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HOST:
It’s a model that’s been popular with Mayor Bloomberg and name-checked by President Obama in the State of the Union: public-private partnerships. The arrangement helped build city monuments like Grand Central Station. Now there is a new approach: private money will team up with taxpayer funds to improve the most basic government services–schools, roads. Max Rosenthal has the details.

REPORTER:

Private investors have pitched in to build some of the of the city’s most famous new attractions:

MOSER:

Citi Field, Yankee Stadium, Barclay’s Center, the entire Midtown West project is a public-private partnership.

That’s Joel Moser, a professor of international affairs at Columbia. He and other experts say that the partnerships, or “P3s” offer governments a way keep paying for the construction they need. Michael Likosky is one of the country’s leading experts on P3s. He says that the approach lets the city take advantage of private sector flexibility.

LIKOSKY:

P3s allow projects to go forward, to get completed faster and it broadens the number of projects one can do.

These days, the projects aren’t limited to stadiums or skyscrapers. New York’s growing population and aging infrastructure means that even bigger bills are on the horizon.

LIKOSKY:

In order to do what we want to do in terms of more high-tech jobs, more manufacturing jobs, we really have to drive down the cost of doing business in the city and in the state. And P3s are the main way that that can happen.

Other big cities like London have already started using private companies to fund basic public needs like water.

It’s worked so far, but it’s not without risk. Private companies save the city money by building the projects themselves, but they expect to make money from the deal. Biser says that can be difficult when talking about something like a bridge.

BISER:

Suppose you enter into an agreement today and you allow the tolls to rise at a certain rate based on certain indexes. You can end up with a toll that is totally unacceptable to society. And therefore the private sector made a deal and they need to get their money back, but it doesn’t fit necessarily with the public good.

NORMENT:

This is not philanthropy. This is a business deal. You’re trying to make an investment in the community.

Rick Norment is the Executive Director of the National Council on Public Private Partnerships. He says that Mayor Bloomberg’s push is a big part of the reason P3s are growing in the city.

NORMENT:

It’s critical in public-private partnerships to have strong leadership from the public sector.

And that leadership should continue after Bloomberg steps down next year. With public money still in short supply, New Yorkers can expect more P3s in the coming years no matter who is running the city.

Max Rosenthal, Columbia Radio News

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Helping the middle class is always a popular item on the political agenda, and nowhere more so than in New York. The city has seen much of its middle class leave for the suburbs over the past few decades. Tony Maglio spoke to David Giles of the Center for Urban Studies to find out how New York can bring those middle class citizens back.

Students graduating in Philadelphia earlier this month (AP Photo/Alex Brandon)

Thousands of college students will walk the stage this month at graduations across the country. And the majority of them will be looking for a job.

But if the past few years are any indication, they could be in for an unpleasant surprise!

Researchers at Rutgers University surveyed graduates from the past 6 years and found that only 50 percent of them are working full time.

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A bit of advice for the unemployed – use your free time to indulge your childhood passions. Producer Andrew Parsons recently found a former graphic designer at his new job on an air crafter carrier… refurbishing antique fighter planes for the Intrepid Air, Space and Sea Museum.

BY ANDREW PARSONS

Peter Torraca restores old airplanes at the Intrepid Air, Space and Sea Museum. On a recent day, he was busy patching new skin onto a 1960s era F3H Demon. The plane was huge and barely fit the 60 foot long restoration tent on the aircraft carrier’s flight deck.

Torraca was never a navy mechanic and never worked with fighter planes. But aviation is a childhood passion of his, passed down to him from his father.

“My dad, he wanted to be a pilot. He started building model airplanes,” said Torraca. “From birth I was just surrounded with balsa dust, all the ephemera that goes along with the model aviation world.”

Torraca’s love for aviation led him to get a pilots license and buy a plane during the 20-year period he was a graphic designer. But when Torraca was out of work in 2010, he was restless. His wife suggested he volunteer at the Intrepid working on the planes. Since he had some experience already, he excelled and was hired. It was a welcomed but unexpected career switch.

