From Third World to first class

DAILY POINT

Biden touches down at LGA

Vice President Joe Biden is coming back to that Third World country in Queens Tuesday afternoon.

Biden and Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo will be at LaGuardia Airport to celebrate the beginning of the airport’s $4 billion redevelopment effort in what’s being hyped as a “major infrastructure announcement.”

Two years ago, Biden used LaGuardia as an example of the country’s worsening infrastructure, noting that visitors who didn’t know better would think they weren't in the United States.

“If I took him blindfolded and took him to LaGuardia Airport in New York, [he] must think, ‘I must be in some Third World country,’” Biden said.

The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey is partnering with a consortium of companies to redevelop LaGuardia’s Central Terminal and the surrounding infrastructure. There are also plans for Delta Air Lines to redevelop Terminals C and D and tentatively to build an AirTrain to run from Willets Point to the airport. Earlier this month, Cuomo announced that the bond financing and lease with LaGuardia’s private partners had been finalized.

Cuomo’s press people will not say whether the event is anything more than a photo op with the VP. But after several news outlets reported that officials were planning to break ground on the AirTrain, Cuomo spokeswoman Melissa DeRosa tweeted that the event was not about LGA’s train to the plane.

But we can be sure that Biden will seize the opportunity to describe LaGuardia colorfully once again.

— Randi F. Marshall

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ALBANY POINTS

Opioids get a starring role

Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo and the State Senate and Assembly have agreed to pass substantial legislation to fight opioids, but there’s still plenty to do and the issue will likely play a starring role in years of legislation ahead.

One of the biggest accomplishments of this legislative session include a package of bills that limit initial opioid prescriptions for acute pain to seven days (down from 30), require medical personnel who prescribe opioids to get continuing education on addiction, expand addiction treatment beds and funding in the state, and require insurers to provide more treatment coverage.

Some of the biggest challenges Cuomo and the State Legislature will likely need to revisit in future sessions include requiring doctors and other prescribers to counsel patients on the pernicious threat of addiction when they prescribe painkillers, increasing penalties on dealers who traffic in significant volumes of drugs, and further increasing access to and the availability of a variety of medications that help opioid addicts stay off heroin and prescription painkillers.

— Lane Filler

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Lowering the bar

State Sen. Tom Croci (R-Sayville) is one of Albany’s foremost proponents for including as many officials as possible in a bill that would strip the public pension from someone convicted of a job-related felony.

But as negotiations muddle along among the Senate, Assembly and Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo on the perennially thorny issue, Croci has lowered his personal bar for success. “If we can leave Albany with an actual pension forfeiture bill,” Croci says, “I think that’s a win.”

And while Croci laments that “it won’t be my bill,” he says the measure currently being discussed “would include every elected official in the state of New York down to town and county and village, and high-level appointees.”

That, he says, is progress.

— Michael Dobie

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REFERENCE POINT

FDR. LBJ. . . JK?

In a new mailing in the 3rd Congressional District Democratic primary, former North Hempstead Town Supervisor Jon Kaiman compares his accomplishments to those of Presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt and Lyndon B. Johnson. It’s a common motif in Democratic primary campaign literature: Sen. Bernie Sanders used images of Roosevelt in mailings before the Iowa caucuses in January. The imagery on the mailings is a sort of Democratic Party greatest-hits mashup.

— Sam Guzik