Tuesday, December 22, 2009
What are some good restaurants by times square in New york city? - Made with love
Are there any Thai restaurants in New York City that are combined with some other type of restaurant?
New York still making news - Audit contends schools face $2 billion funding shortfall when stimulus funding ...
New YorkALBANY - School districts across New York state, including New York City, face a potential funding gap of at least $2 billion when the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act funding runs out in 2011-12 unless federal aid is renewed or replaced by state aid, according to analysis released today by State Comptroller Thomas P. DiNapoli. Property taxpayers could face on average a 7.7-percent tax increase in 2011-12 to make up the loss in ARRA funds, assuming school budgets and state aid remain constant.
“ARRA funding has helped ease some of the budget pain for school districts and taxpayers,” DiNapoli said. ”But that money stops in 2011-12, and when it does, New York’s schools face a $2 billion funding gap. That’s a big hole to fill. The time to start thinking about how to fill that hole is now, not when the money is already gone. It won’t be easy; schools are already facing financial problems. But this won’t just go away.”
DiNapoli’s analysis found ARRA funds made up on average 5.3 percent of total school budgets in 2009-10. The school budget most reliant on ARRA funds in their 2009-10 budgets are New York City (5.7 percent), the big four districts (5.1 percent) and high-need schools (4.9 percent). Low-need school districts face the smallest gap as ARRA funds represented just 2.4 percent of their 2009-10 budgets.
In upstate New York, school districts in Central New York, the Capital Region and the Finger Lakes ARRA funds made up 5.5 percent, 5.2 percent and 5.1 percent of their budgets on average in 2009-10 respectively. ARRA funds represented just 3.2 percent of Long Island school districts budgets and 3.3 percent of Mid-Hudson Valley school districts’ budgets.
DiNapoli’s analysis also found ARRA funding helped independent school districts hold tax levy increases to 2.1 percent on average, rather than an estimated 7.7-percent increase had ARRA funds not been available. Alternatively, school districts would have had to cut costs by as much as 3.2 percent without ARRA funds.
The state projects that foundation aid (the main source of school aid to most districts) will increase by 17 percent over the next three years. To backfill the stimulus funding and meet this commitment, the state would need to increase its share of funding by $4.1 billion, or 31 percent, between 2010-11 and 2012-13, an unlikely scenario given the state’s fiscal difficulties.
To view DiNapoli’s analysis, visit: www.osc.state.ny.us/press/arra-snapshot-121709.pdf.
To view a district-by-district breakdown of ARRA funding as a percent of school district 2009-10 budgets, visit: www.osc.state.ny.us/press/arra-percent-budget-by-dist-2009-10.xls.
What kind of food do they serve in the streets in New York City? - Made with love
What are the codes for bathrooms in restaurants in New York State? - Made with love
stickers-in-nyc
stickers-in-nyc, according to the author:This photo is licensed under a Creative Commons license. Please credit Rob Larsen with a link to Drunkenfist.com, if you use this photo anywhere. Thanks.
Click for the location of the original New York photo only since lots of people are always asking me.
How do you feel about this?
New York Times (blog) Plenty of Snow, and Hard to Get Anywhere
New York CityUpdated | 1:50 p.m. The city was covered in snow, but events and services were not interrupted. Long Island reported severe transportation delays; New Jersey shoppers willing to drive found all-but-empty malls.
On its way out the door, autumn gave the New York region a mighty foretaste of winter, dropping more than two feet of snow on parts of Long Island, jamming highways and causing the cancellation of hundreds of flights but offering youngsters a chance to try out their sleds even before Christmas.
By midmorning Sunday, a 100-mile band of falling snow that had buried the stately boulevards of the nation’s capital in 16 inches of powder had already passed through New York City and was centered off Cape Cod. Matt Scalora, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service office in Brookhaven, said the 25 inches of snow recorded there was the deepest since the 1940s, and snow was still falling in the Hamptons.
With gusts reaching 35 miles an hour, sections of the Long Island Expressway had to be closed to permit plowing or because drivers were hampered by wind driving snow into their windshields. Accidents caused by skids dappled highways and side roads.
In New York City, where 10.9 inches of snow fell, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg reported that there were no deaths or serious injuries as a result of the storm — a contrast to the five deaths along the East Coast that have so far been blamed on the storm. He also gave drivers a pre-Christmas present: alternate side of the street parking will be canceled Monday. Public schools, however, will remain open, he said.
By Sunday morning, 800 flights — a majority — had been canceled at the three major airports in and around New York City, according to Steve Coleman, a spokesman for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. The runways and taxiways were clear and the relatively few flights took off with minimal delays, he said, but the rough weather along the East Coast had nevertheless played havoc with airline schedules. Most travelers, he said, had checked with their airlines and not gone out to the terminals, so there was little of the exasperated encounters at the gates and few of the sleeping passengers stretched out on floors sometimes seen with flights disruptions.
Many of the long-haul buses leaving the Port Authority Bus Terminal in Midtown were also canceled, he said.
A Con Edison spokesman said that 40 customers lost power in the New York City and Westchester region. Metro-North canceled shoppers’ specials on its New Haven line, but most other trains into the city were operating on normal Sunday timetables — about once an hour.
The storm hit the Long Island Rail Road hardest. Stanley Davis, a railroad spokesman, said at 12:30 p.m. on Sunday that service was “extremely limited” with delays of 15 minutes to two hours across the system. Service between Ronkonkoma and Greenport to the east was canceled entirely because of high snow drifts, he said. Service on the Montauk branch east of Speonk was very sparse, he said.
“It’s been a challenging storm,” he said.
Once the snow had stopped falling in New Jersey, resourceful shoppers dug their cars out of thick blankets of snow and took advantage of malls that were less teeming than usual.
Susan Bongiorno, a homemaker who lives in Bloomfield, came out early to the Willowbrook Mall in Wayne N.J., to buy her 17-year-old daughter the “Rock Band 2″ video game because, she figured, “Everybody else will still be digging their cars out of the snow.”
“You have so many service people wanting to help you,” she said. “Normally you can’t find one because the stores are so mobbed. At Best Buy this morning I had three guys helping me at once, I just stood there and they did all the running.”
Declan Butler, 33, a college student, and his wife, Anne, 33, a teacher, took their 18-month-old daughter shopping — navigating slippery roads in spots, but noticing how little traffic there was on the way.
“This road is usually a parking lot this time of year,” Mrs. Butler said.
Fred Beierle, 39, who works in financing and lives in Hoboken, also came to the Willowbrook Mall with his companion, Marina Rosa, 24. They had planned to shop Saturday, but stayed home because of the blizzard and were pleasantly surprised on Sunday.
“We’re lucky we came out in the blizzard,” he said. “Because everyone thinks the roads are bad, so they stay off them, but the roads are fine.”
At the mall in Short Hills, N.J., Roger and Lynn Manshell said they had not planned to go shopping, but after seeing their neighborhood sparkling with snow, they decided to have a day of outdoor activities.
“All the snow did was add a beautiful, winter wonderland to an average Sunday,” said Mr. Manshell, 72, who works as a marketer for advertising products.
Nate Schweber contributed reporting from New Jersey.