City Hall - April 1, 2008

Bruce Blakeman, below, discusses running citywide in 2009 (Page 4), Mike Gianaris sets his sights on Council speaker (Page 12)

Vol. 2, No. 11

and Linda Gibbs, above, explains handling Bloomberg’s legacy portfolio (Page 33).

April 2008

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Still Fighting Preparing for another campaign, Morgenthau warns that budget cuts could boost crime and endanger New York

BY EDWARD-ISAAC DOVERE obert Morgenthau is an old man.

He has a hearing aid in one ear, a slow shuffle of a walk, and on mornings when his neck is particularly stiff he wears a heating pad under his collar.

But even at 88, after 35 years in office, he is still ready to fight.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s (Unaff.) proposed cuts to the budgets of the city’s five district attorneys, which Morgenthau warns could soon reverse the city’s historically low crime rate, have left him with no choice.

People always credit the police for the drop in crime.

Morgenthau acknowledges their involvement, but says he and the other district attorneys are crucial to the effort as well.

In 1974, Morgenthau’s first year in office, there were nearly 650 homicides in Manhattan. Last year, there were 69. Even the enterprising casts of Law & Order cannot keep up: there were 83 murders combined in the last full seasons of the three shows.

ANDREW SCHWARTZ

R

INSIDE:

Hyer-Spencer Prepares for Fight Against Unknown Opponent Page 8

Pheffer and Council Others Start Chamber Wooing Repairs County in Likely to Queens BP Be Delayed Race Again Page 16

Page 30

CONTINUED ON PAGE 18

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CITY HALL

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APR IL 2008

On CBA Promises, Accusations of Yankee Dawdle Pledges of parkland, donations and jobs are slow to be fulfilled, say some in Bronx

BY RACHEL BREITMAN

T

HOUGH THE CONSTRUCTION OF

the new Yankee Stadium, slated for completion in 2009, has been underway for over a year and a half, neighborhood groups are yet to see compensation. The money for the community benefits agreement (CBA), signed in April 2006 by Yankee president Randy Levine, Bronx Borough President Adolfo Carrión (D-Bronx), and City Council members Maria del Carmen Arroyo (DBronx), Maria Baez (D-Bronx) and Joel Rivera (D-Bronx) remains untouched.

“It took the elected officials longer than expected,” said Levine. “The first $800,000 check was delivered to the nonprofit, but we have nothing to do with how it was distributed.”

The team has promised to continue this annual contribution for the next 40 years, along with in-kind donations worth at least $115,000 in tickets and team merchandise. Though the Yankees plan to cover the costs of the stadium construction, valued between $1.1 billion and $1.3 billion, the state is putting $70 million into the cost of parking garages, and construction of a new MetroNorth stop will cost the city $39 million, according to the Economic Development Corporation.

Since its inception, the New Yankee Stadium Community Benefits Fund has been plagued by delays. The seven-member board—which has a minority of Bronx residents—includes a former bank president, a realtor, a former judge, a pastor, and executive directors of several Bronx non-profits. The board first met in December of 2007, three months after the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) approved its application for tax-exempt status and a year after the fund’s administrator was chosen. The members are currently defining criteria to decide who can receive grant money.

“The question that most comes up is why did the process take this amount of time,” said Michael Drezin, who is the Yankees Fund Administrator. “Given that our not-for-profit involves the Yankees, there was a great interest in deciding who would be on the board. The politicians had their hands full in making the selections.”

Drezin said that once the board has its criteria in place, it will be open for applications from neighborhood non-profits, Little League teams and educational organizations. So far, the non-profit has made a single donation of $50,000, which went to a scholarship for students who attend a City University campus in the Bronx.

Employment advocates also questioned whether the promised jobs have reached Bronx residents. The Yankees report more than 25 percent of the work-

ers on the job site to be from the Bronx, citing contracts totaling $121 million directed to Bronx companies, but no outside agency has verified these numbers.

“The city hasn’t released any job figures,” said Bettina Damiani, project director at Good Jobs New York. “Nobody’s watching the store on this one.”

The community benefits agreement also calls for the formation of a construction advisory committee to meet monthly, but no one who signed the CBA could verify who was on the committee or whether meetings have taken place yet.

“The elected officials have not to this date sent over the names of who they want on this committee,” said Levine.

Meanwhile, Bronx business owners are grumbling over the opportunity cost of the increased neighborhood construction on their bottom line.

“I don’t know how many of the businesses are going to survive the construction,” said Pasquale Canale, owner of P&D Hero Shop and the President of the 161st Street Merchants Association.

Canale said that the Dunkin’ Donuts and Supreme Deli have already closed since construction began.

Some politicians who voted for the state and city funds to make the stadium a reality have expressed concerns about the delays in community remuneration.

Unanswered questions came to a head at a February breakfast meeting between Bronx elected officials and representatives of the Yankees.

“Things got a little heated, and the meeting ended early,” said Assembly

centage of jobs for Bronx workers.

“It’s the biggest investment in the history of the Bronx, and there is no reason why the Bronx should still be leading the state in unemployment,” he added.

But politicians involved in the community benefits deal defended the project.

Council Member Maria del Carmen Arroyo said any lags in the process were due to basic bureaucratic sluggishness. “There were some delays in the filing of the non-profit organization,” explained Arroyo. “We didn’t appreciate the complexity of the project that we were setting up. It’s something that you could not avoid.”

Meanwhile, Carrión stood by his belief that the CBA’s original goals would come to fruition.

“This project is going to revitalize an entire neighborhood, and in the end everyone is going to be better off,” he said. “People from the Bronx are working on the stadium. There will be new, improved park space and a funding commitment from the Yankees for community organizations. It really will be beneficial to everyone in the end.” rachellbreitman@yahoo.com Direct letters to the editor to editor@cityhallnews.com.

“The city hasn’t released any job figures,” said Bettina Damiani, project director at Good Jobs New York. “Nobody’s watching the store on this one.”

Member Ruben Diaz, Jr. (D-Bronx). “I don’t fault the Yankees on this, but my question was, why did the foundation take so long?”

Diaz added that he would like to see membership on the Community Benefits Fund board expanded, regular reports from a Construction Advisory Committee, and an increase in the per-

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City Hall Wins Best Political Coverage

Best Editorial Page Design Excellence

for Best Political Coverage, Best Editorial Page and Design Excellence For the second year in a row, City Hall has been recognized for doing what it does better than any other publication in the state. The New York Press Association gave City Hall the 2007 award for Best Coverage of Elections/Politics among all nondaily publications in New York.

“Politics is this paper’s niche and it does it well—head and shoulders above all other entries,” the judges wrote, explaining their decision. “Good analysis as well as reporting.”

Launched in June 2006, City Hall has been eligible for the awards for the past two years, and was awarded the best in this category both times.

City Hall was also named the Best Editorial Page of non-daily publications in the state.

“Well-written, clean design, snappy headlines, heaping variety of coverage,” the judges wrote, “best of all, good writing.”

The publication was also recognized for excellence in headline writing, news photography, best house advertising campaign, front page design and overall design excellence.

Over 550 newspapers and magazines from across New York State submitted entries for this year’s awards.

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APR IL 2008

CITY HALL

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Another Elephant in the Room

ANDREW SCHWARTZ

The “invisible man” of the 1998 comptroller’s race, Blakeman begins exploring ’09 citywide run

Bruce Blakeman was the majority leader of the Nassau County Legislature and the 1998 GOP candidate for comptroller. Now a resident of Manhattan, he is looking at running citywide.

BY ANDREW J. HAWKINS BLAKEMAN FINISHED THE 1998 race for New York State comptroller having learned an important lesson: “Don’t run against a well-financed, popular incumbent,” said Blakeman with a laugh. He lost to H. Carl McCall by a 30-point margin.

Ten years later, the Port Authority commissioner and lawyer is considering another campaign, this time for citywide office. A bid for mayor as a Republican seems to be on his mind.

The three potential Democratic candidates—Council Speaker Christine Quinn (Manhattan), City Comptroller William Thompson and Rep. Anthony Weiner (Brooklyn/Queens)—have already begun their own jockeying. Meanwhile, with Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly repeatedly shooting down speculation he will run, the only possible candidate currently being discussed in Republican circles is billionaire grocery store magnate John Catsimatidis.

Blakeman may be looking to change that.

He discussed the possibilities sitting in his law office on 41st St. and Third Ave., directly across the street from the building where Eliot Spitzer announced his resignation. (“I thought I could keep an eye on him,” Blakeman said sadly of Spitzer, whom he calls a personal friend.)

“I have left the door open to the possi-

B

RUCE

bility of going back into a public life and [mayor] is a very interesting position where you could do a lot of good for people,” he said.

He did not discuss the possibility of running for public advocate or city comptroller. Talk of being on a ticket with other GOP candidates was premature, he said. And he would not comment on Catsimatidis’ presumed political plans.

The prospective Democratic candidates have already pulled in millions of dollars in donations and continue to do so at a rapid pace. Blakeman, though, would not set a deadline for making a decision before he has had time to adequately gauge his level of support.

“You have to take into consideration who the potential candidates are, and you have to take into consideration whether you are prepared to make that sacrifice,” he said.

No doubt the memory of his 1998 loss is still fresh in his mind. Running against a well-entrenched incumbent was one problem. Name recognition was another—the New York Times at one point called Blakeman “the Invisible Man” for his barely noticed campaign.

He ran in what he knew would be an uphill battle, he said, because public service runs in his blood. His father, Robert Blakeman, was a member of the Assembly in the 1960s, representing Long Island.

Blakeman said he remembers campaigning for his father when he was six.

“I was fascinated from a very early

age,” Blakeman said.

The younger Blakeman was elected himself to the Nassau County Legislature when it was formed in 1995. He was then selected as its first majority leader and presiding officer. In 2001, he was appointed to the Port Authority by then-Gov. George Pataki (R).

Blakeman moved into Manhattan in 1999.

Blakeman’s only appearances in the press of late were through the reported exploits of his wife, from whom he is separated. Last November, Nancy Shevell, a Metropolitan Transportation Authority board member, was photographed in the company of former Beatle Paul McCartney in the Hamptons.

Blakeman tries to keep the focus on issues outside the tabloid fodder, stressing the continuing importance of terrorism and public safety in the city. Though the city’s crime rate has declined over the years and the Giuliani and Bloomberg administrations have both tackled terrorism with varying degrees of success, Blakeman insists that vigilance is key.

“We don’t want to go backwards,” he said. “We want to make sure that we have a safe community from a homeland security standpoint.”

Even in a city as Democratic as New York, Blakeman thinks Republicans have proven their political mettle to voters.

“There was a point in time when certain Democrats and independents felt that if they pulled the Republican lever that they would be struck by lightning,” he said. “I think based on the perform-

ances of both Mayors Giuliani and Bloomberg that Democrats and independents are more open to Republican leadership. There’s a track record of achievement.”

That track record has spurred Blakeman to donate tens of thousands of dollars to Republican officials and organizations over the years, including a $15,000 donation to the Republican National Committee and several thousand dollars to former presidential candidate Fred Thompson.

His fundraising efforts for local officials have also earned him many powerful friends on the local level, said former Staten Island Borough President and GOP kingmaker Guy Molinari (R). Last year, Blakeman hosted a fundraiser for Staten Island District Attorney Dan Donovan (R), who was re-elected.

“Bruce has been around and he has picked up some chits by helping people like that from time to time,” Molinari said.

Molinari said he would prefer Blakeman to Catsimatidis. The Red Apple Group CEO last fall switched his party affiliation from Democrat to Republican in what he has indicated is a step toward a mayoral run.

“Catsimatidis would have the jump as far as having a lot of money. But Bruce has access to a lot of money too. A lot of money,” Molinari said, referring to Blakeman’s personal wealth and strong potential as a fundraiser.

Jennifer Saul Yaffa, president of the New York County Republican Party, said she had a brief conversation with Blakeman about running for mayor a few months ago.

“He’s a really good guy, I’m really fond of him,” Saul Yaffa said. “I think he’s a fabulous, fabulous guy.”

Name recognition could pose a problem for either Blakeman or Catsimatidis, she said, but the race is too far away to worry yet much about that.

“They don’t have name recognition like a Ray Kelly does, either one of them,” Saul Yaffa said.

If and when he decides to run, Blakeman said his campaign will be one of ideas and action. In addition to stressing vigilance on public safety and terrorism, Blakeman said he would build on the successes of the Bloomberg administration, focusing on economic development, job creation, health care reform and transportation improvements.

With term limits soon forcing most elected officials out of office, Blakeman said that 2009 is shaping up to be an interesting year.

“And the good news is there won’t be a popular well-funded incumbent running,” he said laughing. “Whether it’s me or anybody else.” ahawkins@cityhallnews.com

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APR IL 2008

Foreclosure Moratorium Bill Gains Traction in Both Houses Padavan and Brennan say time is right for Legislature to tackle sub-prime crisis

BY RACHEL BREITMAN QUEENS, Brooklyn and upstate New York face an ongoing barrage of foreclosures, two state legislators have proposed a bill that they hope would stem the tide of unraveling mortgages.

The bill calls for a year-long moratorium on foreclosures throughout New York. During the proposed 12-month respite, homeowners would be required to make court-ordered minimum monthly payments while renegotiating the terms with the lender. Though the bill, authored by State Sen. Frank Padavan (R-Queens) and Assembly Member James Brennan (D-Brooklyn), has enjoyed bipartisan support in the Legislature, banking industry leaders say the measure will simply prolong the housing crisis by postponing the unavoidable.

Padavan said his bill, which has 24 cosponsors in the Senate, could curb the spiral of foreclosures that have hurt property values, destroyed credit ratings and forced many out of their homes.

“It’s not a bail-out or an abdication of the homeowner,” said Padavan. “This helps the homeowner keep his home off the market, which helps the economy, and at the same time the bank would get a return on the mortgage with interest, rather than being forced to become a real estate broker.”

Both Padavan and Brennan have seen their districts hit particularly hard by housing problems stemming from the sub-prime mortgage crisis.

“We are all hurt by the predatory practices that led us to this perilous position,” said Brennan, whose bill carries 72 cosponsors.

A

S NEIGHBORHOODS IN

ODDS&Ends Old Vegas bookmakers have been trumped by new technology, and dozens of websites exist to bet on the outcome of all sorts of things, including who will be picked to run for vice president. Intrade lets people buy shares in the candidates’ futures.

Ladbrokes gives odds to bet against. Here are this month’s standings.

According to RealtyTrac.com, a website that follows national trends in home foreclosures, Queens currently has 9,815 properties undergoing pre-foreclosure procedures, while Brooklyn’s Kings County has 7,983. Foreclosures in Queens lead the state, followed by Brooklyn, Suffolk, Nassau and Westchester. Monroe and Rockland Counties rank seventh and ninth, respectively.

