GENOME SEQUENCING: The city Health Department awarded a $792,000 contract to Memphis, Tennessee-based lab testing firm PathAI Diagnostics to provide genome sequencing for Covid-19, according to a notice in the City Record Monday. The agency said that the goal of the contract is to increase sequencing among New Yorkers’ Covid samples so that the agency can monitor emerging variants.
WORKER RELIEF: Regional Care Network, a health care staffing agency based in New Rochelle, was ordered to pay $363,000 to more than 1,000 workers after the city found that the firm violated paid sick leave laws, the Department of Consumer and Worker Protection said Monday. The department’s investigation found that Regional Care Network did not offer workers paid sick time nor provide time off when they needed it. In addition to payments to staff, the firm is required to pay $36,000 in civil penalties and costs.
HOME VISITS: The city’s $34 million New Family Home Visit initiative, which sends health care workers to the homes of expecting parents, has served 12,000 families since its expansion two years ago, Mayor Eric Adams said Monday. Through the initiative, trained staff such as doulas, midwives, nurses or lactation consultants conduct in-person or virtual appointments with expecting parents to identify maternal health needs, ensure parents are ready for the delivery of their newborns and connect families with social services. The program is one of the city’s efforts to reduce maternal mortality by 10% through the mayor’s Women Forward NYC initiative.
TICK-BORNE DISEASES: Tick-borne diseases are trending upward in New York City, which reported more than 3,000 cases of Lyme Disease in 2023, according to an advisory from the city Health Department Monday. The agency warned New Yorkers to take prevention measures as the weather gets warmer, such as wearing insect repellant and conducting tick checks. The Health Department surveils human diseases derived from ticks, but also monitors tick populations in the five boroughs.
Just under 20 ambulatory surgery centers in the metropolitan area are “high performing” facilities, according to U.S. News and World Report’s inaugural ranking released this morning.
Of the 142 facilities assessed throughout the state, 17 surgery centers excelled in a specialty service when rated for colonoscopies and endoscopies, ophthalmology care, orthopedics and spine procedures or urology. The surgery centers that earned the top categorization for colonoscopies and endoscopies include:
Carnegie Hill Endoscopy
Gramercy Park Digestive Diseases Center
Yorkville Endoscopy
The Endoscopy Center of Queens
Digestive Diseases Diagnostic & Treatment Center in Bensonhurst
Endoscopic Diagnostic and Treatment Center in Brooklyn
Gastroenterology Care in Brooklyn
Endoscopy Center of Long Island and Digestive Health Center of Huntington, both part of Northwell Health
North Shore Surgi-Center in Smithtown
Long Island Center for Digestive Health in Uniondale
One area institution, the Eye Surgery Center of Westchester in New Rochelle, excelled in ophthalmology. Five, including the Brooklyn Surgery Center in Mapleton, Island Ambulatory Surgery Center which is affiliated with Mount Sinai Brooklyn, Lynbrook Surgery Center, Melville SC and Surgicare of Manhattan in Tudor City, performed well in orthopedics and spine procedures. An additional six facilities upstate ranked as high-performing in one care area.
Just one metro area site, New Hyde Park Endoscopy, ranked as “below average” for colonoscopies and endoscopies. North Queens Surgical Center in Bayside, the Surgical Specialty Center of Westchester, Gramercy Surgery Center-New York and Syosset Surgicenter performed below average for ophthalmology procedures. Additionally, three area facilities underperformed in orthopedics and spine care, including Gramercy Surgery Center-New York, Port Jefferson ASC and Richmond Pain Management ASC on Staten Island. Gramcery Surgery Center-New York also rated below average for urology.
Ben Harder, U.S. News’ managing editor, said the media company decided to publish new rankings for ambulatory care facilities as hospitals continue to push more procedures into outpatient care settings and patients flock toward facilities with faster surgery and recovery turnaround times. The ranking is designed to give patients an idea of where to go for certain types of outpatient procedures, he said.
U.S. News analysts used data from the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services to rate each facility for the quality of care it provides Medicare patients, which make up much of the population that receives procedures at ambulatory surgery centers, Harder said.
Analysts evaluated patients’ outcomes after procedures including colonoscopies and endoscopies, cataract surgeries with lens implants, hip and knee replacements and glaucoma surgeries. They rated each institution based on how many patients took unexpected trips to the hospital or emergency room after procedures, experienced complications after a surgery or died as a result of one, which Harder emphasized is “exceedingly rare.” The facilities that achieved statistically better-than-expected outcomes were rated as high-performing; Harder also noted that facilities with more data to analyze may be more likely to achieve a high or below average rating.
