This past weekend, I joined Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer, Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney, State Senator Eric Schneiderman, Assembly Member Jonathan Bing, and Councilmember Gale Brewer at a press conference along with advocates representing Disabilities Network of NYC, Cerebral Palsy Associations of New York State, Center for Independence of the Disabled NY, Disabled in Action, and the 504 Democratic Club. At the press conference we collectively denounced the proposed fare hike. Access-A-Ride is critical to those who need it, and the revenue that doubling this fare will bring is comparatively unimpressive.

The current standard of fare equity is the minimum a just society should expect. Like a good old fashioned train robbery, the MTA is ambushing paratransit riders because they know that people with disabilities have no other transportation options. This is the most regressive fare hike the MTA has ever proposed because those who can least afford to pay are being asked to shoulder the greatest burden.

I am also not convinced that this is a legal proposal. The transportation provisions of Title II of the Americans with Disabilities Act cover public transportation services, like the MTA system. Public transportation authorities may not discriminate against people with disabilities in the provision of their services. So if a local authority like the MTA chooses not to adequately serve clients with disabilities in its regular system, it is instead required by federal law to create a parallel paratransit system. Decades ago when the ADA was passed, the MTA chose not to make the regular transit system accessible (today there are just over 50 subway stations of 468 that have elevators), so it was required to create the Access-A-Ride service. It goes against the spirit of the ADA to charge people with disabilities more to use a system designed to compensate them for not having access to the regular mass transit system.

I will be doing everything I can to oppose this proposal and I will continue to keep you updated. My press release on this topic can be found in the Publications area of this website.

I have serious concerns about this process, and how it will affect tenants.

On October 16th, I participated in a town hall meeting, along with Eastwood tenants, at the Good Shepherd Community Center. The meeting was an opportunity to ask building management questions about the sub-metering proposal, as well as to hear from the state agencies involved. As a result of this meeting, and the numerous comments I have heard from residents there, I do not believe that the building is ready to go forward with sub-metering.

Too many tenants still have energy-inefficient appliances and faulty electric heaters, these are not personal items, rather these are items that come with the apartment and the management company is responsible for them. Urban American has promised to replace inefficient appliances and to fix heaters and thermostats for any residents who make a request to them. If you are an Eastwood tenant and you have made a request like this to management but they have not responded, please call me.

It is imperative that we have a clear picture of overall energy use in the building. The building’s heat is electric, so it is essential to ensure that tenants do not face unreasonably high utility bills just to stay warm in the winter. It concerns me that so many apartments are poorly insulated and Urban American needs to address this. I have asked the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority to conduct a full survey of energy use and efficiency in Eastwood, so that residents are not penalized by faulty design or maintenance.

I am also concerned that we do not have a real sense about how billing will work under this new system, given the complicated system of affordable housing programs that are integrated into the Mitchell-Lama’s accounting already. Will the utility allowance calculated by state and federal agencies be enough to compensate tenants for a reasonable amount of electricity usage? I have asked New York City Comptroller Bill Thompson as well as the New York State Division of Housing and Community Renewal to work with Urban American to ensure that residents are protected.

NOV. 25th 2008 ***UPDATE*** I have written to Urban American Management on this issue. For those who are following this, please see the Publications area of my website to download a copy of that letter.

I thought I’d post a few photos from the event. First and foremost, I wanted to show everyone my (awesome) Barack O’Lantern. Or Obumpkin if you prefer.

YES WE CARVE (www.yeswecarve.com) is a great little website that I discovered where you can download stencils, like the one I used, to show your Obama spirit this Hallowe’en. It’s really quite easy to download the stencil; print it; and use it to carve your pumpkin. You simply tape the stencil on to the pumpkin and use a knife to cut through along the lines so that when you carve for real, you have guidelines.

I dressed as a donkey (to keep with the election-themed spirit).



District Leader Frank Wilkinson brought some far, far west side spirit to the Upper East Side.



Here I am with LGBT activist and Upper East Sider, Caprice Bellefleur, whose costume was the best of the night.



My office’s Chief of Staff, Eliyanna Kaiser (the she-devil), and my Community Liaison, Paul Curtis (the clown), goofing off at the party.



My Office Manager, Ashley Roberts, rocked the time-honored black cat getup.

Thanks again to everyone who made the event so special!

Click here to listen to this interview: Interview with Assembly Member Micah Z. Kellner on School Overcrowding

The average family uses 60 plastic bags in only four trips to the grocery store. These American-made (the company is Fabriko) Eco-Spun Recycler Tote Bags I am distributing are made from 100% recycled plastic bottles, a material known as PET. PET is considered the greenest material on the planet today and regularly using just one of these bags for daily shopping can eliminate over 1,000 plastic bags from entering our waste system.