New York is not alone in considering a moratorium as a means to slow the subprime mortgage crisis. On the presidential campaign trail, Sen. Hillary Clinton (D) has advocated a 90-day nationwide moratorium.

The Massachusetts Legislature is currently considering a sixmonth moratorium, and housing activists in Michigan have called on their state to consider a moratorium that would last a record-breaking five years.

Some suggest that a national law might be a more effective means of attacking the problem.

“The idea of a moratorium at the national level of 90 days allows some breathing room to come up with more comprehensive solutions to the housing problem,” said James Parrott, deputy director and chief economist for the Fiscal Policy Institute.

“But the states don’t have the financial resources that the federal government has to make these changes.” And there may be negative consequences for the state if New York imposes its own moratorium, said State Sen. Hugh Farley (RSchenectady), chair of the Banking Committee.

“A lot of people in the industry don’t

like the idea of limitations on lending,” Farley said. “We don’t want to do things that could dry up credit in New York State.”

Farley added that banks with federal charters, like Chase, Citibank and Bank of America, may be exempt from any new state laws passed.

As an alternative, Senate Majority Leader Joseph Bruno (R-Rensselaer) favors property tax cuts to aid cashstrapped homeowners, said a spokesperson, Scott Reif.

“Meaningful property tax relief helps people stay in their homes,” he said.

“That’s our priority.”

The mortgage industry has been

Meanwhile, Gov. David Paterson (D) plans to move forward with a proposal left over from Eliot Spitzer’s administration requiring a 60-day notice in writing and an in-person settlement conference between borrowers and lenders before a foreclosure can take place. The bill would also give law enforcement extra muscle against mortgage fraud and foreclosure rescue scams.

“While this does allow an additional 60 days to settle the matter, it doesn’t propose an outright moratorium,” said Paterson spokesperson Morgan Hook.

“We try to give people working with bankers more time to work out an agreement, but obviously, there will be situations where they can’t.”

As the sub-prime crisis continues to mushroom and have a ripple effect across the economy, however, advocates are pushing for fast action in Albany.

Bertha Lewis, executive director of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), a non-profit which provides counseling for lowincome home buyers, favors a combination of the bills that uses benchmarks of Paterson’s proposal within an extended time frame for a moratorium.

“Our experience is that you can’t get the lenders to be serious about renegotiating loans,” Lewis said. “Drastic times call for drastic measures, and you got to slow down this train. A moratorium is a catalyst that will make these systems work.” rachellbreitman@yahoo.com Direct letters to the editor to editor@cityhallnews.com.

During the proposed 12-month respite, homeowners would be required to make court-ordered minimum monthly payments while renegotiating the terms with the lender. resistant as well, arguing that homeowners throughout the state would end up bearing the burden of increased costs on the housing industry.

“We think it can have a severe and negative impact if you restrict the foreclosure proceedings,” said Paul Richman, vice president of State Legislative Affairs at the Mortgage Bankers Association. “To account for that new risk, lenders would have to charge higher down payments and higher interest rates. It would make it more expensive for people to refinance their mortgages.”

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***2008 VICE PRESIDENTIAL ODDS*** REPUBLICAN 2008 VP NOMINEE Chris Cox Charlie Crist Lindsey Graham Sarah Palin Tim Pawlenty Rob Portman Condolezza Rice Tom Ridge Mitt Romney Mark Sanford

PRICE ON INTRADE

N/A N/A 3.8 N/A 15.7 N/A 8.1 N/A 18.9 N/A

ODDS ON LADBROKES

10 6 8 12 6 10 10 12 4 12

to to to to to to to to to to

1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1

2008 DEMOCRATIC NOMINEE Hillary Clinton Barack Obama

DEMOCRATIC 2008 VP NOMINEE Bayh, Evan Bloomberg, Michael Clinton, Hillary Gore, Al Claire McCaskill Obama, Barack Richardson, Bill Kathleen Sebelius Warner, Mark Webb, Jim PRICE ON INTRADE

13 86

ODDS ON LADBROKES

7 to 2 1 to 5

**DATA AS OF APRIL 7, 2008**

PRICE ON INTRADE

ODDS ON LADBROKES

3.9 N/A 9.9 9.8 N/A 6.9 13.6 N/A 4.5 11.9

12 14 8 16 14 8 3 6 16 8

to to to to to to to to to to

1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1 1

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CITY HALL

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APR IL 2008

For Pheffer, County Support May Once Again Be Key to Queens BP Race Some say that she made a deal in 2001. She says she built up goodwill for 2009 campaign

BY ADAM PINCUS FROM

A

rumored 2001 back-room arrangement that gave the crucial Queens County Democratic Party’s endorsement for borough president to then-Council Member Helen Marshall (D) could impact an oddly similar race for the same post in 2009.

That year, there were three Democratic loyalists angling for county support in the contest for borough president, including Assembly Member Audrey Pheffer (D). There were also two Vallones seeking party backing—Peter Vallone, Jr. (D), who was running for City Council, and his father, then-Council Speaker Peter Vallone, Sr. (D), who was running for mayor.

After negotiations, county passed over Pheffer and Council Member Karen Koslowitz (D) and supported Marshall.

The organization also endorsed Vallone, Jr. for Council. But for mayor, the county went with then-City Comptroller Alan Hevesi, rather than Vallone, Sr. Pheffer remained in the Assembly. But based on the discussions at the time, she had reason to believe that she would be given special consideration from the county organization in the 2009 borough president’s race in return for her exit, according to a Democratic source with knowledge of the 2001 discussions.

However, Pheffer said there was no deal.

This was echoed by Michael Reich, executive secretary of the county organization.

“There is never consideration one way or another,” he said. “She did what was necessary for unity for the Democratic Party, and for that I know a lot of leaders were very grateful.”

With the machine behind her in 2001, Marshall handily defeated the wellknown Carol Gresser, a former city Board of Education president who had the endorsement of The New York Times, in a three-way race.

ANDREW SCHWARTZ

R

EVERBERATIONS

Assembly Member Audrey Pheffer is hoping that her second race for Queens Borough Hall will last longer and be more successful than her 2001 bid.

Koslowitz became deputy borough president under Marshall, and is a possible candidate for her old seat in 2009.

For next year’s race, most expect there will again be a wide field of Democratic candidates, again including Pheffer, who is pushing hardest for county support. There are also likely to be two Vallones: attorney Paul Vallone, a candidate for City Council representing Bayside, and his brother, Peter Vallone, Jr., expected to run for borough president.

The three possible contenders most intent on county support in 2009 are Pheffer and two Council members, Leroy Comrie and Helen Sears. Vallone, Jr., with borough-wide name recognition thanks in part to his father’s many years in government, and his $498,000 war chest, is in a better position to run even without county backing. And several district leaders interviewed said he is less

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likely to get it.

Pheffer, who has represented Ozone Park, Howard Beach and the Rockaways for more than 20 years, said there was no deal to get her to leave the race in 2001, but she hoped the move created goodwill within the party.

“I would love to have county backing,” she said. “It is a strong organization and I am proud to be a part of it. I am working to get their support.”

If she does not win the endorsement, she said she would continue in the race.

Pheffer said she was suited to the advocacy work that comprises much of the role of borough president, given her work as a City Council aide, as a staffer for a Queens arm of a citywide neighborhood stabilization program and as an Assembly member. She said she would use her experiences to draw greater services, such as police and buildings inspectors, to the borough. Nor does she shy away from development issues, expressing her support for video lottery terminals and hotels at the New York Racing Association’s Aqueduct Racetrack.

District leader and former Council

INT. 705 A Local Law to amend the administrative code of the City of New York, in relation to removing restrictions on a taxicab operator’s choice of a credit/debit card processor.

SPONSOR: Council Member David Weprin (D-Queens) Though many city taxi operating companies pay as little as 2 percent in processing fees for credit card payments, some charge their drivers up to 5 percent, pocketing the difference.

Member Archie Spigner (D) said he viewed Pheffer, Vallone and Comrie—his former staffer—as the leading candidates.

“Vallone, Jr. said he would run whether he has county support or not. County will be extremely important and I think certain individuals like Comrie and Pheffer are working hard to be chosen,” he said.

So far, Pheffer is the only formally announced candidate.

Comrie, who has not officially announced his intentions, said only that he was “in a good position to be borough president.”

He also thought he had a good shot at getting county support.

“It is way too early to even speculate,” he said, but added, “I fully expect that won’t be a problem.”

Vallone, who said he was seriously considering a run for borough president, noted he had raised the most of any noncitywide candidate.

“The Queens borough president involves bringing money and services to Queens County, and no one has done a better job of that as a councilman,” he said, pointing to his own record.

He said winning without county support was possible.

“My father didn’t have county support in 2001 and beat the county candidate two to one, so I am not concerned,” he said in reference to his father winning more votes in Queens against Hevesi.

Sears said she, too, was mulling over a run.

But it is “too early to announce. We are busy doing a lot of stuff,” she said.

Pheffer may be the one with the borough president campaign filed officially with the Campaign Finance Board, but she trails Vallone in fundraising. She has raised $234,826, but only $80,000 of that was raised over the past year, with the balance coming from her 2001 race, as of the last filing date.

Vallone has raised $688,998, and holds $498,000 in the bank.

Comrie, who raised just under $80,000 over the past year, has only $8,543 on hand, while Sears has raised $73,485. pincus_a@yahoo.com Direct letters to the editor to editor@cityhallnews.com.

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Weprin’s bill would allow individual cab drivers to negotiate with credit card processing companies on their own to avoid paying the 5 perBills on the burner cent fees. for the Council “I’m always in favor of consumer choice. I think people should have a choice; it keeps competition going,” he said.

Weprin said he had yet to discuss the bill with the Taxi and Limousine Commission.

:

ON THE

AGENDA

We are healthcare.

New Yorkers depend on 1199 SEIU

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APR IL 2008

CITY HALL

Needling the Presidential Race as a Non-Candidate Buchanan, Schoen, Shrum and Rollins sound off on how Bloomberg can inject himself into the 2008 campaign

BY ANDREW J. HAWKINS THE FEBRUARY OP-ED THAT officially called off his presidential campaign, Mayor Michael Bloomberg (Unaff.) wrote that he is ready to use his wealth and profile as both mayor of New York and a respected business leader to steer the presidential candidates toward discussing the issues he considers vital to the United States.

His endorsement, he said, might be the reward for the candidate who does this best, as he reminded the audience when introducing Sen. Barack Obama (DIllinois) at Cooper Union in March. On April 9, Bloomberg also introduced presumptive Republican nominee Sen. John McCain (R-Arizona) at a specch in Brooklyn.

During Obama’s speech, which focused on the economy, Bloomberg sat stoically to the right of the stage, his legs

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N

Mayor Michael Bloomberg has many prescriptions for this year’s presidential candidates, but the experts are unsure he will be able to get any of them to pay attention without being in the race himself.

crossed and his hand on his chin. And while the crowd of college students and political spectators applauded generously throughout the speech, Bloomberg’s hands stayed still until the very end.

Bloomberg has left little question about his agenda: in his more than six years in office, he has banned smoking and transfats, launched a nationwide campaign against illegal guns, stressed the need for mass transit, encouraged the integration of immigrants, taken steps to combat global warming and championed education reform, among other efforts. The battles and successes have helped put many of these issues on the national political radar.

He considers all three candidates personal friends, but none have yet done enough to win his support.

“I want concrete examples,” he said, speaking at Georgetown University April 8.

“So far, I don’t know that I’ve heard it from any of the three.”

But as a non-candidate trying to influence the race, Bloomberg’s options may be limited, said Pat Buchanan. A conservative author and two-time presidential candidate, Buchanan knows the difference between attempting to sway the debate from within the fray and from the sidelines.

“He’s got a very tough situation, unless he wants to spend some money and really go out on the campaign,” said Buchanan, “and even then, I don’t think he’s going to get an enormous hearing, now that he’s taken himself out of consideration.”

Bloomberg could have some influence if he ultimately chooses to back a candidate, but Buchanan insisted that the further the mayor gets from the city, the more his clout diminishes.

“He’s probably got some ability, some transferable popularity, but I think it’s very small,” Buchanan said. “They don’t

know who the hell he is in Pennsylvania.

And if they found out, they probably wouldn’t like him.”

None of that will be a problem, said national political observer Larry Sabato, director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia—provided Bloomberg is willing to invest a sizable chunk of his personal fortune in the race.

If the mayor establishes a political action committee to sponsor television ads calling on the candidates to address certain issues, he could easily make himself a factor, Sabato said.

“Nothing is too difficult for a man worth 10 to 20 billion dollars,” Sabato said.

This would follow the model of the Mayors Against Illegal Guns campaign, which last year used about $20,000 of Bloomberg’s money to fund a targeted television ad blitz urging Congress to give local law enforcement more power to

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trace illegal gun owners. Print advertisements from the group pressuring presidential candidates to oppose illegal guns appeared in local newspapers in the weeks leading up to the Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primaries.

But Sabato does not expect that Bloomberg will be able to do much to move the presidential candidates to his position on guns.

“McCain’s a westerner and he has the NRA’s support,” Sabato said, referring to the presumptive Republican nominee and the National Rifle Association.

“Obama is hoping to break the Republican stranglehold on the South and the border states and the rural Midwest states. And that would be a killer of an issue for him.”

Bloomberg has already failed once to drum up support for his fight against illegal guns. Except for former Sen. John Edwards (D-North Carolina) and Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas), every candidate ignored a 16-question survey sent to their campaigns by the Mayors Against Illegal Guns.

Whether Bloomberg plans to fund similar campaigns centered on his other key issues remains unclear. A spokesperson for the mayor declined to comment on Bloomberg’s plans to influence the presidential race.

Doug Schoen, a political strategist who has advised politicians ranging from Bloomberg to President Bill Clinton, was one of the biggest boosters of the mayor’s purported presidential ambitions. While he has not consulted with Bloomberg on how to influence the race, he thinks the mayor is now just biding his time—but that this will do little to change his potential to reshape the race.

“He’s keeping his counsel, he’s watching, he’s waiting,” Schoen said. “He could wait six months and still have a dispositive impact on the election.”

APRIL 2008

he might,” Schoen said.

Robert Shrum, a Democratic consultant who was the senior strategist to the 2004 presidential campaign of Sen. John Kerry (D-Massachusetts), said Bloomberg, as the mayor of the largest city in the country, has the ability to get the candidates to pay attention without spending a dime.

“He has a platform,” Shrum said. “He’s in the media capital of the world. He had a kind of faux candidacy for a number of months. Whenever he wants to, he can speak up about an issue, he can talk to candidates.”

