WHITE PLAINS CITIZENETREPORTER 3,374,995 VISITS IN ONE YEAR—65,000 VISITS A WEEK BY 985,281 VISITORS

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WPCNR CITY HALL BEAT. June 18, 2003, UPDATED 12:15 PM E.D.T. June 19, 2003: If there are homes in your neighborhood which appear to have more garbage and more cars than single or two-family homes can produce, the Safe Housing Task Force encourages you to report your suspicions to 422-1291, and the Building, Fire and Police Departments will jointly investigate the premises.

Mayor Joseph Delfino introduced a coordinated effort between the White Plains Building Department, Fire and Police Bureaus named the “Safe Housing Task Force” yesterday. Its purpose is to “identify unsafe and illegal premises and prosecute persons responsible for such conditions,” according to the official Police-Fire-Building Department news release.

The major difference in the latest effort to attack the chronic illegal housing in the city, (similar efforts in Del Vecchio and Schulman administrations according to persons familiar with police efforts at the time were ineffectual), is that for the first time the city will coordinate information between police, fire and building departments on the identification, enforcement, and remediation of the identified “unsafe” conditions.

A bilingual flyer in English and Spanish has been prepared for distribution to landlords, tenants identified as possible violators, and the flyer reports “One of the primary initiatives for the task force is to indentify unsafe properties and have them restored to a safe condition. The Task Force was also developed to be able to quickly respond to any reported safety or fire code violations.”

Task Force to Crack Down on Landlord Laxness. Gives Tenants, Neighbors Clues to Illegal Housing Conditions.

The official release notes what landlords and property owners are required to provide in their premises according to the Building and Fire codes, and these practices include:

• Fire and Smoke Detection Systems in good working condition.
• Emergency and Exit Lighting that light.
• Fire Extinguishers and Fire Suppression (sprinkler) systems that work.
• Exits “clear and free for passage.”
• Premises must be in a “clean, safe, and sanitary condition.”
• Heating, plumbing and Electrical systems must be in good working condition.
• Premises must be “legally occupied as specified by the Certificate of Occupancy and all applicable State Codes. A landlord cannot claim ignorance regarding the number of occupants living in his/her building.
• Generally attics and cellars are not considered as habitable spaces. If there is a question about such occupancy, the Building Department should be contacted to confirm legality of occupancy of the attics and cellars.
• Rubbish must be kept in closed containers and maintained in an area that can be sanitized.
• Parking of vehicles shall only be in areas permitted by the White Plains Zoning Code.
• Property information and emergency phone numbers shall be updated and submitted to the Building Department, Fire and Police Bureaus.

Task Force Spearheaded by Councilman Glen Hockley

White Plains Councilman Glen Hockley estimates the number of illegally occupied homes to be approximately 90 locations in the city, scattered mostly through Battle Hill, Fisher Hill, North Broadway.

The Safe Housing Task Force has been aided Councilman Glen Hockley’s personal research into the existence of illegal housing. He has conducted extensive subsequent discussions with Public Safety Commissioner Frank Straub, a city court judge, and the city legal and building departments on the legal recourses that can be taken to bring the illegal rooming houses into compliance and keep them in compliance.

Hockley’s relentless meetings and factfinding have contributed a great deal of information leading to the founding of the new Safe Housing Task Force.

Hockley: Mayor Commits to Human Rights Commission Involvement.

Councilman Hockley reported to WPCNR that Mayor Joseph Delfino has endorsed his idea that the City Human Rights Commission should be involved in the process to protect the ultimate victims of illegal housing: the illegal tenants.

Hockley’s feeling is that unsafe, illegal housing makes the tenants as much victims as the neighbors of the illegal occupancy situations. Hockley said the Mayor shared his opinion that when tenants housed illegally are removed from residences that the Human Rights Commission should follow up on the cases.

Hockley told WPCNR his idea was to have the Human Rights Commission monitor the situations of each evicted tenant to assure that they are being treated fairly by landlords or possibly illegal sublessors, (subleasing is widely known as a practice that creates illegal occupancy situations), as well as housed adequately.

Penalties and Penance and Payback.

