More articles, too lazy to backdate.
Jul. 6th, 2005 03:37 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
conuly
One on a man who stayed in an airport for a year.
On Way to Life in Britain, With a Year's Airport Layover
By MARC LACEY
NAIROBI, Kenya, June 29 - After nearly 13 months at the Jomo Kenyatta International Airport, Sanjai L. Shah can safely drop his protest and leave. He is not about to, though.
For all this time, Mr. Shah has risen promptly at 5 a.m., when the intercom announces the arrival of Kenya Airways Flight 493 from Zanzibar. He has drifted off to sleep sometime past midnight, after the last airport travelers have come and gone and the terminal that has become his home quiets down for a while.
In between, Mr. Shah, who was born in Kenya, has lived a life straight out of the Hollywood movie "The Terminal," which was based on another airport dweller, an Iranian refugee who has camped out since 1988 at Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris.
Mr. Shah's bizarre life reflects just how far a father who dreams of sending his son to a British university is willing to go. Without the lower tuition offered to British citizens, Mr. Shah says such an education would be far beyond his family's financial reach, so he decided not to leave the airport until his new nationality was conferred.
But also like the movie, Mr. Shah's drama has a happy ending: a mysterious envelope arrived Wednesday from the British High Commission. Mr. Shah's sullen eyes grow wide as he reads the news inside. Cut to his loving wife and son, jumping for joy as Mr. Shah calls them to share the news. Soon, he will become a full-fledged British citizen, just as British as Tony Blair. As British as Prince Charles.
It was June 1, 2004, when an immigration muddle landed Mr. Shah at the Nairobi airport, stateless and defiant. He pitched camp right outside the rather bleak arrivals hall and has not budged since.
Mr. Shah, 42, has been eating at airport cafes when he finishes off the Indian morsels delivered to him weekly by his wife, Rasmita, a Kenyan citizen. He washes himself in a business class lounge. He spends his days roaming, up one hallway, past the arrival gates, down another hallway, and back to his pile of luggage, stashed in an out-of-the-way corner near a visa counter.
"I know each and every shop," he said recently, strolling along a corridor lined with duty-free items. "I know each and every shopkeeper. I know the sweepers, the security officers, the immigration officers. Everyone."
Even with the letter he has waited so long for in hand, Mr. Shah did not run for the airport exit. Throughout his yearlong protest, he has been fearful that stepping outside the airport might somehow ruin his chance of ever reaching London. Mr. Shah said Wednesday that he would probably remain in the terminal until July 12, when he must take part in a British citizenship ceremony. It will take another week or so to get his British passport. Then he will head back to the airport, this time as a passenger, not a squatter.
Sunshine is what Mr. Shah says he has missed the most, and his pale skin, which is yellowish even, is a testament to that. The oddest thing is that Mr. Shah could have strolled out at any time. He could have picked up his passport from the immigration authorities who are now his friends and marched right out past the baggage carousel into the country of his birth. But he would have been issued only a three-month visa, and it is not certain what would have happened to him after that.
So Mr. Shah chose not to go anywhere. British immigration experts have said all along that the law appeared to be on his side, if only he was patient.
Mr. Shah's case has been a complicated one, steeped in the history of this region and in the complexities of immigration law in a onetime colonial power. He was born in Kenya the year before it achieved independence from Britain in 1963. Back then, the British deemed him a citizen of the United Kingdom and Colonies, or a CUKC in British bureaucratese.
Britain has some of the most complicated nationality laws anywhere. It used to be that anybody in the British Empire was deemed a subject. But revisions to the law over the years have created a variety of categories, including British protected persons, British nationals, British dependent territories citizens and British overseas citizens. "We tend not to use the term second-class citizen, but obviously a British citizen has more rights than a British overseas citizen," said Louise McLean, a former British immigration officer who helps Kenyans navigate the morass.
A British overseas citizen is what Mr. Shah has been for decades, unbeknown to him. It made him less than a real British citizen until 2003, when a new British law enabled him and other British overseas citizens to upgrade to a full-fledged British citizen.
Mr. Shah was thrilled. By this time, he had a sister and other relatives living in Britain. His teenage son, Veer, was approaching college age and Mr. Shah had hopes of his studying science at a British university, rather than following in his footsteps as a laborer in restaurants and factories.
In 2004, Mr. Shah received a British passport and headed off to London. But he made a critical error. He bought a one-way ticket, raising the suspicions of immigration authorities at Heathrow Airport. They questioned him on arrival and eventually denied him access to the country. His passport allowed him to enter Britain for only six months, although he could have stayed indefinitely if he had been granted full citizenship once in the country.
Before he was put on a plane back to Nairobi, the ominous words "PROHIBITED IMMIGRANT" were stamped into his British passport. His Kenyan passport had already been cut by British consular officials in Nairobi.
Kenyan officials put him in detention when he arrived at the Nairobi airport. Once they learned the details of his plight, they allowed him to roam free in the terminal.
Before receiving his good news on Wednesday, Mr. Shah said he had the resolve to continue his airport sit-in for six more months, or even another year, however long it would take. That does not appear necessary now.
"It's been so long," he said Wednesday, as airport workers congratulated him. "But it's been worth it."
And one on the MTA's ill-advised rules
No Coffee on Subway? M.T.A. Holds That Order
By SEWELL CHAN
The Metropolitan Transportation Authority is still without a five-year capital plan, and billions of dollars worth of building projects may be put on hold, but its chairman found himself contemplating an altogether different matter yesterday: Just how much of a mess can a cup of coffee really make?
In a rare move, the chairman, Peter S. Kalikow, asked fellow board members to postpone a final vote on new passenger rules that would prohibit, among other things, moving between subway cars and drinking from an open container while riding.
The board, facing a barrage of unanticipated criticism from riders who are not keen on being separated from their morning cup of subway java, agreed to hold off until July while Mr. Kalikow reviews the rules more closely.
The board's transit committee voted on Monday on the set of passenger rules, which under normal circumstances would have been routinely endorsed by the full board at its monthly meeting, which was held yesterday.
The decision to delay such a vote was another remarkable turn in the long process of preparing the new guidelines, which were proposed in May 2004 but were held up for months because of provisions, now deleted, that would have banned unauthorized photography and videotaping.
Now the open-container rule has become the target of attention.
"We do listen," Mr. Kalikow said earnestly, after the monthly board meeting. "People ask us to review things, and we do listen. A lot of board members do have some serious issues with these rules. There seems to be a misapprehension that you can't drink water from a closed bottle with a cap on it. You can."
