The food fight over FreshDirect is still raging.
Two months after the Bloomberg administration approved $82 million in subsidies for the company to move to the South Bronx, two City Council members have asked the Cuomo administration to halt the deal.
Melissa Mark-Viverito and Maria del Carmen Arroyo want Albany to delay the move pending an audit of the Harlem River Rail Yards, the state-owned, privately-controlled waterfront site where FreshDirect plans to build its new headquarters.
“We need greater transparency,” Mark-Viverito said Tuesday.
The city, state and the Bronx have already committed about $120 million to the online grocer, with some caveats, but the Cuomo-controlled Empire State Development Corp. has yet to approve an additional $9 million. It expects to vote on the grant this summer.
“We are concerned that this property has been and continues to be used in a manner that is causing severe harm to the residents of the South Bronx and that undermines nearly two decades of rezoning and development,” the councilwomen wrote in a May 3 letter to Joan McDonald, state Department of Transportation commissioner.
When Harlem River Yard Ventures leased the site from the state DOT in 1991, the company vowed to develop a new rail system that would reduce local truck traffic.
But Mark-Viverito and Arroyo claim it has done the opposite, inking subleases with heavy truck users such as FedEx, the New York Post and now FreshDirect.
The DOT said it will respond later this month.
Garbage trains do leave the site by rail, noted Mychal Johnson, a community activist who has opposed the FreshDirect move.
The result is a neighborhood clogged with polluting trucks and stinky trains full of trash from other parts of the city, he said.
The 99-year lease held by Harlem River Yard Ventures was at one point slammed by a state controller as a sweetheart deal.
The company declined to comment. It collects about $500,000 per month from its subleases but pays just $43,000 per month in rent to the state, Mark-Viverito and Arroyo wrote.
They claim the city Industrial Development Agency relied on an outdated environment impact statement when it judged the FreshDirect plan. The 1993 statement was put together before rezonings that generated new housing and made the neighborhood less suitable for industry.
Furthermore, Mark-Viverito believes FreshDirect could remain in Long Island City, Queens.
Mayor Bloomberg and others argued subsidies were needed to keep the growing firm from bolting to New Jersey.
But in its application for Garden State subsidies, the growing firm described a Queens expansion as a cheap, viable option.
Where are our Queens elected officials to just let Bloomberg try to get away with this? The jobs and businesses we need to stay right here!
I think it may be up to FreshDirect not Bloomberg. We are getting a big UPS depot in LIC instead
Hello Peek fans
**Check us out on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt on Wednesday** We will be talking about the formula for gadget startups these days — lots of tech companies are trying to create new products and even produce them in the US.
We started that way too, with a vision for a low-cost smartphone that nobody was close to in the China Ecosystem. So we invented our own device, our own software stack and our own cloud. Technology that was unprecedented at the time, the Peek Stack put smart apps on a $30 Bill of Materials in a beautiful, globally award winning package. That was then.
Now there are lots of nice, inexpensive phones being produced by the China Ecosystem — lots and lots. **800 million last year.** Half of all the phones in the world are produced by brands that did not exist a few years ago.
Peek is software is on many of them — our technology makes it possible to do smart things on simple, low-cost phones. Look for it in a ZTE phone near you. Or a MicroMax or a Lava or Gionee or many other brands from China and in regions like India, Indonesia, Latin America, and beyond.
**Here are some updates from the front lines:**
**The China Ecosystem chipsets continue to march** — Spreadtrum, Mstar and Mediatek are all beating their guidance on volume for featurephone **and smartphones** – [see our take](http://www.peek.ly/blog/2012/05/the-march-of-the-china-chipsets/)
**The Android tree keeps forking** — and forking — every big player is creating their own experience. [Why? It’s about brand](http://www.peek.ly/blog/2012/05/why-android-keeps-forking/) Apparently Google’s CFO was complaining last week that everyone is free-riding on *their* innovation. Well, Googorola’s flavor just isn’t enough to help OEMs (besides Samsung) win.
We are well on our way to shipping Peekdroid in fact — a full suite of customized Android with better battery, better memory usage, and faster performance that lets OEMs be different and better — e.g., [Peek on Android –> free in the Android app store](https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=ly.peek.android&feature=search_result#?t=W251bGwsMSwyLDEsImx5LnBlZWsuYW5kcm9pZCJd)
**This month we are introducing publicly the Peek Dev Kit** for deploying one app across multiple featurephone platforms. Look out for an announcement soon — it’s our secret sauce and we are bringing to the broader developer community.
Plus, our crackerjack engineering teams in Nanjing, New York, and Delhi are hiring. Write to me if you have what it takes.
All the best,
Amol
Peekster-in-Chief
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