My Home Constructions’s new project in Hyderabad

My Home Constru-ctions has announced a new residential project Vihanga, near Wipro Junction at Gachibowli in Hyderabad. The 21-acre project will have close to 2,000 apartments, sized between 1,115 sq ft and 2,160 sq ft.

According to the company’s chairman, Jupally Rameswar Rao, the project has been launched with an inaugural offer price of Rs 4,100 per sq ft and the company has by now received bookings for about 60 per cent of the units. It will take about three to four years to complete all phases.

The project will have 20 blocks in a combination of ground-plus-14 and ground-plus-17 floors. About 16 blocks will have six flats in each floor. “We have ensured that over 70 per cent of the total area is open and the rest is ground coverage,” he said.

The size of two BHK units are in the range of 1,115 and 1,275 sq ft and the three BHKs measure between 1,690 and 2,160 sq ft. The four BHKs, also called sky villas, will have landscaped terrace. Its total built-up area will be around 3,500,000 sq ft.

There will be dedicated two-level parking which will accommodate about 3,400 vehicles. Amenities include a reception lounge, jogging track, outdoor play, Car park management system, tennis courts, swimming pool and a skating rink. There will also be multipurpose halls, a clubhouse, gym, spa, guest rooms, convenience stores and a crèche, Rao said.

The project will also have wi-fi enabled areas, car wash area and automated billing for water, power, gas usage and maintenance. On the safety aspects, Rao said the project will have a fire alarm, fire sprinklers in individual flats and wet rises in parking and other common areas. It will also have a security system with motion sensor cameras in the common areas, intercom facility to all units connecting security as well as solar fencing.

Library officials are getting ready to install a new surveillance system that should be a dramatic improvement from the current one, Director Linda Andrews told the Hoover Library Board tonight.Library officials are in talks with a contractor to install 32-36 new security cameras as part of the first phase of the new system, Andrews said. A second phase planned for later would bring the total to 57 cameras, she said.

The current cameras use technology that is 12 years old, Andrews said. “You can’t even recognize a person’s face. There’s no way to even identify anybody,” she said.Newer technology produces much better images, Andrews said. The new system also will cover the parking lot, whereas the current system does not, she said.

Andrews emphasized that the cameras will monitor open areas, hallways and stairways. They will not be used to invade people’s privacy, she said. “The cameras are not going to be looking at what people are reading or looking at on computers,” she said.The camera system will be hooked in to the Police Department for monitoring and is being designed to complement and connect with a more extensive security camera upgrade planned for other city buildings, Andrews said.

Funds for the project are coming out of money the library had left over from roof repairs that came in way under budget, Andrews said. Library officials had budgeted $500,000 for roof repairs, but the work ended up costing about $262,000, leaving a $238,000 surplus, she said. City officials were gracious to allow the library to use the leftover money for other library projects, she said.

The total cost for the first phase of security camera upgrades has not been determined until a contract is reached with the installation company, she said.Other money left over from the roof project will be used to remodel the circulation desk at the entrance to the library, Assistant Director Amanda Borden said.

The current design has people coming to library personnel for help from all directions, and staff members have to bounce around from one location to another to assist people, Borden said. The new design will reduce the size of the desk and allow for more efficient service, she said.

Construction bids are due by Thursday, and library officials hope to start construction by the first or second week of September, Borden said. The project should take about 90 days, she said.

“Hopefully, by the first of December, we’ll have a new, parking system, more efficient circulation desk installed,” she said.The front entrance may be a bit of an eyesore during construction because workers will block off their work area with a temporary wall, Borden said. A temporary circulation desk will be set up in the interim period, she said.

In other business tonight, Andrews informed the Library Board that the Hoover Public Library has received a $26,500 federal grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services to upgrade its public print management system, which allows people to print out and copy documents.

Equipment with the existing print management system was introduced in 2002, library records show. The system has printed more than 1 million documents and has had software updates over the years, but the equipment itself has not been updated and has experienced prolonged outages in the past year while waiting for repairs, library records indicate.

Read the full products at www.parkeasy-pgs.com.

Carlisle Dispatch Center transition plan released

A transition plan released Tuesday details what to expect should the borough council decide to transfer police dispatch operations from Carlisle Police Department to the county.

A meeting was also announced for 6:30 p.m. Aug. 29, at the borough building, 53. W. South St. At that meeting council is expected to make its decision concerning the transfer and the lieutenant structure of the department.At the direction of the council in June, Borough Manager Matt Candland, Police Chief Stephen Margeson and Mayor William “Doc” Kronenberg worked out the parking guidance system .The question of whether the department should have one lieutenant or two, however, remains a sticking point.

Kronenberg and Margeson recommend retaining the current two lieutenant structure. That structure was put in place 23 years ago after a study recommended the creation of two divisions — field operations and administrative services.They said most of the lieutenant’s responsibilities would remain even if dispatch is transferred to the county. The lieutenants are also part of the management team which deals with personnel issues and, with three members, is available at all times for critical events.

“We do not advocate keeping it the same simply because that’s the way we have always done it, but rather because it works well,” Margeson writes in the plan document.Margeson and Kronenberg said the department would need to be completely restructured if a position is eliminated.

The decision would affect the accreditation of the department, which they said is a demanding and time-consuming process, and would take officers from patrols and investigations to work on administrative tasks.However, he writes, most of the tasks assigned to the administrative lieutenant can be reassigned to other borough departments or transferred to the county 911 center should council approve the transfer of dispatch operations. The “few remaining” tasks would be taken on by the chief of police or administrative personnel, who will also have reduced work loads as a result of the transfer.

Candland also recommends that an additional patrol officer be hired with the savings through the elimination of the second lieutenant position “This would allow for enhanced community policing and patrol,” he wrote.

It goes on to describe the process by which phone calls would be handled. When a resident calls 911, a dispatcher at the county would dispatch the call immediately rather than transfer the call to the Carlisle dispatch.Residents would still be able to call the dispatch number, 243-5252, for routine business or to report a non-emergency. Those calls would be answered by a police department administrative staff member who would either resolve the issue or transfer the call to the county’s non-emergency dispatch.

The transition would be “relatively simple and seamless to non-uniformed borough staff,” according to the report. The staff would have to be trained in the use of the radios, public works would take over maintenance at the police station, and the borough’s information technology department would take over IT issues.

Based on the recommendations in the report, the transition plan offers two alternatives — neither of which directly addressed the costs of maintaining the second lieutenant position. The alternatives consider the costs of the radio system and the records system fixed since both will need to be replaced in the next few years whether dispatch is moved or not.

