NYC NOW - Midday News: Rutgers Rejects Caste Discrimination Policy, Bronx School Employee Charged With Attempted Lewdness, and Highlights From Hochul and Murphy’s State of the State Addresses

Episode Date: January 15, 2025

Rutgers University says it will not create a separate category to address caste-based discrimination on campus. Meanwhile, a Bronx school employee has been charged with two counts of attempted lewdness after allegedly exposing himself in front of a classroom on Tuesday morning. Plus, we recap key highlights from the State of the State addresses by New York Gov. Kathy Hochul and New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy.

Welcome to NYC now, your source for local news in and around New York City from WMYC. It's Wednesday, January 15th. Here's the midday news from Michael Hill. Rutgers University says it will not create a separate category barring caste-based discrimination on campus. WNYC's Roon-Venticle-Paul says the decision bucks a nationwide trend in colleges and universities. In recent years, cast has become one. one front in a sort of culture war within the growing South Asian diaspora, with progressive groups pushing for greater acknowledgement of the problem, and conservative Hindus especially saying

the issue is overblown. Rutgers decided caste-based discrimination fell under existing policies prohibiting bias based on religion, ancestry, and race. But the university said it would train campus personnel to recognize and deal with caste discrimination complaints. In recent years, Harvard, Brown, Brandeis, and the entire California State University system have made cast a protected category. An employee of a school in the Bronx is facing charges after he allegedly exposed himself in front of a classroom of students. Police say the incident happened yesterday morning during a gym class at a school in Claremont Village that served students with autism in kindergarten through fourth grade. 44-year-old Dana Barshdorf is charged with two counts of attempted lewdness. The city education

Department says that his alleged behavior is unacceptable and that he's been reassigned pending an investigation. A woman who answered a home phone number listed for Barstaff this morning, declined to comment and hung up. His attorney's information was not immediately available. 31 and mostly sunny now, sunny and just above the freezing market. 33, gusty today and feeling like the mid-teens cold again tomorrow with mid-teen temperatures. Stay close. There's more after the break. On WNYC, I'm Sean Carlson. Governor Hokel is setting her priorities for the coming year.

She delivered her annual state of the state address and touched on everything from affordability to subway safety. WNYC's Albany reporter, John Campbell, joins us now. John, walk us through some of the big ticket items in the governor's speech. What's she pitching for the current legislative session? Well, Sean, the big thing is she wants to cut taxes. In her speech, she said she wants to cut the state income tax for working class people. First, I'm calling for a sweeping middle class tax cut, benefiting 8.3 million taxpayers making less than $323,000. Now, we don't have a ton of detail about what that would actually look like, but it's really at the center of what she's calling her affordability agenda.

Another thing that jumped out of me was a new subway safety plan. The governor says she wants to see a cop on every New York City subway train from 9 p.m. to 5 a.m. And she says the state's going to help pay for it, too. Now, how many cops would that be? How much would it cost? She didn't say, but she's got to deliver her state budget proposal next week. So we should get some answers then. Let's talk about this affordability agenda.

The conventional wisdom out of the 2024 election seems to be the Democrats have ceded ground on pocketbook issues to Republicans. The cost of eggs. John, we heard so much about that. How was Hulkull trying to take back that narrative? Well, the cost of eggs is pretty high right now, Sean. But for one thing she's doing, she's shelling out some goodies. A few weeks ago, the governor announced her plan to send out checks of up to $500 to millions of New Yorkers. That was a big part of her speech, as was her push to boost the state's child tax credit. And there were a few more things. like she wants to give payments of $100 a month to pregnant New Yorkers on public assistance,

then a $1,200 payment when that baby is born. And basically, she's pitching it all as a way of giving New Yorkers their money back. We will never stop finding ways to put money back in your pockets. This is something I've done every year as governor. Now, Republicans are skeptical of all this, as you might expect. They like some of these ideas in theory, like that tax cut we talked about. they want to see how the governor is going to pay for it, which again comes with her budget next week. Let's talk more about that subway plan. There's been a rash of crime on the subway that's been garnering news headlines over the past month or so.

Governor Hokel and Mayor Adams seemed to be aligned on some new public safety initiatives. Talk more about the specifics of some of these proposals. Yeah, I mean, they're aligned in the sense that they agree that they want to see more cops in the subway. The mayor just announced his plan to do that last week. And the governor's plan kind of adds to that a bit. She wants, like we said, to have an officer on every single overnight train. After the speech, Mayor Adams said you have to attack crime from all different angles. That includes more police. We need to be very clear on something because everyone wants to find the one size fits all. There are many rivers that feed the sea of violence. You have to damn each one of them. I cannot say this over and over again. Now, later, the NYPD commissioner, Jessica Tisch, put out a statement of her own.

She said adding officers to trains is great and all, but really what we need to get at is the root cause of subway crime. And to her, that means dealing with repeat offenders that commit an outsized portion of that crime. Now, Hockel is up for re-election next year. And if her poll numbers are to be believed, she is a vulnerable incumbent. What are the stakes for her as this legislative session gets underway? They're pretty enormous, honestly. I mean, you're right. Her poll numbers are quite low, and the sharks are swimming in the waters.

