NYC NOW - March 7, 2024: Midday News

Episode Date: March 7, 2024

Governor Kathy Hochul defends her plan of having National Guard soldiers check bags at subway entrances. Meanwhile, on Friday, the New York City Council will get a bill to stop landlords from using illegal city vacate orders to evict tenants. Also, the transportation company Revel is expanding access to electric vehicle charging near LaGuardia Airport. Plus, WNYC’s Sean Carlson talks with Ricot Depuy, co-founder of Radio Soleil, a Haitian radio station in Brooklyn to get a sense of how Haitians are reacting to the state of emergency in their home country. Finally, a new investigation reveals egregious abuse in New York’s guardianship system. That’s the system in which people are assigned a guardian to look after them because they can’t take care of themselves. Guardians often work for non-profits overseeing an extraordinary number of people with little oversight. WNYC’s Michael Hill speaks with ProPublica reporter Jake Pearson for an exclusive look at his findings.

Welcome to NYC Now. Your source for local news in and around New York City from WMYC. It's Thursday, March 7th. Here's the midday news from Michael Hill. Governor Kathy Hokel says having National Guard soldiers check bags at subway entrances is about giving writers peace of mind. The governor defended a plan on MSNBC's morning Joe today. Hokel says it's about making people feel safe, but she did not shy away from the political ramifications. either. I'm also going to demonstrate that Democrats fight crime as well. So this narrative that

Republicans have said and hijacked the story that we're soft on crime, that we defund the police, no. Hockel subway safety plan is facing criticism from within her own party. Brooklyn Assembly member Latrice Walker says the bag checks will perpetuate racial discrimination and keep people from getting to work. Tomorrow, the New York City Council will get a bill to stop landlords from using illegal city vacate orders to evict tenants. W.W.2C's Charles Lane reports. Queens Council Member Shakar Krishnan says landlords have been using fires, disrepair, and even intentional damage to get city vacate orders. The official notice from the Department of Buildings is then utilized to harass tenants into leaving their apartments. Krishnan says officials are moving

too slowly to help. When landlords trigger these vacate orders, the city becomes complicit. these schemes to force tenants from their homes. His bills would force the city to send special teams to buildings when vacate orders are issued to help them find homes nearby. It also requires the city to take legal action when repairs aren't done fast enough. In other news, the transportation company Revel is expanding access to electric vehicle charging near Lawardia Airport. The company confirmed on social media that will bill the largest EV charging station near any airport. in the country. The news site, queens.com, reports the charging station should be working by 2025. Revel last year announced it would fully focus on efforts on expanding access to electric vehicles.

The company for years operated a network of mopeds throughout the city. Revel says it shut down the service last year after ridership became too low to sustain financially. Taking a look now at your forecast, 51 now, with some clouds up. out there, slight chances of drizzle through midday, cloudy with a steady temperature right around 51. It'll be gusty as well. Cold tonight into the 30s and gusty then tomorrow, mostly sunny. Seems to we dry out, mid-50s, but on Saturday and Sunday we have chances of rain with high temperatures above and below 50. Stay close. There's more after the break. On WNMIC, I'm Sean Carlson. The UN says they are, quote, deeply concerned about the

security situation in Haiti's capital, Port-au-Prince. The country is currently under a state of emergency and a nighttime curfew after continuing violence and escapes from the country's two biggest prisons, which has Haitians on the island and throughout the diaspora on edge. Joining us now to talk more is Rico Dupuy, the co-founder of Radio Soleil, a Haitian radio station in Brooklyn. Rico, can we start with what you're hearing about the current unrest in Haiti right now? What's happening right now in Haiti, people are trying to really make sense of where it's going to lead to.

Because the Haitian people have been demanding the removal of Arian R.N. Rie for months and years, in fact. Alian Rihari came to power simply with a tweet from the core group. The core group is a group of ambassadors countries that call themselves friends of Haiti. And frankly, some Haitians are saying with friends like this who need enemies. They issued a tweet saying there was a power vacuum after Jolznel Mewis died. And the group said, I'm okay, you are the president. Just like that. Only in Haiti.