Bloomberg, a Democrat who switched to the Republican Party to run for mayor and then dropped that affiliation as well, is widely seen as a figure that transcends political parties, Shrum said. With so many swing voters up for grabs, that will necessarily make both nominees eager to have his endorsement.

“He exemplifies a lot of what the country wants right now,” he said. “He’s in the seam of the national mood.”

“They don’t know who the hell he is in Pennsylvania,” said Pat Buchanan. “And if they found out, they probably wouldn’t like him.”

While the mayor’s name is being batted around as a potential vice presidential candidate for Obama or McCain, Schoen said Bloomberg would most likely follow the example set by Microsoft founder Bill Gates, who last year announced his intention to spend $60 million to bump education up on the presidential agenda.

“If he felt he could make a difference on the gun issue, do I think he would spend that kind of money? Yeah, I think

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But Bloomberg could instead become a media pundit, skipping an endorsement and instead sounding off on the race while boosting his own issues, said Robert Shapiro, a Columbia University political science professor who specializes in public opinion and presidential elections.

To have a real impact in doing this, though, Shapiro said Bloomberg would need to be more sensational than he is known for being.

“He would have to start saying very outrageous things—like being so sufficiently unhappy with both candidates that he would support a third candidate,” Shapiro said.

As his term winds down, Bloomberg’s hopes of influencing the presidential race are diminishing, said Ed Rollins, the former Reagan aide who was national chairman of former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee’s (R) unsuccessful campaign for the Republican nomination.

“His millions and billions aren’t relevant in this particular race,” Rollins said bluntly. “At this point in time, he can give twenty-two hundred bucks like any other citizen, and he can go vote.” ahawkins@cityhallnews.com

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APR IL 2008

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Gianaris Plans Council Race and Speaker Run As Farrell removes himself from race, Gianaris hopes to be first freshman speaker

BY ADAM PINCUS MEMBER MICHAEL Gianaris' (D-Queens) expected run next year for the Council seat being vacated by term-limited Peter Vallone, Jr. is seen as something of a cakewalk. But if Gianaris tries for the Council speaker’s chair, a post he has for some years been eyeing, his path will not be as easy, insiders say. Gianaris has money and legislative experience on his

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side, but will be competing against a handful of Council members already lobbying for the job. Incumbent Council members said to be considering the spot include Daniel Garodnick (D), Jessica Lappin (D) and Inez Dickens (D) from Manhattan and Maria del Carmen Arroyo (D) from the Bronx. Meanwhile, another expected would-be speaker, Assembly Member Herman “Denny” Farrell (D-Manhattan), has decided to remove himself from the race.

“He is focused at this point on his Assembly re-election bid. He supports Councilwoman Dickens for the speaker post,” said a Farrell aide, speaking on behalf of the Assembly member.

That would remove a major obstacle for Gianaris, the first Greek-American elected to office from the city, who can wage a Council campaign without risking his Assembly seat. When asked if he would run for Council, Gianaris was coy.

“That is something I am going to seriously consider, but right now I am going to focus on making a case that I deserve re-election in my Assembly district,” he said.

So far there is only one announced candidate for the Council race, Republican Robert Hornak, the deputy director of the city office for Assembly Minority Leader James Tedisco (R-Saratoga/Schenectady). The district is overwhelmingly Democratic.

With more than $2 million in campaign funds from an abandoned 2006 race for attorney general and his Assembly committee, Gianaris will have enough funds to create alliances, if he wanted. However, more than half of that money would likely be off limits because city campaign finance rules are much more restrictive than those of the state, a spokesperson for the city Campaign Finance Board said.

In addition to the healthy campaign coffers, more than 30 of the current Council members will be term-limited out next year, giving any new member a relatively better chance of winning the speaker seat, said political consultant Evan Stavisky. Notably, though, the Council did not elect a new member as speaker after the last term limits purge in 2001, going instead with Gifford Miller (D-Manhattan).

Gianaris had reportedly wanted to make an earlier transition to the Council to give himself some seniority going into the 2009 speaker’s race. The plan involved Vallone running for Gianaris’

Assembly seat, prompting a special election which Gianaris would run in and likely win, in exchange for Gianaris backing Vallone for Queens district attorney down the line. Gianaris would then have had a few years in the Council to develop relationships.

When asked about the never-realized proposal, Vallone characterized it as a rumor, but said he would not comment on private conversations.

The key to winning the speaker seat, party insiders say, is Queens county support. The county Democratic Party has picked the winner in each of the three campaigns for speaker over the 22 years since the post has existed.

Stavisky, who has worked on earlier Gianaris Assembly campaigns, said it was essential for any candidate to get the backing of the tightly unified machine.

“The first challenge is how to find the support of Queens County,” he said.

He discounted the theory that any borough would expect its legislators to be next in line because a Manhattan member had had the seat for two terms.

“It is a new game every time and the political circumstances are different each time,” he said.

Queens has been willing to back a speaker from Manhattan in exchange for getting control of powerful committee chairs, as it did when backing Miller and Christine Quinn (D-Manhattan).

Some believe that the Queens County organization should continue this strategy.

“I think Queens has a net loss if it has the speaker. You can’t have the speaker and Land Use, Finance and Public Safety,” said one Queens Council member, adding that all but one Democrat from the borough currently had a committee chair.

Vallone, though, said the decision was far from simple.

“Queens has done very well when my father was speaker and it has done very well when it controls the most powerful committees,” said Vallone, chairman of the public safety committee.

County executive secretary Michael Reich said he could not yet speculate on which candidate the organization might back, since no one yet knows all the candidates running for Council, let alone speaker.

But the county party would have only one factor in mind when deciding who to support, according to Reich.

“Our goal,” he said, “is to make sure Queens County is in a position to promote the issues that are important [to it].” pincus_a@yahoo.com Direct letters to the editor to editor@cityhallnews.com.

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EDITORIAL

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nough is enough. The State Legislature should force the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) to hand over its financial books to an outside agency for review. And city officials should take the lead in intensively lobbying Albany to make this change. Enlisting a private firm with a solid track record should be an idea given serious consideration.

New Yorkers have been reeling since the MTA announced last month that lighter-than-expected revenue from real estate taxes and mortgages would force it to delay or abandon service upgrades that were promised in the run-up to the most recent fare hike. The announcement was not just disheartening, but truly frightening. Already in 2008, the MTA is $21 million short of its own projections. And the year is far from over, and the recession far from its depth.

Who knows how far in the hole the MTA’s fantasy-land accounting could put the transit system by December?

The gap raises some serious questions about who exactly is doing the projecting, and how. A $21 million shortfall represents either significant calculation errors or projections made by an accounting team living outside reality, if not both. Neither of these should be tolerated any longer. Neither of them can be. And it does not help that MTA executive director and CEO Elliot Sander was apparently so

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removed from the accounting that just three weeks before the shortfall announcement, he made a big show of touting the supposedly on-schedule improvements in the first-ever “State of the MTA” address.

There is far too much at stake. The Fulton Street Transit Center is supposed to be the hub of a rebuilt Lower Manhattan. The Second Avenue Subway Line is supposed to alleviate crowding and spur economic development across Manhattan’s East Side. The No. 7 line extension is supposed to be crucial to the viability of the new Hudson Yards plan. The stations and improvements are supposed to make possible the new Yankee Stadium and proposed Atlantic Yards complex. East Side Access is supposed to revolutionize commuter transit.

Especially without congestion pricing, there is a huge amount the MTA now needs to do to improve public transportation in New York City.

The mayor and many others have made clear cases for how crucial improving and enhancing public transportation is to the vitality of these projects. How much longer will the MTA’s incompetent

accounting be allowed to endanger the future of New York City? How much longer will development and growth be held hostage by justified fears that the MTA will fail once again?

Of course, the shortfalls are not entirely the MTA’s fault. No one should truly expect a public transportation system to come into the black on its own, and the continuing withdrawal of state contributions should have long ago prompted every member of the Assembly and State Senate to come to the floors of their respective chambers screaming.

And the enormous debt service due to bad decisions made a generation ago is a massive gorilla on the MTA’s back.

But that is the reality of the situation, and the MTA has to operate within that reality. An agency that consistently reports cost overruns and revenue shortfalls—and has a history of deftly hiding hundreds of millions of dollars in its own books—is an agency that must no longer be tolerated. On behalf of taxpayers, on behalf of their own interests and on behalf of the future of New York, the political leadership of New York must devise a way to take the MTA’s accounting away from the MTA.

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Nothing to Lose o the Council has had one of the most contentious votes in its history. The final count on the congestion pricing home rule message, 30-20, was not, strictly speaking, a close one. After all, most candidates would be thrilled to get 60 percent of the vote in an election. But by the standards of the New York City Council, with its 51 supposedly diverse and diversely minded members, the margin was razor-thin, a real nail biter.

And yet, the Council chamber’s crumbling ceiling regardless, the building did not fall down. Nor, presumably, would it have fallen had the vote gone the other way, and congestion pricing never made its way to Albany.

Amazing.

This publication was supportive of the mayor’s congestion pricing proposal from the outset, so took the results of the March 31 vote as good news, though clearly, prematurely celebrated. But better news would have been the possibility that even a vote like this could be brought to the floor of the Council and not pass.

Christine Quinn (D-Manhattan) and Mayor Michael Bloomberg (Unaff.) are savvy and powerful leaders who used the powers of their offices and the goodies in their possession to tug Council members in the direction they wanted. Quinn’s delay of the vote until she was sure she had a majority was a flexing of parliamentary muscle to which she is entitled

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as the Council speaker. That is politics.

But what Quinn and the rest of the Council should learn from the vote, which with its 20 nays the speaker still proudly called a victory, is the acceptability of dissent. For those with an interest in vigorous and worthwhile debate, the idea that no bills ever fail in the New York City Council is more than a little depressing, and all too much like Albany.

True, the Council already often gets bogged down debating excess bills which, without the possibility of passing, are grand exercises in futility. However, to enable debates and votes on bills not sure to pass would inevitably change what the Council ultimately votes up, and the kinds of bills which are introduced in the first place. Not only would this help dissipate some of the overwhelming power over the institution which goes to any Council speaker, it could also do much in making the Council the forum for open discussion and cross-pollinating ideas which all representative bodies should ideally be. As someone who has had a strong record on reforming some of how the Council does business, Quinn should start to let bills fail.

Change the rules and allow unguaranteed bills to come to the floor. Change history and let a bill lose in a vote.

That is democracy. That is government.

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OP-ED Still More To Do on Health and Environment for 9/11 Victims

BY REP. JERROLD NADLER arlier this month, Congress, for the first time ever, examined the issue of compensation for those individuals whose health was adversely impacted by the effects of the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center. At a hearing I chaired along with Rep. Zoe Lofgren (DCalifornia), we looked at the economic losses of those individuals. Many people incurred such economic losses when they became too sick to work and lost their jobs, while others have inadequate health insurance and are struggling with exorbitant medical bills.

After the collapse of the Twin Towers on 9/11, tens of thousands of first responders, local residents, area workers and students were exposed to a cocktail of toxic substances said to be worse than the Kuwaiti oil fires. They are now coming down with diseases like sarcoidosis, asthma and RADS (reactive airways dysfunction syndrome).

And it was the actions of federal agencies, like the Environmental Protection Administration and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, that led to so many being unnecessarily exposed to this toxic environment.

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Last June, Sen. Hillary Clinton (D) and I held companion hearings on the actions of the EPA and other federal agencies that allowed workers to work in a toxic environment without proper protection and gave them false assurances as to their safety. At the House hearing, former EPA Administrator Christie Todd Whitman tried to explain why she told New Yorkers that the “air was safe to breathe” when, in fact, she had evidence to the contrary. Indeed, the EPA’s own inspector general found that her statements “were falsely reassuring, lacked a scientific basis, and were politically motivated.” And we now know that the White House changed EPA press releases, “to add reassuring statements and delete cautionary ones.” OSHA failed to enforce safety regulations at Ground Zero—but did at the Pentagon, where no one has developed respiratory problems.

Obviously, none of these injuries would have occurred were it not for the terrorists, who are ultimately to blame, but many would have been avoided if the federal government had acted in a responsible manner. The federal government, therefore, has a moral and legal obligation to compensate the victims of

pro-congestion pricing PACs with maximum contributions—the latter being the very definition of “soft money.”

Freedom of speech applies to everyone, not just mayors. And pay-for-play rules apply to billionaires equally.

Pretending otherwise is not only hypocritical, but in my neighborhood, we’d say it was CHutzpah, with a capital ‘CH.’ Mike Bloomberg has been a good Mayor, by and large. But the occasional inability to see things from the perspective of non-wealthy New Yorkers sometimes leaks out.

The day after he first proposed the $8 fee, reacting to complaints, the New York Post quoted him as saying “Oh, get over it. You pay $12 to get into a movie.” Mr. Mayor, I have constituents who don’t go to the movies because they’re $12 bucks.

Why not just offer to “let them eat cake?”

who submitted claims received compensation. However, while the VCF did an excellent job of handling claims involving people who died or had an immediate and easily diagnosable ailment, like a broken leg, the fund had closed by the time many of the latent ailments we are now clearly seeing began to manifest.

To address the increasing number of the sick, Congress in 2003 provided $1 billion in 9/11 disaster assistance to the Federal Emergency Management Agency to create an appropriate “mechanism for claims arising from debris removal.” FEMA, in a grant agreement with New York City, established the World Trade Center Captive Insurance Company to handle 9/11 claims.

However, instead of distributing these funds, the Captive Fund has litigated nearly every claim, spending millions of dollars on legal fees. Although Congressional intent was to pay claims, only a handful of claims have been paid out, and none for respiratory injuries.

That may be why nearly 10,000 people have filed suit against the City of New York and several contractors who continue to suffer from 9/11-related health effects.

We must assume that in addition to those that are already sick, many more will become sick in the future. That is why I, along with Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-Manhattan/Queens) and Rep. Vito Fossella (R-Staten Island/Brooklyn) have introduced the 9/11 Health and Compensation Act, which would provide comprehensive medical treatment to any person whose health was affected, and reopen the Victim Compensation Fund so that affected people can be compensated for their economic losses.

Indeed, after the hearing, I met with some of the living victims of 9/11 that had come down to attend. One thing is clear—their pain and suffering is real and cannot be ignored. We can never fully repay the debt that this nation owes them; we can never fully alleviate their anguish—but we must try. As the nation continues to heal and rebuild, we must do better by the living victims and heroes of 9/11.

Lewis Fidler is a Democrat representing parts of Brooklyn in the City Council.

Jerrold Nadler is a Democrat representing parts of Manhattan and Brooklyn in Congress.