I mean, you had Republican Representative Mike Lawler of Rockland County in Albany today. He delivered a Republican prebuttal, if you will. He's one of the Republican frontrunners for governor if he decides to enter the race, and he trashed the governor's record on affordability and congestion pricing, but it's not just Republicans either. Representative Richie Torres of the Bronx is eyeing a Democratic primary against Hockel, and he latched on to the governor only putting police on every subway train at night. He said it should be more than that.

And he pointed to some high-profile crimes that have happened during daylight hours. Let's talk about the reality of all this, because Hockel can pitch a bunch of ideas, right? But ultimately, it is up to lawmakers to codify those ideas into actual legislation. So what is Hockel's relationship with state legislators at this point of her administration? and how likely is it that Albany lawmakers will act on her big marquee ideas? Yeah, Sean, I mean, at this point she has a decent relationship with legislative leaders, and they all kind of seem to be on the same page about focusing on affordability issues this year. Even before the speech, the Assembly Speaker Carl Hasty had put out his own call to cut income taxes,

and Andra Stewart Cousins, the Senate Majority Leader, she reacted positively to the governor's speech as well. But really, the rubber meets the road when they negotiate the state budget over the next few months. That's when allies become enemies and vice versa. So stay tuned. That's Dublin-Waz. He's Albany reporter, John Campbell. Thanks so much. Thank you, Sean.

New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy kicked off his final year in office with his annual state of the state address in Trenton. He laid out a list of new priorities and pledged he would work hard for the next year as his administration winds down. We're joined by WNYC's Nancy Solomon. She hosts our monthly call-and-show, Ask Governor Murphy. She's here to break it down. Okay, Nancy, tell us what new ideas New Jerseyans heard from Governor Murphy. Well, I'd say the biggest one is that he called for the legislature to pass a ban on cell phones in all public schools in the state. That's quite controversial.

But he is a strong ally of Vin Gopal, the state senator who leads the Education Committee. And Gopal has already sent out a press release supporting the idea. The governor says cell phones are distracting and causing a rise in cyberbullying. Honestly, is it any surprise that the rise in smartphone usage has coincided with a growing youth mental health crisis? Of course not. And I, for one, I'm not going to sit back as our kids suffer. And the governor also talked about making full-day kindergarten available in all school districts. There are still some that only have half-day.

And let's see quickly. Some of the other ideas included fixing the most deadly intersections on the roadways and improving driver education, same-day voter registration, and removing the kinds of technical violations that can send someone who's on parole who's gotten out of prison back to prison. So he wants to reduce those. Now, Nancy, I heard that our show, or maybe I should say your show, asked Governor Murphy, got a shout out. What was that about? Well, he's proposing changes to a property tax break that's intended for farmers, but is being used by wealthy McMansion owners. There's a retired school principal in Mendham, this guy named Jack Curtis, who's been fighting this because taxpayers in these towns that have a lot of McMansions, this is any place with more than five acres, the other homeowners in the town have to make up for the property taxes that these, wealthy homeowners are getting a break from. So Jack Curtis is called into the show a few times,

and the governor was actually kind of impressed with what he had to say, and eventually he agreed to meet with him. And so today he had Jack Curtis there in the gallery, and he announced that he wants to close this loophole so that farmers can continue to use it, but not wealthy suburbanites who, you know, put a couple of beehives on their property, or even a better example, I'll give you Donald Trump's golf course in Bedminster has goats. And so he gets the property tax break. Well, either way, very cool that asked Governor Murphy resulted in some action, right? So this address was essentially the kickoff to the governor's last year in office. New Jersey has a gubernatorial election this year and his term ends in exactly one year.

Was the vibe different from his previous speeches? Yeah, you know, actually, I think it was a little different. You know, he was at times like a happy warrior just like gleefully ticking through. all of his accomplishments. You know, he raised the minimum wage. He increased funding for schools in New Jersey transit. He revamped the state's affordable housing program. But he was also a little more aggressive than we see him usually in terms of taking on his critics. Here's an example of that. Yes, the budget is bigger because that's what happens when you finally pay your bills and you actually meet your obligation to the people. He went on.

to say, you know, to those who want him to spend less, they should try telling that to teachers and firefighters or women who rely on Planned Parenthood for health care. The other thing I noticed is that he made a few comments about making government actually function better. I haven't heard that from him before. Well, what did he say you would do on that front? Well, it was nothing specific, but it's been a huge topic on Ask Governor Murphy. So, you know, many people have confronted him about how frustrated they are when they can't reach a live person in state government to get their problem solved. He's talked in the past about how artificial intelligence is going to transform how quickly state government can process benefits or answer people's questions.

But this time around, I didn't hear anything specific that he's proposing, but it's going to be interesting to see if this becomes more of a driving force in his final year. That's WNYC's Nancy Solomon. down Governor Murphy's State of the State Address for his final year in office. Nancy, thanks as always. Thanks, Sean. Thanks for listening. This is NYC Now from WMYC.

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