“I’ve been building model airplanes since I was seven and this is a dream,” said Torraca choking up a bit. “This is a dream come true.”

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NFL's Roger Goodell (left) and NFLPA's DeMaurice Smith are the main players in these negotiations. Photo by Charles Dharapak/AP.

The National Football League and its union, the NFL Players Association announced today they’ve agreed to meet with a federal mediator for the next week. It’s an effort to negotiate a new Collective Bargaining Agreement and avoid a strike that could mean an entire year without football.

Simply put, team owners and players are at odds on how to divide football’s massive revenues: a 9 billion dollar pie. Other points of disagreement include the addition of two regular season games, increased benefits for retired players and a rookie salary cap. Robert Boland is a sports business professor at New York University. He says team owners have considerable leverage.

“The worst-case scenario probably right now is that the owners would choose to shut down the game to force an agreement on the players,” he said. “The players would eventually run out of money and sue for peace.”

This is called a lockout. It’s the management’s way of offsetting a strike. Boland says strikes are legal in football, but costly.

“A lockout allows management to stop that economic damage from happening at a critical time by saying we’re just going to cease operation so you can’t hurt us,” he said. “It’s been quite effective in hockey and basketball.”

In the event of a lockout, players wouldn’t get any bonuses or workout off-season money. Team owners on the other hand would still be able to rely on billions of dollars in television revenue. Recently, the players’ union director, DeMaurice Smith, reminded reporters that team owners have consistently earned more since 2006, when the last union contract was struck. Yet, player’s salaries are still years behind.

“We have pushed hard to first get a proposal to understand a justification for a rollback in players share that would put us back around 1992 or 1993,” Smith said. “It’s that serious.”

But NFL commissioner Roger Goodell says the process can’t be rushed. During his annual State of the League press conference on February 4^th, the mood was pretty light, even when player and sometime journalist Chad Ochocinco took the mic.

But then, the Cincinnati Bengals receiver asked him when to expect a deal. Goodell wouldn’t commit.

“We will get an agreement, and I think that’s only going to happen when there’s intense negotiations between your union and the owners,” he said. “This is this the window of opportunity to get this done right because otherwise uncertainty is going to seep into all of our operations.”

Both sides have yet to make concessions. Ken Belson writes about the business of sports for the New York Times. He says the dispute has been somewhat sensationalized by both parties and the media.

“It feels a little bit like a Hollywood negotiation, just given the stature of the players and the league,” he said. “I’ve covered enough labor negotiations to know that a lot of this is theater for our consumption to get one side’s point across or the other side’s point across, and both sides will sort of claim that Armageddon is near.”

Boland, the NYU professor, says the ball is now in the owners’ hands. He says if games are shut down, they would lose money because they wouldn’t sell any tickets or play any games.

“However, they would have a long period of time before they actually play any of those games,” he said. “If they locked out in March, they’d have six months really before games started to be played again and they had any real loss. So they would at least make money in the short run from their television revenue, and not have to play the players.”

A lockout would still  end up hurting team owners, if only for the potential loss of thousands of fans. Boland says that every sport that’s had a significant work stoppage, like a loss of half a season or the loss of a championship, has always taken a lot of time to recover.

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The undergraduate admission office at NYU is housed in an unmarked building on Broadway.  But it is where important decisions are made – well, important to the 42,000 applicants for the class of 2015.  And that’s an increase of 11 percent from last year.  Shawn Abbott is the assistant vice president of NYU’s undergraduate admission.

“We are pretty much at the capacity of what our admission officers can read,” Abbot said. “We have just about 26 admission officers that are responsible for the review of these 42,000 applications.  When the dust settles, we would have hired 3 or 4 additional part-time readers.”

Columbia is facing an even more dramatic increase.  It received more than 34,000 applications this year, a surge by almost a third from the previous year.  The admission office is so swamped that they don’t even have time for an interview.  Bari Norman is a former admission officer at Barnard College and now an independent counselor.