After the initial vote on Monday, criticism emerged from politicians, riders and even transit workers.
Most who spoke before the board focused on the no-drink rule. Michael A. Harris, 20, a college student who uses a wheelchair, said many disabled riders must take medications several times a day. "How is my drinking a bottle of water posing a threat to passenger safety?" he asked.
A station agent, Martin S. Goodman, who attended the meeting in his uniform, even chided board members. "Are you actually New Yorkers?" he asked them. "Why not ban newspapers? In the wrong hands, they can become litter as well."
The Manhattan borough president, C. Virginia Fields, who sent an aide to testify at yesterday's meeting, insisted that riders should be able to move from car to car, which would be banned under the new rules.
"Many of those who go between cars are doing so out of fear or disgust, enough to make them take their chances," Ms. Fields, a candidate in the Democratic mayoral primary, said in a statement. "Are you really prepared to fine a woman who feels threatened by the presence of another passenger for the 'crime' of moving to another car to reach safety?"
Officials said they were trying to reduce injuries and deaths associated with riding between cars. The police said they would not ticket anyone trying to leave a dangerous situation or a car that was not air-conditioned.
New York City Transit, the agency that operates the subways and first proposed the rules, tried to quell the controversy over the no-drink rule. "This is truly a clarification of the rule, and not a new rule," said a spokesman, Paul J. Fleuranges.
The current rule states, "No person shall bring or carry on to a conveyance any liquid in an open container." Such a prohibition has been on the books since at least 1967, and consuming alcohol anywhere in the subway is also forbidden.
Officials said the new language - "No person, while on a conveyance, shall possess any liquid in or consume any liquid from an open container" - was simply intended to make it clear that consuming a beverage on a moving train is unacceptable. Sugary liquids like sodas create hard-to-clean stains and attract rats when spilled, they said.
The maximum penalty for violating the rule, $25, would not change. (Passengers may still drink beverages while waiting on platforms.)
Despite the brouhaha, drinking on the subways is not the most commonly cited offense, according to data from the authority's Transit Adjudication Bureau. As of May, the bureau had issued 22 fines for drinking liquid from an open container this year and collected $1,565, compared with 48 fines all of last year and 72 in 2003.
Fare evasion is by far the most common violation, followed by smoking, obstructing seats, littering, drinking alcohol, interfering with the movement of other passengers, failing to produce identification, selling fare cards, unauthorized commercial activity, riding outside the train, and liquid in an open container.
That same subject again
Reading This Over Coffee? All Aboard!
By CLYDE HABERMAN
NEW YORKERS may well have reached the point where it makes sense for them to take along a lawyer when they ride the subways. Somebody ought to be around to advise them if they are violating various rules put forth by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. On their own, they may have trouble figuring things out.
Subway riders are first told that it might become illegal for them to take a snapshot of Aunt Mabel and Uncle Jed on their first visit to the Times Square station. Then the proposed no-photos ban goes the way of Emily Litella: never mind.
New Yorkers are told that a new rule will prohibit them from walking from one subway car to another. But they are not told why a practice that has long been routine - and sometimes essential to escape the Three Mals: malfunctions, malodors and malefactors - is suddenly so dangerous that it must be banned.
Then, to complicate matters further, that rule is unexpectedly put on ice for at least a few weeks.
So is another new regulation that is aimed at stopping drinking from open containers on trains. Many riders, some of them no doubt overly caffeinated, are in an absolute dither at the prospect of having to toss their coffee cups.
As a result of their concerns, the board of the transportation authority is giving itself more time to decide which proposed rules make sense and which don't.
"We do listen," said Peter S. Kalikow, the authority's chairman.
That's good. But for many New Yorkers, listening is not the issue. Thinking is. The question for them is whether subway managers fully weigh the potential consequences of all their regulations before announcing them.
In fairness, transit officials do not have an easy task. Maintaining a semblance of order underground is a messy business. They have to deal with a riding public that, compared with previous generations, is arguably more focused on individual entitlement than on communal obligation.
Proving this is close to impossible, but it does seem that more men now than years ago insist on sitting with legs spread so defiantly wide that they hog two seats or even three.
More people seem to plant themselves at the doors and refuse to budge. More seem to plunk down packages on empty seats and make no effort to move them when the train fills up.
No one in a crowded car seems to know anymore how to fold a newspaper to keep it from bopping the next guy on the head.
Then, too, more riders than before seem convinced that subway trains are freight cars, where they are free to squeeze fellow riders into a corner with everything from bicycles to refrigerators.
Some insist on their right to do in public what used to be done only in private. They eat entire meals on the train, indifferent to the odors they create.
Women put on makeup while riding to work. Wait till someone pokes out her eye with a mascara wand because the train stops short. It's 8 to 5 she sues Mr. Kalikow for causing the injury.
A BIG concern of the moment, however, is the Venti Brigade, those riders who cannot go anywhere without a large macchiato in hand.
Anyone who has been scalded by spilled coffee on a lurching train recognizes that prohibiting open containers is not necessarily bureaucratic pettiness run amok. But the Venti Brigade is powerful, and so we now have transit officials giving the proposed rule a closer look.
While they are at it, they may want to consider the inevitable unintended consequences of such a ban.
Many riders will simply disregard it, just as they ignore existing rules against littering, panhandling, playing loud music, lying on benches, carrying bulky items and engaging in unauthorized commerce.
Not every New Yorker is lawless, of course. Many abide by rules, and will leave their cups on the subway platform. Only some won't use the trash bin that is three feet from where they are standing. No, that is too difficult. They will drop the cups on the platform itself.
Then, this being New York, they will protest that the station is filthy, as if the trash somehow got there all by itself. Their elected officials will join in and write a complaining report, perhaps similar to one that the City Council issued last week, blaming everyone but the garbage throwers.
On second thought, perhaps riders do not need a lawyer, after all. Maybe a lesson or two from Miss Manners would be better. With a bit more etiquette on the trains, some of these rules might not even have been proposed in the first place.
And again
The Subway New Yorkers Proudly Call Home
By SEWELL CHAN
WHAT is it about New Yorkers and their subway? Last week, officials moved to adopt new rules that would prohibit passengers from drinking from open containers, moving between subway cars or straddling a bicycle on a moving train.
Straphangers screamed bloody murder, and the board of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which oversees the subway, immediately announced it would table the measure for at least a month.
"You can't sleep, you can't drool," said Beatrice McCants, 30, of East New York, Brooklyn. "What's next, 'Don't look at me, you'll get a fine'?"
The commotion was another example of the deep connection New Yorkers have with their century-old subway system.
