes to the oversight of our city's dollars," Ferreras said in a statement. "Clearly, these fines date far past our current administration. It should not take hearings and several weeks of inter-agency communication to retrieve this information; it should be readily available."

Newly elected Council Member Ben Kallos, who had also made such a pledge, joined the nine other districts with his own truncated PB process after taking office in January of 2014, making for ten total participating districts in FY2014.

The ten districts were those represented by repeaters Lander, Mark-Viverito, Williams, Ulrich, Weprin, Levin, Greenfield; and first-timers Kallos, Gonzalez (replaced by Menchaca), and Donovan Richards.

Now, as the FY2015 process is underway, Gotham Gazette has confirmed that the ten council districts in which council members dedicated funds to PB last year will again run the program, while at least ten other council members have committed to initiate the process. These new confirmations include Council Members Corey Johnson, Dan Garodnick, Helen Rosenthal, Mark Levine, Andrew Cohen, Ritchie Torres, Jimmy Van Bramer, Daneek Miller, Antonio Reynoso, and Mark Treyger.

New York City Council Member Ben Kallos uses GitHub to collect public commentary on much of his technology-related legislation. Kallos finds crowdsourcing as an empowering tool that creates a different sense of democracy, he told Government Technology.

On this, the last day of the FCC's public comment period on its "Open Internet" rulemaking, nearly every point for or against net neutrality regulations has been made, and often many, many times. And yet there's a late entrant in the field offering a somewhat novel take.

Nine members of the New York City Council, led by councilmember Ben Kallos of Roosevelt Island and the Upper East Side, have signed onto a last-minute filing supporting net neutrality.

The councilmembers' pro-neutrality starting point isn't the city's considerable new tech scene but the fact that about one-third of the city's population was born somewhere other than in the United States. Of course, New York City has long been a magnet for immigrants. But  the immigrant existence takes on a different texture in an era when long-distance calling fees and hard-to-find native newspapers have been replaced by cheap and easy digital communications.

Roosevelt Island and Upper East Side NYC Council Member Ben Kallos sends the following report reviewing the first six months of his term in office.

Bus riders in certain parts of the city might have an easier commute soon as more than 100 new countdown clocks are scheduled for installation citywide.

The clocks, which tick down how long riders have to wait for a bus to approach their stop, will be spread throughout 11 City Council districts where representatives allocated almost $2.8 million between them.

The New York City Council called on the New York State Public Service Commission to expand access to affordable broadband and close the digital divide. In testimony on the Comcast-Time Warner Cable merger, the Council also spoke of the critical need to protect Net Neutrality.