Staten Island Advance

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‘Cut red tape?’ People are dying in the workplace!

The horrific death of Carlos Gabrielli on a Westerleigh construction site should shock us all to the core. His throat slashed by an electrical saw after a slip and fall, he died in an ambulance after his coworkers frantically tried to stanch the bleeding with the shirts off their backs in the immediate aftermath of the gruesome accident. As the Advance notes in its coverage, this was only the second of three dreadful workplace accidents in Staten Island last week. One day later, a crane collapsed at the construction site of a new Amazon warehouse in Rosebank. One worker’s leg reportedly “snapped in half.” Three days before that, a 25-year-old electrician was knocked unconscious at a construction site in Bloomfield after a small panel explosion exposed him to a 500 volt arc of electricity. These kinds of workplace accidents, unfortunately, are not rare. On average, thirteen workers die on the […]

Drop all the bridge tolls, tax the billionaires

The toll on the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge is too damn high. I realize that it’s a time-honored tradition for Staten Islanders to beat our breasts and complain about how “forgotten” and taken for granted we are. Don’t let me steal your birthright from ya, but there are hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers who have to go over the river and through the woods and across two expensive bridges to get to Grandma’s house in New Jersey. They feel your pain. A $17 bridge toll, a free ride for tourists on the ferry and $2.75 for a subway train that’s as likely to break down as get you to work on time is an inequitable system for all parties involved. Writing in these pages, columnist Tom Wrobleski points to the toll-free East River bridges and notes, “They’re one of the few examples of government totally overlooking a revenue source.” He suggests […]