Hudson Valley Foie Gras says its namesake product is humane—and it wants the City Council to see for itself.

The farm called on council members to visit its Sullivan County facilities during a heated six-hour hearing last month on a bill that would required to make foie gras is nothing short of animal torture—all for the sake of a product few can afford.

With the bill, the council is wading into a debate that has stretched on for decades across countless cities and statehouses. California is the only state with an active ban on the product, but Chicago, Philadelphia and lawmakers in Albany all have weighed similar measures.

The bill's author, Councilwoman Carlina Rivera, said she is trying to create a "more humane city."

"This is something that is truly a luxury product. It is served in roughly 1% of New York City restaurants," Rivera said during the hearing. "And there are alternatives."

The city represents about a third of Hudson Valley Foie Gras' sales, said Izzy Yanay, who helped found the company in 1990. He said the ban could devastate the industry, a major economic driver for the entire county.

Yanay has produced foie gras for four decades, first in Israel, then in Sullivan County. He says the activists who oppose his product have integrity and passion, but he insists that their arguments about his farming techniques are untrue.

"But why believe them or us?" Yanay said. "Send someone to see it with their own eyes before you make a decision that will affect the world."

The council has yet to send an envoy on the roughly 110-mile trip to visit the Hudson Valley Foie Gras farm—which, despite its moniker, is actually in the Catskills, tucked away on Chicken Plant Road in the town of Liberty, population 9,462. Hudson Valley is one of two farms that produce nearly all the foie gras consumed in the United States. The other is a Sullivan County neighbor, La Belle Farm. The two collectively employ about 400 people.

The 200-acre Hudson Valley farm processes more than 500,000 Moulard ducks each year, with $36 million in annual sales. During a tour this month, farm manager Marcus Henley guided a reporter and a photographer through various stages of the process, including the force-feeding.

About 10,000 day-old ducklings arrive every Thursday from Canada. They are raised cage-free inside barns for 12 weeks before being sent to a penned-in barn for force-feeding. That barn did not include any of the cages the farm has been accused of using, but it did confine the animals in a smaller space.

Starting at 12 weeks old, the ducks are force-fed three times daily for up to 21 days. The feeding involves a rubber tube that an employee slides down a duck's throat before pumping in a mix of soy and corn. By the end of the force- feeding period, the duck's liver grows to 10 times its original size. The animal is then slaughtered for foie gras and other products, almost all of which are commodified.

Henley, who has managed the farm for nearly 20 years, insists that force-feeding a duck is different from doing the same to a human. Moulard ducks are bred to produce large livers and have strong esophagi that can withstand the rubber tube used in the feeding, he said.

Veterinarian Holly Cheever, vice president of the New York State Humane Association, who visited the farm in 1997, disagrees.

"We don't do anything this brutal to any other animal on the face of Mother Earth," she said in an interview.

Cheever joined a list of more than a dozen speakers who argued in favor of the ban at the council hearing. Opponents say force-feeding traumatizes the ducks, diseases their livers and can cause serious health complications.

Germany, Israel, the United Kingdom and at least a dozen other countries have banned foie gras production.

Force-feeding, and the controversy surrounding it, dates back centuries. There's evidence ancient Egyptians fattened geese for meat, and there are allusions to liver-fattening in The Odyssey.

Banning foie gras in New York City "would send a very strong signal across the country and around the world," said Gene Baur, president and co-founder of Farm Sanctuary, a Finger Lakes rescue farm and advocacy group. "The city is known for being a thought leader."

A spokesman for Rivera said she does not plan to visit Hudson Valley. She has heard "concerns regarding the validity of the tours" the farm provides, said the spokesman, who shared a flyer distributed to the council that accuses Hudson Valley Foie Gras of "orchestrating" tours for the media that don't show the full extent of the operation.

"We are very careful to make sure that we show everything to everyone," Henley said in response. "Our only defense is our transparency."

It's not clear when the full council will vote on the bill, which has 28 co-sponsors. Several farm representatives and Sullivan County business owners spoke in the industry's defense at the hearing. But the farm's main potential allies, the chefs who serve foie gras at city restaurants, have stayed out of the debate.