Of the more than 7,000 ratings U.S. News awarded about 5,000 sites, about 700 were high-performing, 10%. Roughly the same percentage of New York centers that were evaluated received the same designation, but Harder said the state outperformed other areas of the country in the percentage of centers that ranked well for certain specialties. More than 20% of the New York facilities evaluated for colonoscopies and endoscopies excelled, he said by way of example, “well over the national average.” Of the 13 sites assessed in Brooklyn, five – or 38% – excelled, more than double the national norm.
Harder said this success could be due to New York’s high concentration of facilities that perform just one of the specialty procedures analysts evaluated.
“There's certainly something to be said for doctors’ practices that specialize in one area of care and that’s what they do,” he said, noting that many area hospitals that perform one type of care, such as cancer surgeries and treatments, often perform similarly well in U.S. News rankings. “They’re not trying to be everything to all patients. A lot of the high-performing ones in New York in particular are [single-specialty].”
While analysts did not factor patient volume into their rankings, Harder added that New York’s high patient volumes, particularly in the metropolitan area, help facilities excel in the work they perform.
“I've certainly heard, anecdotally, people will go to an ASC that is a single-specialty [center] in a densely populated community and they've got patients lined up in 15 or 20-minute intervals,” he said. “It's almost like watching air traffic control bring planes into a busy airport. They've got everything down to a science.”
U.S. News is headquartered in Washington, D.C.
City Councilmembers pressed top health officials about Mayor Eric Adams’ executive budget Monday, demanding transparency into how much the city spends on treatment for people with severe mental illnesses as it prepares to negotiate next year’s budget.
Councilmember Linda Lee, chair of the committee on mental health, disabilities and addiction, urged City Health Commissioner Ashwin Vasan to disclose spending on treatment programs that target people with severe mental illnesses or involvement in the criminal justice system – a population that the city has historically struggled to treat.
Lee, who represents Eastern Queens neighborhoods including Fresh Meadows, Jamaica and Bayside, said in an executive budget hearing on Monday that the programs are “crucial” to serving the city’s most vulnerable populations, challenging officials to coordinate care to ensure individuals don’t fall through the cracks.
“What we don’t want is for people to end up in shelters or the criminal justice system, when they should actually be receiving treatment,” Lee said.
Calls for transparency around the city’s mental health budget come as lawmakers continue to pressure the mayor to increase funding for mental health initiatives. The Health Department allocates about a third of its $2 billion budget, or $757 million, to mental health, according to an analysis conducted by the Council. The state funds half of mental health initiatives.
After the mayor released his preliminary budget in January, lawmakers requested at least $45 million in additional funds for mental health programs – specifically those that serve people with severe mental illness and those involved in the criminal justice system.
One piece of that request was a $7.2 million bump in baseline funding for Assertive Community Treatment teams, a Medicaid-funded mobile outreach program that provides mental health and substance use treatment, including medications. The Council asked for funding specifically for forensic teams, which serve New Yorkers involved in the criminal justice system.
The teams received $16 million in the current fiscal year budget, said Aaron Anderson, the Health Department’s chief financial officer. Forensic teams get $3.7 million of that money – an allocation the Council says is not sufficient.
The city’s five active forensic Assertive Community Treatment teams can serve up to 340 New Yorkers at a time, Vasan said.
The funding is significantly lower than for Intensive Mobile Treatment, a program for people experiencing severe mental illness and homelessness who have historically struggled to get treatment through the conventional health care system. Anderson said that the program receives roughly $42 million a year, but it is not funded by Medicaid and therefore cannot make additional revenue.
In addition to requests for mental health treatment funding, the Council has pushed the mayor to include $8.9 million in additional funding for mental health courts, $19.6 million for supportive housing programs and $5 million for trauma recovery centers in Queens and Staten Island, which are designed to provide mental health and support services to victims of violence.
The Council and the mayor plan to finalize the upcoming fiscal year budget by July 1.
Affordable housing construction will drop in the coming year, undercutting one of Mayor Eric Adams’ key priorities, unless the city invests hundreds of millions of dollars in new capital funding, according to a new analysis by an affordable housing policy group.