9/11 and to provide for their health.

Indeed, it was outrageous when Rep. Darrell Issa (R-California) at the hearing called the attacks “simply” aircraft hitting New York, and not an attack on America.

In the immediate aftermath, the federal government did take some steps to address this issue. For example, Congress created the Victim Compensation Fund (VCF), a program designed to compensate people for losses sustained as a result of the attacks on the World Trade Center, and to limit litigation against the airline industry. The fund provided aid to the families of 9/11 victims and to individuals who suffered personal injury in the immediate aftermath of the attacks. In return for accepting these funds, recipients waived their right to sue. By the time the fund expired at the end of 2003, over $7 billion was distributed to survivors of 2,880 people killed on 9/11, and to 2,680 people who were injured in the attacks or the immediate rescue efforts.

The VCF is widely considered to have been a success. Most families of deceased victims chose to participate in the Fund, and 97 percent of those

A Historic Vote, With Historic Consequences

BY CITY COUNCIL MEMBER LEWIS FIDLER n the wake of the Council’s historic vote on congestion pricing, I heard Mayor Mike Bloomberg proclaim that the vote proved that “New Yorkers are overwhelmingly in support of congestion pricing.” And he said that with a straight face!

The die has been cast. But there are a few things that need to be said about the Council vote—which was in fact historic.

Of course, the history being made is a matter of perspective. Like our Democratic presidential race, where history will be made—will it be the first woman or African-American to ascend to our party’s nomination?—the historic nature of the Council vote is a matter of what one sees. Pro or con, the passage of congestion pricing would be a tidal change in the city. On the other hand, in the history of the City Council, no measure brought to the floor by the speaker or majority leader with their support—no less the added support of the mayor—has ever had as many as 20 ‘no’ votes cast.

That last fact flies in the face of the mayor’s statement. Add to that the fact that members were induced—as is their right—to vote in favor of the plan with extra-curricular benefits, and it would hardly be a resounding statement that New Yorkers support the measure on the merits.

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Let me be clear. Members are entitled to decide that the package on the table benefits their district more than the proposal hurts it. That’s politics.

Things like this have happened since the Continental Congress, and I am not above it. But that surely clouds the message that the mayor was sending. It passed. The state was authorized. But that’s it.

Two other important points: The Council ceded all authority to make this decision to the State. We did not pass a specific plan, but rather authorized the state to act. This abdication of a full role was, in my view, an institutional error, regardless of the side you take.

Second, when I said the mayor plays by a set of rules that he condemns for others, his spokesman called me a “sore loser.” Well, actually, in the face of the historic ‘no’ vote, I don’t really think our side lost. But more importantly, this answer sidestepped the facts.

This billionaire mayor has been critical of “pay-for-play” in our city. In many respects, he has been right. But his deeds do not mirror his words. Look at the facts: He “bought” the Republican majority in the State Senate with a $500,000 campaign contribution. He offered at least one Council member a fund raiser over dinner and cocktails at Gracie Mansion. His closest friends, including his accountant, funded the

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APR IL 2008

CITY HALL

Hyer-Spencer Prepares for Competitive Election Against Unknown Opponent

SCOTT WILLIAMS

Xanthakis mulls a second run for seat Staten Island Republicans believe should be theirs

BY DAN RIVOLI HYER-SPENCER (D-STATEN Island/Brooklyn) represents the only Assembly district in the city prone to competitive general elections. She is anticipating a tough fight for re-election as she seeks her second term, after her upset victory in 2006 wrested the seat from Republican control.

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she becomes a multi-term entrenched incumbent.

While Hyer-Spencer is prepping for a redux of her 2006 door-to-door campaign, she has purposely avoided certain opportunities to put her name in the paper. She was the only member of Staten Island’s Albany delegation to refuse to comment on the prostitution scandal which led former Gov. Eliot Spitzer (D) to resign.

“I will continue to stay away from salacious and titillating details,” HyerSpencer said. “I don’t want to be mired in that.”

She has instead tried to put the focus on her record of legislative achievements, like the bill which waives application fees for orders of protection when directed from a court, attempting to fix a problem she noticed as an advocate for victims of domestic violence before being elected. “These are the small things we can change,” she said. “I can craft legislation to fix these infirmities.”

Hyer-Spencer spent her first year prime-sponsoring almost a dozen bills, several of which passed the Assembly or were signed into law.

“This year, these bills are making their way through the process and I’m learning how to lobby them,” she said.

Political opponents, however, criticize her for putting work on legislation ahead of using her office as a bully pulpit.

John Friscia, head of the Staten Island Republican Party, rattled off a litany of issues that he felt HyerSpencer has not suffiAnthony Xanthakis ciently addressed. has so far refrained from “She has not been in launching a rematch the forefront of any of against Assembly the issues that I think Member Janel Hyer-Spencer, are important to Staten leaving her ready for Island,” Friscia said. a battle but unsure of The island GOP, he whom she will face. said, will make a serious effort to put a Republican back in the “I will be in a competitive race for the seat, which is “ripe for the picking.”

“The Republicans are better suited for rest of my political life,” Hyer-Spencer that seat,” Friscia said. “I think that we are said.

Who will be giving her that race this more representative of the community.”

Xanthakis would make an excellent year, though, is something she does not candidate, Friscia said. But if Xanthakis yet know.

Staten Island’s GOP is pushing 2006 opts out of the race, there are other nominee Anthony Xanthakis to make this potential candidates, like Joseph election a rematch, calling him the best Cammarata, a former police officer who candidate to beat Hyer-Spencer before lost the 2006 primary to Xanthakis.

Xanthakis, who was pro bono counsel to the seat’s predecessor, Matthew Mirones (R), is hesitating from jumping into the race to make sure he can put together a winning campaign with the Republican Assembly Campaign Committee (RACC) and the county party.

“They want to make sure it’s a real winner for them,” Xanthakis said. “If we come together, I think we’ll make a fine run at the seat.”

Xanthakis kept his campaign committee open after his loss by a three-percent margin to Hyer-Spencer. To the RACC, his strong showing in 2006 makes him the best candidate to put the seat back in Republican control.

“The fact that Xanthakis came close in one of the worst Republican years since Watergate is telling,” said Josh Fitzpatrick, communications director for Assembly Minority Leader James Tedisco (R-Schenectady/Saratoga).

Though 2008 looks to be an equally tough year for New York City Republicans with former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani (R) losing the presidential nomination, Fitzpatrick sees a silver lining with Sen. John McCain (R-Arizona) on top of the ticket.

“McCain will attract independents and he can reach out to the Reagan Democrats,” Fitzpatrick said. “I think it’s a whole new political map.”

Even with McCain’s potential effect on down-ballot races, the borough’s top Republican, Rep. Vito Fossella (R-Staten Island/Brooklyn) has been having fundraising issues, with his former campaign treasurer under federal investigation. And Fossella has himself been targeted by national Democrats hoping to grab his Congressional seat. But Xanthakis’ ability to build a war chest with few party resources makes him an attractive candidate with an ability to make his own individual appeal to voters, according to former Borough President James Molinari (R-Staten Island).

“What he offers is good funds coming from the Greek community,” Molinari said. “Anthony’s funding would not interfere with money that would go to Vito, for example.”

With this race being one of two competitive elections on the island this November, Molinari feels that a Republican can win if backed by a united GOP and given aid from Albany.

“Is it difficult to run against an incumbent? Yeah, it is,” Molinari said. “But there’re opportunities. It’s a winnable.” danrivoli@gmail.com Direct letters to the editor to editor@cityhallnews.com.

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17

City and State Wrangle Over Education Cuts

ANDREW SCHWARTZ

Mayoral control and city budget could both be threatened, lawmakers warn

Mid-year budget cuts have caused problems in city schools, leading to protests like the “Keep the Promises” rally in City Hall Park on March 19.

BY RACHEL BREITMAN

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N THE MIDST OF PROTESTS OVER

the expected city budget cuts, city teachers, administrators and politicians are waiting on the mayor’s response to an increase in education aid from the State Legislature. After being hit by $180 million in mid-year cuts this January, the Department of Education expects $500 million more to be slashed from the 2008-2009 city budget.

City educators warned that the toll could be heavy.

“The mid-year cuts meant schools needed to drop new tutoring programs after school and on Saturdays,” said Rose Kern, Staten Island chapter chair for the Council for School Supervisors, as she stood in the rain at a mid-March rally at City Hall.

While additional cuts could mean overcrowded classrooms and slimmer academic options, Mayor Michael Bloomberg (Unaff.) has called the cuts unavoidable. He said he was ethically bound to trim the education budget, since other city agencies are facing

reductions of at least five percent.

“We can’t sit here and say one thing is more important than another,” he said on the day of the rally. “Everybody’s going to share the pain in the same sense that everybody shares the rewards.”

According to the Independent Budget Office, a publicly-funded agency that offers non-partisan economic analysis, such sizable cutbacks may not be necessary—or at least not yet.

“We project more revenue than the Bloomberg administration does,” said Doug Turetsky, spokesperson for the IBO. “Though we agree that down the road the city is facing more difficult times, business income tax and personal income tax for 2007 came in pretty strong.”

The state’s Division of Budget insisted it had satisfied its financial responsibility in the enacted state budget.

“We would dispute the way the city views it,” said Division spokesperson Matt Anderson.

The state will provide $644 million in additional aid, bringing the total state aid to $8.33 billion.

“We are still adding money, but it is the city that is cutting,” said Anderson.

Education advocates have also been critical of the mayor’s proposed cuts.

“At the city level, we want the mayor to restore this year’s mid-year cuts as well as next year’s cuts,” said Geri Palast, executive director of Campaign for Fiscal Equity. “If he feels that they cannot restore this year, we want to have a discussion with open books to make sure the cuts aren’t affecting classrooms.”

The Assembly’s plan calls on the city to add $324 million back into next year’s education budget.

“After 12 years of lawsuits and victories in the courts,” said Assembly Education Chair Cathy Nolan (DQueens) in a statement, “now is not the time for the Bloomberg administration to falter on education funding.”

Assembly Member Linda Rosenthal (D-Manhattan) said that since the state upped the ante, Bloomberg must do the same, or risk losing executive control for the schools in his last year in office.

“It was a blame game, but the city won’t be able to play,” said Rosenthal. “In

2009, the mayor’s executive control of the schools will come up for a vote. If that is going to continue, there’s going to have to be a lot of changes.”

Meanwhile, City Council Member Bill De Blasio (D-Brooklyn) put forward a resolution to rescind the mid-year cuts and restore next year’s budget. Already, 43 other Council members have signed the resolution. But Council Member Charles Barron (D-Brooklyn) said rallies and resolutions are purely ceremonial.

“Rallies are fine and resolutions are okay for political purposes,” said Barron, the Higher Education Committee chair.

“But it’s time for the Council to stand up and show its muscle, and the only way to do that is vote ‘no’ on the budget. We have the power to not pass this.”

Council Member Robert Jackson (DManhattan), chair of the Education Committee, agreed that the situation calls for major action and consequences.

“I will vote ‘no’ on the budget if they don’t put education money back,” he said. rachellbreitman@yahoo.com Direct letters to the editor to editor@cityhallnews.com.

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APR I L 2008

CITY HALL

www.cityhallnews.com

Still Fighting Fictional Manhattan, despite having Ice-T and Vincent D’Onofrio on patrol, and Fred Thompson and then Sam Waterston as district attorney, is a more dangerous place to live.

Discussing his work, Morgenthau is careful to stay on message. He immediately starts conversations about his time in office by quoting statistics about the drops in crime, and Manhattan’s move from having the highest murder rate of all the boroughs to the fourth-highest, despite the size of its population and the number of people constantly passing through its neighborhoods. In every election cycle, he has reminded voters of the shifts, though he admits that he would have trouble proving a direct causal link between anything he or his prosecutors have done and the drops in crime.

“What I’m saying is, we’re down more than anybody else. Is that a coincidence?

Could be,” he said.

He believes his prosecutors’ success in getting convictions years ago is still keeping potential repeat offenders behind bars instead of on the streets.

“Police were in all the boroughs, and yet we went from number one to number four,” he said. “And, of course, there were some other things that factored in.”

A booming economy, centered in the

with everything from identity theft to DNA in cold cases.

Most of all, with the extra time and leftover budget, Morgenthau has been able to oversee a massive expansion of white collar crime prosecutions, both in terms of their number and their scope.

Over the years, these have toppled celebrity offenders, like Tyco CEO Dennis Kozlowski, as well as many lesser-known ones. He believes this has improved the economy and overall wellbeing of Manhattan, as well as the city and state which his borough’s financial sector helps support.

The city’s impending budget cuts to his and the other district attorneys’ offices may be about to change that.

Each year, Bloomberg has sent the city’s five district attorneys letters asking them to detail how they would handle a 5-percent budget cut, if one came. Each year, the threatened money was eventually restored going into the final budget.

This year, with Bloomberg warning of extreme budget cuts across the board, the district attorneys are skeptical they will get that 5 percent back. A second letter, which went out last month, indicating that they might have to incorporate an additional 3-percent cut, has them even more concerned.

Crime could go up, he fears, which might drive people to move out of Manhattan, taking the money from their property and sales taxes with them. That will cost the city dearly, he says.

Meanwhile, his office will have no choice but to use its sparser resources to handle a violent crime caseload which may climb as the economy dips. Though he doubts numbers will return to the levels of the ’70s and ’80s, he says slicing his budget will force him to return to the mentality of those days, when his office was almost wholly consumed with tackling street crime. That will mean pulling back his prosecutors and investigators from more complex and time-consuming cases.

Investigations done well will prevent future crimes, he says, pointing to the success his Firearms Trafficking Unit and Homicide Investigation Unit have had in tracking guns and gun crimes, especially in connection with drugs and gangs.

Bloomberg has led a nationwide Mayors Against Illegal Guns campaign, Morgenthau says, but is now trying to force budget cuts which could hamper efforts to fight illegal guns in Manhattan.

Morgenthau smiles at the irony, and says he has not found the mayor’s staff to have any sympathy for the situation.

The cuts in funding and investigations will create problems in many cases, with so many prosecutions resting on ever more complex uses of evidence, from DNA to cellular phone triangulation.

That will drive his conviction rate down, he said, and, in turn, potentially drive Manhattan’s and the city’s crime rate up to higher levels than they have been at for years.

“If you don’t have the people to investigate cases, you’re not going to get as many convictions. You’re going to have more people out on the street. And I think it’s a particular problem in white collar crime,” he said.