"We are trying not to put our friends in a position [where] they could be negatively impacted," Henley said. "We certainly hope they are calling the council directly."

The city's main restaurant lobbying group, the NYC Hospitality Alliance, also is treading carefully. Andrew Rigie, executive director, said via email, "We'll continue our conversations and monitor the legislation."

Baur said that opponents are not "anti-farmer but anti-cruelty." He compares foie gras production to other industries, such as whaling and tobacco, that have suffered under shifting societal priorities. "This is part of a much bigger discussion," he said. "What kind of agricultural economy ultimately makes sense?"

Elected officials in Sullivan County said they want their city counterparts to consider the damage the loss of jobs and tax revenue could bring to the rural county of about 75,000 people. "They have to understand what they are doing to us," said Luis Alvarez, chairman of the county Legislature. 

City Council members accused Mayor Bill de Blasio's administration Monday of throwing minority City Hall as the Housi… Development Fund Corp. co-ops. The fund was created in the 1970s to allow tenants to take over abandoned or insolvent buildings, often in what were then low-income neighborhoods.

"They are the highest gentrifying areas at this particular moment in history, and that can't be a coincidence," asserted Cornegy, chairman of the council's Committee on Housing. "In minority communities, one of the only ways to build and transfer wealth is through the accumulation of equity in properties."

HPD Commissioner Louise Carroll maintained that her agency uses third-party transfer only as a "tax enforcement mechanism" for those properties with outstanding bills of more than $1,000, and that the city offers assistance to owners before dispossessing them.

A number of the homes most recently transferred owed $800,000 or more, she said—but the statute as written obligates the city to implement the policy by entire tax blocks, meaning it must pursue all neighboring properties with $1,000 in debt in order to get at the very worst offenders. She appeared to imply this was to blame for the appearance of targeting particular communities, but highlighted that the city impounded only 62 of the 420 properties it most recently identified as susceptible to takeover.

She added that the administration was open to a "fresh look" and had already impaneled a commission to consider alterations to the law.

"Once the properties are identified for going into the program, the law requires that we pick everything else up," she said. "Tax collection, that's all TPT is."

But Bronx Councilman Ritchie Torres pointed out that this description clashed with the administration's past characterization of TPT as a tool for taking over "distressed properties" in "blighted" areas. Further, his Committee on Investigations found seven of the 420 buildings swept up in the last assessment had no arrears whatsoever or owed less than the $1,000 threshold—a snafu Carroll was unable to explain.

The commissioner's testimony also conflicts with de Blasio's own description of the program's purpose when he announced his intention to expand it during his State of the City

At the hearing, Torres further noted that those dispossessed through TPT receive no compensation, despite the high value of their buildings and the years and resources they have invested in their homes—which are often worth far more than their overdue bills to the city.

"The ends do not justify the means," he argued. "The notion that the government can threaten to strip you of all your equity based on one cent in tax arrears is crazy."

Talk about money for nothing.

The city's property interests poured hundreds of thousands of dollars into Gov. Andrew Cuomo'scampaign coffers in the past six months, new state Board of Elections filings show. But the investment seems to have yielded paltry returns. Big names such as Durst, Fisher, Ratner,Rechler, Rovt and Tishman studded was made permanent and more pro-tenant than it has been in decades, new taxes were imposed on luxury housing sales, and the limited-liability-company loophole—developers' main tool for directing money to politicians—was closed. Building owners tend to use a different LLC for each address in their portfolio and could give a maximum contribution from each. Now they are capped at $5,000 total per election cycle, just like all other business entities.

Affordable-housing builders reaped slightly better returns. Cuomo got a poison-pill amendment inserted into a bill, dooming the legislation, which would have obligated projects receiving public assistance to pay all workers prevailing, union-level wages and benefits. Executives from the Atlantic Development Group, Marathonand Macquesten gave the governor sizable contributions, though smaller than the ones he got from other real estate players. Still, it's hard to see the legislative session as anything but a bust for folks in the business of renting or selling apartments.