Under the mayor’s April executive budget proposal, the Housing Preservation and Development Department would be given $2.1 billion for capital projects. But the nonprofit New York Housing Conference says that proposal, if approved by the City Council, would cause the number of new affordable units financed through city subsidies to shrink by about 32% next year — from an average of 14,700 over the past five years to just 10,066 in the coming fiscal year.
Rising costs of construction mean the city would need to increase its spending further, by about $812 million, just to keep affordable production at current levels, according to the report. The Adams administration has a stated goal of starting construction on 20,000 affordable units next year.
“We’re really concerned that we’ll see a significant drop in affordable housing if this budget is not restored,” said Rachel Fee, executive director of the nonprofit Housing Conference. Fee said the projection was based on a detailed analysis of the city’s different subsidy programs and the capital needs of affordable projects that recently closed.
City Hall spokesman William Fowler said in a statement that the administration “has been crystal clear about the dire stakes of our housing crisis and is responding to that crisis with once-in-a-generation housing wins,” pointing to the wide-ranging City of Yes plan and last month’s approval of a 1,400-unit project at Willets Point.
“With the funding we are proposing, new tools from the state, and ‘City of Yes’ all working together, we fully expect that HPD will continue to be able to hit their targets,” Fowler said.
How much to spend on affordable housing programs may be a central question of upcoming budget talks between the Adams administration and the City Council, which must result in a deal by July 1. Lawmakers have already said they will push to increase HPD’s capital budget by about $732 million annually over five years compared to the mayor’s plan, which the council says would allow some 60,000 additional units to be built or preserved in that timeframe.
The group’s analysis was released ahead of Tuesday’s housing-focused budget hearing at the City Council, where other affordable housing groups are expected to testify in favor of spending more money on financing and construction.
In its report, the Housing Conference raised alarms about what it called a cut in HPD’s capital budget — from $2.6 billion in the current year to $2.1 billion in Adams’ plan for Fiscal Year 2025. But City Hall called that a misinterpretation, since the current year’s capital budget is inflated by unspent funds shifted over from past years. The current year’s capital budget also grew by about $500 million to accommodate a few projects expected to close this fiscal year, the mayor’s office said.
Still, the Housing Conference analysis found that the proposed budget for fiscal 2025 would cause significant slowdowns. The number of new construction units to be financed could fall by 52%, while preservation projects — which use city subsidies to upgrade existing buildings — would have 15% fewer units financed.
A dropoff in financing would also have secondary effects. Without new capital funding, New York City will probably fail to fully use federal Low Income Housing Tax credits, which the city pairs with its own funding to subsidize low-income rents and finance new construction.
And a slowdown in financing would likely worsen HPD’s existing backlog. Housing Commissioner Adolfo Carrión told the City Council in March that the agency has 750 affordable projects sitting in its pipeline now awaiting funding — a backlog that worsened in recent years due to vacancies in the city’s workforce.
The Housing Conference, for its part, argues for a $1 billion increase to HPD’s capital budget next year over current levels — including the $812 million that it says is needed simply to maintain current financing levels. The additional $187 million would help alleviate the backlog and finance some 400 newly built units, according to the analysis.
Allowing affordable housing growth to slow would be a setback for Adams, who ultimately hopes to build 500,000 new homes over the next decade. His hopes have been buoyed in recent weeks thanks to the housing deal in the new state budget, which would bolster his City of Yes plan by creating a new tax break for construction, encouraging more office-to-apartment conversions and eliminating a residential density cap in the city.
About 38.4 million people will take to the roads this Memorial Day weekend, the most in more than two decades of data tracking the holiday’s travel numbers, according to the American Automobile Association.
About 43.8 million people will embark on trips of all forms during the weekend leading into the May 27 holiday, with plane travel, cruises and public transport also proving popular, the group said. That’s the second-highest number AAA has seen since 2005, when consumer sentiment had recovered from the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and had yet to be roiled by the 2008 financial crisis.
Notably, the number of expected travelers this year surpasses 2019 levels, showing that the travel industry has recovered from the Covid-19 pandemic and is thriving again. That recovery is right on schedule, as travel numbers typically take about four years to rebound from collapses, said AAA spokeswoman Aixa Diaz.
“There’s been a psychological shift around travel,” Diaz said in an interview. “We were so restricted in where we were able to go and what we were able to do, now people are willing to spend their money on experiences rather than just things.”