My great hope is that my campaign will begin to raise awareness about alternatives to plastic bags. Single-use plastic bags accumulate and persist on our planet for up to 1,000 years. In New York City, they comprise about 2.87% of our residential waste stream, and they are our largest source of plastic waste – and plastic bags are among the 12 items of debris most often found in coastal cleanups. To read more about this issue, I highly reccomend the website ReusableBags.Com.

My GO GREEN! CHALLENGE comes just after New York City’s Local Law 1, the Plastic Carryout Bag Recycling Law, came into effect on July 23rd, 2008. This new city law requires stores across the City to establish in-store recycling programs for plastic bags and film plastic, such as plastic wrap, dry cleaning bags and newspaper bags. The law applies to stores that use plastic bags and occupy 5,000 or more square feet or have more than five branches operating in New York City. Stores are also required to sell reusable bags.

Introduced just over 25 years ago, the world consumes an estimated 500 billion plastic bags annually (almost 1 million per minute). According to the EPA, over 380 billion plastic bags, sacks and wraps are consumed in the U.S. each year. Four out of five grocery bags in the US are now plastic. Plastic bags don’t biodegrade, they photodegrade—breaking down into smaller and smaller toxic bits contaminating soil and waterways and entering the food chain when animals accidentally ingest them.

I will also be exploring policy avenues to have an even larger impact. Using reusable bags needs to rise to the level of a social imperative, and I think it will, once people realize how simple it is to make such a big difference. A good example is Ireland. That country introduced a new tax in 2002, requiring customers to pay at the register if they wanted to use a plastic bag. Within weeks, use of plastic bags dropped by 94% as the Irish began to adjust to carrying tote bags to the store. Now using a plastic bag is socially unacceptable in Ireland. People are just more aware.

Feel free to stop by my office at 315 East 65th Street during business hours Monday to Friday, 10 am to 5:30 pm to get your free tote bag (while supplies last). Go Green!

The suggested minimum donation is $40. You can pay at the door or you can mail a check to:

The Kellner Committee
217 East 85th St. #117
New York, NY 10028

Hope to see you there!

For the next few weeks I will be visiting schools throughout our communities asking parents, teachers, and concerned residents to sign postcards to Mayor Bloomberg and Chancellor Klein asking them to give students the small classes they need to learn and grow.

It clear that school overcrowding is a growing problem throughout New York City and especially on the Upper East Side—and it is a problem that will not go away until the Department of Education and the Mayor take action to make a proactive change. I am a member of Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer’s Task Force on School Overcrowding. Since January, we have been working to create a comprehensive plan to submit to the City which we believe would help solve the overcrowding dilemma. This November, it is critical that the City’s new five-year capital plan for school construction take into account the projected growth in population and residential construction, especially on the Upper East Side.

To that end I am working with the Borough President to promote “The ABCs of A Better Capital Plan”. The ABCs would:

Address overcrowding and implement the city’s state-mandated class-size reduction plan: 20 students per class in K-3 and 23 in all other grades.

Be proactive and plan ahead to add school seats as neighborhoods grow.

Correct the way school capacity is calculated so the loss of art rooms and other critical spaces to overcrowding is acknowledged.

If you are interested in signing a postcard please stop by my office. Together we can ensure that the next generation of New York leaders receives the education that they deserve in schools that we can be proud of.

A cynical observer might assume that the reason I am so nonchalant about handing over unredacted copies of my financial disclosure forms to anyone who asks, including the New York Sun, who published an article today that featured my doing so (“Taciturnity is the Word on Legislators’ Pay”) is that other than my public service as an Assembly Member, I have no other income. But the fact is that it is precisely because of my elected post that I don’t have any other income. Being a legislator is a full-time gig. Most of my colleagues treat it as a full-time job, and they should.

I was a little surprised that when the Sun called around, I was the only one to comply with their request, but I strongly suspect that if they had called more than just a few lawmakers, they would have received many more forthcoming replies.

As I said in that article, there is an unfair public perception that all lawmakers are crooks or clowns, and the high-profile scandals following the exposure of the occaisonal bad apple only heightens this carictature. But for the vast majority of legislators this is simply not the case, and being more transparent about their finances would demonstrate this. I will work in the next legislative year to improve the laws around transparency. The public deserves to know when lawmakers have other jobs and how much they make from them.

A little over a week ago, Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver told the Associated Press that he would be taking steps to reform ethics and disclosure rules for lawmakers next year. When I next spoke to the Speaker, I made sure to tell him that I completely supported what he said and that I looked forward to working with him on legislation to accomplish good government reforms. I will continue to update you on our progress when the legislature goes back to session in January.