Perhaps the industry should have taken tips from powerhouse law firm Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison and based its contributions on prior results instead of future returns. In 2015 a city settlement awarded $2.9 million to the firm in a discrimination suit against the NYPD (the plaintiffs got $295,000). Crain's found that during the March-to-July federal filing period, more than 50 of the firm's employees collectively gave Mayor Bill de Blasio's presidential campaign almost $50,000, making it the biggest single source of money for the mayor's improbable bid for the Democratic nomination.

Have you heard the one about the MTA being reorganized?

It's no joke, but anyone who has followed the Metropolitan Transportation Authority this decade can be forgiven for not expecting much from the latest effort: a "transformation" sketched out by a consulting firm.

We've taken this trip before. Remember the "forensic audit" that the Legislature demanded a decade ago in exchange for imposing a payroll tax on businesses to fill the MTA's coffers? That was supposed to identify waste, allowing for the agency's bureaucracy to be slashed. Instead, the MTA's headquarters division nearly doubled in size, growing to 3,096 people from 1,623 in 2012. (That growth, cited by the consultant, is so large as to be suspicious—exaggerated, perhaps—to boost public support for an overhaul. But still.)

If you're wondering whether MTA brass are well compensated, consider that colleagues beneath them—the agency's nearly 2,500 subway administrators—enjoy an average compensation package of $240,000. Salaries and benefits are similar at the MTA's other silos: Metro-North, the Long Island Rail Road, and Bridges and Tunnels.

Pay cuts won't be part of the proposed reform, so efficiency and lines of accountability are its goals. To that end, the plan calls for knocking down the silos and centralizing functions, with 40 groups consolidated into six and powerful posts created to improve lines of authority.

Questions have been raised about the particulars of who reports to whom, but the idea, though ambitious given the MTA's ossified culture, is sound.

However, it will amount to little more than rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic if the right leadership is not in place and empowered to act. And that hinges on one man: Gov. Andrew Cuomo.

The governor can promote the turnaround or sabotage it. A surefire way to wreck it is to undermine the MTA leadership—something Cuomo is prone to do when his penchant for micromanagement, mockery and seeking credit get the better of him. Witness his treatment of Andy Byford, the talented New York City Transit president who has morale up and delays down in the subway system. Cuomo pleads innocent, noting that he hired Byford, so the subway chief's success would be his own. But it seems that's not enough. If Cuomo's meddling persists, and MTA board members don't stop sowing chaos, the talent capable of fixing the agency will be scared off and Patrick Foye, Cuomo's capable MTA head, will have no shot at modernizing union work rules and bringing the bureaucracy to heel.

Dick Ravitch and other MTA leaders showed long ago that success is possible. What say you, governor? 

Mount Sinai's plan to relocate and dramatically reduce the size of Beth Israel is critical to reversing the hundreds of millions in losses the hospital has accumulated in recent years, according to interviews with health system officials and its certificate-of-need application to the state Department of Health.

Mount Sinai on Monday filed the application to begin a four-year, $1 billion reconfiguring of its downtown operations.

Beth Israel plans to spend nearly $600 million to build a new hospital on Second Avenue between East 13th and 14th streets. The hospital told the state its inpatient census has declined 10% annually since 2012, and it has an occupancy rate of less than 40%.

"The only path is to rebuild the hospital," said Dr. Jeremy Boal, president of Mount Sinai Downtown. "The current campus is a huge, outdated facility with a massive amount of fixed costs. The infrastructure is past its prime. We're continuing to build out the ambulatory network associated with the hospital because that's where so much of the future is."

The new facility, slated to open in 2023, will have only 70 beds plus its emergency room. An additional 135 behavioral health beds, of which 115 will be licensed by the state, will provide treatment for psychiatric and substance-use conditions. They will be moved from the Bernstein Pavilion on the Beth Israel campus to the former Rivington House on the Lower East Side.

The project will focus on increasing services available at outpatient offices as opposed to the less cost-efficient hospital setting. Its emergency room will continue to be able to treat serious cases, such as heart attacks and strokes, and its current hospital will remain open until the new site is operational.

