Last week, Rosenthal announced her co-sponsorship of a bill that would ban the sale and distribution of shark fins in New York State. The fins are most often used in a traditional Chinese dish, shark fin soup, that is known more for its prestige factor than its taste.

“The quest for shark fin so that restaurants can sell shark fin soup is something that is doing dramatic damage to our oceanic system,” Rosenthal said in a recent interview. “I view this as an environmental bill as well as animal protection. It has major implications, killing the top predator.”

Shark fin hunters often hack off the fins and throw the bleeding sharks back into the water to die. Rosenthal and her co-sponsors, Assembly members Grace Meng, who represents the largely Asian-American community of Flushing, Queens, and Alan Meisel of Brooklyn, hope to stem the demand for the expensive soup and thus the need to hunt sharks by making the fins unavailable legally in New York, where much of the East Coast’s supply originates. (Shark finning has already been banned in West Coast states.)

For some people, animal rights might be considered a pet issue (pun intended) that has little to do with the day-to-day well-being of society. For Rosenthal, animal rights are an extension of a moral and advanced society, no less important than protecting other vulnerable segments of the population.

“She’s really one of the legislators who gets it. She knows the link between animal cruelty and human violence,” said Patrick Kwan, New York state director of the Humane Society of the United States, who has worked with Rosenthal on the shark fin bill as well as other animals rights measures and gave her the Society’s State Legislator of the Year Award in 2009.

It was just that link that led Rosenthal to sponsor and pass her first animal-related bills, which make it possible to obtain an order of protection on behalf on an animal, in 2006. Rosenthal said that she had heard of too many cases where women were afraid to leave abusive spouses because there was no protection for the pets in the household.

“Often, the animal is the first target of the abuser,” Rosenthal said. “[The law] is valuable in terms of predicting what could happen to the human and, of course, it’s relevant in itself.”

Rosenthal has passed legislation requiring any consumer product containing fur to be labeled, letting shoppers know if the fuzzy stuff lining their gloves is synthetic or came from an animal.

She also got a law passed that mandates public schools to inform students of their right to abstain from dissecting animals in biology classes and another that prohibits animal testing for cosmetics if other effective methods exist. This January, a bill she passed took effect that protects black bears from poaching. The law requires that all bear organs from New York be tagged to show they were legally obtained. And while it’s still a contentious issue in New York City, Rosenthal continues to push to ban carriage horses.

It’s tough for any lawmaker to get their bills noticed in the sea of legislation floating around Albany, but Rosenthal said she has earned a reputation as a serious animal crusader, and her success in that realm—as well as the attention that constituents give to animal issues—gets her colleagues’ attention.

“Her compassion is only matched by her effectiveness,” Kwan said. “She will push an issue and she will able to explain to other legislators why this makes sense.”

To Rosenthal, her fight for animals is simply a matter of common sense.

“Animals mean a lot to many people, they’re very important parts of their lives,” she said. “It’s not trivial to push animal bills; it’s part of a larger outlook.”

Now that the winner of the high-powered competition among top universities to institute a new state-of-the-art tech campus has been named, New Yorkers can begin to gauge the implications of hosting the future Cornell/Technion campus on Roosevelt Island.

The city had offered several potential sites, all to be given for free to the winning institution along with $100 million in supporting infrastructure improvements. The search was for a university or partnership of schools that could best design and implement a new school to churn out technically focused graduates and boost the city’s economy as well as its credentials as a destination for tech companies and talent in the same way Silicon Valley has.

After months of vying between big-name schools like Stanford, Columbia, NYU and Carnegie Mellon, the Cornell University/Technion-Israel Institute of Technology won the bid to build on Roosevelt Island on the site of the current Goldwater Hospital, which is scheduled to be vacated within the next several years. Cornell plans to break ground on the new facility by 2017.

“We are deeply committed to becoming a part of the fabric of the Roosevelt Island community,” said Tommy Bruce, vice president of university communications at Cornell. “This project is about connecting our campus to the city around it—and that starts with our neighbors here on Roosevelt Island.”

Residents are eager to make sure that the sense of partnership continues as the project develops.

“We’re putting together a community benefit association with not just RIRA [Roosevelt Island Residents Association] but all of the island’s organizations,” said Matthew Katz, RIRA president. “Senior associations, disability associations, merchants, religious groups, the Roosevelt Island historical society. We would like to have an amalgam of interests so that we don’t forget anything.”