“Even though the economy has slowed, and we would think the interest might go down as a result because these places have pretty hefty price tags on average,” Norman said, “I think almost the sense that a degree from this place is important, or increasingly important in light of the economy, becomes more significant. Hence more applicants come their way.”

But it also got easier technically to apply for Columbia this year because it finally adopted the Common Application: a generic undergraduate application system accepted online by more than 400 colleges in the United States. And Columbia was the last holdout among Ivy League universities.

“The common application is always going to give some sort of a boost,” Norman said.  “You see it in the initial year, and some schools see an even bigger boost in the second year.”

On top of that, financial aid also plays an important factor. Janaye Pohl, a junior from California, chose Columbia over Berkeley for exactly that reason.

“The UC system doesn’t give out a lot of financial aid,” Pohl said. “I would have to end up paying more even though the tuition rate is lower.”

In 2008, Columbia introduced a “no loans” policy.  That means Columbia will make up the difference between the tuition and family contribution with university grants.

“It’s around a thousand or 15 hundred a semester for me, which is like fantastic,” she said.

A fantastic deal indeed.  But for Bari Norman, the independent counselor, her experience tells her ultimately it is the school’s reputation that really matters.

“Columbia will always be a place, so long as the reputation stays as it is,” Norman said.  “It’s an Ivy League school.  The admit rate is very low.  Many people just want what they can’t have. And that would always create the cycle that we have at Columbia and that we have elsewhere. ”

For the 34,000 who applied to Columbia, the chance of getting what they want is getting smaller. Based on previous admission numbers, only about one out of 14 applicants will get in.

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Pilar de Guzzman, owner of Bonne Fete Baking, Inc., makes a cupcake for her small business. Photo by Kaitlin Ugolik/Columbia Radio News

When someone wants to start a new food business, but can’t afford their own kitchen or storefront yet, they can come to the Entrepreneurs Space in Long Island City, Queens.  That’s where Pilar de Guzman makes the cakes and cupcakes for her company, Bonne Fete Baking, Inc.

She recently hired a new employee and she’s teaching him how to frost a cupcake the right way. She pays about $200 per eight-hour shift to use a corner of this 5,000 square foot kitchen. She says it’s a cost-effective way to get her business off the ground.

“You don’t have to have a big investment,” de Guzman said.  “So you maximize your investment and then you grow as needed.”

The number of self-employed people declined by half a percent between May and December of last year. But in January, it rose two tenths of a percent. De Guzman started her business before the decline. She worked in finance at the U.N. for 16 years. It’s taken some time to adjust to being what she calls a “one man band.” De Guzman isn’t alone. The Entrepreneurs Space where she bakes her products has seen an increase in requests for kitchen space from people like her. Katherine Gregory is the director of the Space.

“Many people are reevaluating exactly what they wanna do when they grow up…and it doesn’t matter if they’re fifty years old,” Gregory said. “So they’re looking at the fact that their passion was always baking or cooking or doing something in the food industry and they’re saying, ‘Now is the time to take the chance.’”

But she says there’s a pretty steep learning curve. Jim Brown is an analyst at the state labor department. He says the economic climate is getting better for entrepreneurs, but he sees a lot of small businesses make big mistakes in the beginning, like not having plans for how to stay afloat until they can make a profit.

“That’s one of the most common reasons for businesses failing – the lack of enough capital or cushion to tide you over,” Brown said.

De Guzman avoided this problem because she had savings and support from her husband when she started last April. And Gregory advised her to incorporate so she could avoid New York’s unincorporated business tax. Still, success is coming more slowly than she expected. Consumers are still cautious about buying luxury treats like cupcakes.

“ I think it’s foolish for anyone who’s changing careers to think like I thought that after pastry school, that the next year I’d be a successful business owner in a bakery,” de Guzman said. “It didn’t work that way.”

Things are getting easier according to Jim Brown at the labor department, who expects the number of self employed people to continue to rise.