Since acquiring Beth Israel Medical Center in a deal with Continuum Health Partners in 2013, Mount Sinai has lost a significant amount of money on the medical center's East Village and Brooklyn campuses. They lost $104.6 million last year on $904.9 million in operating revenue. That was an improvement from a $124.2 million loss in 2017.

The hospital has lost more than $430 million in the past four years.

Mount Sinai's profitable flagship hospital uptown helps support those losses.

"By moving to a new hospital and investing in ambulatory care, we're very confident we will get to a sustainable bottom line for the health system," Boal said.

The new hospital will feature only private inpatient rooms, a trend in new hospital construction reflecting patient preference and infection-control protocols.

The new Beth Israel building will be adjacent to Mount Sinai's New York Eye and Ear Infirmary, and the proximity to those specialists will make the hospital especially suited to treating eye and ear emergencies. The health system said in its certificate-of-need application that it plans to eventually combine Beth Israel and Mount Sinai Eye and Ear into a single hospital.

At Rivington House, Mount Sinai plans to build a $140 million Behavioral Health Comprehensive Center. In addition to the 135 beds for inpatient psychiatric care and detoxification, the center will have crisis and respite beds where certain patients can stay for up to a week in a homelike setting. The center will have partial hospitalization and intensive outpatient programs in which patients can receive treatment multiple times a week but continue to live at home. Treatment for other medical conditions and social services also will be available.

"We're creating a full-thickness continuum of care within one location," said Dr. Sabina Lim, vice president and chief of strategy for behavioral health at Mount Sinai Health System. "This creates a bridge. A lot of what's missing from the system are really intensive outpatient services."

Boal said the hospital has committed to not lay off employees as part of its redevelopment by placing them in other jobs within the Mount Sinai system when necessary. He said so far 830 employees had taken on new roles within the system at the same or a higher salary.

He said he believes neighborhood concerns about Beth Israel, which have included comparisons to closures of hospitals such as St. Vincent's Hospital in Manhattan, will dissipate as construction progresses.

"As people see work actually happening, we're very hopeful people will realize this is different than what has come before," Boal said. —Jonathan LaMantia

NYU Langone banks $11M for immunotherapy research

NYU Langone Health's Ronald O. Perelman Department of Dermatology and Perlmutter Cancer Center have been awarded $11 million by the National Cancer Institute—part of the National Institutes of Health—for melanoma immunotherapy research.

The five-year grant will fund work to determine whether therapies that help the immune system fight cancer can be effective, NYU said. Though immunotherapies have shown promise in treating many types of cancer, there remains a need to identify so-called biomarkers, which predict a patient's response to such treatments and risk of immune-related side effects.

The work will draw from clinical trials to determine the relevance of biomarkers. It marks NYU Langone's first work to be funded by the National Cancer Institute's P50 Specialized Programs of Research Excellence, which focus on moving research more quickly from the laboratory to the patient.

"We needed to show innovation, and we needed to show that it can have human impact within five years," said Dr. Iman Osman, professor in the departments of dermatology, medicine and urology and associate dean for translational research support.

Osman and Dr. Jeffrey Weber, deputy director of the Perlmutter Cancer Center, are principal co-investigators in the work. They also co-direct the cancer center's melanoma research program. In 2002 Osman established NYU Langone's Interdisciplinary Melanoma Cooperative Group, which has collected clinical information from more than 4,000 patients.

"Drs. Osman and Weber and the melanoma program investigators will apply their strengths to solve pressing needs in the melanoma field, which can be extended to the increasing number of cancers treated with immune checkpoint inhibitors," said Dr. Benjamin Neel, professor of medicine and director of Perlmutter Cancer Center, in a statement. —Jennifer Henderson

Northwell forms radiation joint venture in Forest Hills

Northwell Health has established its first radiation therapy center in Queens through a joint venture with the for-profit Integrated Oncology Network in Forest Hills.

The 3,000-square-foot clinic has an external-beam linear accelerator that can treat about three-quarters of all cancers, including that of the breast, lung, prostate, brain, head and neck, Northwell said.

The clinic, at 106-14 70th Ave., had been run by ION, a radiation oncology chain with 51 centers in 17 states, and Dr. Roberto Lipsztein, a physician with more than 35 years of experience. Lipsztein will continue to lead Queens Radiation Center as a physician affiliated with, but not employed by, Northwell.