In other cities, passengers don't seem to mind tough restrictions. The Chicago El completely bans food and drink; it allows customers to carry bottled water during "periods of extreme heat." The Washington Metro is so adamant about keeping its uniform stations spotless that in 2000, its police officers handcuffed a 12-year-old girl for eating a single French fry.
But in New York, where eating is permitted, along with drinking on platforms and in stations, things are different.
First of all, the subway here constantly makes news. In recent months, for example, union leaders have criticized a plan to computerize the aging switches and signals that guide train movements. A decision to reassign token-booth clerks as roving customer-service agents also met with complaints from riders, politicians and union leaders, even though tokens are no longer used. And a proposal one year ago to ban photography and videotaping in the name of homeland security was practically shouted out of the system. (It has since been rescinded.)
One reason New York riders seem to regard the subway as theirs may be that so many of them spend a lot of time on it. New York is the only American city where most residents, 55 percent, use public transportation to get to work, and the majority of them use the subway. The system delivers 4.8 million rides each weekday.
New Yorkers are as fussy and proprietary about their subway as small-towners would be about the design of their village square, said Edward I. Koch, the former mayor, who described the fracas over the rules as "provincialism at its best."
Suburbanites often see their sport utility vehicles as adjuncts to their homes. That's how New Yorkers seem to feel about their subway. "Growing up in New York City, subways were almost an extension of my living room, a place where you would hang out with friends," said Roger Sanjek, a social anthropologist at Queens College. "New Yorkers feel that subways are an extension of the life of the streets, rather than simply a way to get from one place to another."
The centrality of the subway to life here makes it "the premier public space of New York City," said Sharon Zukin, a sociologist at Brooklyn College. "That's why issues of access and use are so acute. As with the public parks, there is always a tension between the dynamic and casual use of public space and the controlled, rationalized approach."
The subway is also a trucking route for the city's less well off, Ms. Zukin said. "Nowadays, people get on the subway with cribs, stereo sets - items that many stores don't deliver anymore except for an extra charge," she said. "People do use the subway as their delivery truck."
In one sense, these controversies over relatively trivial behavioral matters are good news - evidence of the city's sustained reduction in crime and some $40 billion worth of capital investments in the subway. The apocalyptic wasteland depicted in "The Taking of Pelham One Two Three," a 1974 film in which an entire train is hijacked, is a thing of the past.
"If you had tried to have good conduct in the 80's you'd have been laughed out of the city," said Alan F. Kiepper, who ran the transit agencies of Atlanta and Houston before he oversaw the New York subway, from 1990 to 1996. "There was rampant fare evasion, and rampant violence, and that was more important than whether someone was going to nibble on a hot dog. You have to take these things in sequence."
And one on Mao
The Mao Myth Thrives, but Don't Mention Its Dark Side
By HOWARD W. FRENCH
YENAN, China - Horribly outnumbered, poorly armed and constantly under attack, 80,000 Communist fighters set out on foot from a base in China's southeastern Jiangxi Province in October 1934 hoping above all to avoid getting wiped out by their Nationalist enemies.
One year and 5,000 miles later, after countless acts of extraordinary courage along the way, the 6,000 survivors of the Long March, led by Mao Zedong, limped into this dusty town in the arid yellow hills of northern Shaanxi Province.
Last year, nearly four million Chinese, from backpacking college students to busloads of middle-aged workers on company excursions, followed in their wake - as tourists, not revolutionaries. Without much else to work with, this modest city, all but bypassed by the industrial revolution sweeping China, enthusiastically promotes some of the most resonant founding myths of the country's Communist republic.
These days, eager visitors crowd the revolutionary museum here to look admiringly at large black and white photographs of the last stages of the Long March, to buy Mao trinkets or to pose for pictures in front of the rustic cave dwellings that served as residences for Mao and other top leaders from 1935 to 1947, when this city was the Communists' main base.
Marxist ideology is said to have little relevance in today's China. But all over this city, people can be overheard trading admiring stories about the heroism of Mao's army or celebrating the spirit of Yenan, as much a name for that 12-year period as for the city itself.
Whether they lived through it, or more likely know of it through popular culture, many Chinese still recall the era fondly as a time of great idealism, of selfless volunteers arriving by the tens of thousands to join the movement, and of Mao's supposedly enlightened leadership before such well-known and monumental tragedies as the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, which killed tens of millions of people.
"We have always loved Mao," said Zhao Shiwei, 43, a provincial trade official who had come from far away Guangdong Province and was posing merrily with a group of colleagues in gray People's Liberation Army uniforms from the era. "He led the nation to success and founded the new China, and he will always occupy a great place in our hearts."
Chinese historians in the academy, like their counterparts abroad, have steadily chipped away at Mao's myth, and the falling chunks have inevitably included many details about Yenan. Far from the idyll celebrated here, the historians say, Mao waged a campaign of political terror against youthful dissenters, perfecting methods of purging real and imagined foes that would be used on a vast scale later. He sold opium to raise money for his army, and it was here that he created his suffocating cult of personality.
"Mao: The Unknown Story," a heavily researched book published recently by Jung Chang, a Chinese writer who lives in Britain, goes so far as to say that the most legendary act of bravery of the entire Long March, the crossing of the Dadu bridge, while enemy gunners took aim from the opposite bank, was fiction. In China, that is the equivalent of saying Washington never led his troops across the Delaware.
That is not all. Far from committed Communists, Ms. Chang writes, many of the marchers were press-ganged captives, and Mao is said to have been carried throughout much of the Long March on a litter by porters, as he read at his leisure. And although Mao's troops were decimated, not a single senior party member was killed or even seriously wounded. "You can't say the Long March was a military victory," said Yang Kuisong, a historian at Beijing University. "It was not about fighting battles. It was a process of running away."
Ordinary Chinese have been carefully shielded from views like this of their late leader, however. Mao's importance to the party he founded remains paramount, even as the founding ideology, Marxism, fades.
For ordinary Chinese, history textbooks emphasize the devotion to the common man and heroism of the early Communists, even teaching that Mao's armies, not the Americans, defeated the Japanese invaders. The television and film industries have cranked out hundreds of movies reinforcing the Mao legend. Writing that strongly challenges the chairman or his place in history simply cannot be published in China.
Sitting outside the town's Revolutionary Museum, where a huge bronze of Mao looms over a parking lot filling with tour buses, a 33-year-old man named Chen affected boredom when approached by a stranger, saying Mao's history was most relevant to people over 40. "We didn't have to suffer the same difficulties that they did," Mr. Chen said. "You always hear about the great sacrifices that Mao's generation made in all the movies and TV shows. It's got to be true, right?"
