A recent decision by the U.S. Supreme Court to uphold lower court rulings against New York Mayor Bloomberg and his “green” PlaNYC:2030 plan should make clear to New Rochelle residents that Mayor Bramson is not telling the truth when asked about the overall goals of his GreeNR plan for New Rochelle. The Mayor has sought support among New Rochelle residents by portraying GreeNR as a “feel good” effort to create parks, plant trees, layout bike paths and make New Rochelle a “livable City. As the U.S. Supreme Court decision against Mayor Bloomberg shows, these so-called “sustainability plan” are nothing more than an attempt to place illegal mandates on private property while creating new taxes and increasing the scope and reach of government into our private lives.
Mayor Bramson informed the New Rochelle City Council last month that he wants a vote on his GreeNR plan this month. At the last meeting, Sustainability Coordinator Deborah Newborn read off a series of amendments to the initial GreeNR plan distributed in April 2010. These amendments, according to Newborn, will be added to the existing plan at some point in the future. Rather than wait, the Mayor wants a vote on the plan before the amended document is completed and published so that Council Members would be blindly voting on a final version of a 30-year plan for New Rochelle, a plan with far-reaching consequences. Council Members must refuse to vote on any such plan until they have received the final version.
Talk of the Sound has been trying to warn New Rochelle for over a year about ICLEI and the radical left-wing groups behind Mayor Bramson’s GreeNR Sustainability Plan. GreeNR is a trojan horse designed to sneak massive amounts of government intrusion into the lives of New Rochelle residents under the guise of promoting clean air, clean water and planting more trees. In fact, GreeNR is just a small part of a global strategy by Marxists and Socialists to redistribute wealth by slowly taking control of private property, placing it under the direct control of the government.
Mayor Noam Bramson, along with Deborah Newborn, his taxpayer-funded sock-puppet, have repeatedly provided soothing reassurances that there are no mandates in GreeNR. Newborn got so carried away with her “no mandates” mantra that Bramson had to correct her when she said the City did not mandate recycling. The City does mandate recycling, residents can be fined for mixing recyclables into their trash. In fact, the entire plan is about create the framework through which the City Council will give the bureaucracy the authority to begin to develop illegal mandates, develop a regime of fees and fines and otherwise find new and creative ways to increase government revenue and the expense of local homeowners.
Despite her title of “Sustainability Coordinator” and an office in City Hall, Deborah Newborn is not a municipal employee. As part of the ICLEI playbook, Mayor Bramson brought her into the government under false pretenses, claiming that her role would involve better insulating public buildings and running cell phone recycling programs. In fact, the hiring of a Sustainability Coordinator is a requirement of ICLEI that there be someone paid by the government but not actually working as a government employee to skirt financial and conflict of interest disclosures. ICLEI provided Newborn’s job description to the Mayor, a job description which states that the role of the Sustainability Coordinator is to “coordinate” with ICLEI not “coordinate” among government agencies as the unaware have supposed. Her primary role is to push LEED, the so-called “green building standards” created by something called the U.S. Green Building Council, an organization created by a group funded by the far-left Tides Foundation which closely aligned with public sector unions and the infamous, discredited and now defunct ACORN. Newborn is a spy, a plant, an operative slipped into an official role within our local government under a false pretense all while serving as ICLEI’s agent in New Rochelle.
GreeNR is the step-child of the mother of all ICLEI infiltration in the United States, Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s PlaNYC. Most people have never heard of this plan but know of its first major initiative, congestion pricing for traffic going into Manhattan – an entry fee starting at $8.00 a day for cars driving into Manhattan between 6 AM and 6 PM on weekdays. The stated benefit was to be reduce carbon emissions. The hidden agenda — establish the principle that to “protect” the earth’s “common” space like air, water, and soil the government must regulate and charge for any use of it that depletes it. Initially, the focus would be regulating things like personal vehicles driving into Manhattan or commercial vehicles like truck and taxis but the same principle could be applied to treat as “common” space private businesses and personal property like a single-family home.
If you want to understand why liberals and their union allies support Mayor Bloomberg and his ICLEI inspired PlaNYC look no further than the Bloomberg’s own projection that adopting congestion pricing would result in $500 million a year in tax revenue. Mandating taxi vehicles is just one of hundreds of aspects to PlaNYC, all means to increase the reach of government into citizens lives while raising taxes.