The first alternative, which recommends the purchase of the C-Net records management system, would have a net cost of $215,500 in the first year with possible savings of as much as $99,500 in 2015, depending on the number of administrative full-time employees retained.The second alternative, which recommends the purchase of the Cody records management system, would cost $308,000 in the first year, but show net savings of up to $93,200 in 2015 depending on staffing.

The Hermon-based company, he said, does things like keep its locomotive running unattended to allow single-person crews on its trains and to save paying two-man rail crews for the few hours it would take to do basic brake tests.

“If you know the industry, you know the safety protocols in place have been arrived at through trial and error through the last 160 years, and you realize that what is involved is arrogance and disrespect to the traditions of the industry,” Stem said. “They were willing to gamble the lives of communities to save an hour or two.

Ed Burkhardt, president of the parent company that owns MMA, Rail World Inc., did not return messages seeking comment Tuesday. Robert Grindrod, MMA’s president, has declined to comment on all matters pertaining to the parking system.

Burkhardt previously dismissed claims that the accident was created by the train having a one-man crew as “a red herring.” He has consistently defended the railroad’s practices as safe.

Investigators of the Lac-Megantic tragedy have said it is too early to determine what caused the crash, North America’s worst rail disaster in two decades. Two big questions are whether the lone engineer applied sufficient hand brakes when he parked the train for the night and why the fuel in the rail cars was so volatile, creating huge explosions and a deadly wall of fire after derailing.

The train had 72 cars of light crude oil when it derailed in Lac-Megantic, killing 47 people. It had been parked for the night, one of its engines running to keep its airbrake system charged, on a steep grade in the nearby town of Nantes by the engineer more than an hour before the accident. Nantes firefighters have said that the engine was shut off after they doused a fire per the standard operating procedure dictated by MMA, Canadian media has reported.

The Federal Railroad Administration emergency order Friday banned parking unattended trains carrying hazardous materials on main rail lines unless government authorized.The order requires railroads to submit guidelines to FRA for securing unattended trains hauling hazardous materials and mandates that workers aboard trains transporting hazardous materials must report to dispatchers the number of hand brakes applied, the train’s tonnage and length, the track’s grade and terrain, among other things.

Company listed on the London Stock Exchange

In May this year, a huge company listed on the London Stock Exchange found itself in the midst of controversy about a prison it runs for the government – Thameside, a newly built jail next to Belmarsh, in south-east London. A report by Her Majesty’s Inspectorate found that 60% of its inmates were locked up all day, and there were only “vague plans to restore the prison to normality”. The prison campaign group the Howard League for Penal Reform talked about conditions that were “truly alarming”.

Two months later, the same company was the subject of a high- profile report published by the House Of Commons public accounts committee, prompted by the work of Guardian journalist Felicity Lawrence. This time, attention was focused on how it was managing out-of-hours GP services in Cornwall, and massive failings that had first surfaced two years before. Again, the verdict was damning: data had been falsified, national standards had not been met, there was a culture of “lying and cheating”, and the service offered to the public was simply “not good enough”.

Three weeks ago, there came grimmer news. Thanks to its contracts for tagging offenders, the company was now the focus of panic at the Ministry of Justice, where it had been discovered that it was one of two contractors that had somehow overcharged the government for its services, possibly by as much as ￡50m; there were suggestions that one in six of the tags that the state had paid for did not actually exist. How this happened is still unclear, but justice secretary Chris Grayling has said the allegations represent something “wholly indefensible and Car park management system“.

The firm that links these three stories together is Serco. Its range of activities, here and abroad, is truly mind-boggling, taking in no end of things that were once done by the state, but are now outsourced to private companies. Amazingly, its contracts with government are subject to what’s known as “commercial confidentiality” and as a private firm it’s not open to Freedom of Information requests, so looking into the details of what it does is fraught with difficulty.

But the basic facts are plain enough. As well as five British prisons and the tags attached to over 8,000 English and Welsh offenders, Serco sees to two immigration removal centres, at Colnbrook near Heathrow, and Yarl’s Wood in Bedfordshire. You’ll also see its logo on the Docklands Light Railway and Woolwich ferry, and is a partner in both Liverpool’s Merseyrail network, and the Northern Rail franchise, which sees to trains that run in a huge area between the North Midlands and English-Scottish border.

Serco runs school inspections in parts of England, speed cameras all over the UK, and the National Nuclear Laboratory, based at the Sellafield site in Cumbria. It also holds the contracts for the management of the UK’s ballistic missile early warning system on the Yorkshire moors, the running of the Manchester Aquatics Centre, and London’s “Boris bikes”.

As evidenced by the story of how it handled out-of-hours care in Cornwall, it is also an increasingly big player in a health service that is being privatised at speed, in the face of surprisingly little public opposition: among its array of NHS contracts is a new role seeing to “community health services” in Suffolk, which involves 1,030 employees. The company is also set to bid for an even bigger healthcare contract in Cambridgeshire and Peterborough: the NHS’s single-biggest privatisation – or, if you prefer, “outsourcing” – to date, which could be worth over ￡1bn.

But even this is only a fraction of the story. Among their scores of roles across the planet, Serco is responsible for air traffic control in the United Arab Emirates, parking-meter services in Chicago, driving tests in Ontario, and an immigration detention centre on Christmas Island, run on behalf of those well-known friends of overseas visitors the Australian government.

In the US, the company has just been awarded a controversial $1.25bn contract by that country’s Department of Health. All told, its operations suggest some real-life version of the fantastical mega-corporations that have long been invented by fiction writers; a more benign version of the Tyrell Corporation from Blade Runner, say, or one of those creations from James Bond movies whose name always seems to end with the word “industries”.

The strangest thing, though, is the gap between Serco’s size and how little the public knows about it. Not for nothing does so much coverage of its work include the sentence “the biggest company you’ve never heard of”.

I first heard Serco’s name about eight years ago, when I was just starting to understand the amazing growth of what are now called “public service companies”. Once I started looking, their logos were everywhere, suggesting a shadow state that has since grown ever-bigger. Their names seemed anonymously stylised, in keeping with the sense that they seemed both omnipresent, and barely known: Interserve, Sodexo, Capita, the Compass Group.

Serco is among the biggest of parking system. At the last count, its annual pre-tax profits were up 27%, at ￡302m. In 2012 alone, its British workforce grew by 10,000, to 53,000 people (tellingly, as many as 90% of them are said to be former civil servant employees). In terms of employees, that makes it more than twice as large as the BBC, and around 20% bigger than Philip Green’s Arcadia group. A very significant player, in other words, and one that has come a long way since its foundation 1929, when it was a branch of the American RCA corporation called RCA Services Ltd, involved in the then booming UK cinema industry. It was renamed Serco in 1987, after a management buy-out, and floated on the stock exchange the following year. In the 25 subsequent years, during which the UK has grown ever-fouder of outsourcing and privatisation, Serco has grown at an amazing rate.

