MONEY'S RACING IN FOR ARMORY SPORTS

When it rains, it pours for the Park Slope Armory.

This spring, Mayor Bloomberg and the City Council pledged $500,000 toward a plan by the nonprofit group Take the Field to turn the long-underused armory into a year-round community sports center.

And last month, Borough President Marty Markowitz set aside $50,000 from his budget to study ways to reuse large parts of the former National Guard home that have sat vacant for years. Markowitz earmarked an additional $500,000 for the armory in next year's capital budget.

Advocates of Take the Field's sportsplex plan cheered the funding for the fledgling project. But supporters ques-tioned why Markowitz decided to fund a new study rather than support a plan already backed by the mayor and Council.
Bloomberg set aside $250,000 for the project in this year's budget. Councilman Bill de Blasio (D-Park Slope) put up the other $250,000.
"We're trying to move ahead into construction as quickly as possible," said Richard Kahan, president of Take the Field, co-founded by Giants co-owner Robert Tisch to renovate school athletic fields across the city.
The castlelike 14th Regiment Armory, on Eighth Ave., between 14th and 15th Sts., houses a homeless shelter and 14 veterans organizations.
Those uses would not be disturbed under the group's plan, which seeks to convert its century-old drill floor into an indoor track with four sports courts. The center would be available for school kids during the day and for community members at night and on the weekends.
Happy for help
"We're more than happy to have the assistance of the borough president's office," said Tyquana Henderson of de Blasio's office. "But we don't want to have money going all over the place. We all want to be together in the end."
Kahan said the project needs about $10 million for its first phase. The group, which also aims to overhaul the Bed-ford-Atlantic Armory in Bedford-Stuyvesant, is working to secure additional funding from private sources and the state.
Officials from Markowitz's office said yesterday they have been impressed by Take the Field's proposal - but they said questions still need to be addressed, such as the project's feasibility and who would oversee the center's programs and upkeep.


Courtesy of the NY Daily News
August 13, 2002, Tuesday

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A Bold New Rebuilding Plan Grows in Brooklyn

Brooklyn’s notorious Bedford-Atlantic armory — reputed to be the city’s most dangerous homeless shelter — will soon be transformed into a recreational facility, according to one of New York City’s best-known real estate developers.

Richard Kahan, the president and co-founder of Take the Field, a public-private venture that rebuilds athletic facilities at public schools throughout city, has drawn up plans for the armory renovation.

Mr. Kahan told a gathering of about 50 residents in Crown Heights that his organization plans to raise $14 million in public and private funds that will be used to transform the five-story armory building from a 350-bed shelter to a mixed-use facility that will continue to house homeless people but primarily serve as a base for local students and sports leagues. The project, he said, would be part of a new program, the Armory Initiative, to be operated by Take the Field.

Once funding has been secured and detailed architectural plans have been drawn, “we think we can build this in 9 to 12 months,” said Mr. Kahan, who was chairman of the Battery Park City Authority and the New York State Urban Development Corporation. The project, he said, is an extension of his organization’s mission to bring the benefits of sports to city schoolchildren. “This isn’t just an issue of where the kids will play,” he said. “This is an issue about what kinds of lives these kids are going to have.”


Courtesy of the New York Sun (Read the full article here)

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STATE TARGETS SHADY GUARDS

As the Statue of Liberty guard scandal spreads, the state has moved to fine or revoke the licenses of 21 security compa-nies that allegedly employed ex-cons, grifters and thugs at facilities throughout New York.

At the heart of the scandal is International Services Inc., a California-based security company exposed by the Daily News for hiring ex-cons to guard the Statue of Liberty and Camp Smith, a National Guard facility in Westchester County.

But in the past few days, the state also has charged 20 other companies with employing unregistered or unqualified guards at airlines, shipping and trucking companies, transit facilities, banks and a number of city and state agencies.

The action was triggered by state controller's office audits that found more than 440 guards employed illegally throughout the state.

The investigation is continuing, and more companies may be cited, state officials said.

