NY Times Editorial: Child Care Cuts "Real, Unnecessary Crisis for Families"

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Ben Bernanke, the Federal Reserve chairman, made a strong argument for good early childhood care. In a speech in New York City, he argued that the value can be especially high for disadvantaged children with a strong payoff for the economy. These programs can increase high school graduation rates, and graduates earn more, pay more taxes, and rely less on state-provided health care.

We hope Mayor Michael Bloomberg was listening. At present, the city subsidizes child care for 98,000 children. His new budget would end that support for 16,500 of them in September, for a savings of $95 million in the city’s $65.6 billion budget.


Families receiving public assistance or welfare will not be affected. Those losing the subsidies are deemed working poor — with an income of less than 200 percent of the poverty level or $36,620 for a family of three. They pay from $5 to $100 a week for city-sponsored child care. Few will be able to pay the full cost on their own, and, without a safe and educational place for their children, many won’t be able to keep working. Their only option will be welfare.


The Independent Budget Office of New York City has suggested several better ways to save or raise money. Cutting transportation for private school students would save $37 million a year. A 6 cent tax on every plastic bag provided at stores would raise $94 million, almost exactly what is needed to maintain current child care subsidies. Mayor Bloomberg and the City Council talk about budgeting for the future. Cutting child care is not the way to do it.

News Alert: Osama bin Laden Is Dead, U.S. Official Says - NY Times

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Osama bin Laden has been killed, a United States official said.

President Obama is expected to make an announcement on Sunday night, almost ten years after the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

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http://www.nytimes.com?emc=na

Flea Market Is Sprucing Up for Move to Coney Island by Liz Robbins - NYTimes.com

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Debbie Quintana-Stiefel knows it is time to expand her palette. Beyond the brown and deep-red lipsticks she carries, she must now add fuchsias and oranges and complementary foundations to satisfy her new customers.

It is a fairly significant change she plans to make to cover the even more diverse complexions of the Brooklyn women she expects to serve when her cosmetics stall moves from the defunct Aqueduct flea market to a new home in Coney Island.

For 33 years, Ms. Quintana-Stiefel was a fixture at a once-bustling racetrack parking lot in Ozone Park, Queens, that hosted 500 vendors. Developers shut down the market in December to build a new casino at the struggling track.

Now the market’s former operators are bringing a handpicked group of 120 vendors from Aqueduct to a smaller site in Brooklyn and introducing a freshly polished identity: no fleas allowed.

Strictly prohibiting secondhand goods, the market of 170 vendors will open on May 15 as part of a shopping and entertainment site called the BK Festival, representing another step in Coney Island’s ambitious, if often contentious, redevelopment plan.

Sitting on Stillwell Avenue, one block from Surf Avenue, the 110,000-square-foot space will also have a fairground for concerts, rodeos, corporate-sponsored giveaways and pony rides.

“They’re going to put some lace and frills to dress it up a bit,” Ms. Quintana-Stiefel, 56, said. “That’s a good thing for me.”

Ms. Quintana-Stiefel, whose wholesale business, Allessia Kosmetics, built a loyal following of Caribbean, African and Central American customers at Aqueduct, was curious to see how the Bensonhurst and Bay Ridge faces would change her stock.

“Aqueduct got big and it got sloppy — this will be a classier act,” she said.

Tommy Brady, 53, an owner of the BK Festival, said, “We want it to fit in more with the whole program of the new Coney Island.” He managed the Aqueduct market with his partner, Tommy Walker, 60, for 13 years.

On Wednesday, the “two Tommies,” as vendors know them, and their event director, William McCarthy, plan to sign the contract with the developer of the property, Joseph J. Sitt.

In 2009, the Bloomberg administration paid Mr. Sitt, 46, the chief executive of Thor Equities, $95.6 million for 6.9 acres he owned in Coney Island; he kept 5.6 acres to develop hotels and stores with the goal of turning Coney Island into a year-round destination. He has razed some older buildings, angering some in the community, but the festival space on Stillwell was already vacant.

That site represents the first part of Mr. Sitt’s vision, even if it will only be seasonal, through October.