In 2010, Hyman was given a CBE for services to business and charity; he is also an enthusiastic fan of motor racing and an evangelical Christian. Four years ago, he was asked about his company’s very low profile, and he said this: “We had a dilemma – what do we do with the Serco name. We are proud of it. We thought we needed billboards at airports and places like that, to be seen with Tiger Woods on. But we worked out very quickly that is not what we are meant to do. We are meant to be known by the 5,000 not the five billion. The people who serve the people need to choose who supplies the service. We are delighted when the public knows who we are, but really, we need to be known by the people who make decisions.”

When Serco made its bid to run NHS community-health services in Suffolk – district nursing, physiotherapy, OT, end-of-life palliative care, wheelchair services – it reckoned it could do it for ￡140m over three years – ￡16m less than the existing NHS “provider” had managed, which would eventually allow for their standard profit margin of around 6% a year. When it started to become clear that Serco was the frontrunner, there was some opposition, but perhaps not nearly enough. “Suffolk isn’t the most politically active part of the country,” says one local insider. “And the staff were very lackadaisical. It was: ‘NHS Suffolk wouldn’t made a bad decision.’ So it was hard to get a campaign going.”

Serco was officially awarded the contract in October 2012, which meant that hundreds of staff would leave the NHS, and become company employees. Within weeks, the company proposed a huge reorganisation, which involved getting rid of one in six jobs. This has since come down to one in seven, two thirds of which will apparently go via natural wastage. In terms of their pay and conditions, the hundreds of people who have been transferred from the NHS to Serco are protected by provisions laid down by the last government, but it is already becoming clear that many new staff are on inferior contracts: as one local source puts it, “they’ve got less annual leave, less sick pay … it’s significantly worse.”

Meanwhile, other people are reportedly quitting their jobs, and the service given to patients is said to be getting worse. “In my team alone, we’re 50% down on staffing hours compared with last year,” says one former NHS worker, who provides home-care to patients who are largely elderly. Thanks to poor morale, she says that the team in which she works has lost around a third of its staff, and she is also having to see to administrative tasks that were previously carried out by someone else: in addition, she claims, support for a new IT regime is “farcical”.

The company that is running Britain

In May this year, a huge company listed on the London Stock Exchange found itself in the midst of controversy about a prison it runs for the government – Thameside, a newly built jail next to Belmarsh, in south-east London. A report by Her Majesty’s Inspectorate found that 60% of its inmates were locked up all day, and there were only “vague plans to restore the prison to normality”. The prison campaign group the Howard League for Penal Reform talked about conditions that were “truly alarming”.

Two months later, the same company was the subject of a high- profile report published by the House Of Commons public accounts committee, prompted by the work of Guardian journalist Felicity Lawrence. This time, attention was focused on how it was managing out-of-hours GP services in Cornwall, and massive failings that had first surfaced two years before. Again, the verdict was damning: data had been falsified, national standards had not been met, there was a culture of “lying and cheating”, and the service offered to the public was simply “not good enough”.

Three weeks ago, there came grimmer news. Thanks to its contracts for tagging offenders, the company was now the focus of panic at the Ministry of Justice, where it had been discovered that it was one of two contractors that had somehow overcharged the government for its services, possibly by as much as ￡50m; there were suggestions that one in six of the tags that the state had paid for did not actually exist. How this happened is still unclear, but justice secretary Chris Grayling has said the allegations represent something “wholly indefensible and Car park management system“.

The firm that links these three stories together is Serco. Its range of activities, here and abroad, is truly mind-boggling, taking in no end of things that were once done by the state, but are now outsourced to private companies. Amazingly, its contracts with government are subject to what’s known as “commercial confidentiality” and as a private firm it’s not open to Freedom of Information requests, so looking into the details of what it does is fraught with difficulty.

But the basic facts are plain enough. As well as five British prisons and the tags attached to over 8,000 English and Welsh offenders, Serco sees to two immigration removal centres, at Colnbrook near Heathrow, and Yarl’s Wood in Bedfordshire. You’ll also see its logo on the Docklands Light Railway and Woolwich ferry, and is a partner in both Liverpool’s Merseyrail network, and the Northern Rail franchise, which sees to trains that run in a huge area between the North Midlands and English-Scottish border.

Serco runs school inspections in parts of England, speed cameras all over the UK, and the National Nuclear Laboratory, based at the Sellafield site in Cumbria. It also holds the contracts for the management of the UK’s ballistic missile early warning system on the Yorkshire moors, the running of the Manchester Aquatics Centre, and London’s “Boris bikes”.

As evidenced by the story of how it handled out-of-hours care in Cornwall, it is also an increasingly big player in a health service that is being privatised at speed, in the face of surprisingly little public opposition: among its array of NHS contracts is a new role seeing to “community health services” in Suffolk, which involves 1,030 employees. The company is also set to bid for an even bigger healthcare contract in Cambridgeshire and Peterborough: the NHS’s single-biggest privatisation – or, if you prefer, “outsourcing” – to date, which could be worth over ￡1bn.

But even this is only a fraction of the story. Among their scores of roles across the planet, Serco is responsible for air traffic control in the United Arab Emirates, parking-meter services in Chicago, driving tests in Ontario, and an immigration detention centre on Christmas Island, run on behalf of those well-known friends of overseas visitors the Australian government.

In the US, the company has just been awarded a controversial $1.25bn contract by that country’s Department of Health. All told, its operations suggest some real-life version of the fantastical mega-corporations that have long been invented by fiction writers; a more benign version of the Tyrell Corporation from Blade Runner, say, or one of those creations from James Bond movies whose name always seems to end with the word “industries”.

The strangest thing, though, is the gap between Serco’s size and how little the public knows about it. Not for nothing does so much coverage of its work include the sentence “the biggest company you’ve never heard of”.

I first heard Serco’s name about eight years ago, when I was just starting to understand the amazing growth of what are now called “public service companies”. Once I started looking, their logos were everywhere, suggesting a shadow state that has since grown ever-bigger. Their names seemed anonymously stylised, in keeping with the sense that they seemed both omnipresent, and barely known: Interserve, Sodexo, Capita, the Compass Group.

