NYC NOW - August 20, 2024 : Evening Roundup

Episode Date: August 20, 2024

Governor Kathy Hochul hopes to release a new plan for tolling drivers through congestion pricing by the end of this year or early next year. Plus, the New York City Department of Correction is investigating the death of a detainee at Rikers Island Tuesday morning. Also, New York City health officials are preparing for a new strain of Mpox. And finally, WNYC’s Sean Carlson talks with two former firefighters about diversity and inclusivity in the FDNY.

Welcome to NYC Now, your source for local news in and around New York City from WNYC. I'm Jenae Pierre. New York Governor Kathy Hokel says she hopes to release a new plan for tolling drivers through congestion pricing by the end of this year or early next year. Hokel put an indefinite pause on the MTA's $15 daily vehicle toll in June. But now she says she's looking into how other cities around the world toll drivers. A place like London where they held up as the example of congestion pricing, they started at five pounds and they worked their way up to the higher number over time. So I'm looking at all the options that we have on the table. Hockel's last minute pause on the tolls scuttled the MTA's plans for buying new train cars, upgrading signals, and adding more elevators to stations.

The MTA did not respond to a request for comment. The New York City Department of Correction says they're investigating the death of a detainee who died at Rikers Island to, morning. They say they've also alerted the federal monitor that oversees city jails. Correction officials say emergency responders transported the detainee to Mount Sinai Hospital in Queens around 5 o'clock, and the detainee was pronounced dead about an hour later. They have not released a person's name or cause of death. Data from the nonprofit Vera Institute shows it's the fifth death in a city jail so far this year. New York City health officials are preparing for a new strain of

Impox that's currently circulating in parts of Africa. They say it could possibly show up here. WMYC's Caroline Lewis has more. The more deadly variant is spreading quickly in the Democratic Republic of Congo and neighboring countries, and a case recently popped up in Sweden. So far, no cases of the deadlier strain have been reported in the United States. An earlier, less severe strain of MPox has been circulating in New York since 2022, although case counts are. are currently low. City health officials are advising doctors to ask patients with the diseases rash-like symptoms about recent travel to Central Africa. A state lab is also examining M-Pox test samples to determine the viral strain. The M-Pox vaccine that's available in New York City

is expected to protect against the new strain of the virus as well. These days, diversity and inclusivity is the topic of conversation when referring to the New York City Fire Department. We'll get into why after the break. Plenty of eyes are on the FDNY and their history of diversity and inclusivity. The extra attention comes weeks after the resignation of Laura Kavanaugh, the first woman to lead the fire department. For more, my colleague Sean Carlson talked with two veteran firefighters, Regina Wilson, president of the Vulcan Society, and Brenda Berkman, who was often credited with being the first woman to ever serve in the FDNY.

In the 80s, Birkman won a federal sex discrimination lawsuit as the sole plaintiff that resulted in the hiring of the city's first woman firefighters in 1982. She starts the conversation describing what it was like joining the FDNY back then. When women first came on the job, there was no preparation for now a two-gender workforce. So the men weren't prepared, the women weren't prepared, And, of course, the city didn't help itself by scattering the 40 women all over the city, no two women in the firehouse, no bathrooms, no locks on the bathrooms, in some cases, no doors on the bathrooms.

I mean, there was no thought given to sleeping arrangements. There were no uniforms or protective equipment that were sized to fit women. So during training, women were going up the aerial ladder and their boots were falling off, and their gloves were not appropriate for their size hands. And in general, it's been really hard to find any leader within the fire department who's been a captain's courageous when it comes to integrating women and people of color and LGBTQ and into the department, which the department and New York City are communities, the people that we are being paid to serve, you know, they need that diversity. You know, you touched on something that I wanted to delve into a little more here. The FDNY is still dominated by men, according to personnel data collected by the city council. Less than 2% of the FDNY's roughly 11,000 firefighters are women, and that's compared to 9% nationwide.

How do you feel about that? Do you feel like progress has been made since you joined the FDNY 42 years ago? Well, there's more than 40, which is the number of women who came on with me. But no, not nearly enough progress. there's still significant barriers. And, you know, you can talk about numbers. It's fantastic that there's more than triple the number of women on the job than when I came on over a hundred.

But at the same time, I really question about how much the department has done to make those different people feel like they are truly part of the organization, and they can bring their full selves to the job. You know, if you look back at the numbers of women today or African Americans today or Asians or Hispanics, those all came from lawsuits. So this wasn't because of the independent effort that the fire department wanted them there.

I mean, from Brenda's time, right up until 2016, we never had a bathroom for females in every firehouse. And so those numbers increased and you're getting to your almost 2% because the Vocal Society sued the fire department and changed the way that we have tests, which was discriminatory when Brenda filed in the 70s and right up until we filed a lawsuit in 2008. Your time at the fire department overlapped with Lorcavenon being named the first female fire commissioner. Oh, yeah, absolutely. How did you feel about that when it happened? As she moved into the first deputy commissioner spot, time after time, myself, Brenda, used to go to her office religiously to let her know that female firefighters were sleeping on the floor on a yoga mat

because they couldn't understand the concept of having to sleep in this room with blacked out windows, totally pitch black, and you're in a room with 10 men. We really didn't get any help from her. Like, these meetings were empty. And so seeing the amount of. of work that we were not getting done and not getting completed, I kind of understood what we were getting ourselves into when she was afforded, this promotion as the commissioner of the fire department of New York. This question is for both of you. Brenda, you can go first.

What's your opinion of the new commissioner, Robert Tucker? Well, I don't have an opinion of him because I don't know the guy. And, you know, I'm hoping that he doesn't try to so hard to be one of the guys. I've always been arguing that diversity is not just a matter of, it's a nice thing to do, it's the moral thing to do, you know, but it's also a safety issue because if you get people all from one group, all thinking exactly alike, they get tunnel vision, they just reinforce each other's, you know, prejudices, let's see what the new Commissioner does going forward. Is he going to be a buff, or is he going to really take a hard look at ways that the FDNY can better serve the communities and the workforce? What do you think,

Regina? The most frustrating thing for me is having hope. I hope we finally fix this bathroom problem. I hope we could stop people from being racist. I hope I hope I hope. I hope. I hope. I hope I hope. Do I think that this is going to happen at a drop of a dime? No, but I do think that this commissioner coming in needs to drop down at least three big, heavy things that will show that he's here. We'll work with him like we've done every other commissioner. And at the end of the day, the vocal society is going to do what the vocusciety is going to do. What does the path forward look like for the next generation of women and people of color who want to join the FDNY? And how can the department expand the diversity? Right off the bat, as Regina says, to create a better workforce

that's more responsive to its communities and allows people who are part of that workforce to bring their true selves to the job. I think the biggest part to me is that you have to let us in a room, right? You have a lot of specialized units that a lot of these white firefighters and white officers have their foot on. And so we got to start moving some of these people out of the way to allow people of color to enter these rooms. This commissioner needs to let us in. We shouldn't have to beg. We shouldn't have to have barriers. Like, just give us the opportunity to work. Let us work. That was former FDNY captain Brenda Berkman and president of the Vulcan Society, Regina Wilson, talking with my colleague, Sean Carlson. The FDNY denied multiple requirements.

request for comment on this interview. Before we go, a quick correction. In a previous episode, we brought you a story about relief for New Jersey residents struggling with medical bills. The story misstated how the Murphy administration is funding the forgiveness plan. For more, read the full story on our news website, Gakamist. Thanks for listening to NYC now from WMYC. Catch us every weekday, three times a day. I'm Jinné Pierre.

We'll be back tomorrow.