ION and Lipsztein also operate radiology clinics on the Upper East Side and in Tribeca.

The Forest Hills location will allow Northwell patients in central Queens to receive radiation therapy closer to home than its center in Lake Success, Long Island, and will contribute to Northwell's efforts to provide radiation medicine at Long Island Jewish Forest Hills hospital, said Dr. Louis Potters, Northwell's director of radiation oncology.

"There's a good number of patients for whom travel is a burden, and the idea here is to relieve that by creating a program that's affiliated and majority-owned by Northwell," Potters said. "The strategy for radiation medicine over the last number of years has been to expand the geographic footprint to match that of the health system." —J.L.

Long-term-care groups oppose CMS arbitration rule

Manhattan-based advocacy group the Long Term Care Community Coalition and the Center for Medicare Advocacy are voicing opposition to a final rule on predispute arbitration issued by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

The coalition and the center, which has offices in Willimantic, Conn., and Washington, D.C., argue that the rule rolls back predispute arbitration protections for nursing home residents. Specifically, they take issue with the removal of a 2016 requirement prohibiting such facilities from entering into predispute arbitration agreements with residents.

"The final rule unnecessarily burdens residents with deciding whether arbitration is the right form of dispute resolution for them before even knowing what the dispute is about or when it might occur," the groups said in a joint statement.

They believe CMS should reverse its decision and, at the very least, allow residents and their representatives to rescind an arbitration agreement within 30 days of the incident that gave rise to the dispute.

However, CMS said the rule would help residents make informed choices about their health care and protect their safety. The agency further said the rule is part of a larger strategy that will reduce hundreds of millions of dollars in administrative costs for nursing homes each year—money that can be reinvested in patient care.

The rule will preserve residents' access to all possible choices for resolving disputes with nursing homes, including arbitration, which can cost residents much less than litigation, the agency said. —J.H.

AT A GLANCE

WHO'S NEWS: Dr. David Buchholz will start in September as senior founding medical director for primary care at ColumbiaDoctors and New York–Presbyterian. He has served as medical director of provider and customer engagement at the nonprofit insurer Premera Blue Cross, which is headquartered near Seattle. Earlier in his career, Buchholz was executive medical director of UCSF Primary Care in San Francisco.

SINGLE PAYER: The federal Employee Retirement Income Security Act, known as ERISA, remains a major barrier to states' single-payer health reform efforts, wrote Erin Fuse Brown and Elizabeth McCuskey on the Health Affairs blog.

YOUTH E-CIG CAMPAIGN: The Food and Drug Administration said Monday it is launching its first television ads to educate youth about the dangers of e-cigarette use. The agency also plans to provide new posters and educational materials to high schools and middle schools across the U.S. as part of its "The Real Cost" Youth E-Cigarette Prevention Campaign. Nearly 11 million young people have used e-cigarettes or would consider trying them.

SEPSIS STUDY: Investigators from the Visiting Nurse Service of New York Center for Home Care Policy and Research led an NIH-funded study on sepsis in home care published in the journal Medical Care. Findings showed that sepsis survivors who received a first nursing visit within two days of hospital discharge and at least one additional visit in the first week of discharge as well as a physician visit in the first week of discharge had a reduced probability of 30-day readmission.

For years, Alibaba, which calls itself the world’s largest retail commerce company, has had a little-known business enabling companies in the United States to source suppliers and manufacturers in China and Southeast Asia. But starting Tuesday, the ecommerce behemoth’s B2B division will be inviting small businesses to use the platform to find new partners and customers both next door and around the world. 

The launch of the operation, which is being done out of Alibaba’s U.S. headquarters in the Meatpacking District, will let small businesses take advantage of a platform that already has more than 10 million business buyers in more than 190 countries and regions. Its executives say that Alibaba.com will offer small operations with little digital presence the chance to access a global B2B market that dwarfs the traditional consumer ecommerce model. 

“When you have an online storefront, you don’t automatically have customers,” said John Caplan, head of North America B2B at Alibaba Group. “And there has been, up until now, no global platform you can join where you can actually get customers from all over the planet.”