“It’s a little nostalgic — I started my businesses as a flea market operator at the Aqueduct,” Mr. Sitt said. At 16, he sold toys when the flea market was known as Barterama, waking up at 2 a.m. to load a truck and grab a corner stall.

Three decades later, his family-friendly concept is more sophisticated, based on focus groups and testing. Two years ago, when the Aqueduct gaming project seemed imminent, he recruited vendors, from pickle makers to bakers, alongside entertainers for a monthlong stint in Coney Island. The results convinced him the model would work.

“There will be no used goods, no dollar goods, but it will be all upscale product, almost like an outlet center,” Mr. Brady said. “We’re not here to hurt nobody; we want to help Coney Island.”

But in Queens, the market’s closing has left some in the immigrant communities missing a primary option for low-cost shopping.

“When we look back at what we lost, we’ll realize in South Queens that we’re not only giving up something that was really historic, it was a support system for many people who would send products back to their native communities,” said Richard S. David, the executive director of the Indo-Caribbean Alliance in Ozone Park.

He said that an impression had been created, unfairly, that the market had represented something “low-scale and unattractive.”

Some former vendors have found other sites. Mike Thai, 26, said he now sold “cheap watches” at a flea market behind the Sunrise Cinemas in Valley Stream, on Long Island. Mr. Thai said he neither wanted to travel to Coney Island, nor pay what he heard were higher rents.

The prices, factoring in total square feet, are the same, Mr. Walker said, because the stalls are slightly larger in Coney Island. The Aqueduct flea market ran three days a week, while the Coney Island market will operate on Tuesdays, Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays.

Mr. Brady said that while no shuttles were planned to take former shoppers the 13 miles from Queens, he hoped to have a trolley within Brooklyn.

“It’s been very tough; Aqueduct was my life,” said Yvonne Kissoon, 52, who had sold lingerie there since 1987 and has her shop nearby. She is excited to have a corner stall at Coney Island; she said she trusted Mr. Walker’s and Mr. Brady’s business skills.

“We don’t know what we’re going to get into,” Ms. Kissoon said, “but it’s better to try than fail to try.”

City’s School-Liaison Office Is Said to Seek Supportive Parents By Fernanda Santos & Sharon Otterman - NYTimes.com

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In 2007, the New York City Department of Education created an office to help families navigate the school system and to make sure their grievances got to the right ears.

Known then as the Office of Family Engagement and Advocacy, it was set up as a bridge between parents and the department’s central office, and was intended to address complaints that parents had lost their voice when Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg took control of the schools.

But lately, according to people who have had dealings with the office, the role has been expanded in a way that has made some of them uncomfortable.

In January, at a meeting of parent coordinators from a number of schools, employees of the office asked them to forge relationships with parents who they thought might speak out in support of the department’s policies, including its controversial push to close failing schools. The employees at one point used a nickname to describe the type of parents they were looking for: “Happy Harrys,” and not “Angry Sallys,” as two coordinators recalled it.

And on Tuesday, an employee at the office circulated a petition among nearly 400 coordinators citywide, asking them to round up parents’ signatures. The petition was in support of one of the mayor’s most concerted political efforts of the year: to persuade the Legislature to end the law protecting the most senior teachers in the event of layoffs.

The unions representing teachers and parent coordinators — city employees who work inside schools and act as points of contact for families — have called for an investigation, charging that the Education Department used public money and civil servants to advance a political cause.

“Seniority has been and is a political issue,” said Santos Crespo, the president of District Council 37, Local 372, which represents the city’s roughly 1,200 parent coordinators. “They were asked to do a political function, out of the purview of their job scope, let alone the conflicts of using public employees to do political work.”

In an interview, the city’s deputy mayor for education, Dennis M. Walcott, said, “What happened around the petition should not have happened.” But he made no excuses for the Education Department’s broader attempts at mobilizing parents.

“There are parents who aren’t satisfied with what’s going on in the schools and there are parents who are,” Mr. Walcott said. “That’s what we work on: to improve our abilities to engage them.”

