Monday’s Headlines: There’s a Meeting for That Edition

An increase in lithium-ion battery fires? There’s a meeting for that.

City Council Speaker Julie Menin loves an oversight hearing, and with the year’s increase in lithium-ion battery fires (first reported by Streetsblog) making major, tragic headlines in recent weeks, that’s just what she’s got in store.

Menin on Friday announced plans for an oversight hearing on Nov. 20 “to examine residential fire safety, following a concerning increase in fatal fires, including battery-related fires, across the city.”

So far this year FDNY attributes 406 fires to lithium-ion batteries — which are commonly but not exclusively used in e-bikes — compared to 241 last year. The largest increase has been in non-structural fires — meaning blazes that occur outside of a home or business. The Department of Sanitation recorded 87 lithium-ion fires in garbage trucks as of mid-October, a 58 percent increase from 2025.

The most recent high-profile blaze killed six people in a row house in Sunset Park, just days after another fire in the Bronx that filled four. Council Member Susan Zhuang, who was at the scene in Brooklyn, told Streetsblog she planned to “look and see if we can set up some stations so people can just charge outdoors.”

Zhuang may have been referring to the city’s extra-delayed efforts to set up battery charging and swapping cabinets on curbsides and sidewalks, which the Adams administration announced in 2023 and have been stuck in bureaucratic hell ever since. The city has not approved a single application for an outdoor charging cabinet.

The Times, meanwhile, reported on Friday on an overall increase in fires — 86 this year compared to 44 last year — but focused its scrutiny on e-bike batteries, which it called “a major driving force behind the rise in fires and fire deaths” despite accounting for just nine of this year’s fatalities.

Menin will co-lead the hearing with Council Members Pierina Sanchez and Joann Ariola. Ariola, a conservative Republican from Queens, has used her bully pulpit as chair of the Committee on Fire and Emergency Management to push unsubstantiated claims that bike lanes slow emergency response times. Earlier this year, she celebrated the reopening of a park road in her district to cars by obnoxiously joy-riding down the strip while parents and kids held a protest to keep the street car-free. Don’t count on Council Member Joann Ariola to give people who rely on bikes to get around the city a fair hearing.

In other news:

• Menin seems ready to play ball on some type of Amazon regulation. (NY Times)
• amNY covered the MTA’s tin-cup funding requests for the new Democratic Congress.
• Penn Station probably won’t be named after Donald Trump after Tuesday’s election results. (Our Town)
• A driver high on cocaine and weed allegedly ran a stop sign and killed a baby in Flushing last month. (Gothamist)
• Another drunk driver allegedly struck a woman on the BQE who had exited a taxicab for unknown reasons. (Gothamist)
• This lady with the middle name “Blank” somehow ended up with tens of thousands of dollars in parking fines, and spent days in court clearing her name. (NY Times)