NYC NOW - July 7, 2023: Evening Roundup

Episode Date: July 7, 2023

Uber Eats, DoorDash and Grubhub are suing New York City to stop it from implementing a new minimum wage for workers. Plus, Yusef Salaam’s win for Harlem’s City Council seat is shaking things up for Manhattan Democratic Party Leader Keith Wright. And finally, WNYC’s Rosemary Misdary joins a group of conservationists to find out what’s happening to the waterbird islands of Jamaica Bay and the East River.

Good evening and welcome to NYC Now. I'm Jene Pierre for WNYC. Some food delivery companies are suing New York City to stop it from implementing a new minimum wage for workers. Uber Eats, DoorDash, and Grubhubb Filed the suit this week in the state Supreme Court to block the pay boost, which is set to take effect on July 12th. The city says the average delivery worker makes just over $7 an hour. Under the new rules, workers would make

almost $18 an hour. The companies argue that the raise would increase costs for consumers and hurt restaurants. In response to the suit, the city's Consumer Protection Commissioner said delivery workers deserve fair pay for their labor. Now to Harlem, where the victory by Yusef Salam in last month's city council primary represents a major upset in city politics. Salam was recruited and mentored by Keith Wright. The Manhattan Democratic Party leader called Salam's win a comeback for a family who was

once at the center of Harlem politics. WNYC's Michelle Bocanegra has the story. That's after the break. On election night, an electricity surged through the crowd at Harlem Tavern. But it wasn't just for Yusuf Salam, a first-time political candidate who won in an upset against the Harlem elite. It was also for former assembly member Keith Wright. What Muhammad Ali said.

When he took on Sunny Liston, he said, we're going to shock the world. Salam is one of the exonerated Central Park Five, a group of black and Latino men who were wrongfully imprisoned as teenagers. Salam won more than 63% of the ranked choice vote, toppling assembly member and political mainstay, Inez Dickens, who won 36%. For Wright, who had been out of the limelight for years, the win showed he's still irrelevant. player. Wright was the handpicked successor to Charles Rangel, a Harlem political legend. But he lost his congressional bid in 2016 to now Representative Adriano Espayat, who became the new local kingmaker. Since then, there's been a fight for influence in a rapidly changing Harlem. Esbyat backed Dickens this spring, but Wright is quick to point out...

Espayat is not particularly popular down in the black community. Esbyat's spokesperson didn't return a request for comment. Wright remembers when he first recruited Salam to run for the seat back in 2022. No one was really even talking to us here, right? We were like in the wilderness. Former Governor David Patterson also threw his support behind Dickens. Even if he had eked out a victory over Assemblywoman Dickens in a close race, we would have all been surprised.

But this was shocking. It was two to one. Jordan Wright, Salaam's campaign manager, is another rising star in political circles. Patterson says Keith and his son, Jordan, remind the former governor of his relationship with his own father, Basil Patterson. The late Patterson was one of Harlem's gang of four, the group credited with making Harlem the original bastion of national black politics. The next Harlem political duo, huh? Well, I'll say it is. I take all my orders from him. It's a comeback that could signal a shifting political landscape in Harlem. That's WNYC reporter, Michelle Bocanegra.

Far from Harlem and with a lot less traffic, the New York Harbor is a hot dating spot for migratory birds at this time, from April to mid-July. About 40 islands dot these waters, but only a handful offer the ideal habitat for nesting grounds. So every year, the New York City Ottoman gets special permission to visit these fragile islands and document how waterbirds are doing. They've been conducting these surveys for nearly four decades now.

But the nesting grounds are struggling. Their decline comes after a period of successful efforts that kept human destruction away. WNYC reporter Rosemary Misdairi joined a group of conservationists to find out what's happening to the waterbird islands of Jamaica Bay and the East River. You are anchored. Decked out in waiters, Dr. Shannon Curley and a half a dozen, ecologists walk hip-deep in Jamaica Bay towards Elders East Island. We'll take the outside nest, and then we'll try to stay parallel.

I will take the gull counts for everybody. Curley researches migratory birds at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. She's leading the annual count of New York Harbor birds. Okay. Okay. It's time. Let's do it. Let's do it.