Serco is among the biggest of parking system. At the last count, its annual pre-tax profits were up 27%, at ￡302m. In 2012 alone, its British workforce grew by 10,000, to 53,000 people (tellingly, as many as 90% of them are said to be former civil servant employees). In terms of employees, that makes it more than twice as large as the BBC, and around 20% bigger than Philip Green’s Arcadia group. A very significant player, in other words, and one that has come a long way since its foundation 1929, when it was a branch of the American RCA corporation called RCA Services Ltd, involved in the then booming UK cinema industry. It was renamed Serco in 1987, after a management buy-out, and floated on the stock exchange the following year. In the 25 subsequent years, during which the UK has grown ever-fouder of outsourcing and privatisation, Serco has grown at an amazing rate.

In 2010, Hyman was given a CBE for services to business and charity; he is also an enthusiastic fan of motor racing and an evangelical Christian. Four years ago, he was asked about his company’s very low profile, and he said this: “We had a dilemma – what do we do with the Serco name. We are proud of it. We thought we needed billboards at airports and places like that, to be seen with Tiger Woods on. But we worked out very quickly that is not what we are meant to do. We are meant to be known by the 5,000 not the five billion. The people who serve the people need to choose who supplies the service. We are delighted when the public knows who we are, but really, we need to be known by the people who make decisions.”

When Serco made its bid to run NHS community-health services in Suffolk – district nursing, physiotherapy, OT, end-of-life palliative care, wheelchair services – it reckoned it could do it for ￡140m over three years – ￡16m less than the existing NHS “provider” had managed, which would eventually allow for their standard profit margin of around 6% a year. When it started to become clear that Serco was the frontrunner, there was some opposition, but perhaps not nearly enough. “Suffolk isn’t the most politically active part of the country,” says one local insider. “And the staff were very lackadaisical. It was: ‘NHS Suffolk wouldn’t made a bad decision.’ So it was hard to get a campaign going.”

Serco was officially awarded the contract in October 2012, which meant that hundreds of staff would leave the NHS, and become company employees. Within weeks, the company proposed a huge reorganisation, which involved getting rid of one in six jobs. This has since come down to one in seven, two thirds of which will apparently go via natural wastage. In terms of their pay and conditions, the hundreds of people who have been transferred from the NHS to Serco are protected by provisions laid down by the last government, but it is already becoming clear that many new staff are on inferior contracts: as one local source puts it, “they’ve got less annual leave, less sick pay … it’s significantly worse.”

Meanwhile, other people are reportedly quitting their jobs, and the service given to patients is said to be getting worse. “In my team alone, we’re 50% down on staffing hours compared with last year,” says one former NHS worker, who provides home-care to patients who are largely elderly. Thanks to poor morale, she says that the team in which she works has lost around a third of its staff, and she is also having to see to administrative tasks that were previously carried out by someone else: in addition, she claims, support for a new IT regime is “farcical”.

In defense of public-private partnerships

Pitchforks raised, a mob of critics pounced on an article I wrote recently for the New York Times in which I dared to assert that the city of Detroit could have benefited from selling or leasing some of its infrastructure assets to private investors in return for large, up-front payments, a reduced debt load and a chance to improve public services under a more efficient, business-minded operating model.

My essay advocated a new wave of public-private partnerships (P3s) for U.S. cities — and I cited several prominent success stories, among them the Chicago Metered Parking System, which transferred 36,000 on-street parking meters to a concession run by Chicago Parking Meters LLC (CPM), a company backed by private equity investors. The 75-year contract, commenced in 2010, delivered $1.15 billion to the city and has been cited as a model for how to run a municipal parking guidance system.

Not so fast, say the detractors, including Reuters’ MuniLand blogger Cate Long. They carped that the article did not mention that I represented investors in several of the P3 transactions described, including CPM (even though my professional bio highlights my role in each of the deals – the Times has since updated the piece accordingly). More seriously, they claim that the CPM partnership has been an abject failure. “The city got ripped off, and continues to get ripped off each day because of this travesty,” said one responder. MuniLand’s Long called it a “municipal scam.”

In fact, this “scam” helped Chicago rank number one in the world for on-street parking in a 2011 IBM Global Parking and Transportation Survey. Among 20 major cities surveyed worldwide, Chicago drivers needed the shortest time to find a space, had the fewest tickets and fewest disputes over spaces, and suffered the least emotional and economic pain over parking, which as any driver will attest, is high praise. In its 2011 Annual Privatization Report, Reason Foundation noted that CPM’s “state-of-the-art maintenance system makes it one of the most sophisticated operations in the U.S.” Reason added, “The Windy City is now an international leader” in parking.

How did such accolades occur in so short a time? Perhaps it’s because CPM invested $35 million in upgrades, replacing the old single-space meters with 5,000 pay stations that accept credit and debit cards, feature an online refund option and provide 24-hour customer service. Drivers will soon be able to digitally feed the meters with their smartphones. The advent of CPM also helped to expose what the Chicago Sun-Times called “widespread disability parking abuses,” with “able-bodied people using relatives’ placards, fake placards and even stolen placards to park for free,” sometimes for days. The practice caused both the city and CPM to lose millions of dollars in revenue, leading to passage of Public Act 097-0845, which established strict criteria for free parking and to reduce incidence of fraud. Reason Foundation noted that under CPM, local residents and small business owners —  including those in Chicago’s ethnic communities — reported a marked increase in available spaces in their neighborhoods.

Chicagoans have benefited in other ways from public-private partnerships, including those involving the Grant Park parking garages and Chicago Skyway toll bridge. A report entitled “Examining Parking Privatization as a Fiscal Solution” published in Government Finance Review stated, “The money received in these deals has been used to pay off debt associated with building Millennium Park, improving the infrastructure of neighborhood parks, funding programs for low-income residents, settling budget deficits, and establishing a long-term reserve fund.” Noting the enormous expenditures needed to renovate the city’s troubled parking system, the report concluded that “Maintaining these garages would have become a significant burden on the city. Leasing the garages allowed Chicago to place the repair obligations on the private operator and free up capital for other projects.”

The hue-and-cry over my article illustrates a fundamental fallacy of those who would bash P3 deals — that they dupe cities to hand over crown-jewel assets to Wall Street barracudas. Nothing could be further from the truth. Municipalities retain control over the assets they lease and over any payments owed to the concessionaire over the life of the concession. P3s are subject to strict procurement laws — and any increases in fees are governed by strict regulatory approval.  Control over the underlying assets remains with the municipality. The concession contracts impose stringent performance standards on the operator which, if not performed, allow the municipality to terminate the concession. Many P3s also include a revenue share with the municipality.

