This week’s biggest Winners & Losers

The 34th Street busway is happening. Or at least it will, one day, after more public engagement on the bus-first proposal continues – a stipulation of the Midtown South rezoning approved by a key City Council committee this week. Still, that’s a better outlook than the busway and its champions – including local Council Members Keith Powers and Erik Bottcher – had just a month ago, when Mayor Eric Adams’ administration unceremoniously paused work on the project.

After a year and a half of highly contentious negotiations and public fighting, Albany Medical Center and the state’s nurses union reached a new four-year contract agreement – and it’s a pretty good deal for the nurses. Jennifer Bejo, the union head of Albany Med, got healthy raises and an increase in starting salaries for her nurses, who nearly unanimously approved the proposal. Staffing concerns remain an issue, but at least the nurses will have a better paycheck while dealing with that.

Congratulations to the newly minted U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, who was confirmed this week. Jeanine Pirro is a former Westchester judge and district attorney who in 2006 ran unsuccessfully against both Hillary Clinton for Senate and Andrew Cuomo for state attorney general. Busy lady! She comes to the role with a requisite Fox News hosting gig on her resume – a bubbly one. And as Trump muses about taking over D.C., Pirro is all for it.

As protestors gathered outside the Clinton Park stables after a carriage horse suddenly died during her shift on Tuesday, activists called out City Council Member Lynn Schulman and Council Speaker Adrienne Adams for continuously putting off a hearing for Ryder’s Law– a bill introduced in 2022 to phase out the carriage horse industry. Alongside a passionate street theater reenactment of  a dead horse, protestors chanted, “Lynn Schulman, what's your excuse? You’re protecting horse abuse.”

Imagine how the conversation went. “I got it! What if we claim an elderly grandmother can’t drive down the block because so many mosque worshippers park their cars on the narrow streets?” Three Oyster Bay town officials admitted in depositions for a discrimination suit that they invented the fictional grandma as the town blocked a Muslim group from enlarging its mosque, though they claimed the fabrication was “an amalgam of testimony and written submissions” from town residents.

Over the course of seven years, Michael Lucchesi, former chair of emergency medicine at SUNY Downstate Medical Center, stole over $1.4 million in hospital funds. What did he put these spoils towards? A vacation to Israel, catering for a tailgate party, front-row suites at Yankees games and a family trip to watch a football game, to name just a few. Well, seems like he’s paying for it now – with three years in prison.