Public health is a necessity in a City as large as ours. All of us from infants to seniors should have access to quality health care. We must support our health institutions and provide preventative health care services such as immunizations to lower expensive treatment costs. Cutting vital health care services from our budget has historically only increased treatment costs in the long term. Through proper support and preventative health care services we can make our City a healthier place to live.
The de Blasio administration is sour on legislation that would require chain restaurants to list products with added sugar because it could be difficult to enforce, a city official said Monday.
A pair of bills introduced today in the City Council of New York would help consumers—including kids—eat and drink more healthfully at restaurants.
Owners of cooling towers are currently required to have them inspected quarterly and immediately have them cleaned if they show a certain amount of the bacteria that causes Legionnaires' Disease. Cooling tower owners then must submit an annual report documenting the inspections and cleanings.
The new law would require inspection results to be submitted to the city almost immediately after they're received. It would also require the city to send electronic reminders to cooling tower owners of upcoming dates.
"As the Health Department issues violations to bring towers into compliance, many buildings with cooling towers are still failing to report the results of their inspections, leaving us to wonder if inspections are occurring at all," bill sponsor Councilman Ben Kallos said.
The proposed legislation – sponsored by Councilman Ben Kallos (D-Manhattan) — isn’t an outright ban since it allows parents to request soda or other sugary beverages when placing their order.
“We want our kids to have access to healthy choices, and the default beverage options under this bill supports that goal,” said Johnson.
City Councilman Ben Kallos was a co-sponsor of the law. He says if the data is correct and there really is widespread noncompliance with the state and city rules, the city should do something about it.
“We need to know if the legislation we passed is actually working,” Kallos said.
Meanwhile, some advocates say the law isn’t working. Brad Considine is the director of strategic planning at the APLD. He believes that New York City residents are not getting their money's worth for the law, which costs cooling tower owners approximately 130 million dollars a year.
“The whole thing is misguided, but they did it over a weekend,” Considine said, referring to the city’s legislation. “They felt political pressure and their political interests and business interests [are] driving this discussion, and meanwhile people are getting sick and dying.”
This story was co-reported by WNYC and Gothamist.
“By lowering the allowable after-hours noise limit in residential areas, allowing inspectors to take noise readings from the street, rather than from inside an apartment, and empowering inspectors with the ability to issue a stop-work order for noisy equipment, this legislation should bring some much-needed relief to New Yorkers,” Sapienza added.
In its Fiscal 2018 Statement of Community District Needs and Community Board Budget Requests, the number one budget expense item Community Board 1 requested was for DEP to “increase (the) monitoring of air and noise quality” in CB 1.
“Thank you to Mayor Bill de Blasio for signing this bill into law and to the Department of Environmental Protection Commissioner Vincent Sapienza for his agency’s expertise and collaboration on this legislation,” said the bill’s author, Manhattan Council Member Ben Kallos, in the release.
Kallos also thanked “the countless residents who complained regularly about after-hours noise,” which he said, “led to this legislation to keep our city a little bit quieter.”
At the January 16 meeting of CB 1 held at the Astoria World Manor, board officers were re-elected to begin two-year terms from January 1, 2018 to December 31, 2020 as follows:
It was first introduced in May 2015. Council Member Ben Kallos was one of its sponsors, and some of the children have been in the chambers advocating before.
“We protested a little bit,” Savann Basen said.
Kallos said his goal is to use only biological pesticides that come from natural materials instead of synthetic materials. He said what’s most concerning is the herbicide spray called Roundup.
“The World Health Organization found that it was a carcinogen, so we introduced legislation right away,” he said.
Children at one New York City school testified in City Council chambers against the use of pesticides in parks. Roseanne Colletti reports.
The New York City Health Department announced the community cluster of the disease Friday. All seven cases have been confirmed in the last seven days. The area impacted is the Lenox Hill neighborhood, which runs from East 60th Street to East 77th Street.
Four of those infected with the disease are still hospitalized, two have been discharged and the person who died was in his/her 90s and had significant underlying health conditions.
Legionnaires' disease is caused when water tainted with Legionella bacteria is inhaled into the lungs. It's a severe form of pneumonia in which the lungs become inflamed due to infection.
The health department said symptoms include fever, cough, chills, muscle aches, headache, fatigue, loss of appetite, confusion and diarrhea. Symptoms usually appear two to 10 days after significant exposure to Legionella bacteria.
State agencies can now leverage an open source tool to help ensure that individuals eligible for income-based human service benefits actually receive them.
The software is Benefit Assist, and it was first launched in 2015 by Intuit for that company’s TurboTax users. Benefit Assist sifts through tax information to help determine a person’s eligibility for benefits from programs such as the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, Medicaid and Medicare.
Now, Intuit has partnered with New York City Council Member Ben Kallos and the federal government's Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) to make its eligibility software free and open source code, according to the company.
