Across the political divide, many people are still sceptical of the two-decade-old reform programme that underpins the boom, including leading lights of the ruling Congress party.
The proposed steps supplemented the state's year-old reform efforts, which a Manhattan-based advocacy group, Children's Rights Inc., declared inadequate.
Mr. Espinal, 27, the chief of staff for City Councilman Erik Martin Dilan and the chosen candidate of the Brooklyn party chairman, Vito J. Lopez, defeated Jesus Gonzalez, the 26-year-old reform candidate running on the Working Families Party line.
The court belongs to a raggedy neighborhood gym called Eastern Athletic, which, for the past twenty-eight years, has leased the top six floors of the oldest reform synagogue in the borough.
New Jersey v. Neulander, better known as the Cherry Hill Rabbi trial, will decide the fate of Fred J. Neulander, the 60-year-old Reform rabbi accused of arranging the murder of his wife in 1994.
The House Ethics Committee has quietly rescinded a 10-year-old reform that required the committee to issue a report on its findings when an investigation fails to result in charges against a lawmaker.
"It is a small price to pay for tranquillity" is how Michael Williams, the chief rabbi of the Synagogue Copernic, the oldest reform synagogue in France — and, in 1980, the first to be bombed by extremists — explains the fact that most French Christians and Jews, while not precisely in favor of laws like that, were quite willing to accept one.
The $7.5 million project represents the end of a long journey for the 54-year-old Reform congregation, which gave up its sanctuary on Second Avenue when it became clear that development plans for that site would never be realized, after which it moved into rented quarters at First Avenue and 23rd Street.
The new numbers come from a program dubbed FireStatLA, which is being billed as the cornerstone of a 2-year-old reform effort.
Democrats control the body by a 24-14 margin, but decades-old reforms require them to cobble together a two-thirds supermajority to pass a budget or raise taxes.