In the date tree garden by the old Revolutionary Headquarters, where Mao presided over early meetings of the Central Committee, a group of fresh college graduates from Xian were curious about a foreigner's impression of Mao.
"In China, nobody hates Mao Zedong," one of the students said in prelude. "This trip is like a souvenir for us. We could have gone anywhere, but we chose here."
Told of the dark side of Mao's record known to historians but not to most Chinese, some of the students grew defensive. "What do you expect us to do, drag him from his grave and flog him," one asked. "The emperors of the past are regarded as great if they moved the country forward, no matter how much the people suffered. With Mao it is the same."
Others, however, grew pensive. "You might say that China is a very different country in the way it deals with history," said one young woman. "But you must understand, foreigners have much more information than we do. There's no real freedom to discuss these kinds of things here."
And one on the end of free water
Water Isn't Free, New York Is Told
By ANTHONY DePALMA
New Yorkers, who long ago accepted the idea of paying dearly for imported spring water to go with dinner, still like to boast that they have the best-tasting tap water in the world.
But many never pay for that high-quality tap water at home, and they get away with it because the city - which runs the water system - never cuts off anybody's water for nonpayment.
Ever.
About 231,000 water customers in New York City are late paying their bills - some by just a few months, others by decades. In all, these water delinquents owe the city more than $625 million in overdue bills and penalties.
Houses and apartments account for 90 percent of those unpaid bills, but the city just absorbs the huge losses and spreads the costs to those who do pay rather than risk the political consequences of being seen as hardhearted.
But the tap may finally run dry. The cost of maintaining the city's mammoth water supply system is rising sharply, with capital improvements estimated to cost $16 billion over the next decade.
And so officials have started working on a plan to selectively cut the water to a few residences with outstanding bills to show that they are serious about collecting those debts.
"Shutting off residential customers will always be a last resort," said David B. Tweedy, first deputy commissioner of the city's Department of Environmental Protection and executive director of the New York City Water Board, an independent public agency that determines rates. "But it's an option we want to have."
Water is an uncommon commodity in New York, an everyday symbol of the city's bounty and power and something that New Yorkers believe they are entitled to, whether or not they can pay for it. In turning off people's faucets, officials realize they could be asking for trouble, and they do not plan to go after everyone who refuses to pay.
Instead, officials plan to target only high-income neighborhoods, to make examples of a few privileged New Yorkers who have not paid their bills - all bills average roughly $600 a year per household - and who would be in no position to complain if they were caught stiffing the system.
There are still details to work out, and no date has been set to begin the new approach, Mr. Tweedy said. He would not identify the delinquents to be singled out, but he said they would be "people with multimillion-dollar condos who are not paying their bills - accounts like that."
But even that is likely to stir things up. Elizabeth Yeampierre, executive director of Uprose, a community group in a low-income area of Brooklyn, said that shut-offs seemed excessive, even if aimed at the rich. "There's going to be complaints about the unevenness of it," she said. "It sounds pretty tricky."
Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg does not like the idea, either. Jordan Barowitz, a spokesman, said that the mayor believed people should pay their water bills but that he did not favor shutting off residential water because "it often hurts innocent tenants and has no effect on those who don't pay the bill."
For most phone companies and electric utilities, cutting off service to delinquent customers is a business reality. Con Edison, for example, cuts service to about 7,500 customers a month. And the next five largest municipal water systems in the country all cut off service when bills go unpaid, according to a survey by the Natural Resources Defense Council.
New York occasionally cuts off stores, offices or other commercial water users as a warning to others.
"When they get the shut-off notice," said Denise M. Richardson, deputy commissioner for the bureau of customer services, "they usually pay."
But the city is one of the few water providers in the country that never shuts off residential users, in part because of the city's complicated water history.
New York's water delivery system is a marvel of engineering and civic gumption, drawing water from as far as the Catskill Mountains, 120 miles away. The city used general revenues to pay for the huge tunnels and reservoirs, and for decades it was cheaper to charge a flat fee, based on a building's size, than to measure how much water was used.
New Yorkers grew up believing that water was unlimited, and free. But the fiscal crisis of the 1970's changed that perception. When officials realized that the water could stop running if the city went bankrupt, the system was made self-supporting, relying on fees.
The city began installing meters in the 1980's. Some initially malfunctioned, or were read improperly, and thousands of customers challenged their bills. Whole neighborhoods refused to pay, officials said, because they had never paid before.
New York is not alone in trying to change attitudes about water. Mexico City started metering water only in the 1990's. It never cuts off service either, and officials there say that about 25 percent of users are now delinquent, about the same rate as in New York.
New York City has long had the legal right to terminate service to residential customers with bills that are at least two years overdue. But besides coming off like Scrooge, officials said, the city could end up working against its own housing initiatives if it cuts off water to tenant-owned buildings with outstanding bills. Health regulations also make it hard to turn off the water in multifamily buildings.
And then there is plumbing. Many older buildings do not even have an outside valve to separate them from municipal water mains. Shutting them off would require digging up the streets.
Despite such obstacles, the city started getting tougher in 2002, when about 40 percent of all 900,000 water accounts were delinquent. Uncollected bills and penalties amounted to $900 million, more than half the yearly annual revenues of $1.6 billion.
The city issued payment reminders for the first time. Notices of long outstanding bills were sent to mortgage companies and other financial institutions where such debts could hold up second mortgages and other deals.
Officials said that 72 percent of customers now pay their quarterly bills on time, and that 85 percent pay within a year. "Most other utilities are up around 90 to 95 percent," Mr. Tweedy said. "We'd like to get it there too."
Short of cut-offs, the most the city can do to enforce payment is a lien sale, where private companies bid on buildings with unpaid property taxes and water bills.
But a loophole allows owners to take their properties out of the lien sale at the last minute by paying their property taxes, even if the water bills remain unpaid.
In the latest lien sale, in the spring, 9,358 properties owed some $25.8 million in unpaid water bills. An analysis by The New York Times showed that many of the 10 largest debtors were housing development fund corporations, which were formed when tenants took over their buildings.
The city assumes that fairness to other customers requires that even low-income buildings pay their bills.
"If everyone pays," Mr. Tweedy said, "everyone pays less."
On Way to Life in Britain, With a Year's Airport Layover
By MARC LACEY
NAIROBI, Kenya, June 29 - After nearly 13 months at the Jomo Kenyatta International Airport, Sanjai L. Shah can safely drop his protest and leave. He is not about to, though.