There has always been a political gray area embedded in the mission of the family engagement office, a division of about 20 employees. Among its roles are running elections to citywide parent councils and organizing an annual lobbying trip for parents to Albany to advocate state financing for city schools, two relatively noncontroversial efforts.

But after Mr. Bloomberg only narrowly won a third term in 2009, there was a growing realization among some in his inner circle that the city had not done enough to win the support of public school parents for the mayor’s education agenda. There was also a sense that the office of family engagement offered a great deal of untapped potential for organizing through its existing network of parent coordinators, said a person who was familiar with the discussions within the Bloomberg administration at the time, but declined to be named so as not to anger City Hall.

One change was to appoint Maura Keaney, a top aide from Mr. Bloomberg’s re-election campaign, to head the Department of Education’s office of external affairs, which organizes all political lobbying and communications work for the department. She appointed a new executive director for the office of family engagement, Ojeda Hall, a dynamic youth minister and community organizer from Queens. Ms. Keaney, who is on maternity leave, did not return calls for comment.

In the effort to reshape the office, one of the first moves was to give it a new name: the Office of Family Information and Action.

There was little discussion, the person said, about whether there might be a conflict about taking on a more political role. “I think the feeling is you are not asking someone to do something they don’t want to do, and parents who disagree with you, it’s not like you are going to give them worse services,” the person said. “You are just trying to identify parents who do support parts of your agenda, and if they want to, why not enlist them?”

On Jan. 11, at a public library branch in Midtown, at least 40 parent coordinators got together for what had been billed as a training session. After workshops on social media and the technological shift in schools, representatives from the family engagement office made their pitch.

“They asked us to get parents to lobby,” said one coordinator at a Manhattan elementary school, who, like others who discussed the meeting, insisted on anonymity for fear that speaking publicly could cost them their jobs. The content of the meeting was reported this week by Gothamschools, an education blog.

Another coordinator, also assigned to a Manhattan elementary school, said the representatives noted that “only complainers come out” to protest to the Panel for Educational Policy, where school closings are decided. The meetings are often dominated by loud protests, often organized by the teachers’ union.

With a vote on 22 school closings scheduled for early February, the coordinators said they were urged to drum up allies among parents in their schools, saying the parents would be more likely to come if they were invited by someone they knew.

The room fell silent, the coordinators recalled. One of them said that when a woman tried to talk about some issues she was having with the principal at her school, one of the office’s representatives said, “No negatives, only positives.”

The phrase would become like a mantra, repeated over and over during the meeting, the coordinators said.

According to the coordinators, the family office representatives also said that because of the city’s financial straits, principals would be allowed to fire parent coordinators to free up money for other staff members and programs in their schools.

“It didn’t feel right for them to do that to us, to tell us that our jobs are in danger and then asking for our help,” one of the coordinators said.

Some principals said they had also become skeptical of the office, and after word got out of the tone of the meeting on Jan. 11, they advised the parent coordinators in their schools against attending future meetings.

In a statement, Ms. Hall acknowledged that circulating the petition this week was improper. “I regret that it happened, because it is not reflective of the day-to-day work that OFIA does to help families navigate the school system,” she said.

And city officials maintained that their efforts to get parents to meetings were not improper. “Our bottom-line goal is to make sure parents are respected stakeholders,” said Mr. Walcott, the deputy mayor.

Police Commissioner Calls Queens Slaying a Hate Crime by Joseph Goldstein - NYTimes.com

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Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly said Tuesday that the fatal beating of an 18-year-old man in Queens early Saturday “falls into the category of a hate crime.”

The victim, Anthony Collao, was at a party at a house in Woodhaven when five gate-crashers, none older than 17, pushed their way inside, Mr. Kelly said. Once indoors, they began “making homophobic remarks” and writing messages on the wall in red markers, said Mr. Kelly, who was asked about the case after a City Council hearing.

As Mr. Collao, who the police said was at the party with a girlfriend, left about 1 a.m., he encountered the same group outside the house, on 90th Street. One of the teenagers had a metal bat and another had a cane, according to a criminal complaint.