Whatever way you look at this guy, he's not supposed to be where he's at. The Haitian people have been demanding his dismissal resignation for years. So now they welcome the fact that he's having difficulty getting back to Haiti. But of course, we don't want the gang's involvement. And the gangs are his gangs. That's the point that has to be made very, very clear. And the role of the gang is to make sure that these unpopular regimes, they survived because the Haitian people would get rid of them in a matter of second were not for the support of the international community. There are more than 150,000 New Yorkers of Haitian heritage in New York State.

How are those with family or other connections reacting here? It's a combination of despair, of shock. There's some hope. I'm hearing a lot of hope because the news is that the United States has been putting pressure on him to resign. And that is the reason for some hope. That's Rico Dupuy, the co-founder of Radio Soleil, a Haitian radio station in Brooklyn. Rico, thanks for coming on again. My pleasure. Any time.

A new investigation reveals egregious abuse in the state's guardianship system. That's the system in which people are assigned a guardian to look after them because they can't take care of themselves. Those guardians often work for nonprofits overseeing an extraordinary number of people with little oversight. ProPublica has partnered with WNYC and exclusively shared their investigation with us. Here to talk about it is ProPublica reporter Jake Pearson. Hi, Jay. Would you tell us about the woman at the center of your story, Judith Spignevich? Sure.

So Judith has spent more than a decade in guardianship. She first became part of this legal arrangement after her father died unexpectedly of a heart attack. And the house she inherited, it turned out he'd taken out a reverse mortgage, and she had this incredibly large bill that she had no way of paying and was in a major depressive state and anxious. And someone who was concerned about her well-being called the city, called Adult Protect Services. And she was diagnosed with depression and anxiety. And that set her on a path to being declared incapacitated by a judge and in need of a guardian to help her with her, what they call, needs, her finances, and so forth. That sort of crisis point in her life set her on this more than 10-year saga not having the legal right and ability to make key decisions about her

life, including when she felt as though she was ready to be released from the guardianship. Here's a clip of Judith Bignovich in October of 2020, leaving a voicemail for the operator of this guardianship pleading to be led out of the legal. legal arrangement. Nobody has called. Nobody has checked on me since the pandemic. Nothing. You've been crickets. It's like nobody, nobody cares one way or the other. This is my life and I want it back. So the guardianship that's featured in our story has actually to cut costs contracted with workers in the Philippines who zoom in from 8,500 miles away to do their annual or four times annual checks with their wards.

Is that a robust care plan? Do you think that somebody in the Philippines over Zoom can fully get a sense of how somebody is living, what they're experiencing, if their needs are being met? That's an open question. Certainly is. Jake, tell us more about who she was trying to reach on the phone there. The court's assigned Judith a guardian that is a nonprofit guardian.

It's called New York Guardianship Services. and it is one of about a dozen guardianships or guardian providers in the city that care for or are assigned by judges to wards who are of little means who are generally poor and have nobody else to look after them or to serve as guardian. The investigation we conducted at Probublica reveals that for this population, this extremely vulnerable population, there are not enough people to look after them and the people who are looking after them have taken advantage of them instead. I should say the guardianship wouldn't answer specific questions about Judith's care or allegations about her time under their watch. They said court rules prohibited them from doing so. But they generally disputed my reporting. And when I asked them to be specific about their concerns, they didn't respond. Who out there, Jake, is proposing any reforms?

And what kind of reforms might they be proposing? The truth is that there has been little public attention to this issue. even as it's sort of an open secret among advocates and lawyers and even the judiciary, that as it exists, it's not functioning. Some people have called for the creation of what's called a public guardian, an institution that actually serves as a social safety net for the poor and those who need help. Others say that the city agencies and county social services departments could do it themselves with more funding. The truth is, is there needs to be more money.

There needs to be a concerted government effort to help folks because the system as it is structured relies on the wards themselves, people under guardianship to fund it. And if they don't have money, if their needs are great and they don't have money to compensate a professional private guardian, that they will not be served. ProPublica reporter Jake Pearson joining us for this conversation. Jake, thank you. Thanks very much. To read Jake's full investigation, visitprobublica.org or our news site, Gothamus. Thanks for listening. This is NYC Now from WNYC. Be sure to catch us every weekday, three times a day, for your top news headlines and occasional deep vibes. Also subscribe wherever you get your podcasts.