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Sorry: The deal between Mayor Zohran Mamdani and City Council Speaker Julie Menin to shut down the Central Park carriage trade is as much of a compromise as the Hitler-Stalin Pact, with the horses and their drivers stuck playing Poland.
The accord to kill these jobs by June 2028 bears all the hallmarks of elite virtue-signaling, but then the mayor and speaker didn’t win their high offices thanks to working-class voters.
So they presume to displace hundreds of workers — immigrants and the children of immigrants — depriving them of honest incomes with no genuine relief plan in place, just a vague offer of job-counseling services.
The owners of 68 carriage medallions are seeing their livelihoods blatantly confiscated — with not a dime set aside to compensate them for their stolen investments.
Talk about putting the carriage before the horse: Expect a serious lawsuit here.
Also, get real: Wiping out the industry effectively sends 160 horses off to the slaughterhouse, despite the elite vision of pastoral animal sanctuaries (again with no hint of who’d pay for them).
They pretend it’s about “a growing public safety liability,” as a Menin statement asserted, but the carriages are linked to a single death in well over a century of operations (and even that tragedy may prove the fault of Central Park Conservancy negligence), while e-bike collisions have killed 133 New Yorkers just since 2019.
Why can’t Mamdani and Menin agree to do something about that menace?
This is purely a pander to privileged prejudice, and it stinks far worse than the horses’ manure after a weeklong heatwave.