With a shout of “this is my hood,” the teenagers chased Mr. Collao down 90th Street and set upon him in a storm of punches, kicks and blows from “an object that appeared to be a stick,” according to the complaint.

Mr. Collao was taken to Jamaica Hospital and died late Monday after he was taken off life support, Mr. Kelly said. The attack and the death were reported by The Daily News on Tuesday.

When the police arrested one of those suspected in the attack, Christopher Lozada, he had an Atlanta Braves cap that belonged to Mr. Collao, according to the complaint. The police also discovered blood on Mr. Lozada’s clothing and on the sneakers of a second person arrested in the case, according to the complaint, which said that a metal pipe with blood on it was recovered from the crime scene.

Mr. Lozada and three other suspects were arraigned in Queens Criminal Court on Monday on charges of manslaughter, gang assault and weapons possession. The police are still searching for a fifth suspect, whose name they did not release. The criminal complaint does not make any mention of antigay slurs, or offer any suggestion as to what motivated the attack. Mr. Kelly said that investigators with an expertise in hate crimes were looking into the case.

David Franzese, a lawyer for one of the defendants, Luis Tabales, 16, said that his client had nothing to do with the assault and “doesn’t know the other individuals he was arrested with.”

Mr. Franzese said the party was at an abandoned home that had become a hangout for teenagers.

The Hands That Steer Are Building the Bikes by Sean Patrick Farrell - NYTimes.com

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Like thousands of other New Yorkers, Jason Henkle throws a leg over a bicycle every day and pedals to work. Unlike most of his fellow riders, Mr. Henkle built his understated single-speed bike by hand.

Mr. Henkle is among a small group of dedicated New York cyclists who have begun building their own bicycle frames. Their hand-constructed cycles are often custom made for a tailored fit and sometimes include personal touches like the small metal pi symbol Mr. Henkle affixes to his machines.

“They’re pi-cycles,” said Mr. Henkle, making the kind of pun befitting his job as a high school math teacher. He keeps two of his bikes in his living room and often spends his evenings and weekends in a tight storage room he has converted into a frame building shop in his apartment building in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn.

A recent Saturday afternoon found him methodically filing steel tubes for a precise fit on a road frame that’s half-finished. “It’s a nice combination of an athletic activity, craft, science and engineering all balled up into one,” said Mr. Henkle, 30, who figures it takes him about 80 hours to complete a frame.

Some people, like Mr. Henkle, treat the craft as a hobby, building bikes for themselves and a few friends. But a growing number of shops are building made-to-measure frames for customers.

“I got to chat with some of the pros,” he said. “I was definitely able to walk away with some good info.”Many other cyclists in New York and the rest of the country have taken up files, torches and even bamboo and glue to build their own bikes. The North American Handmade Bicycle Show, which started in 2005 with 23 frame builders exhibiting their wares, has grown into a Concours d’Elegance for two-wheelers, featuring more than 160 microbike exhibitors. Mr. Henkle attended the 2011 show last week in Austin, Tex., to learn the latest techniques.

Anchoring the scene is Johnny Coast, a 35-year-old with seven years of frame building and, by his count, 200 to 300 frames under his belt. Mr. Coast’s frames, which are highly regarded for their classic lines and elegant lugs — the often-decorative joints that join tubes — start at $2,250.

Mr. Coast and many builders embrace the small imperfections that are less likely to be spotted in mass-produced machine-built bikes.

“I think people like seeing the hand of the builder,” he said. “You see a little file mark, you see a human made this.”

Like many hobby builders, Lance Mercado, 35, began by making bicycle frames for himself and friends. He has been building custom steel frames professionally since 2007, after taking a popular course in Oregon, and is the owner of SquareBuilt, a shop in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, that specializes in single-speed and track bikes.

“I basically was going to buy a bike one day and saw the ad to learn to build a bike,” he said. “So I went, and people started asking me to build them one, too.” He eventually dropped his job as a waiter to pursue the business.