Councilman Hockley is currently working to increase penalities that landlords who repeatedly violate the occupancy, fire and zoning codes face. He is calling for increased fines, as well as landlords paying for housing of evicted tenants. He has one city court judge on board as reporting that such penalties are legally possible, and Hockley is continuing his crusade on behalf of the victims of illegal housing: the tenants.

Concerned Homeowners Number.

Landlords and homeowners with questions of how they may come into compliance or if they are in compliance should contact the Building Department at 422-1269.

Suspect an Illegal Housing Cluster? Call 422-1291.

In addition to fire department inspections and police observations, the city has set up a number for neighbors to report “the location and a description of the unsafe conditions.” That number is 422-1291.

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If there were a bioterrorism attack anywhere in the country, doctors would be at the front lines of response. But doctors in Westchester County now have one major advantage. As of January 2003, they now are part of a real-time automated data feed that tracks and analyzes the early symptoms of a would-be bioterrorism outbreak as exhibited by patients and analyzed by county health officials on a daily basis.

At the request of the Westchester County Department of Health (WCDH), the four-hospital Stellaris Health Network has successfully developed and implemented its Health Alert Network, an early-warning system to address bioterrorism threats via a real-time data feed from local hospitals concerning admitted and emergency-room patients that could be monitored to indicate a problem. Stellaris, the parent company and information technology coordinator of Lawrence Hospital Center in Bronxville, Northern Westchester Hospital in Mount Kisco, Phelps Memorial Hospital Center in Sleepy Hollow and White Plains Hospital Center in White Plains, was a logical choice to be the front-runners of such a system because with a single data feed it could sample four different geographical locations.

Shortly after the 9/11 terrorism attacks in New York and Washington, D.C., the WCDH, under the leadership of Renee O’Rourke, Project Leader with the Department of Health,
approached Stellaris asking for help in coordinating such a surveillance system. Stellaris and county information technology officials met several times during the fall of 2001. Initially, the viability of such a data feed was questionable, says Eran Marom, Stellaris’ Vice President and Chief Information Officer.

“We did not think we were tracking the type of data one would be looking for such a system,” Marom says, explaining that in the end no additional patient information had to be collected, but only the way in which the system reported that information would be changed.

Stellaris’ technical staff then went to work to see whether such a system could be extracted from the hospital network as it existed, how it could be fed to the alert system, and at what frequency. “As the meetings progressed, we started to believe that this was doable,” says Marom.

The result: the county is now tracking and analyzing emergency-room data for four primary syndromes which could be indicators of communicable disease or virus: fever and flu, respiratory problems, diarrhea and vomiting. In addition to providing automatic daily notification to WCDH staff, the county also notifies the resulting analysis to local emergency rooms and other interested parties throughout Westchester County.

But for the data feed to mean anything, the data behind it has to be accurate. Dan Blum, Stellaris’ Vice President of Operations, contacted the emergency room managers of all four Stellaris network hospitals and was assured that the collected data indeed is entered accurately and that – even though it may not indicate a definitive patient diagnosis – it is the best approximation at the time of a patient’s arrival. “This assurance allowed us to gain a level of confidence in what we were offering the county,” says Blum.

“We were also concerned about patient confidentiality,” says Sharon Lucian, Stellaris Vice President and Privacy Officer. Although the Department of Health is considered a government entity that is allowed access to protected health information, Stellaris was uneasy about releasing patient information for this particular purpose. In the end, it was agreed that no information identifying a specific patient would be exchanged as part of the system.

So far, the early-warning system is operating consistently and reliably but, thankfully, has not yet identified any major spike requiring an alarm. “We will be working to further enhance and improve our surveillance activities, including expansion of hospitals reporting data, surveillance of outpatient data and automation,” says O’Rourke.

Indeed, Stellaris and its four-hospital network are on the cutting edge of the kind of surveillance technologies hospitals nationwide plan to implement, replacing more antiquated methods of patient information recording and databases and linking state and federal health officials — all in an attempt to thwart a potential mass bioterrorism outbreak.

Stellaris Health Network is based in Armonk, New York.

To find out more information, please contact Eran Marom at 914-242-7678 or by e-mail at emarom@stellarishealth.org.