Katz said that while he can’t speak for every resident of the island, he has heard only support for the Cornell/Technion proposal. He said that most residents were crossing their fingers in the hopes that the country’s newest tech sector would be close to home.

While some universities in the city have battled their surrounding communities when seeking to expand—NYU Downtown, Columbia in Morningside Heights—Katz said Roosevelt Island residents knew that if a new school wasn’t constructed, something else, perhaps more housing that would overload the Island’s infrastructure, would have gone up when Goldwater Hospital closed.  The island boasts a small population of 13,000.

Residents are hoping that Cornell’s presence will attract more local merchants and investment from the city.
“We’ve got the opportunity to use the finances and clout of Cornell and the city to try to enhance the transportation capabilities for the Island,” Katz said. “We’ve had little success with the MTA and even in the work I’ve done with the Metropolitan Waterfront Alliance. [There will be] ferry service up to 34th Street; we’d like to be included in that. It’s not rapid transit, but it’s a step in the right direction.”

RIRA is also hoping that one of the subway lines that run under the island, either the N/R or the V/M, will be built out to bring another transit option—currently, only the F train stops on the Island.

Cornell is planning to partner with Roosevelt Island schools to enhance their science curricula and bring technology to after-school programming, said Bruce. The campus is planned as a “net zero-energy” facility, meaning that it will supposedly harness as much geothermal renewable energy as it consumes.

It also promises to participate in community programming and bring thousands of new residents, both permanent faculty and staff and temporary students, to Roosevelt Island in addition to the $100 million in investments pledged by the city.

It’s a strange day in New York City when toxic chemicals could become as commonplace in schools as pencils, books and tater tots.

Polychlorinated Biphenyls–more commonly known by the abbreviation PCBs–could potentially be present in at least 700 public schools in the city, says a list compiled by the New York Lawyers for the Public Interest (NYLPI) and distributed by Rep. Jerrold Nadler. PCBs are believed to cause cancer as well as serious damage to the immune, reproductive, nervous and endocrine systems in humans. The compounds were used in construction materials like insulation, electrical equipment and lubricants in the 1950s and ’60s until they were banned by the EPA in 1978.

In 2010, the city allowed the EPA to conduct a pilot test program, measuring PCB levels and determining remediation strategies for five schools—one in each borough. While Downtown schools weren’t included in the pilot program, several schools in the area that are potentially contaminated with PCBs were part of the NYLPI list, including P.S.184 Shuang Wen in the Lower East Side and P.S. 150 in Tribeca. (The full list can be found on the NYPLI website.)

The results from the schools that were included in the pilot program were astonishing. At P.S. 199 on the Upper West Side, there were higher-than-average levels of PCBs, 600-1100 nanograms per cubic meter in the indoor air at the school. The EPA’s reference dose, the quantity of PCBs that a person can be exposed to daily over a lifetime with little appreciable damage or risk, is 200 to 300 nanograms per cubic meter.

The city has acknowledged the need to remove all known sources of PCBs from public schools, the biggest of which are old light ballasts, but the method of removal, including testing, proper abatement, determing the order in which schools will be worked on as well as a timeline and funding, are up for fierce debate among parents, politicians, health experts, the Department of Education and the School Construction Authority (SCA). “What we’ve been pushing for is that the city should come up with a remediation plan to remove these light ballasts quickly,” said Rep. Jerrold Nadler, who represents the west side of Manhattan from the Upper West Side to Downtown. “They’ve got a 10-year plan and that is simply not acceptable.”

A few weeks ago, the City Council passed a new law requiring schools to notify parents when PCBs are found and at what levels. Council Member Margaret Chin, whose district includes much of Downtown Manhattan from Tribeca to the South Street Seaport to Chinatown and the Lower East Side, noted that the Council is pushing for a much shorter, two-year plan to inspect all city schools for PCBs. Chin said 18 schools in her district were built between 1959-1978.

“The SCA is in our school regularly. This has been a constant thing at our school, a constant string of testing and results and the action plan,” said Michelle Lipkin, co-president of the P.S. 199 PTA. Lipkin said they’ve been dealing with PCB issues for the past four years, ever since they were first discovered in the building and the SCA removed all of the lighting ballasts.

Ballasts made before the 1979 ban were filled with PCBs because the chemical compound acts as an excellent flame retardant, which kept fluorescent lighting fixtures from catching fire when the electrical current was switched on. This technology is now obsolete and the latent PCBs are either leaking or about to, but the ballasts need to be removed by abatement technicians who can not only safely take them down but also ensure that the PCB levels surrounding them remain low.

Because of the cost and sheer scale of the project—an estimated $850 million—the city has set a 10-year timeline for removal. But now the communities around these affected schools are fighting back.

Community Board 7, of the Upper West Side, recently penned a resolution, which they took to the full board this week. The resolution asks that “John King of the New York State Department of Education instruct the SCA to expeditiously inspect all schools constructed before 1978 or PCB contamination in lighting fixtures; and that the SCA lighting fixture remediation program be completed within the EPA recommended two- to three-year timeframe.” The state is not required to adhere to the EPA’s guidelines, but many are hoping that they will.

The DOE, however, emphasized that they are doing more than other cities and insisted that their timeline is reasonable.

“Our plan to replace light fixtures in more than 700 school buildings is unprecedented compared to other cities, and PCBs are a nationwide issue,” said Natalie Ravitz, director of communications at DOE, in an emailed statement in response to questions about the DOE’s handling of the removal. “While some people think we should spend more and do this faster, we continue to believe this is an aggressive, environmentally responsible plan that will cause minimum disruption to student learning and generate significant energy savings for the city and taxpayers in the long run.”

But others believe that the matter is far more urgent.

“PCBs are very very dangerous when it comes down to children’s development,” said Christina Giorgio, a staff attorney with New York Lawyers for the Public Interest (NYLPI) in their environmental justice department. “[They] attack every system of the human body. You will have permanently depressed IQs with long-term exposure. When you’re talking about the school environment, you are indisputably talking about long-term exposure.”

NYLPI has filed a lawsuit in federal court on behalf of New York Communities for Change, a group that includes many concerned parents, to force the DOE and SCA to remove the ballasts sooner under the Toxic Substances Control Act, which requires that PCBs are properly removed immediately wherever they are found.

“What the DOE likes to say is that there’s no immediate health risk. Provided you’re not a pregnant woman, if you walk into a room that is contaminated with a high level of PCBs, are you going to drop over dead? No, you’re not. But that’s not what we’re talking about,” Giorgio said.

While all agree that the health risks are accumulated over time, some are insisting that any amount of time spent in PCB-tainted air is too much, especially for women.

“There’s a great deal of research showing risks to pregnant woman now, women who plan to become pregnant in the near future and even those who want to have families a decade from now,” said Andrea Miller, president of NARAL Pro-Choice NY. Other groups advocating for women’s reproductive rights, including Planned Parenthood, have stepped forward to urge the DOE to move more quickly to remove PCBs.

Miller said that her organization understands that the DOE has a lot on its plate; they aren’t asking for immediate removal, they want the DOE to get started quickly and consider stepping up the schedule.

“A woman working in our schools shouldn’t have to trade her ability to have a healthy pregnancy,” Miller said. “We’re just asking that they take this seriously and take a closer look at what the experts are recommending as far as an appropriate timeline.”

“It’s a matter of putting pressure on the city and on the administration,” said Nadler. “They claim it will cost $700 million to $1 billion. We don’t think it will cost that much, but even if it did, we need to do it. We would come up with the money if it were an immediate catastrophe. This is a slow-moving catastrophe.”

As for when Downtown schools might see new ballasts in their schools, members of New York Communities for Change learned that the city will prioritize the retrofitting of new ballasts in the following order: schools with visual signs of leaks, elementary schools built between 1950-1966, secondary schools built between 1950-1966, elementary schools built between 1967-1979, secondary schools built between 1967-1979, elementary schools built before 1950 and secondary schools built before 1950.

As evidenced by the City Council’s resolutions, Chin believes awareness of PCBs is growing but that advocacy is still needed. She pointed out that principals and custodians must work to alert the DOE when ballasts clearly show signs of PCB leaks and repairs need to be made. She added that the EPA could help in educating communities and schools on PCBs.

“Advocacy has to continue,” Chin said, “especially on the [City Council’s] Education Committee. This will be an ongoing process.”

- With additional reporting by Marissa Maier

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