🔦 Building out the Request for Lighting at the Bus Stop

🌟 Author’s Note

Good Morning ☀️ and Happy Sunday to the 125 members of the Better Block Project. It was great to see a few of you this week at our (almost) call with the Department of Finance. I hope everyone is having a great start to 2026!

🔦 Building out the Request for Lighting at the Bus Stop

We’re continuing to push forward with adding lighting at the Franklin and Fulton Bus Stop. This week, we received an email from Chi Osse’s office that they still don’t have a substantive update from the MTA regarding our asks at the Franklin and Fulton bus stop. However, there are some signs of life 🌼 . The MTA has requested a meeting to provide additional details on our requests in the letter. I followed up with the City Council’s office to see if we can have some community members attend that meeting, and we’re awaiting her reply. My hope is we can have the MTA hear from residents directly to increase the sense of urgency they have to do something about the lighting at the bus stop.

In order to maximize our chance of getting the lighting in place, we are also pursuing a few other avenues:

1. We’ve reached out to Leroy Branch at DOT for a follow up meeting to discuss DOT adding streetlights directly

2. We’ve also reached out to Anthony Drummond at the MTA to see if we can have a conversation directly about adding the lighting

We’re also evaluating submitting for a funding request directly for the streetlights. As some background, the City Council, State Assembly Office and Brooklyn Borough’s office all have budgets they can use each year for various community projects. First, there are two types of budgets they can provide funding for:

1. Discretionary Funding: Budget for programs, services and events non-profits offer

2. Capital Funding: Budget for actual infrastructure improvements, like improving parks or in our case, adding streetlights

NYC Open Data provides a full data set on how City Council funds are used across the city, accessible here (the latest data is from FY21). Some interesting insights from the FY21 data:

• Many organizations get funds from multiple Council Members, with the same organization getting funded by up to 36 council members in some cases

• As of FY21, council members could allocate $1.6M per year. Now, I believe this number is closer to $2M

• The top funded organizations included City University of New York ($23M), Legal Aid Society ($11M) and Brooklyn Defender Services ($6M)

• The largest funded programs were the Peter Vallone Academic Scholarship ($16.2M), Jobs to Build On ($3.6M), and CUNY Citizenship Now ($3.0M)

• Total FY21 funding was $376M

I have a love/hate relationship with these discretionary budgets. The benefit is they give more power to local officials to make an impact in their district, and can probably help us with this lighting project. In my experience working with New York City so far, this is really powerful as it gives us a tool to cut through agency bureaucracy to get things done in our local district. The negative is it’s hard to understand how the city is measuring outcomes from this funding, and they introduce the opportunity for more savvy organizations to take advantage of these funding applications, as supposed to the city just using the money to fund it’s core agency needs. With all that being said, it exists as an avenue today to get the streetlights funded, so we’re going to explore it. These budgets are open now and see below the details on applications for each:

• Phara Souffrant Forrest (Assembly District 57): Organizations can request discretionary and capital funding. Requests are due by March 31, 2026, and you can apply here

• Chi Osse (City Council District 36): Organizations can request expense (similar to discretionary) and capital funding. Requests for expense funding are due by February 18, 2026. It’s not clear when the capital funding deadline is. Details on how to apply for funding are here

• Antonio Reynoso (Brooklyn Borough President): Organizations can request capital funding, and the application can be found here and is due February 19, 2026. Organizations can also request discretionary funding, though it’s not clear when the exact deadline is. The application for discretionary funding can be found here

We’ve spoken to a few individuals who have explored and executed on streetlight projects in the past, and the estimate for adding a single streetlight (including labor) is ~$20,000-35,000 per light (thank you Omar, Jenny and Sam for the insight here!).

As next steps, we’re planning to finalize exactly the lighting proposal we want, follow up with City Council and the MTA to confirm the status of the proposal and put in a budget request to ensure we get this done.

🏚️ Next Steps on Holding Negligent Property Owners Accountable

It was our hope this week to connect with the Department of Finance to understand more deeply the challenges of fine collection, but unfortunately this call had to be rescheduled for next week.

We did get a chance to connect with Joel Stillman, the Executive Director of JustFix.org, an organization founded to help tenants figure out who owns their building and give them power to fight for tenant rights. Thank you, Jenny, for the connection! We brainstormed different ways to ensure property owners are held more accountable for violations on their buildings, and discussed the challenges of property owners hiding behind LLCs. Joel also shared this compelling report from the Center for New York City affairs which highlighted:

• Some 24 percent of New York City buildings had rodent infestations as of 2021

• 16 percent of buildings needed more heat in the winter

• More than one in 6 buildings had leaks in their apartments

All of this further emphasizes that we’re on the right track aiming to solve this problem. As a next step, we’re going to work with JustFix on a more in-depth analysis of violations that go unpaid to strengthen our story of why it’s important to ensure these fines actually get paid, and properties are ultimately improved.

Next week, we’re also meeting as a 🐯 tiger team to continue to refine our policy proposal, with an aim to get a final draft by the end of this month.

That’s all for this week’s update. As usual, if you like what we’re doing at the Better Block Project, please forward this to someone you know that is looking to get more engaged in the neighborhood.

See you next week,

David