New York CIty Council Member Ben Kallos

StreetsBlog INSIDE THE BUREAUCRACY: City Won’t Allow Councilmen to Buy Snow Sweepers for Bike Lanes by Gersh Kuntzman

INSIDE THE BUREAUCRACY: City Won’t Allow Councilmen to Buy Snow Sweepers for Bike Lanes

First and Second avenues will not be getting the narrow-gauge snow plows that two Upper East Side Council Members have funded because, get this, city rules bar the use of council members’ discretionary capital money to purchase equipment with detachable, swappable seasonal attachments.

“It’s total bullshit. I feel like Charlie Brown — and Mayor de Blasio is Lucy,” said Council Member Ben Kallos, whose constituents urged him to buy the $143,000 Multihog snow plow, plus its $30,000 snow plow attachment, as part of the participatory budgeting process in 2020. When the balloting was canceled because of the COVID-19 pandemic, Kallos and his East Side counterpart Keith Powers allocated the funds from an account of capital money they both control.

But the city won’t take the cash, for reasons that would impress even Franz Kafka.

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