Retail gasoline prices will be similar to this time a year earlier, AAA said, even as demand leading into the summer hovers at the lowest levels since 2020. Still, prices at the pump may creep up as the summer driving season kicks into full force, AAA said.
A rebound in domestic travel would be a positive signal for global demand at a time when concerns about the strength of Chinese consumption are lingering. Crude prices are still up for the year amid production cuts from OPEC and its allies, and markets are looking ahead to the alliance’s meeting on June 1, where it’s expected to continue the supply curbs into the second half of the year.
New York City will soon have its day in state court to allege that the oil industry misled city consumers about the impact of their products on the climate.
Federal Judge Valerie Caproni on Thursday rejected Exxon Mobil, Shell, BP and the American Petroleum Institute’s request to transfer the lawsuit out of state court, where it was originally filed, to a federal venue where the companies believe they are more likely to win. Caproni’s ruling enables the case to move forward in New York state court after three years of legal limbo.
The city’s suit, which was filed in 2021 by former Mayor Bill de Blasio’s administration, charges the oil giants with “systematically” violating city consumer protection law through false advertising and deceptive trade practices. Several other cities, counties and state governments have filed similar cases to hold oil companies financially accountable for their role in warming the planet.
Attorneys for the companies argued that the case belongs in federal court because it seeks to limit fossil fuel emissions, but Caproni said that that is not what the city is looking to achieve.
“The claims in the city’s complaint are about false and misleading advertisements,” she wrote. “Those claims do not become claims about transboundary pollution and foreign affairs just because the alleged deception relates to the impact of fossil fuels on the climate.”
The timeline of the case isn’t clear, but Hilary Meltzer, chief of the city law department’s environmental division, said the city is eager to press the case.
“The City deserves its day in court to hold these defendants accountable for their false and misleading statements to New York City consumers,” Meltzer said in a statement to Crain’s. “It’s time to get to the merits of this case.”
A judge has ruled that the city must pay more than $13 million total to the daughter of late developer Horace Bullard, whose dreams of creating a year-round amusement park in Coney Island never came to fruition, after years ago seizing her property along the famous Brooklyn boardwalk, according to a notice that appeared in the city register Monday.
Comptroller Brad Lander will cut a check for $6.1 million plus interest — the city already paid $7.5 million nearly a decade ago after taking the property — to Jasmine Bullard of Wantanabe Realty Corp., whose father died of ALS in 2013. In 2016, using eminent domain, the city took control of three of her parcels, at 1520 Surf Ave. and 1507 and 1519 Boardwalk West, adjacent to the site of the original Thunderbolt roller coaster that former Mayor Rudy Giuliani controversially demolished in 2000.
After years of delays related to Covid and various appraisals of the then-vacant land, Kings County Supreme Court Judge Wayne Saitta finally issued a judgment. The comptroller will issue the check May 20, according to city records. James Greilsheimer, of the New York-based law firm Kramer Levin, who represented Bullard, told Crain's neither side is planning to appeal, though Bullard isn't very happy with the decision either.
"We had hoped for some more," said Greilsheimer, who added that the city had hoped for less.
Bullard had owned about 150,000 square feet of property before the city seized roughly 55,000 square feet of it to create contiguous parkland in what's known as the people's playground.
But the question of what will become of the property she still owns — the site of the former Thunderbolt — remains. Dick Zigun, the self-styled "mayor of Coney Island" who founded Coney Island USA and the annual Mermaid Parade, said its value is high, thanks to a past rezoning allowing for a nearly 30-story hotel — but the community would love to see more rides there.
"We all want to know what she has planned for that. We all want her to sell it," said Zigun. "It's a big puzzling question mark in the neighborhood."
More than two decades ago, Giuliani tore down the landmarked Thunderbolt roller coaster, which had become a Hollywood icon. A federal jury later ruled that Giuliani violated Horace Bullard's rights and had no justification to tear down the coaster, which operated from 1925 until the early 1980s but was out of service when the former mayor had it torn down. Eventually, Bullard won a $1 million settlement from the city, which he reportedly never collected, according to The New York Times.
That wasn't Bullard's first run-in with Giuliani. A $450 million plan Bullard had dreamt up in the 1980s to revitalize the park was first thwarted by a financial crash that decade and later by Giuliani, who revoked approvals for the project — a move that Bullard, who was Black and Puerto Rican, later characterized as racist, the Times reported.
The city did not respond to a request for comment about its plans for the the sites or the judge's decision. Attempts to speak with Bullard before press time were unsuccessful.