Krista Ciminera learning the craft with help from Lance Mercado. Chang W. Lee/The New York Times 

Mr. Mercado’s shop has become a nexus of the frame-building community. Krista Ciminera, 27, a messenger, is building a frame for herself and learning the craft at SquareBuilt.

“I really like making stuff with my hands,” Ms. Ciminera said, “and it feels good to be at these machines with sparks flying.”

Recently, Mr. Henkle stopped into SquareBuilt for help on a problem with a lug on his current project. Mr. Mercado welcomes the growing interest.

“The more builders there are in New York, the better for everyone to learn off each other,” Mr. Mercado said.

The city has long been a bike-building center. For more than a century Worksman Cycles in Queens has been making durable utility bicycles and tricycles, and Brooklyn Machine Works has been creating BMX and downhill bikes for more than 15 years. But the community of smaller shops, especially in Brooklyn, continues to broaden. Horse Cycles is a one-man custom-steel shop in Williamsburg, and Bamboo Bike Studio in Red Hook offers a two-day frame-building course using bamboo.

“You can make a bike and make it just as good as any other bike,” said Marty Odlin, 29, who started Bamboo Bike Studio in 2009 and has since expanded to San Francisco. A basic frame-building class costs $632, and proceeds go toward projects to supply bicycles to people in the developing world.

The studio has taught more than 250 people — from 12-year-olds to riders in their 70s — to make the distinctive frames. “They’re beautiful, and they’re really beautiful to the people who build them,” Mr. Odlin said, referring to the bamboo bikes but echoing the thoughts of many hand builders. “There’s a pride thing.”

Planning Comeback, Democrats Huddle with Ousted Members by Janie Lorber - NYTimes.com

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It’s never too early to bring the old faces back.

House Democrats are already deep into planning how to win back the majority – with the help of the lawmakers who lost it for them.

Representative Steve Israel of New York, the new head of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, holds conference calls at least once a month with a group of Capitol Hill alums, which includes about 90 percent of the Democrats who lost their re-election in 2010 and those who retired.

They trade notes on messaging, public relations, Washington happenings and – perhaps most importantly – their districts, now controlled by Republicans. Mr. Israel is working hard to get several of those ousted members, like Stephanie Herseth Sandlin of South Dakota, to run again. (She hasn’t committed.)

Democrats have zeroed in on 14 must-win seats in 8 states – the 14 districts that voted for John Kerry in 2004 and President Obama in 2008, but fell into Republican hands in 2010. Many of those regions will also be the focus of Mr. Obama’s re-election effort, said Mr. Israel, who is in constant contact with president’s political team. Democrats will devote the most attention to Pennsylvania, where a total of five members are on their target list.

With his committee boasting one of the largest January cash hauls n the committee’s history – only $300,000 shy of its all-time fund-raising high for the month – Mr. Israel spoke to a group of reporters at party headquarters on Wednesday with confidence and swagger.

“We have sprung from our defensive crouch,” said Mr. Israel, a former Blue Dog Democrat representing Long Island. “There are 63 unvetted, unknown Republicans, and we have introduced them to their constituents and their constituents are getting buyer’s remorse.”

Mr. Israel traveled to Chicago in December to meet with Rahm Emanuel, the former White House Chief of Staff, who led Democrats back into the majority as committee chairman in 2006. And like Mr. Emanuel, he has developed an election strategy systematically, as if heading into a military battle. After the 14 do-or-die districts, funds will be directed to the 54 seats that Republicans captured in 2010 with less than 55 percent of the vote, followed by the 61 Republican-held districts that voted for Mr. Obama in 2008.

The last few weeks have been far from flawless for the new majority in the House — something that Mr. Israel was relishing Wednesday morning.

“I wake up every morning trying to figure out how to win 25 seats,” Mr. Israel said. “Being in the minority sucks, but being in the minority and being able to do something about it is priceless.”

City Council Wants to Know When Bloomberg’s Away by Michael Barbaro - NYTimes.com

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Mayoral Sign-Out Sheet? Secretive Jaunts Spur a Thought 

His poll numbers have slid. His first choice to lead the city schools turned him down. And the budget deficit? Don’t even ask.