Although Alibaba’s international strategy predates the current China-U.S. trade war by several years, Caplan noted that the platform should help American businesses by providing domestic sources for their products. The U.S. has by far the largest number of buyers on Alibaba.com, followed by India, Canada, Brazil and Australia.

Starting Tuesday, Alibaba will also be launching a series of events—the first in Industry City—to help small businesses learn how to use its platform, which includes digital marketing tools, online payment capability and “direct ownership” of the customer relationship.

Unlike Amazon, Alibaba does not take a portion of sales revenue, but makes its money from member subscriptions and advertising sales. And its sellers retain possession of their data. 

Flushing, Queens-based coffee roaster Vassilaros & Sons has already signed onto the new service. Chief Executive John Moore sees Alibaba as performing a function similar to trade shows, but with the advantage of being a global operation with the technology to facilitate introductions.

“We haven’t really done extensive marketing, and yet we’re sitting on a 100-year history and an incredible story that will resonate with a lot of people that would like to identify with New York City,” Moore said. “Alibaba gives us a mouthpiece to the planet that we would otherwise never be able to generate ourselves.”

Thunderstorms after a spate of hot weather have caused flooding deep enough to float cars in some New York City neighborhoods.

The National Weather Service has issued a flood advisory in the city. It says rain may lead to small creeks and streams and low-lying spots Tuesday morning.

Videos posted on social media Monday night showed inundated streets in parts of Brooklyn, Queens and Staten Island. The waters were so deep in some places that they floated cars.

One video… Twitter showed a pedestrian crossing a street in Williamsburg in knee-high water.

Thousands of Con Edison customers lost power during Monday's storm. Service was restored to most by Tuesday.

The region got about 2 inches of rain between Monday afternoon and Tuesday morning. The weather service says the rain should end by Tuesday afternoon.

Thunderstorms after a spate of hot weather have caused flooding deep enough to float cars in some New York City neighborhoods.

The National Weather Service has issued a flood advisory in the city. It says rain may lead to small creeks and streams and low-lying spots Tuesday morning.

Videos posted on social media Monday night showed inundated streets in parts of Brooklyn, Queens and Staten Island. The waters were so deep in some places that they floated cars.

One video… Twitter showed a pedestrian crossing a street in Williamsburg in knee-high water.

Thousands of Con Edison customers lost power during Monday's storm. Service was restored to most by Tuesday.

The region got about 2 inches of rain between Monday afternoon and Tuesday morning. The weather service says the rain should end by Tuesday afternoon.

Thunderstorms after a spate of hot weather have caused flooding deep enough to float cars in some New York City neighborhoods.

The National Weather Service has issued a flood advisory in the city. It says rain may lead to small creeks and streams and low-lying spots Tuesday morning.

Videos posted on social media Monday night showed inundated streets in parts of Brooklyn, Queens and Staten Island. The waters were so deep in some places that they floated cars.

One video… Twitter showed a pedestrian crossing a street in Williamsburg in knee-high water.

Thousands of Con Edison customers lost power during Monday's storm. Service was restored to most by Tuesday.

The region got about 2 inches of rain between Monday afternoon and Tuesday morning. The weather service says the rain should end by Tuesday afternoon.

Thunderstorms after a spate of hot weather have caused flooding deep enough to float cars in some New York City neighborhoods.

The National Weather Service has issued a flood advisory in the city. It says rain may lead to small creeks and streams and low-lying spots Tuesday morning.

Videos posted on social media Monday night showed inundated streets in parts of Brooklyn, Queens and Staten Island. The waters were so deep in some places that they floated cars.

One video… Twitter showed a pedestrian crossing a street in Williamsburg in knee-high water.

Thousands of Con Edison customers lost power during Monday's storm. Service was restored to most by Tuesday.

The region got about 2 inches of rain between Monday afternoon and Tuesday morning. The weather service says the rain should end by Tuesday afternoon.

New York state leads the nation in nonprofit…; jo… and the wages they support.

According to a report released Tuesday by Comptroller

The City Council will consider banning the sale of cellphone location data to marketers and other businesses—a practice coming under increasing scrutiny throughout the country.