Bloomberg’s initial attempts to mandate vehicle use in New York City failed:
Judge Strikes Down NYC’s Green Taxi Fleet
Many months ago, I told you that New York City was working on greening its taxi fleet, which is part of the PlaNYC initiative to get the city more environmentally friendly (I notice, too, that I mentioned Mayor Bloomberg’s term limitation in that post…haha, he changed the law so he could keep being mayor). Part of the overall plan with the taxis was to make it mandatory that all cabs are hybrids by 2012. And last week, a federal judge said no dice to that.
Bloomberg appealed all the way up to the U.S. Supreme Court and lost:
NYT: City’s Lengthy Push for Hybrid-Engine Taxicabs Hits a Legal Dead End
Paul A. Crotty of Federal District Court in Manhattan, rejected that proposal too, writing in a 2009 opinion that the incentives amounted to “a de facto mandate” and thus fell under the same legal issues. The United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit later upheld that ruling, which city lawyers had hoped could be appealed to the Supreme Court.
If New Rochelle residents would ask, I would tell them to read Talk of the Sound’s entire 7-Part Series on ICLEI and GreeNR but if you cannot make the time and had to pick just one I would point readers to All About ICLEI: Part VII – Sustained Development.
If readers want to understand all they need to know, they need look no further than a 6 minute audio recording of David Kooris giving the Keynote Speech at New Rochelle’s first “sustainability initiative” meeting on September 30th, 2010.
David Kooris Speech/Earth Overshoot Day (.mp3)
Kooris, part of the vaguely titled Regional Planning Association, yet another ICLEI “partner”, spends half his time talking about Earth Overshoot Day. If the Mayor’s keynote speaker at the first (and only) “sustainability initiative meeting” spends most of his speech dwelling on a subject that few, if any, New Rochelle residents have ever heard of it might just offer some important clues as to who is being ICLEI and GreeNR and where they are trying to take New Rochelle, the United States and, for that matter, the world. Older residents will be familiar with the term “worker’s paradise”. Read more about Kooris, his speech and the groups behind his speech here.
UPDATE: Consider this latest announcement from Mayor Bramson, New Rochelle building supers to learn green tips.
The Mayor said “Providing instruction and guidance so we all can understand what can be done is really the essential first step”. Really? First step towards what? Answer: Towards mandating that privately-owned apartment buildings implement government policies.
The Green Supers Program is a partnership with SEIU Local 32BJ. Readers will not have too look far to find connections between the SEIU, ACORN, The Tides Foundation, George Soros and the usual assortment of far-left radicals.
ACORN’s biggest union backer, the Service Employees International Union, gave more than $4 million to the community organization and its affiliates from 2006-07, according to Dept. of Labor filings. One SEIU local union, the Illinois Homecare Workers and Home Childcare Providers, sprouted from ACORN’s organizing efforts and pays rent to ACORN.
Again, GreeNR is a plan to increase the scope of government, increase taxes and, once you understand the SEIU connection, a way to increase union membership and thus increase union dues which are, in turn, poured back into the Democratic Party.
One other point worth noting, Deborah Newborn is quoted saying “”The GreeNR sustainability program is an attempt to make New Rochelle more sustainable by addressing all sectors of energy use. We have 43 initiatives. Making mid- and high-rise buildings more efficient is one of them.”
If the Newborn and Bramson can create this program to educated building superintendents, something that falls under one of the 43 initiatives in GreeNR, without the City Council having seen a final version of the GreeNR plan let alone voted on it, then why is approving GreeNR even necessary. Why cannot the Mayor just move forward with individual initiatives that have full support of the Council and do not cost New Rochelle taxpayers any money? If you ask the Mayor he will tell you that the entire GreeNR plan must be approved as a complete package. Why? He never seems to explain that but it is not hard to see. The plan is a set of interlocking initiatives which will establish a set of principles that will justify future regulation, mandates, taxes and fees. When residents complain, the Mayor will be able to justify all of them on the grounds that they reflect the principles outlined in GreeNR. By that time it will be too late and New Rochelle will be ground under the boots of our boy-Mayor.
The time to stop this was in hiring Deborah Newborn. Council Members failed to do their home work and the Mayor snuck her through. She is not doing what she was supposedly hired to do but now she is there and it will be impossible to get rid of her as long as the Mayor controls a majority on Council. Council Members cannot fail again. They need to do their homework on GreeNR and kill it dead.
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Bloomberg’s Plans
Working in NYC,I wonder what Mayor Bloomberg is doing with his green plans. He has totally forgotten about the subways and subway stations. On any given day you will find the subway cars and station steps dirty and full of debris. Perhaps he should look there and start greening the transit system.