For all this time, Mr. Shah has risen promptly at 5 a.m., when the intercom announces the arrival of Kenya Airways Flight 493 from Zanzibar. He has drifted off to sleep sometime past midnight, after the last airport travelers have come and gone and the terminal that has become his home quiets down for a while.
In between, Mr. Shah, who was born in Kenya, has lived a life straight out of the Hollywood movie "The Terminal," which was based on another airport dweller, an Iranian refugee who has camped out since 1988 at Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris.
Mr. Shah's bizarre life reflects just how far a father who dreams of sending his son to a British university is willing to go. Without the lower tuition offered to British citizens, Mr. Shah says such an education would be far beyond his family's financial reach, so he decided not to leave the airport until his new nationality was conferred.
But also like the movie, Mr. Shah's drama has a happy ending: a mysterious envelope arrived Wednesday from the British High Commission. Mr. Shah's sullen eyes grow wide as he reads the news inside. Cut to his loving wife and son, jumping for joy as Mr. Shah calls them to share the news. Soon, he will become a full-fledged British citizen, just as British as Tony Blair. As British as Prince Charles.
It was June 1, 2004, when an immigration muddle landed Mr. Shah at the Nairobi airport, stateless and defiant. He pitched camp right outside the rather bleak arrivals hall and has not budged since.
Mr. Shah, 42, has been eating at airport cafes when he finishes off the Indian morsels delivered to him weekly by his wife, Rasmita, a Kenyan citizen. He washes himself in a business class lounge. He spends his days roaming, up one hallway, past the arrival gates, down another hallway, and back to his pile of luggage, stashed in an out-of-the-way corner near a visa counter.
"I know each and every shop," he said recently, strolling along a corridor lined with duty-free items. "I know each and every shopkeeper. I know the sweepers, the security officers, the immigration officers. Everyone."
Even with the letter he has waited so long for in hand, Mr. Shah did not run for the airport exit. Throughout his yearlong protest, he has been fearful that stepping outside the airport might somehow ruin his chance of ever reaching London. Mr. Shah said Wednesday that he would probably remain in the terminal until July 12, when he must take part in a British citizenship ceremony. It will take another week or so to get his British passport. Then he will head back to the airport, this time as a passenger, not a squatter.
Sunshine is what Mr. Shah says he has missed the most, and his pale skin, which is yellowish even, is a testament to that. The oddest thing is that Mr. Shah could have strolled out at any time. He could have picked up his passport from the immigration authorities who are now his friends and marched right out past the baggage carousel into the country of his birth. But he would have been issued only a three-month visa, and it is not certain what would have happened to him after that.
So Mr. Shah chose not to go anywhere. British immigration experts have said all along that the law appeared to be on his side, if only he was patient.
Mr. Shah's case has been a complicated one, steeped in the history of this region and in the complexities of immigration law in a onetime colonial power. He was born in Kenya the year before it achieved independence from Britain in 1963. Back then, the British deemed him a citizen of the United Kingdom and Colonies, or a CUKC in British bureaucratese.
Britain has some of the most complicated nationality laws anywhere. It used to be that anybody in the British Empire was deemed a subject. But revisions to the law over the years have created a variety of categories, including British protected persons, British nationals, British dependent territories citizens and British overseas citizens. "We tend not to use the term second-class citizen, but obviously a British citizen has more rights than a British overseas citizen," said Louise McLean, a former British immigration officer who helps Kenyans navigate the morass.
A British overseas citizen is what Mr. Shah has been for decades, unbeknown to him. It made him less than a real British citizen until 2003, when a new British law enabled him and other British overseas citizens to upgrade to a full-fledged British citizen.
Mr. Shah was thrilled. By this time, he had a sister and other relatives living in Britain. His teenage son, Veer, was approaching college age and Mr. Shah had hopes of his studying science at a British university, rather than following in his footsteps as a laborer in restaurants and factories.
In 2004, Mr. Shah received a British passport and headed off to London. But he made a critical error. He bought a one-way ticket, raising the suspicions of immigration authorities at Heathrow Airport. They questioned him on arrival and eventually denied him access to the country. His passport allowed him to enter Britain for only six months, although he could have stayed indefinitely if he had been granted full citizenship once in the country.
Before he was put on a plane back to Nairobi, the ominous words "PROHIBITED IMMIGRANT" were stamped into his British passport. His Kenyan passport had already been cut by British consular officials in Nairobi.
Kenyan officials put him in detention when he arrived at the Nairobi airport. Once they learned the details of his plight, they allowed him to roam free in the terminal.
Before receiving his good news on Wednesday, Mr. Shah said he had the resolve to continue his airport sit-in for six more months, or even another year, however long it would take. That does not appear necessary now.
"It's been so long," he said Wednesday, as airport workers congratulated him. "But it's been worth it."
And one on the MTA's ill-advised rules
No Coffee on Subway? M.T.A. Holds That Order
By SEWELL CHAN
The Metropolitan Transportation Authority is still without a five-year capital plan, and billions of dollars worth of building projects may be put on hold, but its chairman found himself contemplating an altogether different matter yesterday: Just how much of a mess can a cup of coffee really make?
In a rare move, the chairman, Peter S. Kalikow, asked fellow board members to postpone a final vote on new passenger rules that would prohibit, among other things, moving between subway cars and drinking from an open container while riding.
The board, facing a barrage of unanticipated criticism from riders who are not keen on being separated from their morning cup of subway java, agreed to hold off until July while Mr. Kalikow reviews the rules more closely.
The board's transit committee voted on Monday on the set of passenger rules, which under normal circumstances would have been routinely endorsed by the full board at its monthly meeting, which was held yesterday.
The decision to delay such a vote was another remarkable turn in the long process of preparing the new guidelines, which were proposed in May 2004 but were held up for months because of provisions, now deleted, that would have banned unauthorized photography and videotaping.
Now the open-container rule has become the target of attention.
"We do listen," Mr. Kalikow said earnestly, after the monthly board meeting. "People ask us to review things, and we do listen. A lot of board members do have some serious issues with these rules. There seems to be a misapprehension that you can't drink water from a closed bottle with a cap on it. You can."
After the initial vote on Monday, criticism emerged from politicians, riders and even transit workers.
Most who spoke before the board focused on the no-drink rule. Michael A. Harris, 20, a college student who uses a wheelchair, said many disabled riders must take medications several times a day. "How is my drinking a bottle of water posing a threat to passenger safety?" he asked.
A station agent, Martin S. Goodman, who attended the meeting in his uniform, even chided board members. "Are you actually New Yorkers?" he asked them. "Why not ban newspapers? In the wrong hands, they can become litter as well."