Fewer white collar crime convictions, he warns, will mean less money coming into the city in recovered revenues. In fiscal years 2004-2007, they brought in $89 million to the state and an additional $93 million to the city in recovered taxes, fines from settlements and other payments—many times more than the $5.7 million he is seeking to

“If you don’t have the people to investigate cases, you’re not going to get as many convictions. You’re going to have more people out on the street. And I think it’s a particular problem in white collar crime,” Morgenthau said. borough, was likely one of these. Ensuing gentrification creeping into previously untouched corners, from Alphabet City to East Harlem, was undoubtedly another. An overall citywide campaign to clean up some of the most prominent seedy spots, Times Square prime among them, also helped.

The net result is that Morgenthau’s office has had many fewer violent crimes to occupy the time of his staff of about 500 assistant district attorneys, leaving time and resources to start more than a dozen new bureaus and units dealing

Though a vigorous opponent of the proposed cuts, Morgenthau stopped short of saying that this will definitively lead to a new crime wave. Always a politician and a lawyer, he chose his words carefully.

“I think there’s a danger that you’re going to see an increase in crime, because the fact is that when people are convicted and are in jail, they’re not committing crimes,” he said. “That’s a fact of life. And also, arrest, prosecution and jail is a deterrent—not a complete deterrent, but it has a deterrent effect.”

ANDREW SCHWARTZ

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 1

keep in the budget for his office.

Council Member Peter Vallone, Jr. (DQueens), chair of the Public Safety Committee, says most of his colleagues in government do not see Morgenthau’s argument.

“There are a few Council members who are on board, but most people in City Hall don’t truly understand the importance of the district attorneys’ offices and their need for additional funding,” he said.

Most make the mistake of believing that fighting crime is contingent only on police funding, according to Vallone.

“You’d think that after watching so much Law & Order, people would under-

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A

stand that there are two coexistent branches of law enforcement,” he said, with a grim chuckle. “But apparently, they don’t.”

Nor has Morgenthau’s insistence that his office could probably easily generate the revenues to pay for their budgets convinced many people, though Vallone said it should have.

“He’s claiming that he can go after trillions of dollars that are allegedly hidden from New York State,” Vallone said. “I have no reason to disbelieve it. I don’t know him to subject to whimsy often.”

fter his many decades of experience in government, Morgenthau seems to see where this situation is headed. He expects the cuts to come.

So he has been pushing harder than ever for changes to the formulas which determine how much of the money recovered by cases his office prosecutes is directed back to his office to fund future operations. The office gets a portion— enough to make up for the amount lost since the 2003 budget cuts—but especially for recovered taxes, Morgenthau would like to see sizable increases in how much comes back. Under a revenue program

negotiated as part of each year’s budget, the office is only eligible to receive 25 percent of the recovered money, up to $2.7 million, even with major settlements like the $40 million recovered in the Tyco case.

The city’s four other district attorneys also receive portions of the recovered money.

However, with so many of the people, companies and institutions that are subject to these decisions centered in Manhattan, the overwhelming bulk of the investigations are brought in by Morgenthau’s office.

Morgenthau does not want a higher percentage of recovered funds. But the ceiling, he said, should be eliminated.

“We think it’s in the interests of the

APR IL 2008

19

city to do that. It isn’t as if we’d put the money in our pocket. We’d use it to make more cases,” he said.

That could lessen the impact of the impending budget cuts, he believes, and perhaps give him the resources to increase his office’s activity on new fronts, like tracking terrorist finances, investigating companies involved with sub-prime mortgages, pursuing negligence at construction sites and assisting immigrants.

And there may yet be other ideas, either for new laws or prosecutorial techniques—like his groundbreaking “John Doe” indictments, first used in 2000 to charge the DNA profile of an unknown

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orgenthau does not have a clear statistical yardstick by which he measures his success over his nine terms and 34 years in office. There is no one piece of data he tracks, nor any cumulative figures which he compares year to year.

Instead, he said, “it’s a sense that we’re making progress” that gives him confidence in the job he is continuing to do. And it is a job he wants to continue to do: despite recent rumors and speculation of his impending resignation or retirement, Morgenthau says he is planning to run again next year.

The last time he was up for re-election, in 2005, people assumed he was waging his last campaign, a swan-song ninth term for an 86-year-old man who had become a legend of local politics. He had had no opposition at the polls for 20 years, and appeared on the Democratic and Republican lines every four years.

Then Leslie Crocker Snyder, a former prosecutor in his office and criminal court judge, leapt into the race. He had been around too long, she said, accusing

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APR I L 2008

man in a rape case. This innovation prevented rape cases with significant evidence from becoming ineligible for prosecution if the perpetrators could not be found within what was then a five-year statute of limitations on rape cases.

He admits that keeping up with all the technological advances in how crimes are committed and prosecuted is impossible, but says he feels comfortable relying on his staff to help him through those cases and methods which are beyond his grasp.

“I’d be kidding you if I said I understood all of them,” he said. “I don’t. The important thing is to have people around you who do understand them.”

Whatever he does, according to Staten Island District Attorney Dan Donovan (R), will have significance for all prosecutors.

Himself a former assistant district attorney under Morgenthau, Donovan noted that Morgenthau’s vertical, rather than horizontal, management structure was already standard by the time he arrived on the job in early 2004. But Donovan instituted other innovations after the model of his old boss, including being the first to indict a John Doe DNA profile on Staten Island, three days before the statute of limitations would have ended.

The rapist was caught one month later.

Inevitably, the Manhattan district attorney draws major media attention, Donovan said, and Morgenthau has used that to influence prosecutors around the city and across the country.

“A lot of the things Mr. Morgenthau does, they’re publicized for the rest of us to find out,” he said. “Mr. Morgenthau doesn’t call us to say ‘Hey, you should try this,’ but the coverage allows us to know what he’s doing.”

On Morgenthau’s Agenda: Terrorism, Mortgages and Construction Negligence s an example of what he believes his office can and should be doing, Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau cited his office’s massive 2003 case which began with 115,000 credit cards issued by a Caribbean bank and used in Manhattan. The office eventually discovered $3.2 billion in questionable transfers from New York to, among other places, various points in the Middle East.

Certain recent movements involving Iranian money have caught his eye, he said, though he declined to provide details of the investigations.

“I’m very concerned about Iran, and I think people aren’t focusing on that.

Iran has been trying to buy industrial material in the United States—medium-range, long-range rockets for their missiles,” he said. “We are working on it. That’s not something I’m ready to talk about publicly, but we’re looking

A

him of a prosecutorial approach that had grown musty and outdated. She defied all the conventional wisdom, the whispered assurances that she need only wait until 2009, when he would not run again.

The story made national headlines.

Outside of the handful of gray lions in the United States Senate, politicians over 80 are generally punch lines or stunt candidates, when they exist at all. Morgenthau, though, waged an aggressive campaign against Snyder and, though he declined repeated requests to debate, showcased everything from the constantly declining crime statistics in Manhattan to photographs of him meeting with Martin

at terrorist financing—put it that way.”

Meanwhile, he is continuing to lobby for new laws in many different areas. He wants to see a legislative response to the sub-prime mortgage crisis, in which he has a personal stake: six months after being assured by his long-time bank that it never sold mortgages, the bank sold the mortgage on his East 86th Street apartment. The mortgage was then sold again, this time to Countrywide, the company which has become synonymous with the sub-prime crisis. Countrywide then syndicated his mortgage, leaving Morgenthau unclear on who controls his debt or what recourses he might have.

“The problem is that if I said I wanted to prepay my mortgage, if I wanted to extend it to have a 15-year mortgage, I don’t know where I’d go. I don’t know who the hell owns it,” he said.

Morgenthau would empower bankruptcy courts to modify mortgages. The

current lack of control borrowers have over the holders of their mortgages and the possibility that this could enable people to lose their homes as financial giants get rich, he said, is “unAmerican.”

“We should be looking to protect the owner of a primary residence. They’re the people that should get priority,” he said. “And they don’t.”

On the local level, he wants to simplify the burden of proof for proving intent on construction sites. Five violations in any three-month period should be enough, he said. First suggested years ago, Morgenthau’s bill has gathered more steam in the aftermath of the mid-March crane collapse on the East Side.

Next, he said, he wants to begin the process of crafting legislation to tackle exploitation of illegal immigrants.

—EIRD eidovere@cityhallnews.com

59 percent of the vote, and went into the general election with no opponent.

Back then, a few reports noted with some incredulity that Morgenthau would not commit to calling 2005 his last campaign. And sure enough, he has been raising money to run for a 10th term, possibly to promote a very straightforward slogan, “90 in ’09. “ The real plan, say those close to him, is to die in office. But to do that, he will need to keep winning, which most expect he will be able to do, even with Snyder planning to take him on again in 2009. And she will not be alone: Richard Davis, a private attorney with experience in the Treasury

Democratic establishment they will have to court to win the nomination when he is no longer running.

He may be an old man. He may be a legend. But he is also a politician, which means he plans to win.

Nor will next year’s race necessarily be his last, he said. Whether Manhattanites will be treated to a “94 in ’13” slogan, he does not know.

“My crystal ball’s not that good,” he said.

Though he clearly has no love for Snyder, he denied the speculation in the political world that he is staying in office in part to keep her from having an open seat to run for in 2009, as vengeance for running against him in 2005. If he wins but does not complete his term, the governor would be able to appoint a successor, who would then be an incumbent going into the next race. Morgenthau said there is no orchestrated effort to block Snyder.

“Nah,” he said. “That’s an exaggeration.”

Though he clearly seems inclined to have Snyder kept out of the office, Morgenthau said he has not put much thought into who, or even what kind of person, he might want to see succeed him as one of the nation’s busiest and highest-profile district attorneys.

After all, that would mean thinking of a race when he is not running himself.

“That,” he said, “is a long way down the road.” eidovere@cityhallnews.com

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Nor will next year’s race necessarily be his last, he said. Whether Manhattanites will be treated to a “94 in ’13” slogan, he does not know.

Luther King, Jr. and John F. Kennedy from four-and-a-half decades earlier. He stumped at subway stops. He ran a commercial with the camera circling in on him, standing on the steps of the courthouse, his arms crossed and jaw locked.

Few expected that Snyder would actually beat Morgenthau, even with the New York Times editorializing that she should.

In the end, the institutional and financial support he received made sure she did not: he won the Democratic primary with

Department and United States Attorney’s office, is planning to run and resigned as chair of Citizens Union to do so. Richard Aborn, president of the Citizens Crime Commission of New York City, is rumored to be planning a run as well. And there may be more, though most expect several interested and potentially heavy hitters, like State Sen. Eric Schneiderman (DManhattan/Bronx) and Cyrus Vance, Jr. to sit out any race which includes Morgenthau, lest they upset the

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CITY HALL

www.cityhallnews.com

THE

APRIL 2008

POWERGRID Per Capita State Budget Spending

MD

KY

$5,167

CT $4,985

This year’s state budget came in at $124 billion dollars. That makes New York Introthe third-highest state spender in the nation, and represents about a $10 billion jump from last year.

But considered per capita, New York ranks behind several other states, including Alaska, Hawaii, Wyoming and Vermont.

This position may yet change—the budget numbers used for the 49 other states is from last year’s numbers. New York finalizes its state budget earlier than any other state in the nation, and well before the end of the fiscal year on June 30, which all other state governments wait for before determining their spending. Texas waits until the end of August to finalize its budget. Alabama and Michigan wait until the end of September.

New York, though, missed its March 31 deadline again this year, making for late budgets 21 of the last 24 years.

$2,075

OH $5,081

FL $3,857

ID $4,227

HI $8,705

GA $2,194

AK $20,894

IN DE

$3,910

$4,400

ME

LA

AZ

$6,411 11

$4,216

M MI

$6,769

$4,228 $4,2 2 228

KS $1,920

M MA C CO

VT

$4,163 $4,1 163

$8,667

$3,668 3,,668

MS

NV V

$4,519

$3,552 $3,55 52

WY $8,211

NJ

AR

$3,853

$10,246

MT

WA

$4,003

$6,192

TN

MO M

$4,645

$3,680 $3

NM

OR

$3,110

RI

OK

$6,496

NH

$1,984

SD

$6,759

$3,902

$3,736

NE $3,876

PA $2,598

SC $4,863

NY

VA A $4,888 88

WV

NC

$6,423

$7,706

$2,333

UT U $4,347 $4

WI

TX $6,508

AL MN $3,500

$2,056

$5,314

ND $3,864

*Data provided by budget offices in each of the 50 states.

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CITY HALL

www.cityhallnews.com

APR IL 2008

ISSUE FORUM: HEALTH

Overcoming New York’s Health Disparities

BY ASSEMBLY MEMBER RICHARD GOTTFRIED ARTIN LUTHER KING, JR. SAID, “Of all the forms of inequality, injustice in health care is the most shocking and most inhumane.” In New York, we have glaring disparities in health care in communities of color and among women.

Infant mortality rates—the percentage of babies that die before their first birthday—are more than twice as high for black New Yorkers as for whites. People of color are more likely to have no health coverage—17 percent of blacks, 35 percent of Hispanics, 20 percent of women, but only 10 percent of white males.

People of color have much higher rates than whites of chronic conditions that can be avoided or better treated by proper primary and preventive care, such as diabetes, asthma and heart disease.

The causes of health disparities are not a mystery. More people of color live in poverty, which can have devastating health effects. There are fewer health services located in communities of color.

People of color live in communities with more environmental pollution.

Language and cultural differences make it extraordinarily difficult for peo-

M

ple to use the health care system.

Furthermore, negative attitudes and lack of understanding on the part of health care providers—especially from backgrounds far from those of their patients—can be real barriers to caring, quality, professional health services. Few health professionals are from the communities they serve.

Making headway against the problems in our health care system will go a long way in reducing health disparities. This year’s state budget enacts many longoverdue steps in that direction proposed first by then-Gov. Eliot Spitzer (D) and approved by the Legislature.

The new “Doctors Across New York” program and related efforts will support young health professionals who practice in underserved rural and urban areas.

This could help young people from those communities serve their communities.

The new state budget begins to shift resources to community-based providers of primary and preventive care—community health centers, hospital clinics and private practitioners.

Much more needs to be done. For example, New York requires hospitals to provide language access services. These rules need to be enforced and broadened to cover other providers. We should fund

these services to ensure that they are provided.

The most important action to reduce health disparities is to adopt universal health coverage for all New Yorkers.

Former Governor Spitzer began developing a universal coverage plan, and Governor Paterson is continuing that work. He is expected to present the results of these efforts later this year.

It should not only get coverage to the uninsured, but also deal with the insurance problems of those who do have coverage.

People without health coverage face obvious obstacles to health care. But even people with health coverage face obstacles. High deductibles, co-payments, limited benefits, limited provider networks, unfair denials of coverage for services, and inadequate payments that require patients to pay more to providers are unfair to all of us, but especially hurt people with limited financial resources

or limited educational background to help them deal with health plan bureaucracies.

The right answer is to offer publicly-sponsored coverage paid for with broad-based public financing, like Medicare or Child Health Plus—but for every New Yorker.

Publicly-sponsored coverage would be accountable to the public, not to insurance company stockholders. We’d be able to promote primary and preventive care, offer reimbursement rates that provide access to quality health care, and support language access—all key to overcoming health care disparities.

Progressive public financing would make it available to everyone, with the cost fairly distributed based on ability to pay.

(For information on my proposal for universal health coverage, “New York Health Plus,” go to: http://assembly.state.ny.us/mem/?ad=075 &submit=Go.)

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Richard Gottfried, a Democrat representing parts of Manhattan, is chair of the Assembly Health Committee.

Financing Health Care as if Health Mattered

BY DR. THOMAS FRIEDEN, MD, MPH F MONEY WERE THE CURE, WE

I

would be the healthiest nation in history. We spend $2 trillion a year on health care—a sixth of our economy, nearly twice the proportion spent by most other industrialized countries. Yet we don’t receive anything close to the potential health return for this investment.

We fail to care adequately for more than half of the people with hypertension and diabetes and three-quarters of those with high cholesterol. Failure to provide basic preventive care results in tens of thousands of amputations, strokes, heart attacks and premature deaths every year.

How can such an expensive system perform so poorly? Simple: we pay to treat illness, not to prevent it. We reward providers for complex medical procedures but we pay little or nothing for care that keeps people from needing those procedures in the first place. A patient with a heart attack may need an operation that costs $100,000 or more. A doctor who prevents heart attacks—by helping patients control risk factors such as high blood pressure and high cholesterol—may actually lose money.

The system needs to be reoriented to support doctors in their goal of keeping

people healthy. This includes giving them the clinical tools needed to provide improved preventive care at every visit, and the ability to document effective prevention so insurers can reward them for it.

Mayor Bloomberg’s Primary Care Information Project is an ambitious step in that direction. Its centerpiece is an electronic health record that has been engineered with prevention as a priority.

By helping doctors improve primary care and tracking their success at keeping people healthy, it provides the foundation for a new model of health care.

Electronic health records can streamline reimbursement and prevent needless tests and procedures. They can also prevent medication errors and improve coordination among providers. But New York City’s new electronic health record—already being used by more than 200 primary-care providers with 200,000 patients—does more. It tells the doctor when a patient has an out-of-control condition, is overdue for screening or immunization, or needs extra atten-

tion. Instead of waiting for patients to show up with symptoms, it can generate automatic reminders for routine preventive care—a service that dentists, veterinarians and auto mechanics provide routinely but that health care providers do not.

Imagine a 55-year-old man who, like more than 60 million other Americans, has high blood pressure. When he’s due for a checkup, the electronic health record prompts the provider’s office to call him. During the exam, the doctor has instant access to the patient’s medical record and can use it to track his cholesterol and blood pressure readings and graph them for the patient to see. The computer software suggests that the doctor consider a simple, less expensive and more effective drug regimen to reduce blood pressure. The doctor can also assess the patient’s response to treatment, check the medical literature for optimal interventions, and prevent risky drug interactions. The software recommends appropriate immunizations and cancer screenings, ensuring that life-saving steps are taken by

default—not because a harried doctor, with incomplete information, happens to remember.

Besides helping doctors provide better care, our electronic health record helps them monitor their own performance. Today, few doctors know how many of their patients have hypertension, let alone what proportion are adequately treated. Doctors using New York City’s new health record can see how well all patients with the same condition in their practice are doing. This has important implications. If public and private insurers start rewarding providers who most effectively prevent needless illness, the entire system would benefit.

Insurers could charge less without cutting profits. Businesses would gain a healthier workforce. And employees would be healthier and more productive.

Mayor Bloomberg has called for making electronic health records as common as stethoscopes in doctors’ offices. This would cost money, but the expense would be only a tiny fraction of our current health care bill. And with both information technology and payment oriented toward prevention, we could begin to build a system that gives real health value for our health spending.

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Dr. Thomas Frieden is the New York City Health Commissioner.

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APR IL 2008

ISSUE FORUM: HEALTH

Preventing Obesity and the Health Problems It Causes

BY COUNCIL MEMBER JOEL RIVERA

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Issue Forum for May:

Education with political perspectives from: Council Member Robert Jackson (D-Manhattan), Chair of the Council Education Committee New York City Schools Chancellor Joel Klein Assembly Member Catherine Nolan (D-Queens), Chair of the Assembly Education Committee State Sen. Stephen Saland (R-Columbia/Dutchess), Chair of the Senate Education Committee

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unprecedented health crisis, with epidemic-proportion obesity generating a wide range of otherwise preventable illnesses. Unhealthy dietary habits and physical inactivity contribute to nearly 300,000 deaths in the U.S. each year.

This situation is even worse in New York City, where the Bronx leads other boroughs in the prevalence of heart disease, diabetes and stroke, ailments that can all be traced back to the unhealthy consequences of obesity.

A study conducted by the Centers for Disease Control found that Hispanic children in New York City have the highest rate of obesity. Scientists point out that many Hispanics carry genes that make us predisposed to being overweight. I won’t disagree with the scientists but I do believe one major factor contributing to this epidemic is a significant lack of nutritional knowledge.

As the chair of the City Council’s Health Committee, and in response to this growing health emergency, I have set a number of priorities in order to properly direct Health Committee resources to address these issues. Needless to say, looking for creative ways to educate New Yorkers and mitigate the obesity epidemic is my number-one priority.

One way my committee is contributing to the battle against obesity is through a partnership with Health Corps, an educational and mentoring program that teaches American youth about the workings of the human body, and looks to motivate our young people to become health advocates in their communities.

Health Corps was founded by cardiac surgeon, best-selling author and Oprah Winfrey show regular, Dr. Mehmet Oz, who was propelled to action after operating on many overweight young adult patients with blocked arteries.

Dr. Oz and I recognize the need for a change in attitudes and lifestyles, a major step that requires a new mode of education, not only for our youth, but also for school faculty and parents. Highlighting simple steps to healthier lifestyles, the Program’s health coordinators urge students to read food labels, carry pedometers and walk at least 10,000 steps daily.

What I particularly like about the pro-

gram is the way in which it encourages our students to become agents of change.

The Health Corps, employing a team of idealistic health coordinators, delivers its nutritional and fitness education to students throughout the city. Backed by a strong public-private partnership, the Health Corps initiative spans 35 high schools in four states, including 28 New York metropolitan schools that benefit from a $2 million appropriation from City Council that I helped secure.

Given the gravity of our burgeoning health crisis, it is essential that we look for ways to break the unhealthy attitudes and behaviors that will, if we’re not successful at altering them, inevitably bankrupt our entire health care system. The Health Corps model, and Dr. Oz’s visionary work, is the kind of dramatic intervention that we need to change our country’s unhealthy direction. I am grateful that I’ve been able to collaborate with the doctor’s vision for the future, and I am also deeply appreciative for the support of my City Council colleagues in this vital task ahead.

C

Joel Rivera, a Democrat representing parts of the Bronx, is chair of the Council Health Committee.

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APR IL 2008

ISSUE FORUM: HEALTH

No Shortcuts in Covering Children’s Healthcare Needs

BY REP. CAROLYN MCCARTHY

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nation is experiencing a healthcare crisis. Millions of Americans are uninsured and forced to make difficult choices between seeking adequate healthcare services and paying for other basic necessities. What is perhaps most troubling is that, more often than not, the most vulnerable among us, children and the elderly, go without health care all together.

America’s healthcare shortcomings have become one of the most vexing issues of our time. But nowhere is it more difficult to bear than when children go without healthcare. That is why I have consistently championed the cause of healthcare coverage and availability for children through the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP).

It is crucial that SCHIP receive adequate funding and that coverage is available for all children in need. That’s why in December I voted for a short extension of SCHIP until March of 2009. The bill the House passed will ensure that children currently covered under the SCHIP program maintain their coverage. Unfortunately, while I supported the extension, I worked tirelessly through the fall to pass a longer reauthorization that would secure the healthcare needs of children for years to come.

We can not take any shortcuts in covering children’s healthcare needs. While I’m disappointed in the bill the House passed, SCHIP would have otherwise lost its funding. Under the current system, over 6.6 million children nationwide are covered by SCHIP. Congress needs to act to extend coverage to the millions of children who do not currently qualify under SCHIP, but still go uninsured.

Additionally, I have introduced an initiative that would focus attention on common health maladies suffered by tens of thousands of American children born with congenital deformities such as cleft lips and palates, skin lesions, vascular anomalies, malformations of the ear, hand, or foot and other more profound craniofacial deformities, and require insurers to cover reconstructive treatments and surgeries.

Currently, for children that are insured under private health insurance, important corrective procedures that address congenital deformities are often not covered under many plans. The procedures are often said by insurance companies to be “cosmetic” and not “medically necessary.”

Unfortunately, there are numerous examples of children and families around the country that are experiencing obstruction and denial to necessary reconstructive surgical care. It is essential for children with these problems to receive timely surgical care in order to

have a chance at leading normal lives.

And yet, an increasing number of insurance companies are denying access to care by labeling the procedures “cosmetic” or “nonfunctional” in nature.

The arguments on behalf of the insurance companies that deny coverage for these correctable ailments fail on a number of significant points and the need for corrective surgeries goes far beyond cosmetic and aesthetic issues. In fact, children with severe cleft lips and palates, for example, can have difficulty breathing, swallowing and may even need special feeding tubes to eat—not to mention the psychological and emotional impact of living with visible deformities.

That’s why I have introduced the Children’s Access to Reconstructive Evaluation and Surgery (CARES) Act, to guarantee that children in need of reconstructive surgery are not denied care.

The CARES Act differentiates between cosmetic and reconstructive surgery and requires managed care and insurance companies to do the same.

These treatments mean the world to families and helps children move through the world with a new sense of confidence. This is a serious health matter to the children and their families, and surgery will change their lives forever. I believe insurers have a responsibility to provide coverage.

We need to do all we can to continue to fight for the healthcare needs of our nation’s most valuable resource: our children. We have the ability and responsibility to provide adequate coverage for America’s children and I will continue to work to make sure that no children go without the care that they need. They are innocent in this battle, and Congress needs to act to help them live full, productive and healthy lives.

C

Carolyn McCarthy, a Democrat representing Nassau County, is the chair of the Subcommittee on Healthy Families and Communities.

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28

APR IL 2008

CITY HALL

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Legislators and Advocates Urge New Governor to Drop the Rock Paterson’s past take on drug reform gives hope that he will bring change to laws

BY RACHEL BREITMAN

D

RUG REFORM ADVOCATES IRATE

at Eliot Spitzer for moving slowly on campaign promises to repeal the Rockefeller Drug Laws are now eyeing David Paterson (D) as a potential champion for change.

The Commission on Sentencing Reform, appointed by Spitzer’s executive order in 2007, has engaged in an exhaustive study of the state’s criminal justice system. But some have grown impatient waiting for alterations to the 35-year-old drug laws, which set strict sentences for possession or sale of narcotics, requiring lengthy prison terms for nonviolent drug crimes.

“We are not going to wait until the results of the commission,” said Robert Gangi, executive director of the Correctional Association, a prison reform group which joined more than a hundred activists in Albany on March 27 for Drop the Rock Advocacy Day, to lobby staff from dozens of legislative offices.

“We are looking to the new governor to move quickly on this issue,” said Gangi.

“Thirty-five years is way too long.”

When he was majority leader of Senate, Paterson was an outspoken proponent for abolishing the controversial drug laws and co-sponsored a 2004 study on the impact of the law’s harsh punishments. Paterson

was also arrested at a sit-in at the governor’s mansion while demanding the laws’ repeal.

Then-Gov. George Pataki (R) signed the 2004 Drug Law Reform Act as a culmination of Paterson’s research. Though it reduced the mandatory prison sentences for nonviolent drug offenders and individuals with no prior offenses, drug policy advocates said it left the job unfinished.

“There are four key points that Rockefeller reform would have to include,” said Gabriel Sayegh, Project Director for the Drug Policy Alliance.

“These include increasing a judge’s discretion to determine a sentence, reduction of lengthy minimum prison terms, the addition of non-prison drug addiction treatment options, and retroactivity for those sentenced under the old laws.”

Paterson has not commented on his drug law reform agenda since he became governor, despite speaking candidly about his own youthful use of marijuana and cocaine.

That is how things will likely remain until the results of the commission’s research arrive, said Paterson spokesperson Jennifer Givner.

“The Commission on Sentencing Reform has been meeting and discussing the issue regularly, and they are expected to issue a report summarizing their recom-

mendations sometime later this spring or summer,” she said.

But the year-old commission recently postponed its expected report until late fall or the beginning of 2009, according to a spokesperson for the Division of Criminal Justice Services. A preliminary report last October recommended community-based treatment as an option for nonviolent drug addicts in lieu of prison terms.

“I am hopeful that we will be enacting substantial reforms to the Rockefeller Drug Laws,” said State Sen. Eric Schneiderman (D-Manhattan/Bronx), the Senate’s representative on the 11-member commission. “But we are looking at all the sentencing requirements in the state. The Rockefeller Drug Laws are just a small subset of the work we are doing.”

In the meantime, Assembly Correction Committee Chair Jeffrion Aubry (DQueens) has been a point-person on the issue in the Legislature. Aubrey’s bill, passed last April in the Assembly, offered convicted first- and second-time drug offenders the option to receive treatment and probation instead of prison terms.

“We are in a position now to really propose the bill as we envision it,” said Aubrey. “If the governor doesn’t move now, I would say to him, ‘David, that’s the same tired thing that was said to us by

Eliot Spitzer.’”

One stumbling block may be limited interest on the part of the Senate leadership.

“In the past we have supported some easing of the Rockefeller Drug Laws,” said Scott Reif, a spokesperson for Senate Majority Leader Joseph Bruno (RRensselaer), “but it is not a front-burner issue right now.”

With the Commission on Sentencing Reform’s report still months away, it remains to be seen whether Paterson will push through the sweeping changes he once proposed as a senator. While a repeal of the laws has been unpopular with some upstate politicians whose economies sometimes depend on revenue from state prisons, swift reform could help Paterson drum up support within the Democratic base.

“Updating the Rockefeller laws could be a mutual win for both the new governor and the Legislature,” said David Birdsell, the dean of the School of Public Affairs at Baruch College. “It is imperative for [Paterson, Bruno and Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver] to begin to notch some victories before they go out on the campaign trail in the fall.” rachellbreitman@yahoo.com Direct letters to the editor to editor@cityhallnews.com.

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APR IL 2008

Cost Increases and Practical Considerations Threaten to Delay Council Chamber Repairs Again Fixing ceiling, replacing elevator and refurbishing offices not likely to start until at least 2010

BY ADAM PINCUS SOME COUNCIL MEMBERS, turning over a renovated City Hall chamber and suite of offices to the next class of legislators is almost a moral obligation.

The oldest continually used space by a local city government last saw significant updating in 1950. Its current state of disrepair is an embarrassment, they said.

“They call this the people’s house. And I know if this was my house, my wife would not let me leave until I had painted and renovated this house,” said Council Member Joseph Addabbo (D-Queens). “It is a shame.”

But the hope to leave the building in better repair than they found it is slipping away.

The bulk of the complex project— which would repair a splotchy historic ceiling, replace an elevator, refurbish Council offices, install building-wide air conditioning and fire alarm systems, and replace the building’s exterior front steps—will be left to those entering office in 2010, members said.

They learned in a Democratic caucus meeting in late March that some urgent work could be completed before they left, but the rest would be delayed.

“The fact is the chamber has always been a big mess, with falling paint and torn carpet,” Council Member Helen Sears (D-Queens) said. But, citing budget woes and logistical challenges, she added, “We would have to vacate and would have to be out for the next two years. Where do we go for all that time?”

It was in 2003 that preservation architect Mary Jablonski, a partner at Jablonski Building Conservation, Inc., did a survey of the chamber and said the repair work would be a challenge.

“There is older plaster that has to be matched. You have to make sure certain things are compatible. There is not a quick and easy fix,” she said.

And with the height of the ceiling, rising some 30 feet, a permanent scaffold would need to be installed.

“The height of the ceiling makes it more complicated,” she said.

The project is estimated to cost about $60 million drawn from the city’s capital budget and would take about a year, city officials said.

In March, the city Department of Design

T

ANDREW SCHWARTZ

O

“The chamber is one of the most beautiful in the county,” said former Council Speaker Peter Vallone, Sr., who is an advocate of renovating the peeling ceiling.

and Construction, the lead agency for the renovation, received proposals from construction management consultants; from

The paint and plaster ceiling above the heads of the city’s legislators is peeling and blotchy. Occasionally, fallen flecks drift down onto witnesses during testimony, reported some Council members.

Standing in the balcony visitors get sweeping views of the ornate chamber: the deep browns in the carved wood framing the high windows, the rich wall paneling, the muted oil paintings of American heroes, and, high up, the sculpture of a settler and a Native American below a wingspread eagle.

But also from the balcony, visitors can see up close the flaps of paint peeling like parchment and the pattern of rosette and star providing regularity to the mottled surface where white plaster has been removed to reveal a coarser

Occasionally, fallen flecks drift down onto witnesses during testimony, reported some Council members. their analysis a work schedule should be drawn up by the summer, agency spokesperson Matthew Monahan said.

grey mortar.

From the balcony one can see not only the 105-year-old allegorical painting of New York as a cultural and commercial crossroads—the central image of the ceiling—but the words of George Washington reproduced on a canvas, a limp corner of which hangs down.

One of the logistical considerations is that during some part of the construction the Council will meet in session outside the chambers, perhaps for months.

“It is disappointing. It never gets cheaper. They are talking about not being able to finish before the end of the term.

Originally they thought it would be 14 months, now they are talking over two years to do the renovations,” said Council Member Leroy Comrie (DQueens).

Former speaker Peter Vallone, Sr., who served for 27 years in the Council, agreed that the room needed to be repaired.

“The chamber is one of the most beautiful in the county,” Vallone said. “The paneling is from one huge redwood tree... they used prison labor to build it—it has a remarkable history.”

The only time he recalled meeting outside the chamber was after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, when he convened the Council at the 42nd Street Library.

The current chamber was originally occupied by two smaller court rooms and a hallway when City Hall was opened in 1812, according to a history of the building provided by the city Landmarks Preservation Commission.

It was not until January 1898 that they were consolidated and opened as a single chamber for a precursor to the City Council known as the Municipal Assembly. That work was designed by John H. Duncan and J. T. Brady, the same architects behind Grant’s Tomb.

Air conditioning was installed in the chamber during the administration of William O’Dwyer, who served from 1945 to 1950. It was that year, 1950, that City Hall received its last major renovation, getting new lights and a new paint job.

After 58 years, and with so many members set to have term limits force them off the Council next year, Council Member Simcha Felder (D-Brooklyn) said the time for another renovation had come. That may be particularly true for those members, like himself, who are looking to run for other offices next year.

“Some have a custom: when they move out of an apartment, they clean it,” he said. “That is supposed to be good luck for the people moving out.” pincus_a@yahoo.com Direct letters to the editor to editor@cityhallnews.com.

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APR I L 2008

IN THE CHAIR

Through Advocacy and Funding, Koppell Aims to Help the Mentally Ill Cope Addressing the needs of children is of particular concern to committee and its chair

BY DANIEL MACHT WO YEARS AGO, IN THE MIDDLE OF

Council Member Oliver Koppell’s (D-Bronx) district office holiday party, three Ringneck doves wandered through the door. They had been abandoned by a neighbor and for days were idling outside in the cold before making their move.

Koppell’s staff decided to adopt the birds.

They are still in the office.

Soon after the adoption, one constituent who faced eviction stopped by Koppell’s office for support. She brought along her autistic child, who watched as the birds cooed and tossed seed onto the floor. The doves calmed the child while his mother sought advice, said Anna O’Connor, Koppell’s chief of staff.

Koppell has become attuned to the prevalence and everyday challenges of children with autism and other disabilities, and, as chair of the Committee on Mental Health, Mental Retardation, Alcoholism, Drug Abuse and Disability Services, he said his mission is to raise the visibility of their plight. Since most mental health and disability programs are funded and regulated by the state and federal government, Koppell said his committee acts more as a conduit for funding and a soapbox for discussion than a policy-making body.

Committee hearings range from discussions about depression among Latinas to the connection between homelessness and poor mental health.

But Koppell said addressing the needs of mentally ill children is of particular concern to him.

“We should have a mental health program in every school and we don’t,” Koppell said. “It is frustrating to some degree.”

This year, Koppell is fighting to maintain the funding of two mental

ANDREW SCHWARTZ

T

Council Member Oliver Koppell views his Committee on Mental Health, Mental Retardation, Alcoholism, Drug Abuse and Disability Services more as a conduit for funding and a soapbox for discussion than a policy-making body. health programs that the city administers, both of which were initiated by his predecessor, Council Member

INT. 682 A Local Law to amend the administrative code of the City of New York, in relation to providing legal counsel for certain persons subject to eviction or foreclosure proceedings.

SPONSOR: Council Member Alan Gerson (DManhattan)

:

ON THE

AGENDA

While criminal defendants are guaranteed legal repre- Bills on the burner for the Council sentation at trial, tenants facing evictions are not.

This does not make sense to Gerson.

“If you give me a choice, would I prefer to spend a month in jail and receive a fine or lose my home forever? I’m not sure. I might opt for the month in jail,” he said.

In addition to putting eviction defendants at a disadvantage, the current system makes trials move more slowly and inefficiently, Gerson believes. Judges are forced to either assist defendants or ignore problems, he said, making cases drag on while the defendants struggle to understand legal technicalities.

Margarita López (D-Manhattan). One is a geriatric mental health program, the other a mental health program for children under five. Both must have their funding restored by the Council with each year’s budget, which could make the programs vulnerable to cuts this year because of the current economic downturn.

Koppell said he also hopes to get the Taxi and Limousine Commission to include access for the disabled as an element of the new design for an environmentally sustainable taxi fleet.

A self-described “jack of all trades,” Koppell said he never expected to become an advocate for the mentally ill and disabled. While his father used to make him debate issues at the dinner table growing up, which he said helped steer him toward politics, Koppell said growing up he never experienced drug abuse, mental illness or disability upclose.

But at the outset of 2006, Koppell said, he was looking for a chairmanship. With López term-limited out the year before, Mental Health, Mental Retardation, Alcoholism, Drug Abuse and Disability Services had a vacancy.

Speaker Christine Quinn (DManhattan) gave him the job.

A 23-year veteran of the Assembly, Koppell was selected as the attorney general to fill out the remainder of the term Robert Abrams resigned from in 1993. He lost the Democratic primary to retain the position the following year, and spent the next seven years in private life before being elected to the Council in 2001.

He still looks back fondly on his time in the Assembly. In his office, he keeps a framed copy of the five-cent redemption tax legislation “bottle bill” which he wrote in 1982, and which he considers his political legacy.

“More than 100 billion bottles and cans have been recycled in the last 25 years, so it is something that has affected everybody and the environment,” he said.

Deferring to the speaker’s and mayor’s offices as a Council member can be frustrating, Koppell said, especially when he is unable to draw on Albany contacts to help move forward projects and proposals he thinks are important.

“I’ve known Shelly Silver for 25 years but I can’t call Shelly Silver and say, ‘Why can’t you do this, that and the other thing,’ because Shelly is responsive to the mayor and speaker,” Koppell said. “He might listen to me, but what I tell him won’t be so significant.”

He also feels the drop-off in the ability to make substantive change between Albany and the Council acutely. If his committee often does not make news, Kopell said, there are structural reasons: Most funding is decided at the state and federal levels.

“In a sense, the city plays a somewhat less active front-seat role,” he said. “The city primarily is a conduit for funding.”

Term-limited out of office next year, Koppell said it is unlikely he will run for borough president. He believes the race will be difficult to win for a nonLatino.

While on the Council, Koppell has maintained his private law practice. Once forced out of City Hall, he said he plans to work full-time at his firm—though he does not rule out a return to elected office. But whatever happens, before Koppell packs up his office, he must find new homes for the Ringneck doves, which have since multiplied. Where once there were three, now there are five.

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APR IL 2008

33

Managing the Mayor’s Legacy Portfolio

ANDREW SCHWARTZ

Cash incentives and homelessness reduction remain high on agenda for Gibbs

As DHS commissioner and now deputy mayor for health and human services, Linda Gibbs said that her biggest challenge has been reducing the number of homeless families in the city.

BY ANDREW J. HAWKINS T FIRST,

LINDA GIBBS, THE deputy mayor of health and human services, can seem unexpectedly enthusiastic about having a job that immerses her in poverty and suffering. Despite the many problems in her portfolio, she remains upbeat: she firmly believes that she and Mayor Michael Bloomberg (Unaff.) have done and will be able to do a lot to change things.

“I am adoring my job,” she said, her blue eyes twinkling as she sat in a conference room on the first floor of City Hall.

“I’m a very hands-on manager. I really love the detail.”

The job fits well with the personality and interests of a woman who has spent 30 years in city government.

“Some of that is a little bit geeky, I guess,” she said.

Gibbs oversees the departments of homeless services, children’s services, health and mental hygiene, aging, correction, probation and juvenile justice. She believes that rather than dealing with individual families or people case by case, the city has an obligation to attack each problem at its core. But each case can be instructive, she said.

“When one person comes in,” she said,

A

“instead of just dealing with them on that issue, you can have a chance to look at the whole household and the history to see how this crisis is not a stand-alone incident, but in fact a symptom of a broader issue.”

Gibbs, who led the Department of Homeless Services (DHS) for four years prior to her appointment as deputy mayor, and before that held positions in the Koch and Giuliani administrations, views problems through a decidedly bureaucratic lens.

“The theme of my work here at City Hall,” she said, “has really been about ‘How can we help the agencies to leverage each other’s actions in a way that gives us a better result for our clients and their families?’”

As deputy mayor, Gibbs, the lifetime bureaucrat, and Bloomberg, the billionaire technocrat, have been trying to untangle the web of funding streams, independent regulatory agencies and technological headaches that she says have led to many lost opportunities in health and human services. Gibbs said Bloomberg has turned to her to develop a more holistic approach toward the agencies now under her control.

Many of Bloomberg’s signature policies—and the ones which have actually

been implemented—fall under her supervision, including the smoking and transfat bans and his anti-poverty and homelessness prevention programs.

For the last year, she has been administering a program which offers cash incentives to the poor of up to $5,000 annually to meet goals like attending medical check-ups, appearing at parentteacher meetings and holding down jobs.

The program, modeled on one she and the mayor studied on a trip to Mexico City last April, is about to be reviewed for its efficacy.

“Most of the programs are in the first year of implementation, so we’ll start to see some of the results,” she said. “This year and into the next, it will be finding what is working, and what should be scaled up.”

Welfare advocates commended the mayor for the cash transfer program, though some conservative groups argued the payments provide a false incentive for people to do what they believe everyone should already be doing. Gibbs is a staunch supporter of the program, but she and the mayor acknowledge their critics—in her Inner Circle debut in March, they joked about the program, with the mayor pretending to offer Gibbs cash for being on time and conveying her message.

As deputy mayor, Gibbs has continued the work she began as DHS commissioner, when she oversaw the opening of over 2,000 new shelters and distribution of millions of dollars to landlords to place homeless people in apartments.

Gibbs said that her biggest challenge has been reducing the number of homeless families in the city. In 1998, the city recorded having 4,500 homeless families.

That number has since doubled, even as Gibbs and the mayor have been trying to develop ways to fulfill his 2004 promise for a two-thirds reduction in the homeless population by the end of his term.

Earlier this month, the administration announced that street homelessness in the city was down 12 percent since the previous year and down 25 percent from 2005.

But with a year left, the numbers remain high: a Coalition for the Homeless report released in March found 35,000 people sleeping in city shelters nightly in 2007. During the last homeless crisis in the late 1980s, the shelter population hovered around 25,000.

Patrick Markee, a senior policy analyst at the Coalition, accused Gibbs and the mayor of cutting off dialogue with advocates and service providers, which he said contributed to an administration failure.

“Last year was the worst year for fam-

ily homelessness in modern New York City history,” he said.

Gibbs argues that advocacy groups are ignoring certain statistics in favor of others.

“I think there are many advocacy organizations that, in the interest of attracting attention to their cause, can be selective about how they report data,” she said. “Yes, there are too many homeless people. But let’s look at the big picture, and let’s actually try to figure out where we have common ground.”

She said an ongoing class action lawsuit brought by the New York Legal Aid Society has in part complicated efforts.

Currently, the city cannot force homeless families to live in apartments they have previously rejected. The lawsuit, which has been litigated for over 20 years, aims to change that, giving the city the power to keep families in these apartments, and thereby prevent them from returning to the streets.

Robert Hess, Gibbs’ successor as DHS commissioner, said that having a former DHS commissioner as deputy mayor has been extremely helpful in getting the administration to focus on homelessness.