State investigators said they found no wrongdoing on the part of government officials in the guard debacle. But, they conceded, unscrupulous security companies, which pay many of their guards only a few dollars above minimum wage, are encouraged to cut corners by the state's policy of hiring the lowest bidder. Cutting corners International, for example, had millions of dollars in low-bid government contracts, including a single $1 million deal to provide guards at nine state sites, four of which demanded top security clearances.
"When a company cuts corners, it may find it can't pay for screening or training," said Mark Peters, chief of the At-torney General's Public Integrity unit. "It hires unqualified personnel and may ship them off to facilities that assume they are dealing with honest vendors and getting qualified guards."
Last week, the attorney general filed a lawsuit against International seeking punitive damages and restitution of millions the company allegedly bilked from state and city agencies.
Lax state laws compound the security guard crisis.
Guards in New York have long been required to be fingerprinted and to pass a criminal background check. But in 1994, bowing to industry pressure, the state softened the law to limit screening to crimes committed in New York. Out-of-state criminals, those convicted in federal jurisdictions and illegal aliens easily skirt detection.
Among them was the ex-con at the Statue of Liberty, who managed to get a New York state guard license despite an armed robbery conviction in North Carolina.
The law also exempts certain New York State convictions. The rap sheets of guards at Camp Smith included con-victions for drunken driving and leaving the scene of an accident - but they still had valid guard licenses, though at lev-els lower than required.
Indeed, state regulations are so lax that guards can be hired - and put to work - even before required background checks have been completed, officials said.
New York Secretary of State Randy Daniels submitted legislation in Albany on Thursday to close loopholes in the law. The bill would forbid companies from hiring guards before they have been screened. It would reinstate the re-quirement of a federal fingerprint check and increase fines for using unregistered guards to as much as $10,000 per vio-lation.
In the past, guard companies resisted federal checks because they took too long. But current technology can provide results in 14 days and improvements are soon expected to provide a full screening within as little as two days, said De-partment of State spokesman Eamon Moynihan.
At city homeless shelters, 208 of 450 International guards hired under a $12 million contract were unregistered and working illegally, according to the attorney general's office.
Guards at one shelter beat and robbed a resident, according to the attorney general's complaint. A guard at another allegedly assaulted his supervisor.
Police brass have complained repeatedly of problems with International guards at Brooklyn's notorious Bedford-Atlantic Men's Shelter. The Department of Homeless Services has penalized the company about $150,000 for a variety of contract violations and used its own unarmed police force to bolster weak security. Lack of enforcement A company memo indicated that International "was never in compliance with the contract and never had any intention of being so," according to court papers.
But no action was taken to terminate International's contract until Friday, when the Department of Homeless Ser-vices announced the company was being replaced at the seven shelters it was hired to guard.
In a June 21 letter to the agency, the company asked to get out of its contract because "an act of war . . . perpetrated on Sept. 11, 2001, has made it impossible to prosecute the work required."
In the letter, International's vice president, Bunce Pierce, made no mention of the contract violations and offered no explanation of how the terror attacks affected shelter guards. But he did complain that the department "is severely be-hind" in payment and asked to be "paid in full by June 30."
A department spokesman said the issue was under review.


Courtesy of the NY Daily News
June 30, 2002, Sunday

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ARMORY EYED AS REC CENTER

A nonprofit group headed by Giants co-owner Robert Tisch, which specializes in developing athletic facilities around the city, is eying the long-derelict Park Slope Armory for its next project.

Take the Field, which already has refurbished 18 sports fields around the city since it was founded 18 months ago, is considering the crumbling, castlelike structure on Eighth Ave., between 14th and 15th Sts., as well as similar sites, for a makeover as a year-round community recreation center.

"This is a great opportunity because we happen to have these buildings available," said Richard Kahan, president of Take the Field and the former head of the state Urban Development Corp.

Right now the 14th Regiment Armory is only partially used - for several offices and as a homeless shelter for up to 70 women.

Building such facilities from scratch could cost hundreds of millions of dollars, but renovating each armory can be done for less than $15 million, he said.

