Facing Out: The Week’s Most Interesting News

September 28, 2024

Max Van Wie catches air on a new mountain bike course that he designed at Mt. Van Hoevenberg in Lake Placid, N.Y., which for the first time this weekend is hosting UCI Mountain Bike World Series events. Nancie Battaglia

Dear Colleagues and Friends:

Every now and again, you come across something that makes you stop and ask: What were they thinking?

The saga of Avila Retirement Community in Albany, N.Y., is a great example.

Avila was built in 2004 in response to a critical and growing need for senior housing in the community. Recognizing this need, the City of Albany worked collaboratively with Avila’s developers to negotiate a 99-year agreement governing the amount of property tax Avila would pay each year. It is important to understand that, but for this agreement, which was approved by the Albany Common Council and the Mayor, Avila would not have been built, and the city would have 200 fewer safe, high-quality housing units for its seniors. Ask New York City what happens when you don’t have enough senior housing to meet the need.

Avila paid its taxes on time every year and otherwise abided by the terms of the agreement for two decades. Then, without warning, the city assessor decided unilaterally that the contract both parties abided by for 20 years was no longer valid and seeks to impose what amounts to a 3,700 percent tax increase on a community whose residents are fixed-income retirees.

Avila is fighting back in court. Still, you can imagine the anxiety this sudden uncertainty is causing for residents and their families. It’s distressing, it’s not right, and it was completely avoidable. What were they thinking?

CRIME DECLINE: You’d never know it by watching the news or the endless peppering of political ads, but crime in the U.S. is trending downward. The FBI’s Summary of Crime in the Nation 2023 reported that violent crime overall was down 3 percent from 2022, with homicides down 11.6 percent and rape falling by 9.4 percent. Property crimes broadly declined as well, with one glaring exception — vehicles thefts spiked 12.6 percent.

WELL, NOT EVERWHERE: Somewhere, the spirit of Boss Tweed is raising a glass to the fragrance of scandal that is enveloping New York City Mayor Eric Adams and a lot of his associates, who, if the feds are right, seem to have created their own mini crime wave. Adams this week became the first sitting mayor in the city’s history to be indicted, charged with bribery, fraud and soliciting a political contribution from a foreign national. Not long after the indictment was unsealed, The New Yorker published a long look at Adams’ history of blurring lines and how the swaggering confidence that is his hallmark might also be his undoing, titling its piece, “The Most Obvious Scandal in the History of New York City.”

LEARNING LOSS: America’s middle and high school students are reading far fewer books as part of school curricula these days, with the focus shifting to teaching key passages or concepts and other shorter-form content that is more aligned with modern needs and attention spans. The idea is not to remove books but to teach media literacy and add other texts that feel relevant to students, a leader at the National Council of Teachers of English, which acknowledged and endorsed the shift, told The Associated Press. Critics are worried about the long-term harm to students’ critical thinking skills.

NIL AND VOID: College football fans, you knew this day was coming. The starting quarterback of an undefeated team that is ranked in the Top 25 for the first time in school history quit the team because, he said, he hadn’t been paid the $100,000 that was promised to him. Matthew Sluka, who transferred to UNLV after a stellar career at Holy Cross, is the first player known to have quit over lack of payment since the NCAA lifted rules for players to receive compensation in 2021. The school responded that Sluka made “financial demands … in order to continue playing,” which the school interpreted as a violation of NCAA rules and which sounds an awful lot like the tactics of a certain former NFL cornerback.

It’s the last sail of summer, the fall colors already showing themselves on Garnet Lake in Johnsburg, N.Y.

CANADIAN ROCKINESS: Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who assumed office in 2015 in the glow of a 63 percent approval rating and with favorable comparisons to his counterpart south of the border, President Obama, is looking increasingly like a lame duck. The opposition Conservative Party initiated a no-confidence vote that, had it passed, would’ve triggered a federal election. Follow-up votes were planned. Trudeau has faced mounting pressure to step down as his approval rating has plummeted under 30 percent.

MIND GAMES: Companies that succeed on a large scale in a competitive marketplace spend a lot of time and energy figuring out not just how to price a product, but how and why the consumer is likely to respond. This attention to consumer behavior explains why prices are so quick to increase when production costs go up, but slow to retreat when those costs come down, according to a trio of researchers from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern. The notion is that we intuitively understand that the prices we pay will increase if production costs increase and we don’t think twice, but when input costs fall, companies with solid sales have an incentive to keep prices constant, given that a price drop may cause consumers to pause and consider comparison shopping.

A MIRACLE OF TECHNOLOGY: Luis Armando Albino was 6 years old when he was kidnapped from an Oakland park in 1951, lured away from his older brother by a woman who promised him candy. Authorities and his family tried for years to find out what happened to him, but all of their efforts yielded not a clue. “This is a rare situation when a boy disappears and doesn’t eventually show up — alive or dead,” Oakland police Lt. Dominic DiFraia told The Oakland Tribune in 1966, 15 years after the abduction. “I’d give an awful lot to find out why.” An online DNA test taken by a niece born a decade after his disappearance yielded the breakthrough everyone was looking for, and with the help of the FBI and other law enforcement, Luis Albino saw his family for the first time in 73 years, including the brother who was with him when he vanished.