What is certain is that most cities can’t provide the level of investment needed to create and maintain infrastructure and related services that are fit for 21st century usage. The professional management and innovative technology a private operator brings to public infrastructure is value enhancing. Meanwhile, it’s the investors who assume the risk in taking over delivery of services for many decades to come. Even then, returns on P3 investments are a far cry from the alpha earned on hedge funds, more in line with an investor-owned electric utility.

And there’s another point: P3 deals rehabilitate more than public conveniences. Often, the transactions deliver vital services for sanitation, transportation or healthcare. For a partnership structured to privatize the municipal water and waste systems of Bayonne, New Jersey — another deal in which I advised investors — the private capital used to fund the concession was critical in replacing decades-old pipes and meters. In this case, serious public safety concerns – including main breaks, contamination and boil water advisories — were addressed by a P3.

For Detroit, the die is cast. As a result of its Chapter 9 filing, the Motor City will have to sell some of its non-core assets to cover $18 billion in liabilities. Let’s hope that Detroit’s emergency manager is able to partner up with some patient, long-view investors willing to invest in the city’s future for generations. And may other strapped towns avert their own bankruptcies by welcoming more private investment in public infrastructure. For any U.S. city today not even to consider a P3 option would be the real scam.

SEC tries ‘Al Capone’ tactic to put SAC’s Cohen

In the end, Greenwich billionaire Steven Cohen, one of the most successful hedge-fund managers of his generation, could end up getting banned from the business he dominated for an error of omission, not commission.

In an administrative action that constitutes its first formal salvo against Cohen, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission alleged he failed to supervise two wayward portfolio managers and ignored “red flags.” The agency stops short of accusing the owner of Stamford-based SAC Capital Advisors of insider trading. While the proceeding may result in his being barred from managing other people’s money, it won’t carry the potential penalties available if the SEC had sued him. It also pales in comparison to a grand jury indictment for securities fraud, and the 20 year prison term a conviction could bring.

Instead, the SEC claim that Cohen should have known two of his subordinates were using material, non-public information to rack up hundreds of millions of dollars in trading profits will be easier to prove. The regulator will have a lesser burden of proof and won’t have to deal with all of the protections afforded a defendant in a lawsuit, let alone a prosecution.

“They are using an Al Capone-style tactic,” said John Coffee of Columbia Law School, referring to the prosecution of the Chicago gangster in 1931 on charges of tax evasion. “The SEC is aiming at his kneecaps, not his jugular. This is a little like catching John Dillinger entering a bank with a submachine gun and charging him with double parking.”

The SEC, which seeks to ban Cohen from the financial industry for life in the Car park management system, alleged he received “highly suspicious” information that should have caused any reasonable hedge-fund manager to investigate the basis for trades by subordinates Mathew Martoma and Michael Steinberg.

Cohen may find some guidance in how to respond to the agency from Rajat Gupta, the former Goldman Sachs director charged in the Galleon Group insider trading probe. Gupta sued the SEC after it filed an administrative action against him, saying he wanted the SEC to sue him so he could fairly defend himself. After both sides dropped their actions, agreeing any SEC matter would be in a federal court, Gupta was indicted by a federal grand jury. The SEC sued him, too.

An SEC administrative proceeding is held before an administrative law judge, not a U.S. district judge or federal jury. The administrative law judge will rule “no later than 300 days” from the date which the order was served, the agency said.The administrative law judge, in Washington D.C., will hear testimony and issue a determination, parking system, said Tom Gorman, a former lawyer with the SEC’s Enforcement Division who is now in private practice.

After the administrative judge issues a ruling, the SEC makes the final determination, evaluating the facts supporting the allegations. Cohen may appeal to the federal appeals court in Washington, which handles such regulatory matters.But unlike if he were sued by the agency, Cohen won’t be entitled to evidence collected by the government, a distinct advantage if its only goal is to put him out of business.

SAC spokesman Jonathan Gasthalter has said the agency’s action against Cohen “has no merit.” Kevin Callahan, a spokesman for the SEC, didn’t return a call seeking comment.SAC oversees $15 billion, about 60 percent of which is money from Cohen and employees. Cohen, whose net worth is estimated at about $9 billion, has returned 25 percent a year in his funds since founding his firm in 1992, after taking half of the profits in fees, a record unsurpassed by other equity hedge-fund managers.

SAC portfolio manager Mathew Martoma, 39, was charged by the U.S. in November with insider trading. Prosecutors accused him of helping Cohen’s hedge fund reap at least $276 million by trading on illicit tips about an Alzheimer’s drug. SAC’s Michael Steinberg, 41, was indicted in March by a federal grand jury in Manhattan for allegedly earning more than $1.4 million by trading on illegal tips about Dell and Nvidia.Both men, who were also sued by the SEC for insider trading, have pleaded not guilty in the criminal cases brought by Manhattan U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara, and are scheduled to go to trial separately in November.Regulators alleged Cohen, 57, ignored the suspicious actions of his subordinates and signs that pointed to malfeasance, in a failure to properly supervise that allowed the alleged illegal trades to take place.

In the administrative action, the agency for the first time described Cohen’s alleged personal involvement in trading activities with the two subordinates, including a claim that Cohen sold off hundreds of thousands of shares of Dell in August 2008. The SEC said the sale came after Steinberg sent Cohen an email that the U.S. alleged included nonpublic information about the company’s disappointing earnings set to be reported days later. The agency doesn’t allege that Cohen knew that the information was illegal, a prerequisite to any prosecution of Cohen for insider trading. Instead, the SEC said he failed to supervise the men after receiving information that should have caused a “reasonable” hedge fund manager to investigate the basis for the trades.

The nature of the agency’s action against Cohen, in effect a disciplinary action that occurs internally, caught many by surprise, since it comes after years of scrutiny by federal authorities, both civil and criminal.”If they put Steve Cohen out of business, it’s not normally something you would see from a failure to supervise case,” said Hillary Sale, a law professor at Washington University in St. Louis. “You see failure to supervise cases in the broker-dealer world, but not with a fish this big.”

The SEC proceeding against Cohen was brought July 19, just days before the agency faced a five-year statute-of-limitations deadline stemming from trades sparked by Martoma’s tips made in late July 2008.The agency action now puts the regulator at the forefront of the U.S. investigation of Cohen and his hedge fund.The government’s six-year insider-trading crackdown on fund managers, analysts and insiders at technology companies has resulted in charges against more than 80 people and convictions against 73 people.Prior to last week’s filing, the government’s major actions against alleged inside traders and their associates have largely been tandem federal enforcement efforts — pairing simultaneous charges by Bharara’s office with a lawsuit by the SEC.

