Friday’s Headlines: Menin Wants to Take This Outside Edition

City Council Speaker Julie Menin wants you to know she’s serious about bringing back year-round outdoor dining.

“I’m deeply committed to fixing the broken dining program that was passed by the last iteration of the Council, and I say that it was broken because it wasn’t year-round,” Menin told the crowd at the annual Public Space Awards hosted on Thursday by Open Plans.

Menin, who used to own a restaurant in Manhattan, called the seasonal restrictions enacted under her predecessor Adrienne Adams “absurd,” and committed to lowering the fees for restaurants and bars that want to set up al fresco.

“You know, it’s not like you have all this space to store restaurants and chairs,” the speaker said. “It really deprived not only restaurants but the public writ large from the benefits of open dining — so we are fixing the program.”

The event in Brooklyn marked the fourth year in a row that Open Plans, which shares a parent organization with Streetsblog, has hosted the Public Space Awards.

This year’s honorees were:

• Council Member and Transportation Committee Chair Shaun Abreu, who received the Clean Streets, Clear Sidewalks Award for his leadership in bringing trash containerization to his Manhattan district.
• “The Longest Table” founders Andy Lerner and Maryam Banikarim, whom Open Plans named its “Most Inspiring Community Connectors” for bringing communal dining to streets across the city and globe.
• City-As-School Assistant Principal Carl Oliver and teacher Maria Bermúdez, who received the Students First Streets Award for their work organizing the Clarkson Street school street.

And following Mayor Mamdani’s re-commitment last week to citywide trash containerization launched by his predecessor, Abreu gave a spirited defense of the effort.

“A lot of people complained, but I said, ‘It’s ok. If it doesn’t work, we can go back to litter.’ But they’re not complaining now,” he said. “They don’t want to go back.”

Read more about the awards and honorees here.

In other news:

• We missed this, but over the weekend President Trump said he doesn’t want to move Madison Square Garden to renovate Penn Station. (NY Post)
• And conservative talk radio host Andrew Cuomo agrees! (WSJ)
• The MTA wants Amtrak’s Penn Station far away from its LIRR concourse. (Gothamist)
• More Amtrak-MTA tensions: The federally owned railroad sued the MTA for not letting it test its new Acela trains on Metro-North’s Hudson and New Haven lines. (Gothamist)
• Something Cuomo’s WSJ column failed to mention: the absence of public seating at the ex-governor’s crown jewel Moynihan Train Hall. (Places Journal)
• Advocates hope the mayor’s free bus vision won’t get in the way of “Fair Fares” expansion. (amNY)
• Cops made one arrest in the chaotic car “takeover” incident from the weekend, with seven other suspects still at large. (Gothamist)
• The Daily News Editorial Board wants recidivist reckless drivers to lose their licenses — though, lest we forget, unless the car itself is immobilized, drivers frequently keep motoring even on a suspended license.
• “A Hit-and-Run Driver Is Killing Geese on Long Island.” (NY Times)
• Will Mamdani cut the cord on Eric Adams’s $2-billion deck over the remainder of Hudson Yards? (NY Times)
• The mayor expressed sympathy for New Jersey’s approach to World Cup train fares. (amNY)
• More IBX public meetings are scheduled for the coming weeks. (amNY)
• Unions want the mayor to veto a bill creating “protest buffer zones” around schools and educational facilities. (The City)
• The MTA wants your input on its forthcoming renovation of the LIRR’s Jamaica Station. (amNY)
• Eric Adams “loyalists” remain stashed away in city government. The Mamdani administration fired one such official in January who’d been placed at DOT by the outgoing administration. (Politico)
• And finally — it’s no longer news that the mayor loves Citi Bike, but that doesn’t mean we’re tired of it: