Bugged Out gives me a good talking (down) to

Bugged Out has left us another comment. Are we especially blessed?

Did some of his poisoned arrows hit their marks? I’m not sure. I think some of them did.

His original comment has all kinds of well-placed bolded statements, but I’m not going to reproduce them here. My fidelity to certain principles apparently only goes so far.

Renee,

My comments shouldn’t disappoint or discourage you. If anything, I admire your passion and desire for a bed bug task force to be created. It’s your belief that the city government should start it that is unrealistic to me.

What don’t you understand about City Hall not being interested in protecting its citizens from bed bug infestations? Yes, Renee, your goal is most certainly pie-in-the-sky, and the details of your own posts are proof of how unrealistic your goal actually is.

You admit that you have no experience in city politics. That I wholeheartedly believe, because if you did you wouldn’t be screaming for City Hall to establish a bed bug task force. I’ve worked as a reporter and editor in several local newspapers in Queens, Brooklyn and Manhattan for seven years, much of that time covering city politics. As a reporter, I’ve interviewed dozens of Council legislative directors, agency bureaucrats and of course, Councilmembers. I’ve worked on several Council and State Assembly campaigns and I’ve worked for one Councilmember. So unlike you, I do understand how this city works.

That being said, considering how much you repeat (ad nauseum) about how Cincinnati and Toronto and countless other cities’ lawmakers are addressing the issue of bed bugs while our hometown, I would think by now that you’d take the hint and notice the elephant in the room: that New York is not capable of accomplishing things that have been done by smaller cities with less money.

The sad, sad truth is that for all our big city sophistication, culture and cosmopolitan charm, the government of New York City is probably as corrupt as the government of any backwater country you can think of. I’d go as far to say that New York is one of the most corrupt, if not the most corrupt, cities in the United States.

Let’s take a look at Cincinnatti, one of the two cities you gush about so much. Their nine Councilmembers are paid $58,000 a year. In New York we have 51 Councilmembers that are each paid a starting salary of $112,000, and that’s only for newly elected Councilmembers (only one new Councilmember was elected last year, Eugene Mathieu of Brooklyn). How about Toronto? Each Councilmember is paid $96,000 (US$90,000) each year. Long story short, their Councilmembers are paid less than ours, yet those cities’ residents dealing with bed bugs get better government.

Those “small-town rubes” must be laughing their asses off at New York. I have “bed bugs and New York City” on Google Alerts, and maybe twice a week I recieve a news headline from a newspaper outside of New York City making fun of us…labeling our city as a haven for bed bugs.

Don’t you think I want my City Council to step up and do what’s right? When I first started my blog, I was a lot like you, even encouraging readers to write to their repsective Councilmember. I don’t even remember how many Councilmembers I wrote to, urging them to support Gale Brewer’s bed bug bill, I wrote so many. I’m sure those Councilmembers’ interns promptly deleted every e-mail I sent.

I have come up with two possible scenarios (and one nearly impossible one) in which a bed bug task force could be established in New York City:

1) Go Brooklyn: Since Brooklyn appears to be the epicenter of the City’s bed bug epidemic, an alternative would be for Brooklyn residents to petition their Borough President to establish a bed bug task force for that borough. It wouldn’t serve anyone who doesn’t ive in Brooklyn, but the city’s most populous borough would have a bed bug task force. If infestation reports were to decrease in Brooklyn as a result of a boroughwide task force, the other Borough Presidents might be more willing to copy Brooklyn’s model, especially in the year in which their position is up for grabs. What’s more, if a Brooklyn bed bug task force were successful, the Council may actually establish a citywide bed bug task force. Whether it would actually do anything to help New Yorkers is another question.

2) Play the Waiting Game: Wait five years or so or until the bed bug epidemic is so widespread that at least four or five million New Yorkers live with bed bugs, in which case the problem will be too huge for the Council to ignore. At this point, depending on how many millions of New Yorkers will have bed bugs by then, the Council may even go so far as to not only establish a bed bug task force, but also a bed bug Council Select Committee, a Council Subcommittee, or a full-fledged Council Committee, all of which will have much more money and power than a mere task force.

3) Play Ball: Since those of us living with bed bugs are a minority among New Yorkers, technically we are a special interest group. We can form a political action committee (PAC) and raise money to buy candidates. When I say buy, I mean our PAC officially endorse a City Council candidate and donate at least $10,000 to his or her campaign. I say $10,000 because that amount is too large for any Council candidate, even an incumbent, to turn away from. If they are elected, they will vote any way we tell them to. The more we donate, the more influence we will have on them. Once elected or reelected, we guide our newly purchased politician, urging City leaders to place “our guy” on all the right committees that will empower him to do what we want him to do. PACs that cannot afford to contribute that much money to a political campaign can endorse a candidate by offering free campaign labor, with about 50 members of this hypothetical bed bug PAC each willing to commit about four to eight hours a week to pass out campaign literature, put up posters, make phone calls, whatever the candidate needs for their campaign. If possible a bed bug PAC can contribute both free labor and big fat campaign donations. Needless to say, a bed bug PAC will bluntly let the candidate know what we want in exchange for our generous donations. If this sounds strange to you or even slightly illegal, I’ll have you no this is how the labor unions have the Democratic Party wrapped around their fingers, and how the real estate and finance industries have the Republicans under their control.

Pledging votes only works if we have a lot of PAC members living in the candidate’s Council district, or if a sizeable number of our members are willing to falsely register themselves as residents of that Council district. If our “endorsed” candidate doesn’t give us what we want and we feel they didn’t work hard enough, we simply endorse that politician’s opponent in the next election. If our endorsed politician doesn’t establish a bed bug task force because too many more powerful Councilmembers kept him down, the PAC may have to purchase more than one politician. We can also “endorse” a Councilmember that already serves on a committee that can help us, like Consumer Affairs or Buildings, but this will cost the PAC a bit more.

This is all incredibly expensive to accomplish, and political action committees are legal organizations that must follow strict legal guidelines so we will need a legal team to make sure we don’t do anything that lands ourselves in jail.

I think we’ve all done the letter-writing deal, we’ve all called and complained to 311, we’ve done all that, and with few results. In my view, petitioning the Brooklyn Borough president and the local Community Boards in Brooklyn to establish a bed bug task force sounds like the most realistic solution if you really want a task force established somewhere in NYC by 2009.

You said, “So our city and state politics are dysfunctional? Money is scarce? Political will hard to find? We cannot concern ourselves with such persistent problems. We just want New Yorkers to live free of bed bugs.” That’s like saying, “Who cares if I don’t have gasoline in my tank, I’m all out of brake fluid and all four of my tires are punctured? I just want to drive to work!” Not gonna happen.

Without a City Council that is highly accountable to its constituents, and with no political will from those who do have the power to do so, your goal is absolutely unattainable. What is it that you do not understand about New York City?

You keep telling people to “take action” in the form of letter writing campaigns. E-mails to Council members who obviously couldn’t give two shits about our situation. E-mails which are probably deleted as quickly as if they were spam. How about some real action?

I would very much like to start a nonprofit organization that would act as a bed bug task force in New York City. We wouldn’t be reinventing the wheel here, as we would simply mimic what other cities as Toronto and Cincinnati have already accomplished. We could solicit small donations on our blogs via PayPal. If the Council wishes to take credit, they can allocate Council funding for our organization. What’s more important, we can actually give New Yorkers the support they’re not getting from the government.

Unfortunately, state and federal regulations prohibit me from starting a charitable organization with fewer than three people. I truly admire your passion, and I’d love for you to join me and translate that passion into results through a nonprofit bed bug task force for this city.

As you’ve documented quite well on your blog, there are local experts in the private sector who could guide a nonprofit bed bug task force in the right direction. We could even ask the task forces of other cities for advice. Unlike your campaign to get the City Council to establish a bed bug task force, a nonprofit task force is quite doable.

I almost can’t blame the City Council for not caring. For anyone who rakes in a six-figure income, paying a bed bug exterminator $300 a room is no big deal. Neither is throwing out their infested furniture and buying brand new furniture and fancy mattresses. But what about the New Yorker struggling to make ends meet, living on an air mattress and a bunch of stolen milk crates for furniture? That’s who a bed bug task force can really help, cinluding those who do not have Internet access.

So Renee, do you want to take real action and join me in forming a nonprofit bed bug task force, or do you want to keep telling people to ignore my logic and instead spend two minutes on a bullshit letter-writing campaign to city and state officials who couldn’t care less about our problems? In the meantime, you can depress us further with more and more news of cities who are actually accountable to their citizens, and the rest of the country can continue making fun of us New Yorkers.

Look, we gave our city two years to do something about the bed bug infestation, and all they’ve done is publish a pamphlet. It’s not like we never gave them a chance to take action. I can’t wait another two years for the City to stand around and do nothing, and neither can the New Yorkers who read our blogs.

If you’re really interested in taking real action, you know how to reach me.

For the record, the one filed under N for needless to say—or maybe for never gonna happen—New York vs Bed Bugs is not going to be involved in the setting up of a “private” bed bug task force funded via solicited “small donations.”

These pages may be of related interest:

1. Bugged Out thinks we’re wasting our time
2. We still need your help
3. New York versus Bed Bugs
4. Reminder: our CitizenSpeak campaign
5. Our CitizenSpeak campaign