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Civitas No. 37 -- June 26, 2003

     The Broadside of Local Politics and Civic Design

Our Motto: “You have to hack your way through a lot of lunchmeat in this world."

Quote of the Month:

"Everything has been figured out, except how to live" — Jean Paul Sartre

Tulin In Surprise Bid for Council Seat,
and Other Hot Summertime Tidbits Fresh Off the Grill — by Jim Kunstler

Saratoga Lawyer Peter A. Tulin, a Republican maverick who has served as city attorney under two mayors, and battled with members of his own party, is seeking an endorsement from the city Democratic committee in his bid for Public Safety Commissioner. The Dems otherwise lack a candidate for that office going into the fall election. Tulin has already been endorsed by the Conservative Party. His opponent would be incumbent commissioner, Republican Tom Curley. We sat down with Tulin for an interview Wednesday morning:

Civitas: How do you actually get an endorsement?

Tulin: I sent a letter asking for an interview and a review of my credentials. They all have a right to hear where I stand on the issues.

Civitas: How would you run the police department differently?

Tulin: The current head of the deparment has spent eight years studying the truck traffic. It’s worse than ever and they’re not even talking about it anymore. Every single oversized truck should be ticketed. Deliveries downtown should be done early in the morning. We should re-visit those truck loading zones on Broadway. There’s also been a failure to deal meaningfully with parking.

Civitas: Would you go for parking meters?

Tulin: No. They don’t pay for themselves. Plus everyone’s got to carry around a load of quarters. There are other strategies. Diagonal parking. We ought to try different things. I’m interested in action not committees.

Civitas: Overtime pay in the police department is impressive.

Tulin: It’s over $1 million a year now. It’s more than doubled in the past six years. Overtime is not a fact of life, it’s a fact of mismanagement, an institutional defect. Maybe we need to hire more officers. The sales tax shortfall would be a non-issue if police overtime pay was reduced.

Civitas: The police station in the back of city hall is a cramped, skeezy, dark, medieval hole.

Tulin: As a physical facility it’s a disgrace. And very bad for police morale. I have a plan to break ground within two years on a new building containing police headquarters very close to where they are now, at no cost to the taxpayers. It’s called mixed-use development on city-owned land. I’ll have more to say about that before the election

Civitas: The public safety commissioner also has a seat on the city council and has to deal with larger issues of the public interest like—

Tulin: The mother and father of all issues is the city’s relationship with the county. It has been very problematic. The $15 million dollar landfill we were compelled to ante up for, which has never been used, is the grossest example of government waste in New York State. The city paid for 50 percent of the county’s sewer infrastructure and we don’t use close to half of it. Now the county wants us to join with them on a water scheme costing over $75 million. The city DPW has a better, far less costly plan, and they’re dealing with it in a meaningful way. The county is dealing with it in a purely political way.

Civitas: Isn’t there a lot of opposition to turning Saratoga Lake into a reservoir?

Tulin: Nobody calls Lake George “Reservoir George” and it’s used for drinking water. If the lake were managed as a resource, it would be cleaner with no threat to the recreational users.

Civitas: Does the city get a fair shake with the county on the racetrack admission tax?

Tulin: I don’t notice the county sheriff’s department providing service around the track. Our police stand out there on Union Avenue. And our fire department is the one that’s there, not the county volunteers. We should get the full share on racetrack admissions.

Note to readers: we will interview all willing city candidates over the next several months.

Affordable Housing Crisis

Now that even a packing crate in a city neighborhood costs over $200-Large, and apartments under a Grand-a-month are rare, the crisis is real. Single young people, service workers, old folks all increasingly have trouble staying in the city. Mayor Klotz’s office has come up with a good comprehensive plan of tax incentives, reformed building regulations, and subsidies for getting more apartments on the ground. In fact, the first major project may get underway soon — apartments infilling the vacant frontage along West Circular in what is currently ambiguous and useless “open space” behind the Stonequist senior apartment tower. We won’t overanalyze the fiscal technicalities of the affordable housing problem, but we would emphasize these points of urban design.

Subsidized housing should be as good-looking as “market” housing, and doesn’t cost more. Design and proportions matter. Building typologies matter. Never put more than eight units of low-income housing on one building site.

Concentrating poverty — a la Jefferson Terrace — multiplies social problems.

The housing problem would benefit hugely by simply removing current restrictions on accessory apartments and garage apartments. There is apparently a misapprehension among the public that all renters are winos and criminals. Accessory apartments have two benefits: they help the owner carry the mortgage and the give someone else a place to live.

Don’t restrict “affordable” units to a particular group like seniors, and don't outlaw children. This only ghettoizes people by age group and creates abnormal social relations.

Parking Parking Parking

The public is obsessed and inflamed over the parking issue. Much of this sentiment is delusional of course, perhaps even borderline psychotic. People actually expect to park right in front of the restaurant they are going to on Phila Street, for instance, when they could easily find a space two blocks away and walk. Are we such a nation of lazy slobs now that a two block walk is beyond the pale? Psychotic or not, parking is a political issue that must be dealt with. And so comes the Lenz committee report on parking, issued June 17.

One idea in it stands out, and not necessarily in a good light. That is to eliminate the ground floor retail portion of a new parking structure proposed by DPW for the empty lot between the old boarded up Hub building and the little green square on Woodlawn. Bad idea. Church Street has been dead long enough and needs to be activated with destinations for pedestrians (and locations for businesses). A Stewart’s shop is not enough (in fact, the current renovation of that shop may leave it looking uglier than it was before). This area one block from our city’s 100-percent corner (Church and Broadway) looks like a UFO landing strip.      

We hear that committee member Tim Mabee of the Adirondack Trust had a particular animus against mixing retail with parking and spoke out against mixed-use in the committee meetings. We also hear that this is “payback” for the hard time that the bank got over demolishing the Hub building.

Personally, we here at Civitas think that the future is so not going to be about driving cars that the financing of gigantic parking structures at the cost of $12,000 to $15,000 per space is the last word in public policy psychosis. But we’re cranks that way.

To Be Or Not To Be?

At ten a.m. Wednesday, Councilman Mike Lenz told Civitas he intended to sign a memo allocating $16,000 to the Shakespeare in the Park program, which is desperately needed to make up for promised money that got gridlocked in State Senator Joe Bruno’s office by the state budget fiasco. Without it, the popular program may have to be cancelled. By 4:30, Lenz still hadn’t signed it. Just sign it, Mike.

Instructional Corner

Rush hour on Caroline Street. 5:20 p.m.
Traffic jams are rare on traditional interconnected street grids.