Earlier this month, the Wall Street Journal, citing unidentified sources, claimed federal prosecutors had concluded they didn’t have enough evidence to charge Cohen by the end of this month for crimes related to Martoma’s tips. “This matter has been investigated for months,” said Tom Gorman, a former lawyer with the SEC’s enforcement division, now a partner at Dorsey & Whitney in Washington. “Clearly the SEC does not have the facts to bring an insider trading case or they would have brought it.”

Gorman said the SEC’s action was based on two criminal insider-trading cases that have yet to go to trial. Should either Martoma or Steinberg be acquitted, it could damage the SEC’s proceeding, he said.While he wouldn’t address the Cohen case specifically, Bharara took the unusual step in a speech last week of pointing out that prosecutors have other statutes, including conspiracy, that can push back any statute of limitations deadlines.

The Dementia Rescue Missions

On the afternoon of November 23, 2012, Sam Counts left his home on East Ninth Avenue in Spokane Valley to pick up bread from the grocery store. Simple enough. He had just gotten back from Christmas shopping with his wife of 45 years, now also his full-time caretaker. Counts, 71, had been diagnosed with dementia less than a year earlier. Hanging onto normalcy before the disease progressed further, Sam’s daughter Sue Belote would visit him several times a week, and he would still call her on the phone, she says. Sam’s doctor had said it was OK to drive, as long as someone else was in the car. On this Friday, Sam got into his white 2012 Kia SUV alone.

After two hours Donna called her daughter, worried. “I don’t know what to do. Dad didn’t come back and he never stays away this long,” she said. Three hours after he left, the family reported Sam Counts missing.The next morning, Saturday, radio and television outlets reported versions of the same story: a local man missing, trim, six feet tall, last seen in a red-and-black jacket, jeans and white tennis shoes. A description of a car and its license plate number was included.

Over seven frantic days, with the help of the Spokane County Sheriff’s Office, friends and family led a search that spanned parts of three states. They enlisted the help of a family friend who worked for the parking management system to flyer local buses, and former colleagues of Counts in the postal service put up missing person photos in post offices. In the meantime, the family faced public criticism. Why was he allowed to get into the car alone? Why didn’t he have a cell phone?

Wandering behavior has become increasingly familiar. Yet Washington is not prepared to deal with this emerging public health threat. Few police departments have policies or training to educate officers on Alzheimer’s or dementia. An Amber Alert-like system set up in 2009 to help find wandering people is underused, its coordinator acknowledges, and bills to create a formal Silver Alert system like those in more than 20 other states foundered in both houses of the state Legislature this year.  Washington is also one of just six states that haven’t even started work on a statewide Alzheimer’s plan, even as the population at risk of wandering surges.

Over the same five-year period, at least 33 Washington residents with dementia who wandered have been found safe, according to news media reports. In each of those cases, law enforcement became involved either as a result of a missing persons report filed by family or a caretaker or when alerted to unusual behavior by a member of the public. King County Search and Rescue has responded to 10 cases involving Alzheimer’s or dementia since the start of 2012, all of which ended safely. Countless other cases are not reported to the police, not reported in the media, or both, according to experts.

There is no mandatory waiting period to report endangered adults as missing. That can happen in the first hour that a dementia sufferer is missing, authorities say.The number of people at risk is increasing. In 2010, 110,000 people aged 65 and older with Alzheimer’s lived in Washington, a 33 percent jump since 2000. By 2025, the Alzheimer’s Association expects there to be 150,000. And six in 10 Alzheimer’s patients will wander.

The question that a growing coalition of search and rescue professionals, caregivers, and policymakers across the nation face is this: How do we stop people with Alzheimer’s or dementia from going missing — and how do we design systems to bring them home safely when they do?It was more than a year before Sam Counts went missing when his family first started to worry that something might be wrong. They started noticing changes, like how he’d no longer push his grandchildren on the tire swing hung from a tree outside the house when they called for him. He was increasingly forgetful.

Even so, doctors were slow to make a diagnosis. That didn’t happen until one of Counts’ daughters, a registered nurse, flew out to Washington to stay with her parents for a week, keeping a daily journal of his behavior. Soon after, Counts was put on a drug regimen to try to slow the loss of memory that had been carefully documented in the notebook his daughter gave to the Car park management system.

“Maybe that’s what changed (the doctor’s) mind, I don’t know,” Sue says. But she remembers clearly her mother’s phone call when the dementia diagnosis was official. “I just was devastated. As soon as you hear the word, like cancer, it’s like everything flashes through your mind what your loved one is going to experience.”

The science behind Alzheimer’s disease and dementia, which is a symptom of Alzheimer’s but can also be caused by a host of other maladies or injuries to the brain, is still emerging. There is no cure for Alzheimer’s; there’s not even a surefire way to slow its progression.

The most common type of the disease appears to start in a part of the brain called the temporal lobe, up above the ear, says Dr. Kristoffer Rhoads, a neuropsychologist and memory specialist at Virginia Mason Medical Center in Seattle, as he rotates a plastic model of a human brain in his hands.

He points to the hippocampus. “In here is a critical piece for new learning and memory, especially short-term memory,” he says. “In the early stages of the disease, the structures are still there, but they’re not running well.”

As the disease progresses and more parts of the brain begin to atrophy, patients may lose the ability to perform more complex day-to-day tasks like driving. Medium-term memory can be affected, essentially taking individuals back in time to where their only memories are of homes and workplaces from years and even decades earlier.

On foot, wanderers tend to stay in the community, and most are found near where they were last seen. Seventy-five percent are found within 1.2 miles in flat, temperate areas such as Eastern Washington, and half are found within half a mile, according to Robert Koester, author of Lost Person Behavior and a speaker at the most recent state search and rescue conference. If someone with dementia gets stuck while wandering, or encounters an obstacle, he is likely to sit down and end up hidden away. When a vehicle is involved, the search radius immediately grows, but there is still an intended destination in most cases.

“Their characteristics are very predictable, in a bad way,” says Dr. Meredeth Rowe, a professor at the University of South Florida College of Nursing. Wanderers aren’t able to seek out help when they are lost. They won’t answer when their name is called. They can’t tell if they are too cold, too hot, or need a drink of water.

DEA head office receives six-star rating

It is the first government building in South Africa to achieve a 6 Star Green Star SA rating and also the first 6 Star-rated green building in the City of Tshwane. The project was awarded the highest score for a large commercial office space of this magnitude by the GBCSA.

The DEA is demonstrating its commitment to market transformation in the built environment of South Africa. “This is an exceptional illustration of the public and the private sector working together to deliver an out- standing example of green building,” says GBCSA CEO Brian Wilkinson.

