By Matthew Russell Lee
www.innercitypress.com/uncmp2sound073109.html
UNITED NATIONS, July 31 -- The day after the UN's Capital Master Plan sealed off an area in front of the Security Council balcony with red "Asbestos" tape and then afterwards quickly declared the area safe, CMP chief Michael Adlerstein barred the Press from a "Town Hall" meeting about the plan and safety.
Adlerstein, when Inner City Press was previously blocked from covering such a meeting, promised to allow entry in the future. But on July 31 he shrugged and his spokesman argued that the offer had been only for the next meeting, and that the presence of the Press would change the discussion.
Inner City Press has been provided with several blow by blow accounts of the meeting. The fallen ceiling and testing for asbestos was raised. But another controversy, which perhaps explains Adlerstein's desire for secrecy, was an incident discussed in which concrete hit a workman on the UN construction site in the head. This was written up as a violation, along with the UN's general contractor Skanska blocking access to the Siamese connection carried water to put out fires.
Adlerstein told concerned UN staff that Skanska is appealing. The staff, at least as sampled by Inner City Press, were not convinced. Adlerstein was asked to put on the UN's web site all information about violations. He said he would check with the Office of Legal Affairs. Given his exclusion of the press and public from his "Town Hall" meetings, Internet posting of safety violations seems unlikely.
Adlerstein was also grilled about bad conditions in the UN's "swing space" in the Albano Building on 46th Street. Russian staffers of the Department of General Services and Conference Management complained of freezing air being thrust upon them from badly designed vents directly above their workplaces.
Inner City Press was invited and confirmed this, as well as the lack of air conditioning at the Arabic DGACM unit lower down in the Albano Building. One wag jokes that this was a form of profiling, and that the Arabic group, if and when the UN compound is finally fixed, are not assured of a right of return.
The UN's messengers' unit, meanwhile, says it is forced to work in cramped quarters with the whole Albano unit using a single toilet, and without access to the various floors of the Albano Building which they need to visit or service. Inner City Press' invited visit reveals some floors with fire doors blocked or taped open, others sealed up tight. Some complained that when Secretary General Ban Ki-moon visited this week, he went to only two floors. The issues raised at Friday's closed door meeting and below, these staffers say, are not understood or taken seriously by Ban Ki-moon.
A recurring complaint was the lack of sound proofing cutting into the ability top work. This is a theme with Adlerstein, who along with Department of Management chief Angela Kane is insisting on changing a previously commitment to the UN correspondents that their "swing space" would be similar to what they have, with the ability to make phone calls and, in the case of investigative journalism endeavors like Inner City Press, to meet confidentially with whistleblowers.
Now Adlerstein, Kane and Ban's advisors have decreed that walls will be only seven feet tall, and paper thin at that. In an attempt to divide and conquer, wire services will be able to request taller walls after a week, while other media like Inner City Press and the Washington Post -- which is mulling closing its long time UN bureau, as Inner City Press exclusively reported, as picked up by the Daily Beast -- can only make such a request after four months in a "Whistleblower Free Zone."
Inner City Press' visit on July 30 -- after a demand to delete a photograph of the police taped "Asbestos" zone on the floor -- to Adlerstein's office in the basement under the library found that he has full floor to ceiling walls, hard and sound proof. Secrecy reigns at the UN, with safety and sanity seeming to take a back seat. Watch this site.
