Fresh off passing the state budget in Albany this week, legislators returned to their districts to laud their successes and discuss their next moves at a town hall specifically geared for Norwood residents. State Sen. Jamaal Bailey, Assembly Members Nathalia Fernandez and Jeffrey Dinowitz, joined Councilman Andrew Cohen in getting those ideas out.

Guests in the Cherkasky Auditorium submitted questions covering everything from the plastic bag ban (Dinowitz: “We didn’t need them 35 years ago, we don’t need them today.”), to parking, congestion pricing and marijuana legalization (Bailey: “Conversations continue to be ongoing… my main concern with legalization is impacted community benefit.”) Nearly 100 people attended the two-hour town hall on April 4.

Rent Reform
In Norwood, a neighborhood with “the highest rate of rent stabilization” in the Bronx according to Cohen, an unsurprisingly high number of the questions were about rent reform. Democrats won back the state Senate last fall in part thanks to their promises to fix New York’s notorious rent laws.

“This is an issue which is probably more dear to my heart more than anything,” Dinowitz said. “Even before I could vote, I actually volunteered some of my time at a housing clinic helping people with landlord-tenant disputes.”

Complaints to his office of landlord abuse and rent disputes are more common than any other issue, according to Dinowitz, who said he was confident the legislation he and others in the Assembly tried to pass for years would finally make its way to the Governor’s desk. Among them is revoking preferential rent in favor of a standard rent that applies throughout the duration of the lease without invoking a legal rent.

Landlords can offer preferential rent—a lower rent than the legally regulated rent—but can increase it to the legal rent upon lease renewal. Dinowitz also wants to remove vacancy bonuses that allow landlords to jack up rent by upwards of 20 percent any time a tenant leaves. Dinowitz argues this gives landlord “a perverse incentive” to keep apartments empty and potentially force tenants out so they can hike up rents for the next tenant.

Parking
Longtime Norwood resident Sirio Guerino submitted the first question of the evening: Would elected officials support raising parking tickets from $115 to $500 in order to discourage double parkers, hydrant parkers, and the other lawless drivers who clog up East Gun Hill Road and elsewhere? The short answer: no.

“While the problem you described is very real, I don’t think I would personally be supportive of raising the fine to $500 because I kinda want to be re-elected,” Dinowitz said, to laughs.

While Dinowitz called for increased enforcement and improved public transportation, Fernandez said developers need to create parking decks along with their apartment buildings, something they frequently avoid due to a waiver that allows them to avoid providing more parking if their building is near a subway stop. Cohen floated a residents-only parking permit pilot program.

“It’s going to be very difficult to change car culture,” Bailey said. “Our mass transit system has by-in-large failed us, which forces people to purchase cars even if they don’t want to… I don’t know if we should be raising fines on the backs of working folks.”

Congestion Pricing
In an extension of the parking discussion, the elected officials discussed the impact of the new congestion pricing that was just passed as part of the budget. The plan is to charge a once-a-day toll for any vehicle traveling in Manhattan south of 60th Street, beginning as soon as 2021. Eighty percent of the revenue generated will be allocated for city subways and buses, while the remaining 20 percent will be split by Metro-North and the Long Island Rail Road.

“That’s the big and most important to me, the money for the MTA,” Fernandez said. “We absolutely need it. It’s not a question anymore. This is the quickest and best way.”

Bailey, while optimistic about the new revenue, worried commuters from outside the five boroughs will park and transfer to mass transit, a problem that already exists in his bifurcated 32nd Senate District, he said.

Dinowitz, a one-time opponent of congestion pricing, shared similar concerns for a plan he said garnered its strongest support from Manhattanites and Brooklyn gentrifiers. Among them was the issue of parents from his district driving below 60th Street to pick their kids up from a school, a price tag Dinowitz estimates can run in the “thousands of dollars a year.”

“I always believed the best way to raise the money for the MTA was to have a charge that all of would pay a little bit, instead of a small number of people paying a lot,” Dinowitz said. “Not to be provincial about, but I’m not that worried about Manhattan. They seem to be able to take care of themselves.”