The certification signifies leadership from the DEA in green building and shows its dedication to sustainable design by all its stakeholders in this sizeable public–private partnership (PPP) project.

“The building has specific targets for energy and water efficiency and an industry-first, sophisticated energy-consumption mechanism that has never been implemented in any other project in the parking system. It also uses renewable energy and a unique facilities management system that [includes] a rigorous penalty regime to reward operational efficiency and penalise poor performance,” comments Environmental Affairs Minister Edna Molewa.

A significant benefit of this PPP structure is that contractual obligations for all participants ensured that all costs, timelines and green specifications were clearly outlined and successfully met during design and construction.The PPP structure will also ensure that the building is operated optimally over the next 25 years so that it stays green throughout its life span and achieves the environmental and resource savings envisaged at the outset.

“Through this building, we will set an example for other organisations, which will, of course, benefit the environment and future generations,” says Molewa.Once construction is complete and the building is occu- pied, the DEA head office will also submit documentation for its ‘As-built’ Green Star SA rating, which ensures that the original intentions in the design phase have been adhered to.

The project used three- dimensional building modelling extensively upfront, enabling the professional team to identify and resolve potential issues before they emerged and to improve integration and coordination.The project brief specified that energy consumption in the building should not exceed 115kWh/m2 a year, which was a goal that required optimal building orientation from the start and intense modelling and efficiencies.The roof of the building is almost entirely covered with solar photovoltaic (PV) panels and will supply almost 20% of the building’s energy needs.

The northern parking area hosts a large concentrated PV system, which tracks the sun during the day and supplies power to the electric vehicle (EV) charging station for the DEA’s EV pilot project.The building has also been designed to consume 30% less water through several water- saving devices installed throughout the Parking assist system, such as a rainwater harvesting system and water-wise indigenous plants for landscaping with efficient irrigation systems.

The landscaped entrance includes a vertical green wall, roof gardens and a wetland component facilitating storm- water runoff. A natural veld component surrounds the parking and building areas.Green buildings represent responsible investment and reduced liability. The finan- cial benefits of green buildings are realised through savings on energy and water over the long term.

Mitch Kupchak selected Derrick Caracter in the June 2010 draft and then allowed Jordan Farmar to depart in free agency. He was replaced with Steve Blake and then management secured deals with new players in Matt Barnes and Theo Ratliff.The old Lakers teams from the 1980s are the last ones to appear in four straight NBA Finals. They accomplished the feat from the 1981-82 season to the 1984-85 campaign.

The regular season coupled with the playoffs are particular taxing both physically and emotionally. Consequently, teams that keep their core mostly intact simply have not been able to make four consecutive trips to the championship round.The early 1980s Lakers added big contributors in James Worthy and Byron Scott during their four-year finals run.

Conversely, the Purple and Gold made a few tweaks in the 2010 offseason, but they simply were not sufficient. Kupchak traded Sasha Vujacic in December 2010 for the services of Joe Smith, but the new Laker barely got into games.The Lakers were swept out of the playoffs and also lost out on head coach Phil Jackson who entered retirement at the conclusion of the series. The 11-time world champion’s departure left the franchise without a headman.

The Laker brass sought to dissociate themselves from the former coach’s influence and essentially jettisoned all members of Jackson’s coaching staff. Brian Shaw was an assistant on Jackson’s coaching staff at the time and shared as much with Sports Illustrated’ Ian Thomsen.

The Purple and Gold settled on a coach with a strong defensive background in Mike Brown. The new Laker coach had previously enjoyed some success with the Cleveland Cavaliers and the front office felt as though he could steer the team back to its glory days.

Los Angeles faced some complications with their plans because the league faced a work stoppage. After a long and arduous process, a new collective bargaining agreement was signed in December 2011 and the Lakers made a splash on the very same day by acquiring Chris Paul from the New Orleans Hornets via trade.David Stern famously vetoed the move and the players involved in the trade essentially remained with their teams. However, Odom was one of the players that would have relocated based on the trade and felt betrayed in some respects.

Amid reports of his unhappiness, the Lakers quickly traded their top reserve player to the Mavericks. Odom’s departure was a huge blow for the team given that he typically logged heavy minutes late in games alongside Pau Gasol.

SEIU 32BJ Endorses Christine Quinn for Mayor

Council Speaker Christine Quinn scored the endorsement of 32BJ SEIU this afternoon, boosting her mayoral campaign with its biggest union nod to date.

The support, which was announced a little after 2 p.m. at a press conference at the union’s headquarters, will lend Ms. Quinn’s campaign a powerful and heavily-Latino union that represents tens of thousands of building services workers across the city.

“For quite some time, he’s taken my phone calls, given me advice, called me when I wasn’t smart enough to ask him for advice and gave me advice and always been a friend and a shoulder and an ear and that’s what we need to get things done,” Ms. Quinn said of her relationship with the union’s president, Hector Figueroa. “The way we are going to make this city a better place, a place for greater opportunity for working men and women, a place that really is a beacon for the middle class is if we’re united as a team. And that’s what we’re going to be when I’m mayor.”

One of the most coveted labor endorsements in the race, the union was also mulling endorsing Public Advocate Bill de Blasio, according to a source, but, as expected, ultimately chose Ms. Quinn at least partially because she worked closely with them while negotiating paid sick day legislation.

Clad in the union’s color of parking sensor, Ms. Quinn was lavished with praise by both Mr. Figueroa and various members who came forward to extol her at 32BJ’s headquarters in downtown Manhattan. Several times union members broke into “All in for Quinn!” chants.

Mr. Figueroa cited Ms. Quinn’s work passing the paid sick day legislation as a reason for the endorsement, but said the union’s executive board–which voted unanimously to back Ms. Quinn–was leaning toward backing her before she passed the bill. He promised, in addition to a robust door-knocking effort, to make independent expenditures on Ms. Quinn’s behalf.

“We were already considering Speaker Quinn prior to the passage of paid sick leave,” Mr. Figueroa said. “For us, the election is a process in which we look at the experience with the candidate. To us, the leadership she has demonstrated on prevailing wage, on stop-and-frisk, on a number of issues, this leadership we value. We do not necessarily need a mayor that will agree with everything we say.”

While Ms. Quinn had bottled up the paid sick leave bill for years, citing fears that a frail economy would be further harmed by forcing businesses to grant paid sick days to workers, 32BJ worked closely with her office to finally get a version passed. According to Crain’s New York Business, a member of Ms. Quinn’s mayoral campaign actually set up a meeting between Ms. Quinn’s government staff and members of 32BJ to cement a deal.