With a palm-sized stenopad and a pen in hand, Curley records all the field data. She listens attentively as the rest of the team begins to count. He shot it. 11 more green eagret. Two more snowy. One, two. It's the crew's job to scan the ground in bushes for nests. To do that, they use a rear-view mirror attached to a 10-foot pole to peek into nests to identify the species

and number of eggs. That's really the focus of the Harbor Arons project is the conservation of these wading birds. Dustin Partridge is the Director of Conservation and Science at the New York City Audubon. Last year, our surveys were, you know, we got to count and it was disheartening because they were the lowest number of wading bird nests

ever recorded in the harbor was last year. Partridge says the alarming trend started around 2010, but has worsened in recent years due to human causes. Pollutions, sea level rise, and urban animals at 3,000. arrive on people's waist, such as rats and raccoons, have caused waiting birds to abandon more than half their perennial nesting sites. I wonder if this island's flooded?

That's what I'm thinking. Curly and survey volunteer Jose Ramirez Garofalo note the rapid changes caused by sea level rise. Ramirez Garofalo is a Ph.D. student at Rutgers University's ecology and evolution program. This ground is very mushy, too. Yeah, the nests are all pushed back onto the... Yeah, this is weird. Yeah. Okay.

Usually were the nests out on the perimeter of the island? They were far out. Yeah, they were pretty far. All of this area would have been full. At least last year was full of nests. And where we entered the island, there were always nests very close to the beach. And this was just last year? Yeah.

And this year they've retreated? Correct. The birds push away from beaches because that's where the shadow of human choices comes ashore and is most felt. Two were dead from fishing line. I saw it and then two like this, so that's four. We find raccoon tracks and raccoon scat, raccoon dropping. In some cases, like devoured carcasses right next to scat and traps. Evidence of raccoons is a bad omen to bird conservationist Todd Winston.

If raccoons get on the island, it seems as though birds often abandon. Because we've repeatedly seen big colonies completely desert their island, and at the same time find raccoon tracks or droppings. Once an island is abandoned, the birds don't return. According to NYC Audubon's nearly 40 years of data. Every time we lose an island, we're losing birds, and the birds that we do have are concentrated on the few islands that are left, and that increases their risk to predation, flooding, disturbance.

At the harbor's peak population in the early 2000s, birds used 15 of the islands for mating. now that number has dwindled to six. We really need to conserve and protect the different islands that are out here. There is some good news. The number of total active nests on the harbor islands from this spring survey is 1,398. That's a small bump up from last year. Which is really nice, but it doesn't break us from that trend that we're currently in.

Overall trends from historical data show steep declines of more than 60% for some waiting bird species that once dominated the harbor. Three species were not spotted at all. This is all to not just track what's happening, but to advocate for on behalf of these birds. There are different things that we could put in place to stop disturbance, to improve the quality of the habitats, to stop predators from accessing them,

to stop people from going there during parts of the year. There's a lot of management that can help improve this. The New York City Audubon is now conducting a deep analysis of, the data they have collected for nearly four decades for the Harbor Heron survey. Scientists will use these findings to better understand the harbor's changing ecosystem and assess new conservation efforts. They hope to publish this comprehensive report later this year.

For Partridge and his crew, the annual count is a crusade to ensure New York City remains a healthy habitat for birds and their offspring. That one still has egg attached to it. That's adorable. They yawned. That's WNYC reporter Rosemary Misdary. Before we go, we want to take a moment to mark a special milestone for us here at WNYC. It gives me great pleasure to launch this, the voice of New York, onto the airwave.

There to join the great and glowing fraternity of free American channels of communication. This Saturday is the 99th anniversary of WNYC's first official broadcast. It was a hot July 8th evening in 1924 when WNYC took to the airwaves for three hours and 26 minutes of music, speeches, blessings, and prayers. And look at us now. Oh, how we've grown. Cheers to WNYC. Thanks for listening to NYC now from WNYC. Shout out to our production team. It includes Sean Boutage, Ave Carrillo, Audrey Cooper, Leora Noam Kravitz, Jared Marcel and Wayne Schoemeister with help from the entire

WNYC Newsroom. Our show art was designed by the people at Buck, and our music was composed by Alexis Quadrado. I'm Jene Pierre. We'll be back Monday.