Bloomberg Stadium Foes Urge Silver to Support Pricing

Then: “Honk No” to Mayor Bloomberg’s plan. Now: Stop honking and pay $8.
Bloomberg’s West Side stadium foes are now his congestion pricing friends.

Manhattan Community Boards 4, 5 and 6 are holding a joint public hearing on the PlaNYC congestion pricing proposal tonight at 6:00pm. In an interesting twist of politics, the West Side Neighborhood Alliance, a coalition that includes many of the organizations that urged State Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver to kill Mayor Bloomberg’s West Side
Stadium proposal a few years ago, are now pushing Silver to support the Mayor’s congestion pricing plan. They will publicly announce their support at tonight’s meeting.

“We fought Mayor Bloomberg on the stadium because we thought it was the wrong thing for our neighborhood and for the city as a whole. We’re supporting him on this because congestion pricing is an effective way to reduce traffic, clean the air and produce new revenue for our transit system,” said John Raskin, Director of Organizing at Housing Conservation Coordinators and a founder of the West Side Neighborhood Alliance.

Members of the West Side Neighborhood Alliance are collecting hundreds of signatures from congestion pricing supporters to present to Speaker Silver later this week, hoping that their stadium savior of 2005 will become the clean air champion of 2007.

“Speaker Silver saved our neighborhood from the West Side Stadium,” said David Warren, a resident of West 34th Street and member of the West Side Neighborhood Alliance. “Now we need him to save us from idling cars and the tons of pollution they produce while they sit on our streets.”