NYC NOW - June 27, 2023: Evening Roundup

Episode Date: June 27, 2023

A new federal report on Jeffrey Epstein’s death finds negligence and misconduct at the now-closed Metropolitan Correctional Center in Manhattan. Plus, crime in New York City subways is still lower than years past, despite what officials call “a bad couple weeks.” Also, the MTA's long-stalled congestion pricing program has received complete federal approval. And finally, we continue our celebration of Pride month with Eleanor Batchelder who shares her personal story as a lesbian businesswoman in New York City.

Good evening and welcome to NYC Now. I'm Jenae Pierre for WNYC. The Department of Justice says negligence and misconduct at the Federal Bureau of Prisons played the biggest role in Jeffrey Epstein's suicide four years ago at a federal jail in New York City. Epstein was arrested in July 2019 on charges of sex trafficking and conspiracy to engage in sex trafficking. In a newly released report, a federal watchdog points out that Epstein had no sale at the now-closed Metropolitan Correctional Center in Manhattan, which gave him time alone. The watchdog also says officials left Epstein with an excess of bad linens, something the financier

later used to take his own life. Similar to findings of other investigations into Epstein's death, the watchdog says there's no indication of foul play. Despite what officials call a bad couple of weeks, crime in New York City subways is still lower than in years past. WNYC's Charles Lane has more. Police say that Sunday night, a man on the S train in Rockaway was pistol whipped, robbed, and shot in the leg. This follows a spate of knife attacks the weekend prior. Still, MTA CEO, Janelle Lieber, says a surge of cops into the transit system has kept crime down.

And we're going to continue to use the enforcement of the rules of conduct, and including the fair evasion enforcement, to try to make sure that bad guys don't come into the system. According to stats, there were four murders in the subways in the first four months of last year. This year, there were only two over the same time period. Felony assaults also fell about 6%. Stay close. There's more after the break. The MTA's long-stalled congestion pricing program has finally received the required approval from the Federal Highway Administration, clearing the way for the plan's implementation. The plan to charge drivers who enter Manhattan below 60th Street passed the New York State Legislature in 2019,

and since then, it's been working its way through multiple layers of federal bureaucracy. For more, WNYC's Michael Hill spoke with transportation reporter Stephen Nesson. Was the final federal approval unexpected? Was there a chance the program was in jeopardy at this point? There really wasn't much of a chance. Back in May, that was when the federal government signed off on the congestion pricing. program. They said the environmental assessment that they had conducted, basically this very exhaustive study the MTA did, looking at basically every possible way that the environment around

New York going basically all the way to Philadelphia, you know, all parts of New Jersey, how those areas might be impacted if the MTA is charging vehicles in Manhattan a fee, you know, whether truck traffic will go up, whether car traffic will increase in certain places, things that could adversely affect the environment. They studied it. There were thousands of pages of research, and the federal government said, yes, this seems very good. You did a great job. We will sign off on it.

And then that set the clock ticking for a 30-day waiting period. And that 30-day waiting period expired yesterday. And that's why we now can say with great certainty that the federal government has signed off on the congestion pricing program. And, Stephen, do we have any idea what the fees will be, what the tolls will? be for this? Well, the MTA hasn't set a final fee structure yet. They're still in the phase where they're looking at several options. We do know that it'll be somewhere in the range of $9 to $23 during peak commuting time. The federal government did insist based on a lot of feedback from the

public about drivers who drive in the evening and ways to make it more fair that there are some restrictions in place on the MTA. For example, the overnight fee, like the evening hours, has to be 50% less than the peak hour charge, or maybe they should charge nothing at all. And there's another requirement that taxis in four higher vehicles, you may have heard them complaining about the congestion charges, they can only be charged once a day. Those are just some of the restrictions, the federal government imposed on the MTA. And when can drivers, when can we expect congestion pricing to actually begin? That's the question everybody asks. When is it going to start? Well, the MTA is hoping it'll start by next summer, roughly, or maybe next spring it'll get up and going, and then

the tolls will start later in the summer, the actual charging. But as I said, the MTA hasn't set the fee structure yet, so we don't know what they're going to charge. They haven't installed the Gantry, sort of the easy pass readers, they'll be used to charge drivers. There could be some issues with that. And of course, we've heard New Jersey lawmakers complaining a lot and threatening lawsuits against the program. So a lawsuit could also hold up the program. And Stephen, along those lines, we're hearing now that Governor Murphy has hired a lawyer to look at this and perhaps to challenge this. Do we know anything more about that at this point? Nothing's been filed yet, so we don't have anything to report on that. It's still just threats, but we do know that several Congress members in New Jersey are

complaining about that. Representative Josh Gottheimer is probably the most vocal. He's even created a caucus in Congress to oppose this. program. So we don't know for sure, you know, what legal challenges it faces, but they're threatening it. You know, Stephen, there are a lot of people when these kind of things are proposed and they're approved when you're talking about tolls and raising money, a lot of people start asking, what are they going to do with this money if they're asking for more money from us? What's the plan for that? It's a great question. Like, why are we doing this in the first place? You may recall the MTA was in very bad shape four or five years ago, and they put together a massive plan to really

bring back the subways, make the signals modern, add elevators, buy new electric buses. It was very ambitious. Over $50 billion. And to fund that, to get the money for that, they wanted two toll drivers using congestion pricing. And that's where we find ourselves. And the MTA is hoping that by charging somewhere between $9 to $23 per vehicle in Manhattan, it'll raise a billion dollars. And if you heard my debt feature the other week, they're going to use that to take on more debt. billion dollars that will go toward buying new signals, buying new buses, improving the subway service so it's a more attractive option than driving. That's WNYC's Stephen Nesson talking with my colleague Michael Hill. As we mark Pride Month, WNYC has been asking older adults in LGBTQ plus communities

to share their own personal histories and reflections. My name is Eleanor Batchelder. I live in Jackson Heights, New York. I identify as a lesbian. I'm 83 years old now. I had a bookstore. The bookstore was called Woman Books, and it was in Manhattan, on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, which at the time was where I lived.

The store opened in 1975. At that time, New York City did not have a proper women's bookstore, we thought. So we decided three of us, three women, got together, and we decided to make our own women's bookstore. It became eventually very, very successful, although a lot of people didn't understand what it was. They said, what is woman books? I said, well, you know, we now have something called a women's bookstore, which examines a lot of different aspects of a woman's life and the things that women care about.

So women would come and find whatever their interest was and usually go off with an armload of books. This was a time of great change for women in women's lives. And so women who were trying to think about making changes would come to the store and would ask for books. There were obviously a lot of lesbians coming out at that time, and some of those women had had different lives before they decided to become a lesbian or found that they were lesbians.

Not everybody after all came out, but to be a woman at that time was very exciting because so much was happening. There were so many more possibilities all of a sudden. We built the store on what our country, customers ordered what they wanted. They often knew more what was out there than we did. It was an example of what women could do on their own, not being sponsored by men, not being sponsored by any kind of a larger entity, just what women could put together and accomplish on

their own. I had a lot of confidence in myself, I think, at every point, and I guess that's an important thing. And the women's movement is important because it gave so many women. enough confidence to go and change their lives and do the things that they wanted to do. That was Eleanor Badge Elder of Jackson Heights, reflecting on her personal history as we mark Pride Month. Thanks for listening to NYC now from WNYC. Catch us every weekday, three times a day. We'll be back tomorrow.