POWER PLAY: Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania, the nuclear plant made famous by a near disaster in the 1970s and that last produced power five years ago, is being restarted at a cost of about $1.6 billion to provide a reliable, heavy load of carbon-free electricity for Microsoft data centers. Constellation Energy said it expects to have the undamaged reactor back on line by early 2028. Bobby Hollis, vice president of energy for Microsoft, called the agreement “a major milestone in Microsoft’s efforts to help decarbonize the grid,” The Wall Street Journal reported.

BENEATH THE SURFACE: It may be tempting to chuckle, but if you read the comments on a popular Reddit thread, it’s apparent that being what most people consider to be extremely good looking can come with some very unwelcome and emotionally damaging side effects. Harassment was a big one, of course, but so are the glares of needlessly threatened spouses, aspersions about intelligence and assumptions that someone so good looking must also be vain.

CLOSING TIME: The last full-service Kmart in the United States, on Long Island, will close in October. The discount retailer, known for its blue-light specials, once had 2,000 stores from coast to coast.

TARGET RUN: An 8-year-old in Ohio drove her mother’s Nissan Rogue 25 minutes to the local Target, where police found her enjoying a frappuccino. Her family arrived shortly after to retrieve the car and take her home.

 LUXURY LIVING: One of the largest private homes in the country is coming on the market following the divorce of its longtime owners, billionaire Hyatt hotel heir Tony Pritzker and philanthropist Jeanne Pritzker. The 50,000-square-foot palace is expected to list for $150 million to $200 million.

CORN DOG: A K9 with a sheriff’s department in Michigan found a 3-year-old who had become lost in the corn maze at a local apple orchard. The boy was more than a quarter-mile away in the dense maze, but the dog found him in three minutes. 

BAY STATE BULLS: Eight bulls escaped from a rodeo at a mall in North Attleboro, Mass., and charged through a parking lot, trampling a fence. Luckily, no one was injured.

EUGENE “MERCURY” MORRIS was a star running back for the only undefeated team in NFL history, rushing for more than 1,000 yards and a league-best 12 touchdowns for the 1972 Miami Dolphins, followed a season later by 954 rushing yards, a league-best 6.4 yards a carry and 10 more touchdowns as the Dolphins successfully defended their Super Bowl title. A proud defender of the undefeated team’s legacy and a three-time Pro Bowl selection, Morris served time in prison in the 1980s for cocaine trafficking before the Florida Supreme Court overturned his conviction. He later became a motivational speaker, urging others to avoid drugs. He was 77.

MARGARET NATALIE SMITH was born on the eastern side of London in 1934 to a pathologist father and a Scottish mother who was a secretary. She was 5 when the family moved to Oxford. At a very early age, she had the urge — the compulsion, she later said — to act. She joined the newly formed Oxford Playhouse and made her acting debut in 1952 in “Twelfth Night.” She became one of the finest British stage and screen actors of her generation, with award-winning roles that ranged from a freethinking Scottish schoolteacher in “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie” to the acid-tongued dowager countess on “Downton Abbey.” She was, The New York Times wrote, “its breakout star, from the beginning … playing Lord Grantham’s elderly and still stubbornly Victorian widowed mother, Violet Crawley, the dowager countess. She disapproved of electric lights, was unfamiliar with the word ‘weekend’ and never met a person or situation she couldn’t ridicule with withering imperiousness.” She died in London at 89.

THOMAS McTYGUE started public life as a firefighter and ended up shaping the modern look of Saratoga Springs, N.Y., the longest-serving commissioner in the city’s history, a total of 32 years overseeing public works under six mayors. He knew how to drive a plow or cut a political deal and is credited with leading efforts to beautify the city with flowers and trees along Broadway and restoring the historic Kaydeross Carousel and monuments in Congress Park. When he closed the city landfill, he figured out a plan to harness methane from the buried organic material to power ice-making at a public skating rink across the street. He was 83.

“She had an unexpected issue with kids when she was pretty young, and I just wanted her to get more confidence and be able to defend herself. So she had to choose something, whether it was martial arts, or boxing, wrestling, something like that. She chose boxing.”
— Krista Sbuttoni, whose daughter, Nya Almodovar, a sophomore at Albany (N.Y) High School, just won the 114-pound novice title at the USA Women’s Boxing Championships in Louisiana.

FROM THE HEART: Drivers for a West Michigan school district used 28 yellow school buses to spell out “We (Love) U” in an open field, a message to a terminally ill colleague who saw it from hundreds of feet up in a balloon.

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Principal Author: Bill Callen.

Contributors: Mark Behan, Ryan Moore, Kristy Miller, John Brodt, Claire P. Tuttle, Nancie Battaglia and Emily Miller.

FACING OUT is what we do. We help companies, organizations and individuals work effectively with their most important external audiences – their customers, their shareholders, their communities, the government and the news media.  www.behancommunications.com

Facing Out features news and other nuggets that caught our eye, and that we thought might be of value to you, our friends and business associates. Some items are good news about our clients and friends, others are stories that we hope will leave you a bit more informed or entertained than you were five minutes ago. As always, we welcome your ideas and feedback. 

Let’s make it a conversation: mark.behan@behancom.com