Pettiness On Parade

Mayor de Blasio will be leaving office soon. His term in office has not been without some pretty major scandals (generally ignored by the media). In March 2019, The Federalist Papers reported that the Mayor’s wife, Chirlane McCray, was given $850 million for a mental health program she was spearheading. The second major scandal involved the horse-drawn carriages in Central Park.

The article reports:

The program, ThriveNYC, has fallen far behind its goals and appears to be a massive failure for the city.

But even in spite of that the city has decided to increase the budget of the program which is expected to spend $5 billion in the next five years.

The program was set up to screen 78,000 new mothers for post-natal depression. What actually happened between 2016 and 2018 was that slightly more than 28,000 patients were screened and 570 were offered help. Narcan kits were also handed out, but there are no statistics saying how many were used. When an attempt was made to acquire a budget, they received two budgets with very different numbers. No one seems to know exactly how the money was spent.

There was also the matter of the horses in Central Park (article here). In early 2014, Mayor de Blasio announced that he was going to put a high priority on removing the horse-drawn carriages from Central Park. After all, asking horses to pull carriages in a world of automobiles is cruel. Animal rights groups backed him up. Well, not so fast. It seems that Steve Nislick, chief executive officer of a New Jersey-based real-estate development company, Edison Properties, has an interest in removing the horses–Edison Properties owns multiple properties in the area where the stables for the horses are located. New development of those lots could be quite profitable.

Now to today’s scandal. Mayor de Blasio wants to break the Trump organization’s contract to run the Ferry Point golf course in the Bronx by Nov. 14 – a move that could cost the city over $30 million. As if the city didn’t have enough financial challenges.

Red State reported yesterday:

Former President Donald Trump got a reprieve from the city’s efforts to evict his company from the Ferry Point golf course.

Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Debra James granted the Trump Organization a temporary stay from Mayor de Blasio’s effort to break the company’s contract to run the Bronx course by Nov. 14 – a move that could cost the city over $30 million.

After the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, de Blasio ended contracts for Trump’s company to operate the Central Park Carousel, the Wollman and Lasker ice rinks in the park, and the Bronx golf course.

The city’s Parks Department quickly picked new operators for the ice rinks and eventually found a new company to run the the carousel. It also awarded a new license for the golf course to a Georgia-based company, Bobby Jones Links.

The Trump Organization sued over the golf contract, maintaining in court papers that the deal was nixed over politics.

Judge James granted a stay…

Stay tuned for more foolishness out of New York City.