Plans call for turning the armory's century-old drill floor into an indoor track, complete with four different sports courts the size of four full-sized gyms. It would be open for use by local schools during the day and by neighborhood people in the mornings and evenings.

Take the Field has only just started meeting with community groups on the project.
And it is still working to raise the necessary funding from public and private groups for the plan.
But already, many who live in the area say the project could be a tremendous boon for the chronically underused structure.
'Wonderful idea'
"I think it's a wonderful idea," said Robert Lucas, assistant director of the Park Slope Women's Shelter, which cur-rently uses the building.
"From what I've heard, it sounds like nothing but a positive thing to me," he said. "And it would certainly be a good utilization of the space."
Take the Field also is drafting plans to overhaul three other similar structures across the city - the Bedford-Atlantic Armory in Bedford-Stuyvesant and one each in Queens and the Bronx. But officials said the Park Slope project is best poised to go first.
Kahan said his group is hoping to raise mostly public money for the project, in contrast to its field renovation pro-gram, which relies more on private money.
"We're going to try to be very aggressive about it," he said, adding that Take the Field intends to work with officials at the federal, state and city levels to fund the project.


Courtesy of the NY Daily News
May 6, 2002, Monday

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IN A FIRST, COPS WILL PATROL HOMELESS SHELTER

For the first time, uniformed cops will be posted in a city homeless shelter to reduce crime.

Beginning this week, two officers will be posted from 4 p.m. to midnight at the Bedford-Atlantic armory shelter, Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly told the Daily News yesterday.

The 350-bed men's shelter in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, was chosen, Kelly said, because "based on anecdotal information, that place has a reputation as a bad spot."

Within days of taking office, Mayor Bloomberg said he wanted to make the shelters safer for the homeless, some of whom would rather stay on the streets, even in frigid weather, than risk assault or robbery in a city-run dwelling.
About 29,000 people are being housed in shelters throughout the city.
Kelly directed his borough commanders to survey all the city shelters last month. "This is the one they recom-mended putting someone in," Kelly said.
Kelly visited Bedford-Atlantic last month. "There were people who had just come out of jail. I saw someone there with a Rikers uniform on," he said. "If people feel unsafe in the shelters, it exacerbates the homeless problem on the street."
He said that statistics show crime is down in the shelters, but "the issue with shelters is underreporting of crime. You can look at the statistics and see they're down, but still feel unsafe."
Kelly, speaking by telephone en route to the Waldorf-Astoria, site of the World Economic Forum, did not have shelter crime statistics at hand.
"We will try these things. They are not absolutely etched in stone. We will see what the impact is," Kelly said, add-ing that it is possible cops could be assigned to other shelters in the future.
He also said that police will increase training for the peace officers and security guards who regularly work in the shelters. There is no plan for the NYPD to formally take over the security personnel, as it has with school safety offi-cers.
The Bedford-Atlantic armory has been one of the most notorious shelters since the mid-1980s, when it housed 1,000 men during the homeless crisis.


Courtesy of the NY Daily News
February 3, 2002, Sunday

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In Making Crowded Homeless Shelters Safer, Some View the Issue With a Sense of Security

On Monday, outside the Bedford-Atlantic shelter, Peter Engler, 23, said that current security personnel were overwhelmed. ''You can bring drugs in here, you can bring weapons in here, anything you want,'' Mr. Engler said. ''No one does anything. The N.Y.P.D., that's what I'd like to see in here.''

Dawn Witter, 45, who has stayed several times at Brooklyn Women's Shelter since 1989, said that while she has seen improvements over the years, she is still frightened. ''You got to have friends, you got to be careful,'' Ms. Witter said. ''You don't know where these people are coming from. Sometimes people come in from prison and they walk around bullying people. You have to watch your back.''

Steven Banks, the Legal Aid lawyer for the Coalition for the Homeless, said that emergency cots provided by the city during winter months leave the homeless especially vulnerable, without lockers to secure their possessions. Mr. Banks said he would meet with city officials today to discuss winter accommodations. He planned to request the statistics for tracking crime in shelters.