The Manhattan borough president, C. Virginia Fields, who sent an aide to testify at yesterday's meeting, insisted that riders should be able to move from car to car, which would be banned under the new rules.
"Many of those who go between cars are doing so out of fear or disgust, enough to make them take their chances," Ms. Fields, a candidate in the Democratic mayoral primary, said in a statement. "Are you really prepared to fine a woman who feels threatened by the presence of another passenger for the 'crime' of moving to another car to reach safety?"
Officials said they were trying to reduce injuries and deaths associated with riding between cars. The police said they would not ticket anyone trying to leave a dangerous situation or a car that was not air-conditioned.
New York City Transit, the agency that operates the subways and first proposed the rules, tried to quell the controversy over the no-drink rule. "This is truly a clarification of the rule, and not a new rule," said a spokesman, Paul J. Fleuranges.
The current rule states, "No person shall bring or carry on to a conveyance any liquid in an open container." Such a prohibition has been on the books since at least 1967, and consuming alcohol anywhere in the subway is also forbidden.
Officials said the new language - "No person, while on a conveyance, shall possess any liquid in or consume any liquid from an open container" - was simply intended to make it clear that consuming a beverage on a moving train is unacceptable. Sugary liquids like sodas create hard-to-clean stains and attract rats when spilled, they said.
The maximum penalty for violating the rule, $25, would not change. (Passengers may still drink beverages while waiting on platforms.)
Despite the brouhaha, drinking on the subways is not the most commonly cited offense, according to data from the authority's Transit Adjudication Bureau. As of May, the bureau had issued 22 fines for drinking liquid from an open container this year and collected $1,565, compared with 48 fines all of last year and 72 in 2003.
Fare evasion is by far the most common violation, followed by smoking, obstructing seats, littering, drinking alcohol, interfering with the movement of other passengers, failing to produce identification, selling fare cards, unauthorized commercial activity, riding outside the train, and liquid in an open container.
That same subject again
Reading This Over Coffee? All Aboard!
By CLYDE HABERMAN
NEW YORKERS may well have reached the point where it makes sense for them to take along a lawyer when they ride the subways. Somebody ought to be around to advise them if they are violating various rules put forth by the Metropolitan Transportation Authority. On their own, they may have trouble figuring things out.
Subway riders are first told that it might become illegal for them to take a snapshot of Aunt Mabel and Uncle Jed on their first visit to the Times Square station. Then the proposed no-photos ban goes the way of Emily Litella: never mind.
New Yorkers are told that a new rule will prohibit them from walking from one subway car to another. But they are not told why a practice that has long been routine - and sometimes essential to escape the Three Mals: malfunctions, malodors and malefactors - is suddenly so dangerous that it must be banned.
Then, to complicate matters further, that rule is unexpectedly put on ice for at least a few weeks.
So is another new regulation that is aimed at stopping drinking from open containers on trains. Many riders, some of them no doubt overly caffeinated, are in an absolute dither at the prospect of having to toss their coffee cups.
As a result of their concerns, the board of the transportation authority is giving itself more time to decide which proposed rules make sense and which don't.
"We do listen," said Peter S. Kalikow, the authority's chairman.
That's good. But for many New Yorkers, listening is not the issue. Thinking is. The question for them is whether subway managers fully weigh the potential consequences of all their regulations before announcing them.
In fairness, transit officials do not have an easy task. Maintaining a semblance of order underground is a messy business. They have to deal with a riding public that, compared with previous generations, is arguably more focused on individual entitlement than on communal obligation.
Proving this is close to impossible, but it does seem that more men now than years ago insist on sitting with legs spread so defiantly wide that they hog two seats or even three.
More people seem to plant themselves at the doors and refuse to budge. More seem to plunk down packages on empty seats and make no effort to move them when the train fills up.
No one in a crowded car seems to know anymore how to fold a newspaper to keep it from bopping the next guy on the head.
Then, too, more riders than before seem convinced that subway trains are freight cars, where they are free to squeeze fellow riders into a corner with everything from bicycles to refrigerators.
Some insist on their right to do in public what used to be done only in private. They eat entire meals on the train, indifferent to the odors they create.
Women put on makeup while riding to work. Wait till someone pokes out her eye with a mascara wand because the train stops short. It's 8 to 5 she sues Mr. Kalikow for causing the injury.
A BIG concern of the moment, however, is the Venti Brigade, those riders who cannot go anywhere without a large macchiato in hand.
Anyone who has been scalded by spilled coffee on a lurching train recognizes that prohibiting open containers is not necessarily bureaucratic pettiness run amok. But the Venti Brigade is powerful, and so we now have transit officials giving the proposed rule a closer look.
While they are at it, they may want to consider the inevitable unintended consequences of such a ban.
Many riders will simply disregard it, just as they ignore existing rules against littering, panhandling, playing loud music, lying on benches, carrying bulky items and engaging in unauthorized commerce.
Not every New Yorker is lawless, of course. Many abide by rules, and will leave their cups on the subway platform. Only some won't use the trash bin that is three feet from where they are standing. No, that is too difficult. They will drop the cups on the platform itself.
Then, this being New York, they will protest that the station is filthy, as if the trash somehow got there all by itself. Their elected officials will join in and write a complaining report, perhaps similar to one that the City Council issued last week, blaming everyone but the garbage throwers.
On second thought, perhaps riders do not need a lawyer, after all. Maybe a lesson or two from Miss Manners would be better. With a bit more etiquette on the trains, some of these rules might not even have been proposed in the first place.
And again
The Subway New Yorkers Proudly Call Home
By SEWELL CHAN
WHAT is it about New Yorkers and their subway? Last week, officials moved to adopt new rules that would prohibit passengers from drinking from open containers, moving between subway cars or straddling a bicycle on a moving train.
Straphangers screamed bloody murder, and the board of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which oversees the subway, immediately announced it would table the measure for at least a month.
"You can't sleep, you can't drool," said Beatrice McCants, 30, of East New York, Brooklyn. "What's next, 'Don't look at me, you'll get a fine'?"
The commotion was another example of the deep connection New Yorkers have with their century-old subway system.
In other cities, passengers don't seem to mind tough restrictions. The Chicago El completely bans food and drink; it allows customers to carry bottled water during "periods of extreme heat." The Washington Metro is so adamant about keeping its uniform stations spotless that in 2000, its police officers handcuffed a 12-year-old girl for eating a single French fry.
But in New York, where eating is permitted, along with drinking on platforms and in stations, things are different.