But of all the aggravations that have accompanied Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg’s final term, perhaps none is as unexpected, personal and stinging as this: Now people have the temerity to ask when he is leaving town.

After shrugging off his globe-trotting, none-of-your-business disappearances for nine years, lawmakers are suddenly pestering City Hall aides about the mayor’s weekend whereabouts.

Editorial writers have derisively compared him to the perpetually camouflaged Waldo, wondering how New Yorkers are supposed to find him. And a member of the City Council is exploring a bill that could — what’s this? — require Mr. Bloomberg to notify the public every time he, say, jets off to Bermuda for a round of golf.

A mandatory sign-out sheet for the billionaire mayor? City Hall seems apoplectic. But the clamor is unlikely to die down, largely because the mayor refuses to disclose where he and his top lieutenants were when his administration botched the cleanup of the Christmas weekend blizzard, creating confusion about who was in charge.

During such a crisis, said Councilman Peter F. Vallone Jr., “No time should be wasted trying to figure out who is in power.” Mr. Vallone has made inquiries about legislation that would compel City Hall to disclose whenever a mayor leaves town, and who is in charge during his absence.

In the complicated marriage between Mr. Bloomberg and those he governs, there had always been an unspoken understanding: He ran the city well, and they resisted the urge to poke into his private life.

His handling of the Dec. 26 snowstorm, however, appeared to change that. Now, New Yorkers are treating him like, well, an ordinary public official, demanding pesky information like whether he is on their continent during a disaster.

“He is now being treated as mayors in New York City have historically been treated,” said Bill de Blasio, the city’s public advocate, who under the City Charter would become mayor if Mr. Bloomberg were incapacitated (or, theoretically, stuck indefinitely in the Caribbean).

Mr. de Blasio said he wished Mr. Bloomberg and his aides would simply acknowledge whenever he left the city. “I think they would save themselves a lot of trouble,” Mr. de Blasio said.

The mayor does not see it that way. He jealously guards his privacy and cherishes secret jaunts to his five vacation homes, in places from Vail, Colo., to London. It is not unusual for him to spend a weekend in Paris, a six-hour flight from New York. This weekend, like many others, Mr. Bloomberg had no public events scheduled, and his aides declined to say where he was.

For a decade, Mr. Bloomberg has steadfastly rejected calls for transparency in his personal travels, arguing that in an age of instant communication, nobody needs to know his exact location. The mayor, he argues, is mayor whether he is in City Hall, or Singapore, or somewhere in between.

Pressed to explain how he can govern from abroad, his aides for the first time disclosed the high-tech apparatus he used to remain in communication. He has equipped his private planes with satellite phones and has access at all times to an emergency government communications system that was designed to operate even if the telecommunications system was sabotaged or became overloaded.

They have come in handy. In 2005, after terrorists bombed the London subway system, Mr. Bloomberg was on a flight from Asia to New York. Aboard his Falcon 900, the phone rang: It was his police commissioner, Raymond W. Kelly, consulting him on heightened security measures on the city’s trains and buses.

Still, the hyper-secrecy that surrounds Mr. Bloomberg’s comings and goings is highly unusual. Mayor Edward I. Kochnot only shared his vacation itineraries with the world, but also held teleconferences with the news media from wherever he was visiting. New York governors have routinely disclosed where they will spend their day, whether or not public events are scheduled. At his most coy, Gov. David A. Paterson alerted constituents that he was in Suffolk County — clever code for the beachside villages of the Hamptons.

Even the president, whose job Mr. Bloomberg has at times compared to his own, does not try to hide his movements. On Christmas Day, for example, the public was told that Barack Obama skipped his morning workout, watched a basketball game on television and left his Hawaiian vacation home at 3:26 p.m. in a short-sleeve shirt and dark slacks. Reporters who inquired about how Mr. Bloomberg spent the day were told this: no comment.

Increasingly, that answer seems, even to his closest allies, insufficient. During hearings about the blizzard, held by the City Council, lawmakers struggled to determine who was in charge over the Christmas weekend. Under city law, when Mr. Bloomberg leaves the city, mayoral power falls to the public advocate, unless it is delegated to a deputy mayor.

