Bernard Daly, the project manager for the city's massive water filtration plant project under way in Van Cortlandt Park, is relentlessly upbeat. Despite the cost overruns, delays, federal fines and accusations of impropriety in the siting of the plant on public parkland, Daly looks out over the sheer vastness of the $3 billion undertaking and beams.

Four months ago, the walls of DeWitt Clinton High School in Bedford Park were a dull shade of blue. With the help of local dentist Jay Fensterstock, the organization Publicolor, and 87 determined Clinton students, the walls of the school's second floor and cafeteria now sport vibrant shades of 13 different colors.

I seem to recall that the elected officials who promised jobs actually did nothing to secure a Project Labor Agreement. If they had used standard PLA language, they could have invoked zip code radius hiring in order to ensure that some Bronx folks got interviewed for the jobs. While several local elected officials - including members of both the Rivera and Diaz clan - said that job creation was a goal, I suspect that they knew as well as everyone else that the trades wouldn't have too many members who would meet the zip code requirement.

"My wife says I have a fault of believing in government," Assemblyman Michael Benjamin told us the other day when we asked what his thoughts on the filtration plant were these days. He was referring to the promises, most now broken, made to him and his colleagues by city officials when seeking the Assembly's support for building the plant in Van Cortlandt Park. Kennedy Benjamin might have missed her calling. Her critical eye would have helped save city taxpayers from footing the bill for what is increasingly being considered a public disaster.

New York State has one of the four highest school dropout rates in the country, and that could cost the state billions of dollars, according to a study released by Bronx Assemblyman Peter Rivera in May.

News of longtime State Senator Efrain Gonzalez's indictment on mail fraud charges rocked the northwest Bronx at the end of summer. That lone charge proved just the tip of the iceberg when, on Dec. 13, federal prosecutors piled on an additional nine charges alleging that Gonzalez conspired with three other co-defendants to bilk the state for half a million dollars from 1999 to 2005. The previous indictment did not stop local voters from re-electing the Bronx lawmaker. He received nearly 90 percent of the votes in a landslide victory over virtually unknown Conservative party candidate Ernest Kebreau. In an interview two months before the first indictment, the Norwood News pressed Gonzalez to divulge where and how he allocated his member items (discretionary funds that senators and members of the Assembly dole out to local institutions each year). He refused to say where the money was going or which organizations he had given money to in the past.

Responding to increasing pressure to create more jobs in the northwest Bronx during the construction of the Croton Filtration Plant in Van Cortlandt Park, the head of the city's Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) said the agency would fulfill promises it made to the community and find ways to place more local residents in construction unions.

When the city and local politicians tried to sell Norwood residents on a plan to build the massive Croton Water Filtration Plant in Van Cortlandt Park, they offered two benefits in exchange for years of traffic interruptions, lost parkland, and increased air pollution - $240 million in Bronx park renovations and the promise of jobs for local residents. The park renovations are under way now.