The .  A report from to stop selling the data to third-party apps. 

Also last month, Sens. Mark Warner, a Virginia Democrat, and Josh Hawley, a Republican from Missouri,

Lawyers for financier Jeffrey Epstein are appealing a

New York is catching up to most other states by Gov. Andrew Cuomo, a Democrat, signed legislation Tuesday making it a misdemeanor to distribute intimate photos of another person without their consent. Violators will face up to a year in jail.

The new law, which takes effect in 60 days, also will permit victims to sue the person who distributed their photos and seek a court order to have online images taken down.

Debated for years, the bill had been held up over concerns that internet companies could be held legally responsible for inadvertently allowing revenge porn photos online.

The legislation's Senate sponsor, Democrat Monica Martinez of Long Island, says the new law addresses what she calls a "particularly heinous" kind of offense.

Just when it seemed like taxes in New York Governor Andrew Cuomo will increase the county’s sales tax by one percentage point to 8.375% on Aug. 1, bringing it in line with neighboring Rockland and Putnam counties, but about two percentage points higher than in Connecticut. The increase will raise about $47 million in fiscal 2019 and $103 million in 2020, and is “a credit positive for the cash-strapped county, its municipalities and school districts,” Moody’s Investors Service said in a note.

“The cash infusion will allow the county to boost reserves, which have declined significantly over the past four years,” Moody’s said. Reserves are expected to rise to $80 million by the end of 2020 compared with $65 million at the end of 2018.

In November, Westchester, home to the wealthy suburbs of Scarsdale and Bronxville, lost its AAA grade from S&P Global Ratings and Fitch Ratings after drawing down its cash reserves to cover retroactive raises given to government employees. The two rating companies assign a AA+ to the county’s bonds and Moody’s rates the debt a comparable Aa1.

The average Westchester homeowner pays $17,392 in property taxes, the highest in the U.S. and almost $4,500 more than second-place Rockland, according to Attom Data Solutions.

Westchester home sales last year were hampered by rising interest rates and a new $10,000 cap on deducting state and local taxes. However, the housing market rebounded in the second quarter, jumping by the most in three years, as falling mortgage rates enticed buyers, according to a report by by appraiser Miller Samuel Inc. and brokerage Douglas Elliman Real Estate.

The county will share 20% of the new sales-tax revenue with the 38 municipalities in the county that don’t levy their own tax, and 10% with 37 school districts. Many towns have said they’ll use the money to reduce the need for property-tax increases in future budgets, according to Moody’s.

School districts and local governments have historically received about $120 million in sales-tax revenue from the county and may receive as much as $40 million in new revenue after the increase, according to S&P.

About $400,000. That’s how much two New York City deli owners say to a new burger restaurant they’re planning in Brooklyn.

The men are victims of a complex face-off between the utility that supplies gas to the metropolitan area and state regulators. New York and New Jersey have denied approvals for the $1 billion Williams Cos. pipeline expansion that National Grid has said is needed to boost their gas capacity.

Williams Cos. has vowed to reapply for approval but, in the meantime, National Grid is declining to approve any new contracts to supply gas. It’s a decision that could hamstring new businesses and housing, say support groups in New York and on Long Island.

The deli owners learned in early July the utility wouldn’t accept their application for gas. Now they say they may have to cancel their plans. “We have already hired employees, who are sitting and waiting, asking ‘When can we come into work?” Muhammad Quereshi, one of the men, said in a telephone interview. The denial, he said, leaves them to pay back $400,000 in business loans they expected would come from the new restaurant’s profits.

Nobody knows how many businesses are affected yet, but any business that wants to come in and requires natural gas—in particular, restaurants—will face difficulty trying to get it.

London-based National Grid won’t say how many applications it hasn’t processed. Annually, the company normally receives around 8,000 applications from commercial, industrial and residential consumers requesting natural gas service, according to Domenick Graziani, a spokesman. The utility declined to discuss The application by Quereshi and Shahbaz Warraich, saying customer information is confidential.

In the past, National Grid has said that if the pipeline project isn’t cleared by winter 2020, applications in the region can’t be processed.