First of all, the subway here constantly makes news. In recent months, for example, union leaders have criticized a plan to computerize the aging switches and signals that guide train movements. A decision to reassign token-booth clerks as roving customer-service agents also met with complaints from riders, politicians and union leaders, even though tokens are no longer used. And a proposal one year ago to ban photography and videotaping in the name of homeland security was practically shouted out of the system. (It has since been rescinded.)
One reason New York riders seem to regard the subway as theirs may be that so many of them spend a lot of time on it. New York is the only American city where most residents, 55 percent, use public transportation to get to work, and the majority of them use the subway. The system delivers 4.8 million rides each weekday.
New Yorkers are as fussy and proprietary about their subway as small-towners would be about the design of their village square, said Edward I. Koch, the former mayor, who described the fracas over the rules as "provincialism at its best."
Suburbanites often see their sport utility vehicles as adjuncts to their homes. That's how New Yorkers seem to feel about their subway. "Growing up in New York City, subways were almost an extension of my living room, a place where you would hang out with friends," said Roger Sanjek, a social anthropologist at Queens College. "New Yorkers feel that subways are an extension of the life of the streets, rather than simply a way to get from one place to another."
The centrality of the subway to life here makes it "the premier public space of New York City," said Sharon Zukin, a sociologist at Brooklyn College. "That's why issues of access and use are so acute. As with the public parks, there is always a tension between the dynamic and casual use of public space and the controlled, rationalized approach."
The subway is also a trucking route for the city's less well off, Ms. Zukin said. "Nowadays, people get on the subway with cribs, stereo sets - items that many stores don't deliver anymore except for an extra charge," she said. "People do use the subway as their delivery truck."
In one sense, these controversies over relatively trivial behavioral matters are good news - evidence of the city's sustained reduction in crime and some $40 billion worth of capital investments in the subway. The apocalyptic wasteland depicted in "The Taking of Pelham One Two Three," a 1974 film in which an entire train is hijacked, is a thing of the past.
"If you had tried to have good conduct in the 80's you'd have been laughed out of the city," said Alan F. Kiepper, who ran the transit agencies of Atlanta and Houston before he oversaw the New York subway, from 1990 to 1996. "There was rampant fare evasion, and rampant violence, and that was more important than whether someone was going to nibble on a hot dog. You have to take these things in sequence."
And one on Mao
The Mao Myth Thrives, but Don't Mention Its Dark Side
By HOWARD W. FRENCH
YENAN, China - Horribly outnumbered, poorly armed and constantly under attack, 80,000 Communist fighters set out on foot from a base in China's southeastern Jiangxi Province in October 1934 hoping above all to avoid getting wiped out by their Nationalist enemies.
One year and 5,000 miles later, after countless acts of extraordinary courage along the way, the 6,000 survivors of the Long March, led by Mao Zedong, limped into this dusty town in the arid yellow hills of northern Shaanxi Province.
Last year, nearly four million Chinese, from backpacking college students to busloads of middle-aged workers on company excursions, followed in their wake - as tourists, not revolutionaries. Without much else to work with, this modest city, all but bypassed by the industrial revolution sweeping China, enthusiastically promotes some of the most resonant founding myths of the country's Communist republic.
These days, eager visitors crowd the revolutionary museum here to look admiringly at large black and white photographs of the last stages of the Long March, to buy Mao trinkets or to pose for pictures in front of the rustic cave dwellings that served as residences for Mao and other top leaders from 1935 to 1947, when this city was the Communists' main base.
Marxist ideology is said to have little relevance in today's China. But all over this city, people can be overheard trading admiring stories about the heroism of Mao's army or celebrating the spirit of Yenan, as much a name for that 12-year period as for the city itself.
Whether they lived through it, or more likely know of it through popular culture, many Chinese still recall the era fondly as a time of great idealism, of selfless volunteers arriving by the tens of thousands to join the movement, and of Mao's supposedly enlightened leadership before such well-known and monumental tragedies as the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, which killed tens of millions of people.
"We have always loved Mao," said Zhao Shiwei, 43, a provincial trade official who had come from far away Guangdong Province and was posing merrily with a group of colleagues in gray People's Liberation Army uniforms from the era. "He led the nation to success and founded the new China, and he will always occupy a great place in our hearts."
Chinese historians in the academy, like their counterparts abroad, have steadily chipped away at Mao's myth, and the falling chunks have inevitably included many details about Yenan. Far from the idyll celebrated here, the historians say, Mao waged a campaign of political terror against youthful dissenters, perfecting methods of purging real and imagined foes that would be used on a vast scale later. He sold opium to raise money for his army, and it was here that he created his suffocating cult of personality.
"Mao: The Unknown Story," a heavily researched book published recently by Jung Chang, a Chinese writer who lives in Britain, goes so far as to say that the most legendary act of bravery of the entire Long March, the crossing of the Dadu bridge, while enemy gunners took aim from the opposite bank, was fiction. In China, that is the equivalent of saying Washington never led his troops across the Delaware.
That is not all. Far from committed Communists, Ms. Chang writes, many of the marchers were press-ganged captives, and Mao is said to have been carried throughout much of the Long March on a litter by porters, as he read at his leisure. And although Mao's troops were decimated, not a single senior party member was killed or even seriously wounded. "You can't say the Long March was a military victory," said Yang Kuisong, a historian at Beijing University. "It was not about fighting battles. It was a process of running away."
Ordinary Chinese have been carefully shielded from views like this of their late leader, however. Mao's importance to the party he founded remains paramount, even as the founding ideology, Marxism, fades.
For ordinary Chinese, history textbooks emphasize the devotion to the common man and heroism of the early Communists, even teaching that Mao's armies, not the Americans, defeated the Japanese invaders. The television and film industries have cranked out hundreds of movies reinforcing the Mao legend. Writing that strongly challenges the chairman or his place in history simply cannot be published in China.
Sitting outside the town's Revolutionary Museum, where a huge bronze of Mao looms over a parking lot filling with tour buses, a 33-year-old man named Chen affected boredom when approached by a stranger, saying Mao's history was most relevant to people over 40. "We didn't have to suffer the same difficulties that they did," Mr. Chen said. "You always hear about the great sacrifices that Mao's generation made in all the movies and TV shows. It's got to be true, right?"
In the date tree garden by the old Revolutionary Headquarters, where Mao presided over early meetings of the Central Committee, a group of fresh college graduates from Xian were curious about a foreigner's impression of Mao.
"In China, nobody hates Mao Zedong," one of the students said in prelude. "This trip is like a souvenir for us. We could have gone anywhere, but we chose here."