But the Bloomberg administration has tried to set up a blanket policy: Rather than delegate power each time he leaves New York, Mr. Bloomberg signed an executive order stipulating that his first deputy mayor, Patricia E. Harris, was in charge whenever he was away. Under the same order, if Ms. Harris was not in town, power then skipped to the deputy mayor for operations, a job now held by Stephen Goldsmith.

As the storm rolled toward New York City on Dec. 25, Mr. Bloomberg was in Bermuda, where he has a waterfront vacation home, according to three people told of his travels. Mr. Goldsmith was in his Washington town house. As for Ms. Harris? Nobody would say.

Mr. Vallone, a Democrat from Queens, said his potential legislation would not require the mayor to disclose his whereabouts, but simply to acknowledge his absence and to name his designated fill-in. Mr. Vallone said his real anxiety was that the mayor might be away during a terrorist attack, when momentous decisions, like whether to lock down a neighborhood or shutter the subway system, must be made in seconds.

“I almost always believe that a more open and transparent process works better,” Mr. Vallone said. He said his bill would probably not require such disclosures when a mayor took a short trip to Albany or Long Island, for example.

Stu Loeser, a spokesman for the mayor, said such legislation was unnecessary because Mr. Bloomberg never fully ceded his authority, making it unimportant to disclose who was where.

“Leadership and decision-making powers of the mayoralty,” Mr. Loeser said, “remain with the person who was elected mayor."

He said Mr. Bloomberg had earned his privacy. “The mayor is at work by 7:15 most mornings, and entitled to hours off and a private life,” Mr. Loeser said. “And whether he’s in Bayside, Bay Ridge, or visiting his mom in the Bay State, he’s always reachable and always in charge.”

Mr. Vallone’s bill could prove difficult to dismiss, however. The councilman is both a longtime ally of the mayor and a popular figure in the Council.

Gene Russianoff, a staff lawyer at the New York Public Interest Research Group, said he sympathized with Mr. Vallone’s intention.

“It’s surprising that the mayor is not required to do this already,” Mr. Russianoff said. The speaker of the Council,Christine C. Quinn of Manhattan, has signaled openness to the concept.

And it seems likely to resonate with residents still upset about the problems caused by the holiday storm.

“I completely support it,” said Marsha Zoback, 57, who lives in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, and struggled to navigate the snow-clogged streets with a bad hip.

“If you don’t want to tell people where you are going,” she said, “don’t be in public office.”

New York Takes Bold Step on Cash in Judicial Races by William Glaberson - NYTimes.com

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New York’s top court officials will bar the state’s hundreds of elected judges from hearing cases involving lawyers and others who make significant contributions to their campaigns, a move that will change the political culture of courts and transform judicial elections by removing an important incentive lawyers have for contributing.

Campaign fund-raising of the more than 700 trial-level judges around the state who are elected has been a persistent source of complaints and allegations of corruption, with some judges doling out lucrative assignments to lawyers who were political contributors.

The decision takes the form of a new rule of the state court system and will be announced on Tuesday by Jonathan Lippman, the state’s chief judge. It is believed to be the most restrictive in the country, bluntly tackling an issue —money in judicial politics — that has drawn widespread attention.

The rule is more restrictive than similar measures adopted recently in Washington, Oklahoma, Michigan and other states, and would take the question of disqualification entirely out of judges’ hands. It flatly states that “no case shall be assigned” by court administrators to a judge when the lawyers or any of the participants involved donated $2,500 or more in the preceding two years, court officials said.

Judge Lippman, who promoted the adoption of the measure by a statewide judicial board, said in an interview that the rule was critical to preserve the integrity of the state’s courts. “Nothing could be more important for the judiciary than to have the public see that we’re neutral arbiters of disputes,” he said. “If we don’t have that, we don’t have anything.”

Judge Lippman will make the announcement and detail specifics of the rule at his annual State of the Judiciary speech in Albany on Tuesday. It was adopted on Feb. 1 by the Administrative Board of the Courts, a five-judge body that has broad rule-making authority. Court officials said that, to permit comment, the rule would not become final for 60 days.