In May, New York denied a key permit for the Williams Cos. pipeline, with the Department of Environmental Conservation saying it would result in water quality violations, including those caused by kicking up hazardous metals and disturbing seabed habitats. The denial was “without prejudice,” meaning the company can reapply.

Environmental groups have argued that the Northeast Supply Enhancement, as the pipeline is named, is unnecessary and would further New York’s reliance on fossil fuels. Williams and National Grid say the project is needed to meet demand during the winter months, when consumption of the heating fuel peaks and prices can spike.

Business advocates say that while they understand the need for environmentally-friendly alternatives to gas, the technology for renewables isn’t there yet to meet the energy needs of the region. The decision not to approved the pipeline extension is also thwarting a regional transition from heating oil to cleaner-burning gas.

"Renewable projects are a long-term play, but they’re not here yet," said Kevin Law, president and CEO of the Long Island Association. "They can’t turn on lights, heat our homes or cool our buildings for many years to come."

In notices sent to its customers, National Grid is encouraging ratepayers to sign a pre-written letter in support of the project to be automatically sent to New York Governor Andrew Cuomo, who has been a leading voice opposing pipelines. "To be clear," National Grid’s notice says, “we need this additional supply to support all new requests for natural gas, for residential, multifamily and business purposes."

The utility cutoff will “undo a lot of the success we’ve had in growing the Long Island community in the last 10 years,” Law said.

New York City and Long Island aren’t the only areas in the state facing the issue. Westchester County was put under a moratorium on new natural gas service by Consolidated Edison Inc. in March. At the time, the County projected that the construction of 16,000 homes could be suspended.

The issue has forced some developments to be redesigned to accommodate new methods of heating, said Mitchell Pally, CEO of the Long Island Builders Institute.

Pally said he expected several projects to leave the area since “it’s hard enough to develop in Long Island. Without an adequate and sustainable energy source, it will be much more difficult.”

“It’s definitely stopping development at a very base level,” said Thomas Grech, president and Chief Executive Officer of the Queens Chamber of Commerce.

Trade uncertainty will be a “lingering cloud” over risky assets for at least 18 months, according to growth stocks, she said.

“We don’t think we’ll go back to the sunshine of 2017, where we had a very risk-on positioning,” Santos said Tuesday on Bloomberg TV. “We go back to this lower-growth, lower-return, focus on income type of approach.”

Trade tensions are ruining what Santos expected to be a turning point two years ago for international equities on the back of economic and earnings growth momentum. Before that, she said it had been a “lost decade” in which they significantly underperformed U.S. stocks. While the trend of global easing will provide a floor to economic growth, keeping the probability of a recession low, geopolitical risks mean it’s not a time to “go all-in” on high-yield debt or stocks, according to Santos.

“Unfortunately, we were thrown that trade winkle, so we’re back to a scenario where the U.S. here in the short-term will probably outperform—it’s more defensive,” Santos said. “But when we speak to our clients and look out five or 10 years, we think it eventually turns.”

To the editor:

Nowhere in the new ,” June 12).

The older multifamily homes in New York City are all over 60 years old and will need renovations, yet the amounts landlords are permitted to pass on have been capped and term-limited.

Allowing any municipality in the state the ability to opt in to these regulations at any time must give pause to potential investors in multifamily properties outside the city as well. Why buy a building at free-market prices only to have the vote-grubbing politicians decide that they want to cultivate favor with tenants in their precincts?

I guess politicians don’t remember the 1970s in the Bronx.

James Stilidiadis
Senior vice president
R & M Appraisal Reports

Almost 1 million New York City households lack broadband internet, with the largest number being seniors, those without a high school degree, those not even looking for work and those living in poverty.

The stark figures come from , or 27%, lacked broadband.

Stringer’s report is focused on the census, but the implications are far broader than the once-per-decade count, especially for education and employment. The study did not attempt to establish why households lacked broadband. Many of them might have access to it but cannot afford it or choose not to subscribe.

One program offers broadband internet to low-income households for $14.99 per month, but it is not widely known and requires customers to jump through a series of hoops to subscribe.