“Linda Gibbs has given keen insight into the inner workings of DHS and has been an invaluable collaborator,” he wrote, via email.

At the outset of a new recession, Gibbs said she is concerned that social services for homeless and needy children could get slashed out of the city’s budget.

“I think the real challenges in the social services is that when the fiscal situation worsens, some of the first programs that become at risk are those that in the long run can have a cost,” she said.

While a slimmer city budget could doom some homeless shelters, the city has other programs in place to address the problems, she said.

“We have proven strategies around homeless prevention and permanency solutions that are cheaper than shelters,” she said.

There is uncertainty ahead for the city, and in some ways for Gibbs as well.

Serving as deputy mayor is the pinnacle of her life in government, she said.

“I have the job I always wanted,” Gibbs said. “After that, what happens, I don’t know.”

Gibbs, who majored in art in college before going to law school, has spent her life around politicians and government workers, and her husband is a lobbyist.

But whatever she does next, she ruled out lobbying, running for office or practicing law.

“Those are the top three things I definitely don’t want to do,” she said laughing. ahawkins@cityhallnews.com

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APR IL 2008

Diaz Miscalls the Roll City Clerk Hector Diaz is still relatively new on the job. That may explain why he is still struggling over a few Council members’ names when calling the roll. Tense moments during the March 31 stated meeting to approve the home rule message on congestion pricing were lightened momentarily as members and staffers puzzled over Diaz’s stumbling over several names, most prominently “Goya” (Eric Gioia), “Monserratti” (Hiram Monserrate) and “Oh-do” (James Oddo). None of the three stumbled over their votes—Gioia and Monserrate supported the proposal, Oddo voted against the plan.

Prosecuting Stalk-Gate Troopergate investigations and a brewing re-election campaign have kept him busy, but Albany District Attorney David Soares (D) found time for one more case: taking on Jack for climbing up the beanstalk and stealing the magic beans. Soares played the role of the prosecutor in “The Fairy Tale Trial” pro-

duction presented by Literacy Volunteers—Mohawk/Hudson April 4, held in the New York State Museum Theater. The case did not require any subpoenas from members of the gubernatorial administration, past or present, nor advisory opinions from Attorney General Andrew Cuomo (D).

New York City’s Green Lantern In March, the 30-story Weiss Federal Office Building in Lower Manhattan received the Building of the Year award in the Earth category from the Building Owners and Managers Associations (BOMA). It was also named the Government Building of the Year at the annual BOMA ceremony.

Ted Weiss represented parts of the Bronx and Manhattan in Congress from 1977 until his death in 1992. Completed in 1995, the building was dedicated to Weiss in honor of his long service to New York.

The Ted Weiss building was the first federal government building to receive an Energy Star designation in 1999. It was designed by the world famous architectural firm HOK, which has also designed Dunn Tire Park in Buffalo—the first of what would come to be known as “retro” baseball stadiums—and the George H.W. Bush Presidential Library.

But the office tower was notable even before completion. The Ted Weiss building was redesigned after its groundbreaking to accommodate for the discovery of an African burial ground, which holds the

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CITY HALL

Are You Smarter Than a Fifth-Grader?

remains of slaves dating as far back as 1626.

Big Plans But Short Memories at Hudson Yards Christine Quinn (D-Manhattan) has been battered in recent weeks for her office’s allocation of at least $4.7 million in last year’s budget to phony community groups. If the allegations and investigation help sink what is presumed to be her budding bid for mayor next year, she should take note: city employees and politicians can have short memories for unsuccessful mayoral candidates.

Just ask Quinn’s predecessor as speaker, Gifford Miller (D-Manhatan), who found himself initially shut out of the official unveiling of Tishman Speyer’s plans for Hudson Yards. Police let through dozens of staffers and press pass-waving reporters to the platform above the rail tracks, but stopped Miller and an aide from entering.

“But they invited me!” Miller protested to the officer skeptically examining the driver’s license he offered as identification.

Miller eventually got in a few minutes after the event began. Nonetheless, he went unacknowledged by his old political sparring partner, Mayor Michael Bloomberg (Unaff.), who thanked all the officials who had gathered for the event—albeit at first acknowledging “Assemblyman Tom Duane.”

“Sorry, I didn’t mean to demote you,” Bloomberg said, looking back over his shoulder, to see Duane shrugging.

Eventually, a mayoral aide pointed out Miller’s presence in a note to Bloomberg, who in turn whispered it in the ear of Gov. David Paterson (D), the event’s emcee. Paterson quickly acknowledged his presence.

Bloomberg Likes Paterson’s Height Also at the Hudson Yards announcement, Mayor Michael Bloomberg (Unaff.) noted that the event was his first appearance using a governor’s podium since the end of George Pataki’s term.

Bloomberg, who is 5’6”, is much closer in height to Paterson than Pataki, who is 6’5”.

“This is the first time that I’ve used your podium since it was reduced from the George Pataki height, and I will say that I much prefer this—you and I can see over it, whereas with Pataki, we had to stand on a platform,” Bloomberg said.

Johnson Joins with Black Equity Alliance Joyce Johnson has been appointed the new president and CEO of the Black Equity Alliance, a community think tank.

Johnson said she hoped to build the organization’s strength “so that we can effectively leverage the collective $74.9

PHOTO PROVIDED BY CHESS IN THE SCHOOLS.

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Council Member Dan Garodnick played Waley Liu, a fifth-grader from P.S. 2 in Manhattan, at the Garodnick Challenge II, a chess tournament he sponsored on March 29. About 350 students from across the city competed at the event, organized by Chess in the Schools. Garodnick lost. billion buying power of our community and serve as a catalyst for progress.”

Johnson was a candidate for the Assembly seat won by Daniel O’Donnell (D-Manhattan) in 2002, and finished third in the 2005 Democratic primary for the City Council seat won by Melissa Mark Viverito (D-Manhattan/Bronx). She was then the deputy campaign manager for Charlie King’s 2006 campaign for attorney general, and this past year was the New York State field director for Illinois Sen. Barack Obama’s (D) presidential campaign.

City Sings the Praises of Six Civil Servants Six of the city’s more than 250,000 employees received accolades, awards and cash because somebody actually noticed that they do an excellent job, when the Fund for the City of New York announced its annual Sloan Public Service Award winners.

A ceremony was held at the Great Hall at Cooper Union.

The six honorees were selected for their quality work and their willingness to go beyond the basic requirements of their job.

The Fund solicits nominations from the public at large, city employees and past winners. According to the award’s organizers, “the final selection [is] made by an independent panel of prominent citizens.”

In additional to adulation from Mayor Michael Bloomberg—who spoke at the awards ceremony—the winners received $7,500 and an original portrait drawn by Niculae Asciu.

The 2008 winners are: Amy Bernstein, Verone Kennedy, Vito Mustaciuolo, Joya Ramirez, Lin Saberski and Jill Woller.

Schumer, the Lost Wilbury Sen. Charles Schumer (D) arrived at a recent press conference at his midtown Manhattan office after a day of driving around upstate New York, leaving him with the songs from the ride still running in his head. Before getting things started, he took a moment to see whether the assembled reporters could name the five members of the Traveling Wilburys, the “super group” which put out two albums in 1988 and 1990.

Reporters managed to name four— Bob Dylan, George Harrison, Roy Orbison and Tom Petty—but could only name the last, guitarist Jeff Lynne, with Schumer’s help.

Schumer discovered the Wilburys long after their last recording session, he explained, but that has not made him any less of a fan.

“I have a gap in music. My head is filled with music from the 50s, 60s, 70s.

Then the 80s, I have kids,” he said. “So, when the Wilburys came out, I was listening to Sesame Street.”

“Handle with Care,” he said, is his favorite of their songs. Though he declined to sing any of that one, once through the substance of the press conference, he started reminiscing about seeing Dylan in concert, prompting him to sing the first verse of a favorite, the bluesy “Highway 61 Revisited.” His aides quickly made sure no camera or recorder was rolling.

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APRIL 2008

:Up from Zero

viously it was being abated and deconstructed simultaneously. We’ve altered that, so we’re just going to abate the building, clean it all the way down to the bottom and then deconstruct it.

CH: So by the end of 2008, abatement is finished?

AS: And deconstruction.

CH: So the building won’t be there at all?

AS: That’s the plan, yes.

vi Schick was Eliot Spitzer’s choice to head the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation (LMDC), and so far David Paterson has not only kept him in the job, but added acting downstate CEO of the Empire State Development Corporation (ESDC) to his responsibilities.

In a room overlooking Ground Zero, Schick sat down to discuss progress at the site, how the 16 acres fit into his overall vision for Lower Manhattan, the coming disappearance of the Deutsche Bank building and his thoughts on the future of the structure of the ESDC. What follows is an edited transcript.

CH: There are people who feel the progress on the 16 acres has been too slow. What do you say to them?

AS: Part of that, clearly, is history. There’s an enormous amount of history that occurred between September 12, 2001 and December 31, 2006 that I wasn’t involved with and wasn’t there for and so I can’t talk about that. What I could talk about is what we’ve done since I joined the LDMC in April of last year; and since then, the focus everyday has been on how we’re moving this forward. Is it a long, complex project? Absolutely. And so, I think there’s some element of frustration because of the five years that were spent before we got here, and we’re cognizant of that, but there’s nothing we can do about that.

What we can do is make every moment in the present and future used properly.

CH: When do you think the Freedom Tower and Ground Zero are realistically going to be open for business?

AS: I think the Freedom Tower is a building that’s going to be owned and operated by the Port Authority, so I’d probably let them speak as to their occupancy plans on that. As I said, we’re in a different environment than I think we were in the immediate post-9/11 period where everybody was concerned whether downtown would come back, and right now we know that downtown came back, and the residential sectors and retail sectors, commercial sector is strong, so what we have to do is do our business, get it built and get out of the way so that we’re not obstructing any of the progress that we’ve seen until now.

CH: But you’ll leave it to the Port Authority to say when there will be occupancy?

AS: I think the office buildings are all scheduled to go online at around 2012, it’s their building, the Silverstein building.

CH: Are you concerned that the possible delays in the construction of the Fulton Street Transit Hub could be a problem for redevelopment in Lower Manhattan?

AS: I don’t know that there’s going to be a delay. A cou-

ANDREW SCHWARTZ

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City Hall: A lot of people are paying attention to what happens in Lower Manhattan and Ground Zero. Does it make your job tougher when you have so many people analyzing every little decision that’s made?

Avi Schick: It adds a layer of complexity. You have to be cognizant of what’s going on around you. Ultimately, though, the way this job has to operate is just that you have to operate on making forward progress on that day and ultimately reaching the end line. It’s all about where we have to get and each day moving forward to get there.

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ple months ago, the MTA announced there’s going to be some fiscal realities and they want to revisit some of the plans. I think there have been conversations since then to sense it was necessary. The downtown community has made clear its view about how important the project is and again, how important timeliness is, because right now people believe in downtown, it’s not like we need to promise new projects to convince them to come, we just need to deliver on the ones that have been promised and get out of the way so they can go about their business. And so we made that clear, we’re in the middle of conversations with the stakeholders downtown, and the MTA and I think everyone wants to deliver what was promised, I think that would be the best thing.

CH: But if the MTA’s apparently continuing fiscal problems do lead to delays, will that be an issue?

AS: The MTA is clearly under fiscal pressures everywhere, given current economic realities. Having said that, I think everybody’s cognizant of the need to get Fulton Street delivered. It’s probably the number-one priority of the business community downtown, and so delay is not an option.

CH: Economic delays are endangering projects around the city. In a recession, how does the progress keep at the pace for Lower Manhattan that you wanted to keep it at?

AS: Frankly, the good news is that I really think this is an opportunity for Lower Manhattan because the pressure that’s going to be seen in development projects all around the city is one that involves financing. It’s becoming increasingly difficult to obtain financing for spec—for projects that are being built on spec without tenants. The downtown projects, because of so much attention here and focus here the past couple years, have the financing in place. For example, if you take all six towers we were talking about downtown—Goldman Sachs, obviously the money’s in place, they’re coming up. JPMC is fine for their building, Freedom Tower’s going up, Port Authority’s building that, no problem, and then the three Silverstein towers, same thing, the money’s in place between the Liberty Bonds and the insurance proceeds. So that’s really probably a great opportunity for downtown. We’ll be ahead of the cycle as there’s an economic downturn that perhaps puts pressure or causes a delay at some projects elsewhere.

These buildings will all go forward, and when the inevitable recovery comes soon, we’ll be poised to take advantage of that.

CH: You are now the acting downstate CEO of the Empire State Development Corporation. What does that mean for your job responsibilities?

AS: I was, since January of 2007, serving as president and CEO of ESDC, and so I was doing a large part of that job in any event, whether it’s Atlantic Yards, whether it’s Columbia, I’m Chairman of Governor’s Island and running a portion of day-to-day operations so I was there to ask people: Whether or not you associated me more with LMDC more, I was spending a substantial amount of my time on ESDC management on a day-to-day basis.

CH: Those concerns came back last summer with the Deutsche Bank fire. Were people right to be concerned?

AS: Listen, getting the Deutsche Bank building down is our number one priority, it’s a focus of a tremendous amount of effort of management right here and, so, it’s priority one and gets a concurrent amount of resources form LMDC. Again, how that interplays with environmental concerns, again, we have a dozen air monitors in and around the building at 130 Liberty Street, they’re on a scaffolding right there and they were fully operational during and after the fire, and continuously operated, and the test results even through and emitted after the fire were always negative or below target and trigger levels. That’s certainly good news. There was never a moment when there was anything that our very sophisticated monitors, and it’s done by an outside company that’s sort of reviewed and overseen by the EPA, so there’s never been a moment when we’ve had a reading that’s any cause for concern.

CH: What’s your assessment of where things stand on ESDC projects like the Javits Center from the time that Pat Foye was leading the agency?

AS: Listen, I’m just not going to get into that.

CH: When do you expect the building will be gone entirely?

AS: By the end of the year, the end of this calendar year.

We’re going to abate the building down, you know, pre-

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CH: Where do you see Javits going?

AS: Listen, Javits is really important to the economic vitality of New York. I think that broadly speaking, there’s an agreement on a way to proceed with the City, which I’m speaking to Bob Lieber about. Clearly the city and state have to be walking in lockstep on this to deliver what needs to be done, and that’s the goal, and that’s the path we’re going to take.

CH: Where do you live?

AS: I live in Brooklyn.

CH: Where in Brooklyn?

AS: Flatbush.

CH: And if Lower Manhattan improves to the state that you want it to get to, would moving into Lower Manhattan ever be something you consider?

AS: I imagine the way Lower Manhattan is improving, I’ll be priced out of the market.

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