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WALK THIS WAY Park Slope sidewalk repairs progress following corruption scheme
The city will examine and reconstruct hundreds of street corners around the city to make them more easily
accessible for stroller-pushers and people with disabilities. Department of Transportation
BY AIDAN GRAHAM
The city is making headway
on a long-delayed project to
repair hundreds of sidewalk
ramps throughout Park Slope
— after fi nally replacing its
dirty contractor.
Original plans for the
city’s $12.6 million infrastructure
repair project
called for 962 curb cuts to
be refit and ready to go this
September, but the project
suffered a yearlong delay after
executives with the city’s
original contractor were indicted
in a quid-pro-quo corruption
scheme in April,
2018, according to a spokesman
for the Department of
Design and Construction.
“It set us back by approximately
a year,” said Ian Michaels.
“As a result, we’re
not close to being done with
the project yet.”
Manhattan District Attorney
Cyrus Vance claimed
the higher ups at Haider Engineering
P.C. colluded to
bribe a mid-tier bureaucrat
at the city’s Department of
Environmental Protection,
who passed along confidential
documents, schedules
for upcoming contracts,
and internal cost estimates
for city projects to the construction
outfit.
In exchange, Haider execs
awarded their mole with
dinners at classy restaurants,
stays in high-end hotels,
and tickets to Broadway
plays, in addition to
handing out some $7.5 million
in subcontracts to companies
affiliated with the
civil servant.
The indictment forced the
city to cut Haider Engineering
loose, and then put their contract
out to bid for the second
time as part of a roughly yearlong
procurement process.
Michaels claimed that the
city’s new contractor, PCI Industries
Corp, will hustle to
complete as much of the project
as possible before the end
of the year, while noting that
each corner, which features
two ramps each, will take
approximately three days to
complete.
As much as the new ramps
will benefit the neighborhood’s
notoriously strollerheavy
sidewalk traffic, the
Park Slope repair work is
part of a citywide project resulting
from a 2017 lawsuit
and subsequent court-ordered
study, which revealed
that 80 percent of New York
City sidewalk ramps fail
to meet federal disabilities
standards.
As such, the completed
curb cuts will feature
smooth paving and shallow
inclines, in addition to tactile
markers for the blind,
Michaels said.
The CEO of Haider Engineer,
Syed Haider, plead
guilty to corrupting the government
in the fourth degree
in Manhattan Supreme
Court on March 26.
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