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WPCNR MAIN STREET JOURNAL. By John F. Bailey. June 13, 2003: Mayor Joseph Delfino of White Plains announced this week that the City of White Plains would be announcing a new initiative to control illegal rooming houses in Battle Hill, Fisher Hill, North Broadway, and other areas in the city. He said he would be holding a news conference Tuesday of next week to go over the details and the cooperative effort that the police, Department of Building and fire departments will be undertaking to identify illegal rooming houses that the Mayor described as plaguing the city and taking advantage of lesser privileged citizens.

The Mayor announced the initiative at the meeting of the Council of Neighborhood Associations.

In a parallel initiative, Councilman Glen Hockley told WPCNR this week that a White Plains city judge has advised him that leveling stiffer penalities on landlords such as jail time, and assigning responsibility for housing displaced tenants, was definitely a possibility, and that nothing prevented the city from doing this to landlords identified and convicted of being consistent violators of housing zoning laws.

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WPCNR WHITE PLAINS VOICE. By John F. Bailey. June 12, 2003: When I interviewed David Brinkley, it was 1966, and the 6 foot 3 anchorman was visiting the Ohio Wesleyan University campus in Delaware, Ohio, (where I was matriculating). Mr. Brinkley was appearing as part of a Lecture-Movie Series.

I was a campus radio station News Director at the time and naturally sought an interview. Tables turned, Mr. Brinkley, after answering hundreds of questions from a packed house at OWU’s Grey Chapel hall, graciously submitted to one more set of questions from a nervous young reporter on Vietnam, the peace process, the like, treating me with a respect and courtesy I remember to this day.

He was serious, thoughtful, measured in his responses with the wry wit, and not in love with himself, as so many “reporters” are today. That was obvious from the way he looked me in the eye, smiled, and sought to put my nervousness at ease.

David Brinkley had class, poise, and a single mindedness of purpose to report things as he found them. He died Tuesday evening in Houston from a fall according to the Associated Press.

Because of how he treated me that day, I always remembered him with respect, and modeled myself after his courteous easy going style, or at least tried to. Viewers of White Plains Week who remember Mr. Brinkley’s days as “interpretative foil” to his Montana-bred sidekick, Chet Huntley, will recognize my homage to him in the show’s blatant steal of the Huntley, Brinkley signoff, in which Mr. Brinkley would end the nightly NBC newscast saying, “Goodnight Chet,” and Mr. Brinkley would respond in his gravelly voice, “Good night, David, and Good night for NBC News.”

The Huntley-Brinkley team revolutionized convention coverage where they would be on the air for hundreds of hours straight it seemed, with Mr. Brinkley droning on like a politicalized Mel Allen with anecdotes and observations, eruditely, cleverly delivered adlib. Mr. Brinkley set the style for political commentating in a style uniquely his own. He used the appropriate word. Something today’s anchorpersons have no command of whatsoever.

Mr. Brinkley made you pay attention with his softspoken, in control style, that never rattled, with no fear of expressing his opinions of speeches, events, and directions matters were heading. He directed his own questioning, asked hard questions, and made the interview about his subject, not himself.

He was an original and can be said, in his style, to have elevated the profession of news reading to the level of news anchoring, anchoring being the art of getting at why things happened, and shedding light on where they are going and bringing out the story behind the story. This subtle elevation of the art of news created by Mr. Brinkley bringing what Edward R. Murrow did in specials, to the news every day was pioneering in an era where the media were far more pressured by politicians than they are today.

The Huntley Brinkley Report as Mr. Brinkley’s show was known was the first to use two anchors to deliver the news to hold viewers’ attention and it made NBC News instantly competitive with CBS, thanks to Mr. Brinkley’s colorful and thought-provoking delivery.

He was able to do this because he wrote and spoke in a style that was thoughtful. He strung together words well adlib and mastered the end of the sentence zinger, which is not an easy thing to do.

Mr. Brinkley did not style his hair. He did not dye it as he aged, as anchors do today. He did not have plastic surgery, or whiten his teeth. Up to his last few years, he would appear on camera for ABC with snowwhite hair his craggy aged face without pretentions. He reported. He was not the story. He called the stories as he found them, he did not spin them.

Good night, David, and thank you for U.S.A. News.