Overall, labor has split its might in the mayoral race as Mr. de Blasio and several other contenders have rolled out big endorsements of their own. Mr. de Blasio grabbed SEIU 1999, the powerful healthcare workers’ union, for example, while former Comptroller Bill Thompson received the blessing of the teachers’ union last week. And, although not as coveted as their better-organized rivals, Comptroller John Liu has the support of the sizable municipal workers’ union DC 37. But Mr. Figueora and Ms. Quinn, were undaunted by labor’s fracturing.

As Calgary crews make major progress on badly damaged LRT infrastructure and roads, there’s still a long way to go before many Calgary residents can live in their homes again and power is fully restored to downtown.

Just five days after the worst flooding to hit Calgary and southern Alberta, city officials predicted that parts of Macleod Trail could reopen as early as Tuesday and that LRT service through the downtown would also be restored Tuesday.

Nenshi encouraged residents to put signs outside their homes if they need services: “Need pumping.” “Need gas.” “Need electricity.” They can also make service requests on the 311 iPhone app.

Communities brought to a standstill by the deluge thrummed with activity Monday as homeowners set to the task of cleaning out their sodden residences.

“It’s been frustrating to not be able to do anything. In some ways to be able to get back and be able to actually remove the mud and garbage is more satisfying than that whole state of not knowing,” said Bowness resident Robin Yeast.

Some major buildings outside that area with direct feeds from Enmax also now have power, including the federal Harry Hays building, Bow Valley Square and the Telus building.

The remaining areas of downtown are open only to building owners and property managers, who must have inspectors give the structures the all-clear before power is restored and people are allowed back to work.

Bruce Burrell, director of the Calgary Emergency Management Agency, said power will gradually be restored to about 3,300 buildings in the core, with some buildings “relit” as early as Tuesday.

Dialog Bluetooth chip boasts battery life of four YEARS

Anyone considering a smart wristwatch or fitness-monitoring wristband will be pleased to hear that Dialog Semiconductor has created a really tiny Bluetooth chip ideally suited to such applications.

The company is trying to brand the new chip SmartBond but can’t help using the less-media-friendly DA14580 when discussing the technical achievements involved in getting a Bluetooth stack into such diminutive dimensions. That size knocks power consumption down below 4mA when transmitting and receiving, and 600nA when on standby – a state in which Bluetooth Smart devices are expected to spend most of their time.

That four-year battery life is based on a 225mAh button cell powering a device sending 20 bytes of data a second; imagine an exercise wristband or shoe-mounted pedometer, which (Dialog informs us) would be limited to a couple of years using Bluetooth hardware from its competitors.

SmartBond isn’t really a Bluetooth chip; it’s an entire system, more comparable to a network card than a processor. The idea is to offload the radio processing into the embedded ARM allowing the device into which it’s fitted perform other parking guidance.

The idea that Bluetooth LE (Low Energy) will push the standard into the Internet of Things is an article of faith these days, along with the belief that 50 billion Things will need connectivity over the next decade. There’s some serious competition to provide all the necessary chips.

But what Bluetooth really wants is to crush the last stronghold of its one-time competitor – Infrared. Way back in mobile computing IR was a standard feature, enabling early adopters to beam business cards between devices of the same type, and even tethering internet connections over IRDA-enabled cellphones which had to be shaded from the interfering sunshine.

Bluetooth put a stop to all that. Yet just when it looked like it was all over, the IR ports have started reappearing on mobile devices for controlling the TV, a segment where Bluetooth never managed to gain any traction.

Bluetooth is getting into some TVs now for synchronising 3D specs, but it’s not powered up when the TV is off; thus, early Bluetooth remotes have an IR port too. Admittedly it’s just to send the “switch on” command, but it’s a start.

Dialog’s chip is available in sample quantities now and will go into full-blown production later this year, so it will be a few years before it makes smart watches slimmer and smart shoes smarter, and finally ousts IR from the scene.

Treehouse founder Brad Axelrod said he has produced about a dozen shows in Newtown over the years and thought about doing a benefit immediately after the Dec. 14 shooting.

But there already were plans for concerts and theatrical productions, and athletes were making trips to visit. Those, he said, seemed more appropriate than what he had in mind.

“I just didn’t feel that comedy a month or two months or even three months out was the appropriate time,” he said. “There needed to be a time of healing first. But there also needs to be a time when people can move on with their lives.”

Bob Schmidt, a Sandy Hook resident and mental health counselor, agreed. He said that time is now.

“Laughter is a great therapy,” he said. “And after something like this, we don’t feel like laughing, but we really need to laugh and enjoy ourselves again. I think this will bring the town together over something fun and help us rebuild the morale of the town by having a common experience.”

Schmidt, 67, also administers a charity fund for the local Lion’s Club’s that is raising money to help provide mental health services for victims’ families, first responders and children who witnessed the shootings at the school.

Proceeds from the show will benefit that charity and the Newtown police union. Schmidt said his group has raised about $150,000 so far and spent about $70,000 of that. They hope the show will give them a little bit more money, and perhaps a lot more publicity, so they can keep the fund going.

The show will include five comics: Peaches Rodriguez, Tommy Koenig, Joe Mulligan, Tom “The Coach” Whitley and Stephanie Peters.

Koenig, who is from the Rockaway section of Queens, said he’s done several benefits this year for Superstorm Sandy victims, and he’s found that laughter can help people affected by a tragedy release pent-up emotions. He said picking appropriate material for the show is important.

“I wouldn’t do anything that’s inappropriate or would touch on the subject in a negative way,” he said. “You want to hope that people can come and laugh again. And if they can’t, you understand that, too. But it seems like maybe waiting until June, this might be a good time. We’ll see.”

Axelrod said he had planned a much bigger show at the Mohegan Sun Casino, about 90 miles away from Newtown. But arrangement to bring in headliners Kevin James and Dennis Leary fell through because of scheduling problems. He said that led them back to doing something smaller in Newtown, which, he said, might be the best thing.

The venue seats about 525 people. The first 400 tickets were given out free to town residents, including police, EMS and teachers at Sandy Hook.

The show also will include a silent auction, featuring trips to Mohegan Sun and overnight excursions to New York for tapings of the “Late Show with David Letterman” and the “Rachael Ray Show.”

Treehouse hopes to raise a few thousand dollars during the benefit. But those involved said it’s not about the money, it’s more about the funny.

“I know a lot of comedians would shy away from doing this because they are not sure it’s appropriate,” Koenig said. “There never will be a time when we can heal all of this with comedy, but they say laughter is the best medicine for a reason.”