Told of the dark side of Mao's record known to historians but not to most Chinese, some of the students grew defensive. "What do you expect us to do, drag him from his grave and flog him," one asked. "The emperors of the past are regarded as great if they moved the country forward, no matter how much the people suffered. With Mao it is the same."
Others, however, grew pensive. "You might say that China is a very different country in the way it deals with history," said one young woman. "But you must understand, foreigners have much more information than we do. There's no real freedom to discuss these kinds of things here."
And one on the end of free water
Water Isn't Free, New York Is Told
By ANTHONY DePALMA
New Yorkers, who long ago accepted the idea of paying dearly for imported spring water to go with dinner, still like to boast that they have the best-tasting tap water in the world.
But many never pay for that high-quality tap water at home, and they get away with it because the city - which runs the water system - never cuts off anybody's water for nonpayment.
Ever.
About 231,000 water customers in New York City are late paying their bills - some by just a few months, others by decades. In all, these water delinquents owe the city more than $625 million in overdue bills and penalties.
Houses and apartments account for 90 percent of those unpaid bills, but the city just absorbs the huge losses and spreads the costs to those who do pay rather than risk the political consequences of being seen as hardhearted.
But the tap may finally run dry. The cost of maintaining the city's mammoth water supply system is rising sharply, with capital improvements estimated to cost $16 billion over the next decade.
And so officials have started working on a plan to selectively cut the water to a few residences with outstanding bills to show that they are serious about collecting those debts.
"Shutting off residential customers will always be a last resort," said David B. Tweedy, first deputy commissioner of the city's Department of Environmental Protection and executive director of the New York City Water Board, an independent public agency that determines rates. "But it's an option we want to have."
Water is an uncommon commodity in New York, an everyday symbol of the city's bounty and power and something that New Yorkers believe they are entitled to, whether or not they can pay for it. In turning off people's faucets, officials realize they could be asking for trouble, and they do not plan to go after everyone who refuses to pay.
Instead, officials plan to target only high-income neighborhoods, to make examples of a few privileged New Yorkers who have not paid their bills - all bills average roughly $600 a year per household - and who would be in no position to complain if they were caught stiffing the system.
There are still details to work out, and no date has been set to begin the new approach, Mr. Tweedy said. He would not identify the delinquents to be singled out, but he said they would be "people with multimillion-dollar condos who are not paying their bills - accounts like that."
But even that is likely to stir things up. Elizabeth Yeampierre, executive director of Uprose, a community group in a low-income area of Brooklyn, said that shut-offs seemed excessive, even if aimed at the rich. "There's going to be complaints about the unevenness of it," she said. "It sounds pretty tricky."
Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg does not like the idea, either. Jordan Barowitz, a spokesman, said that the mayor believed people should pay their water bills but that he did not favor shutting off residential water because "it often hurts innocent tenants and has no effect on those who don't pay the bill."
For most phone companies and electric utilities, cutting off service to delinquent customers is a business reality. Con Edison, for example, cuts service to about 7,500 customers a month. And the next five largest municipal water systems in the country all cut off service when bills go unpaid, according to a survey by the Natural Resources Defense Council.
New York occasionally cuts off stores, offices or other commercial water users as a warning to others.
"When they get the shut-off notice," said Denise M. Richardson, deputy commissioner for the bureau of customer services, "they usually pay."
But the city is one of the few water providers in the country that never shuts off residential users, in part because of the city's complicated water history.
New York's water delivery system is a marvel of engineering and civic gumption, drawing water from as far as the Catskill Mountains, 120 miles away. The city used general revenues to pay for the huge tunnels and reservoirs, and for decades it was cheaper to charge a flat fee, based on a building's size, than to measure how much water was used.
New Yorkers grew up believing that water was unlimited, and free. But the fiscal crisis of the 1970's changed that perception. When officials realized that the water could stop running if the city went bankrupt, the system was made self-supporting, relying on fees.
The city began installing meters in the 1980's. Some initially malfunctioned, or were read improperly, and thousands of customers challenged their bills. Whole neighborhoods refused to pay, officials said, because they had never paid before.
New York is not alone in trying to change attitudes about water. Mexico City started metering water only in the 1990's. It never cuts off service either, and officials there say that about 25 percent of users are now delinquent, about the same rate as in New York.
New York City has long had the legal right to terminate service to residential customers with bills that are at least two years overdue. But besides coming off like Scrooge, officials said, the city could end up working against its own housing initiatives if it cuts off water to tenant-owned buildings with outstanding bills. Health regulations also make it hard to turn off the water in multifamily buildings.
And then there is plumbing. Many older buildings do not even have an outside valve to separate them from municipal water mains. Shutting them off would require digging up the streets.
Despite such obstacles, the city started getting tougher in 2002, when about 40 percent of all 900,000 water accounts were delinquent. Uncollected bills and penalties amounted to $900 million, more than half the yearly annual revenues of $1.6 billion.
The city issued payment reminders for the first time. Notices of long outstanding bills were sent to mortgage companies and other financial institutions where such debts could hold up second mortgages and other deals.
Officials said that 72 percent of customers now pay their quarterly bills on time, and that 85 percent pay within a year. "Most other utilities are up around 90 to 95 percent," Mr. Tweedy said. "We'd like to get it there too."
Short of cut-offs, the most the city can do to enforce payment is a lien sale, where private companies bid on buildings with unpaid property taxes and water bills.
But a loophole allows owners to take their properties out of the lien sale at the last minute by paying their property taxes, even if the water bills remain unpaid.
In the latest lien sale, in the spring, 9,358 properties owed some $25.8 million in unpaid water bills. An analysis by The New York Times showed that many of the 10 largest debtors were housing development fund corporations, which were formed when tenants took over their buildings.
The city assumes that fairness to other customers requires that even low-income buildings pay their bills.
"If everyone pays," Mr. Tweedy said, "everyone pays less."
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thanks
Date: 2005-07-06 04:51 am (UTC)Thanks a lot Canuly, for inlighting me... :)
I did as you said, and managed to upload pictures from URL to my entries.
Thanks
Noah
Re: thanks
Date: 2005-07-06 09:26 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-07-06 05:11 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-07-06 10:04 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-07-06 03:25 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-07-06 04:46 pm (UTC)thanks
Date: 2005-07-06 04:51 am (UTC)Thanks a lot Canuly, for inlighting me... :)
I did as you said, and managed to upload pictures from URL to my entries.
Thanks
Noah
Re: thanks
Date: 2005-07-06 09:26 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-07-06 05:11 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-07-06 10:04 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-07-06 03:25 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-07-06 04:46 pm (UTC)