East Side Notes From the Neighborhood

MALONEY ASKS, "WHERE ARE THE WOMEN?" Upper East Side Rep. Carolyn Maloney made national headlines last week for purportedly walking out of a congressional hearing on contraception and religious liberty held to address how President Barack Obama's directive for health insurance companies to provide coverage for contraception will affect religious institutions. There were so few women on the panel that several Democrats insisted that Rep. Darrell Issa, a California Republican and chairman of the House Oversight Committee, accept Sandra Fluke, a law student from Georgetown University, onto the panel with male religious leaders.

Maloney clarified in a phone interview last Thursday that although she hadn't exactly staged a dramatic walkout, she was still pretty angry.

"They were so few women on the committee that it just looked like a walkout," she said, explaining that she had to be at another hearing after her opening statement but that she did come back. "What I wanted to know was, where are the women? There was not one single woman representing the hundreds of thousands of women" who could be affected.

LAPPIN GRILLS COPS Our sister publication City and State reports that Upper East Side City Council Member Jessica Lappin gave the NYPD an earful over its reluctance to share data at a Council hearing on accident investigation policies. After the hit-and-run death of Mathieu Lefevre last fall, family members had to file a Freedom of Information request for details about his death, which Lappin said was "literally adding insult to injury."

Susan Petito, the NYPD assistant commissioner for intergovernmental affairs, said the department would not do so out of concern for "the integrity of the data." Queens Council Member Peter Vallone noted that crime data had been posted before without being manipulated. "If you were afraid of it being changed once you put it out there, you would never put information out there."

BLOOMBERG ANNOUNCES DEAN OF NEW TECH SCHOOL Last week, while visiting the New York City headquarters of Internet company Tumblr, Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced that professor Daniel P. Huttenlocher, Cornell University's dean of computing and information sciences, had been named founding dean of the university's Technion-Cornell Innovation Institute, slated to open on Roosevelt Island in 2017. Cathy Dove, currently associate dean in Cornell's College of Engineering, will co-lead the campus as vice president and Technion professor Craig Gotsman will serve as the founding director.