Taciturnity Is the Word On Legislators’ Pay

By JACOB GERSHMAN, Staff Reporter of the Sun | September 18, 2008

While other state lawmakers are accustomed to cloaking their financial secrets behind lax disclosure laws, Assemblyman Micah Kellner stands apart.

Unlike most of his Albany colleagues, the 29-year-old Democrat of the Upper East Side has no problem providing an unredacted review of his financial disclosure forms. Not that his forms disclose terribly much: The only income Mr. Kellner earns comes from his $79,500-a-year salary as a legislator.

“I guess I’m very poor,” he said. “It’s the most depressing day having to fill out these forms.”

Other lawmakers contacted by The New York Sun, including the four legislative leaders, were not so forthcoming, refusing to make available the full versions of their annual statements.

Under rules set up by lawmakers in the 1980s, they are permitted to conceal how much outside income they earn, a practice that is coming under increasing scrutiny.

Last week’s arrest of a Queens assemblyman, Anthony Seminerio, whom federal prosecutors accuse of accepting payoffs from hospital executives in exchange for lobbying his colleagues on budget matters, has again trained a spotlight on Albany’s disclosure laws. Critics say they are too weak, allowing lawmakers to hide business interests that could potentially conflict with their public duties.

Mr. Seminerio, who maintains his innocence, established a private consulting firm to sell his services. By law, he was not required to publicly disclose the nature of his business or how much outside income he earned.

In Albany, it’s hard to find a lawmaker defending the current system. In theory, most are supportive of stricter reporting requirements. Some, including Mr. Kellner, are pressing for new resolutions or legislation, saying the Seminerio arrest has undermined their credibility.

Mr. Kellner said he is concerned that the public has a perception that lawmakers are “crooks or clowns.” For the “vast majority of us, neither of those things is true,” he said, adding that by giving the public a fuller account of their outside work, lawmakers could better make that case.

In practice, few are willing to share information beyond what the law requires. Those who are so inclined say they fear such an act of transparency would alienate their less-forthcoming colleagues.

[Click here to read more…]

Yesterday, I joined Councilmember David Yassky and my State legislative colleagues Assembly Members Jonathan Bing and Michael Gianaris and State Senator Martin Golden to call on the New York City Council to pass two bills introduced by Councilmember Yassky; one would expand the City’s film production tax credit and the other would create a new credit for post-production work. Our effort was reported on in today’s New York Sun.

Tax credits for the film and television industry are proven to bring jobs and help the local economy. Since New York State tripled its film production tax credit, heavy employment shooting days are up 84%. This means that more union actors have jobs. Screen Actors Guild officials say that a significant number of previously uninsured actors are now in union-sponsored healthcare programs because of the availability of these jobs in New York. According to the Mayor’s Office, the initial 5% tax credit that Councilmember Yassky achieved with his 2005 legislation has generated $600 million and over 6,000 new jobs for the City’s economy. His new production credit expansion legislation would triple this.

Equally important is post-production. As a film school graduate, I watched as many of my friends moved to Los Angeles because of a lack of jobs here in New York City. Particularly, in film and television post-production, most people don’t realize that most of the work that goes into making the movies and TV shows we love comes after the camera stops rolling — sound mixing and re-recording, foley artists, adding the track, digital effects, and more. The ripple effect of a post production tax credit encouraging that industry here would be a major boon to our local economy.

Councilmember Yassky’s post-production credit and a state-level credit (A.10689) proposed by Assemblymember Steve Englebright, which I co-sponsor, would stimulate the ripe field of post-production in New York City. New York has three major, state of the art post-production facilities, rivaling what Los Angeles has, but Los Angeles still wins 95% of all post-production jobs.

Joining us at yesterday’s press conference were actor Matt Servitto of The Sopranos, actress and writer Nancy Giles of CBS Sunday Morning and representatives from the Motion Picture Editors Guild, Screen Actors Guild, Writers Guild, Cinematography Guild, American Federation of Musicians, Theatrical Teamsters, IATSE and the Deluxe New York post-production facility.

As a person with a disability, I am very excited about this new festival and hope that it will bring together both people with disabilities and others in our shared community to discuss and appreciate the diversity of the human experience.

I was honored to be asked to participate in the kick-off event for the festival, being held in my district on Roosevelt Island. This is especially appropriate because Roosevelt Island is home to many people with disabilities, and as a planned community, it boasts some of the most accessible public spaces in New York City. I will participate in a discussion after the film about individual and shared societal beliefs and views about disability in today’s society.

Joining me in that discussion will be Claude Ritman (Executive Director, Coler-Goldwater Hospital) and Virginia Granato (President, Roosevelt Island Disabled Association).

I hope you join me for this free event!

Sunday, September 14
1:30 PM
Goldwater Memorial Hospital
1 Main Street
Roosevelt Island