City Council Votes for Cheap Gas and More Parking

11:01 AM EDT on September 14, 2006

Christine Quinn's City Council overrode its first mayoral veto yesterday. According to the Gotham Gazette:

After evidence of price gouging arose in the days after Hurricane Katrina, the council began working on a bill to prevent such behavior in the future. In July, it approved Intro 296, which says that gas stations must keep their prices the same for a 24-hour period before they can change them again. The Department of Consumer Affairs would enforce the regulation.
Mayor Michael Bloomberg vetoed the bill, saying that existing fraud protection laws were sufficient. "Telling a business how often it can change its prices is just not something that the City should do," said the mayor in his veto message. "It does not address the real issue, and unduly interferes with private enterprise."
The council overrode the veto by a vote of 43 to 6. Democratic council members Simcha Felder, Daniel Garodnick, and Helen Sears voted no, as did Republican council members Dennis Gallager, Andrew Lanza, and James Oddo.
The council also passed a measure to rezone a four-block area of Northern Tribeca currently zoned for manufacturing. Under the plan, the area would be opened for the development of apartment buildings and 180 spaces of parking in the area bordered by West, Watts, Washington, and Hubert Streets.

Aaron Naparstek

AARON NAPARSTEK is the founder and former editor-in-chief of Streetsblog. Based in Brooklyn, New York, Naparsteks journalism, advocacy and community organizing work has been instrumental in growing the bicycle network, removing motor vehicles from parks, and developing new public plazas, car-free streets and life-saving traffic-calming measures across all five boroughs. Naparstek is the author of "Honku: The Zen Antidote for Road Rage" (Villard, 2003), a book of humorous haiku poetry inspired by the endless motorist sociopathy observed from his apartment window. Prior to launching Streetsblog, Naparstek worked as an interactive media producer, pioneering some of the Web's first music web sites, online communities, live webcasts and social networking services. Naparstek is currently in Cambridge with his wife and two young sons where he is enjoying a Loeb Fellowship at Harvard University's Graduate School of Design. He has a master's degree from Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism and a bachelor's degree from Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. Naparstek is a co-founder of the Park Slope Neighbors community group and the Grand Army Plaza Coalition. You can find more of his work here: http://www.naparstek.com.

City Council Votes for Cheap Gas and More Parking

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