One of the recent campaigns that drew attention to the issue was a 2008 three-way Democratic race for Surrogate’s Court in Manhattan in which the candidates raised nearly $900,000. The winner, Nora S. Anderson, was indicted and then acquitted of campaign finance violations after taking $250,000 from a Brooklyn lawyer for whom she had worked.

The issue has been less intense in New York than in many states that have had multimillion-dollar political campaigns for top courts because the judges on New York’s highest court are appointed rather than elected.

Judicial politics in New York State and New York City are byzantine, with the political parties often controlling the nomination process. But even uncontested elections in the city can cost $25,000 or more, with judges hiring campaign consultants and paying for campaign events and mailings. Of about 1,140 full-time trial judges in the state, about 730 are elected, including judges in the powerful Surrogate’s Court and the highest-level trial court, the State Supreme Court, which can hear cases worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

Primary contests for judicial positions that pay $136,000 or less have cost $250,000 or more. In some upstate counties it is routine for candidates for the bench to raise $100,000 or more, partly to pay for television advertisements to create name recognition.

In New York City there have been widespread allegations that the political consultants in judicial races are so closely tied to political organizations in some boroughs that their fees have essentially become the price of a judgeship. But a series of judicial scandals in Brooklyn and a challenge to New York’s method of judicial selection that failed in theUnited States Supreme Court left the system of financing judicial campaigns largely untouched.

In 2005, a Surrogate’s Court judge in Brooklyn, Michael H. Feinberg, was removed partly for awarding $9 million in legal fees from estates to a friend who was a political contributor. In 2008, a Rochester City Court judge who was running for State Supreme Court was admonished for asking a lawyer who appeared before her for political backing from the bench, though she did not ask for a contribution.

There have been disputes, including one that reached the Supreme Court, over the influence of political contributors in multimillion-dollar judicial races in West Virginia, Illinois, Alabama, Pennsylvania and other states.

In New York, for much of the last decade there have been calls for change, including in 2003 from a commission appointed by the previous chief judge, Judith S. Kaye. Its report described “the problematic nature of having judges raise money from the lawyers that appear before them.”

Lawyers have long been the main contributors in judicial campaigns in New York, and, in some instances, the reasons were evident. One study in 1998 of two powerful Surrogate’s Court judges in the city who are no longer in office showed that lucrative appointments for legal work went to campaign contributors in 66 percent of one judge’s cases and in 54 percent of the other’s.

The national drive for scrutiny of contributions to judicial campaigns gained momentum after a 2009 Supreme Court ruling that said the chief justice of the West Virginia Supreme Court had wrongly ruled in the $50 million case of a coal company whose chief executive had spent $3 million to help elect him.

But the New York rule is more stringent than even what many critics of the judiciary have proposed. Court officials said they planned to use computer programs to compare the names of lawyers and other people involved in cases against public records of contributions to judicial candidates. If contributions of more than $2,500 over two years are found, the case would be assigned to a different judge.

It could be a disciplinary offense or create a ground to appeal if a judge were to handle a case involving a contributor.

The statewide judiciary board consists of the chief judge and the presiding justices of each of the state’s four intermediate appeals courts, and it has the authority to adopt rules without public comment.

Around the country, some judges have defeated efforts to force them to disqualify themselves over political contributions, saying it is a precept of judicial independence that judges decide whether they can rule fairly. In New York State that argument has had special resonance among some judges who say that the court system’s administration has increasingly encroached on their powers.

But critics of the judicial campaign finance system have been saying that the courts have been tainted by a political culture that permits lawyers to try to gain influence with judges by contributing to their campaigns. Sandy Galef, a Westchester County Democrat in the State Assembly, said she had been frustrated about the fate of a bill she has filed for years to require judges to recuse themselves in cases involving political contributors, including lawyers.

The bill never attracted much interest in the Legislature, said Ms. Galef, a former schoolteacher. “Maybe,” she added, “one of the problems is we have a lot of attorneys.”