Courtesy of the NY Times
Read the full article here

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NY: Bloomberg Touts Quality of Life Crackdown

The New York Post (1/9) reports, "Mayor Bloomberg and Police Commissioner Ray Kelly yesterday unveiled 'Op-eration Clean Sweep' -- the NYPD's quality-of-life crackdown that aims at wiping out public urination, prostitution and squeegee men." Bloomberg also "said his top cop had spent Monday night touring some city homeless shelters to assess their safety." And the mayor "said he had personally met with officials from the Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church, where homeless people are permitted by a court ruling last week to sleep on the steps." Bloomberg, who has said he's "trying to work out an arrangement with church officials to keep the homeless off the steps, credited Kelly with being the first top cop to target quality-of-life crimes."

Long Island Newsday (1/9) reports, "Hundreds of so-called quality of life offenders were arrested or ticketed over the weekend, and officials said Tuesday that more action is on the way." The "arrests and summonses, issued in 50 'tar-geted areas' that include Hell's Kitchen and Long Island City, are the focus of Police Commissioner Ray Kelly's first major initiative: a crackdown on the kind of low-level offenses that became a hallmark of the Giuliani administration." But in "signs that this initiative may be kinder and gentler than in the past, police officials said some offenders were issued desk-appearance tickets, instead of being forced to go through the booking system, and Kelly said he made a surprise visit to the Bedford-Atlantic Men's Shelter in Brooklyn Monday night to check on safety conditions there."


Courtesy of the Bulletin's Frontrunner
January 9, 2002, Wednesday

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MAYOR EYES PUTTING COP IN EACH SHELTER

Mayor Bloomberg said yesterday he'll put a cop in every city shelter, if necessary, to keep homeless New Yorkers safe.

Bloomberg's comment came as the city braced for its first winter storm of this season, and also followed his vow last week to improve shelters - even as he promised to aggressively move the homeless off the streets.

The new mayor tackled the homelessness issue during a busy day in which he attended the inaugurations of Man-hattan Borough President Virginia Fields and Staten Island Borough President James Molinaro and a post-inauguration reception for Bronx Borough President Adolfo Carrion.
"I want to make sure that there are beds for anybody that needs them and that those beds are safe," Bloomberg said yesterday in a radio interview on WABC-AM. "The police commissioner is checking into that, and if we have to we'll post a police officer at each shelter."
Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly is conducting a safety study of city shelters. Sources said last week that he plans to institute a crime-tracking system for the shelters modeled on the NYPD's Compstat program, which helped drive down crime on city streets.
"Commissioner Kelly has ordered his borough commanders to embark on a survey of security at all city-run shel-ters to determine what can be done to make those shelters safer," said NYPD spokesman Michael O'Looney. "That may include better alarms, better locks, and it may include placing police officers in some shelters."
Many homeless people refuse to stay in city shelters, saying they are unsafe and dirty.
"This is like one of the worst neighborhoods with a roof on top," said a 25-year-old man named Maldi, who stays at the Bellevue Hospital shelter. "It's like being on the streets with a roof." More than one aspect Mary Brosnahan Sulli-van, executive director of the Coalition for the Homeless, said Bloomberg has good intentions, but more needs to be done.
"Physical safety is one aspect of this problem," she said. "Posting a single officer at the doorway of the Bedford At-lantic armory [in Brooklyn] is welcome but not enough. It's filthy, dangerous and chaotic. What a single beat cop can do at the front door is limited."
The city's Department of Homeless Services said it has increased its security budget by 50% in the past three years. Private security officers and better-trained peace officers are used at shelters.
At the Sony Plaza Public Arcade on Madison Ave., homeless people seeking shelter from the winter weather yes-terday had mixed reactions to the possibility of police at shelters.
George Mellos, 60, said he has been homeless since 1989 and swore off shelters after being robbed at the Fort Washington shelter eight years ago.
"I don't know if the cops will do anything, I don't know if they won't do anything," he said. "But that's the reason we don't go to the shelters. They have security guards but they don't do anything."


Courtesy of the NY Daily News
January 7, 2002

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