City Hall - May 1, 2007

Inez Dickens, below, discusses amassing power and shedding weight (Page 8), Buffalo Mayor Byron Brown becomes a Western New York kingmaker and possible statewide contender (Page 18)

Vol. 1, No. 12

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The

Birthday Cash Grab Spitzer and Paterson compete for donors under joint fundraising limit

BY ANDREW HAWKINS racks are beginning to show in the self-imposed fundraising limits of Gov. Eliot Spitzer (D) and Lt. Gov. David Paterson (D).

With separate birthday extravaganzas in the works— Paterson’s on May 22 and Spitzer’s on June 7—questions on how campaign cash is handled, who receives the bulk of it and whether some donations will have to be returned if they exceed the limit are in front of

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INDEX: Statistics lacking to prove Brooklyn tourism boom Page 11

Lobbyist Corner: Walter McCaffrey lobbies for red light on congestion pricing Page 13

Following Bloomberg, Schneiderman plans gun control campaign in Albany Page 20

CHatter: What people are talking about this month Page 26

Back and Forth with NY1 anchor and new author Dominic Carter Page 27

May 2007

Mogul Mayor and the

Media The man who built a media empire is on a campaign to rewrite the rules for city journalists

BY EDWARD-ISAAC DOVERE

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hough certainly not the first media baron to seek or win public office in this country (the tradition goes back at least as far as Poor Richard’s Almanac editor and publisher Benjamin Franklin), Michael Bloomberg (R) is the first to be mayor of New York. Over the last six years, the man who built an unlikely media empire has, as mayor, become the most visible citizen of the media capital of world. The mogul has become the story, the man who started news divisions in every medium now the daily bait for the press corps himself.

Bloomberg understands the media, he understands its duties and needs, said New York Times publisher Arthur Sulzburger, introducing him to the Newspaper Association CONTINUED ON PAGE

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and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, above, writes on the op-ed page (Page 23) about why and how the federal government should keep New York the world financial capital.

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MAY 2007

CITY HALL

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ON/OFF THE RECORD BREAKFAST

Carrión Discusses Affordable Housing, Democratic Credibility in 2009 Mayor’s Race Bronx borough president speaks at second breakfast in series dolfo Carrión, Jr. was the featured speaker at the second City Hall On/Off the Record Breakfast April 30, held at the Commerce Bank flagship location on 42nd Street and Madison Avenue.

An intimate crowd heard the Bronx borough president and 2009 mayoral hopeful share his thoughts on integrating affordable housing into development plans in the Bronx and the city as a whole, thoughts on the 2009 race and several other topics which came up during the off the record portion of the morning.

Some excerpts from the on the record portion of Carrión’s interview: City Hall: What qualifies housing as affordable?

Adolfo Carrión: During the last mayoral campaign there was a discussion that became a very prominent discussion about the affordability gap, or affordability crisis— what people were spending from their family income on shelter. And I think that the standard formula has been that about 30 percent of your income should be dedicated to housing so that you can balance the rest of your life, but we know that is not true in New York City in so many households. There is a misnomer—people have referred to affordable housing as housing for the poor, or the working class, or for the poor working class. In fact, affordable housing is relative to the buyer. So if a middle income household can afford $2,000 a month or $1,800 a month, well, that’s affordable for them, as opposed to the wage worker who’s at the lower end of the scale and is not making too much money. … In my office, 7 out of 10 calls we get are about housing—quality, affordability, access issues, maintenance issues. But 7 of 10 constituent service calls related to housing? We obviously have a very serious problem.

CH: What is the role that government should have in promoting new housing development?

AC: We should maximize wherever we can the opportunities near the mass transit infrastructure. Everywhere where there is a train station, where there is a bus depot, where there is a concentration of access, we should have higher density zoning. There’s a friend of mine who wrote a book on leadership, and he said “leadership is that threshold point where you disappoint your supporters.”… When we decided that we were going to invite the New York Yankees to talk about their franchise’s life here in this city and in the county of the Bronx, and that we would consider building a new stadium, building a new park, building a new hotel and convention center, and a new rail station and a new ferry landing on the Harlem River waterfront, first of all people said you’re insane, you’re sticking your hand into a hornet’s nest. My answer was, you don’t get elected so that you can feel good about things. You get elected so you can lead your constituency, your community, your city, your society to a higher and a better place. …

I think when people look back at the beginning of this century in the Bronx, I think it will be looked at as the revival and renewal period of the last century, when we built the art deco buildings up along the Grand

EMILY ROSENBERG

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Concourse, when we built the Grand Concourse up in the 1900s and people thought it was insane. It’s those critical moments where the city’s leadership can really lead. If you go back to the early history of the city, and you go back to the personalities, they jump out at you: people who were bold, people who were willing to be unpopular for a little to get us on the right track.

CH: Besides zoning changes, do you see a role?

AC: The other side is to incentive-ize. And that means that in order to get to the right price point to be able to get people to live here—and I really think we need to figure out how to keep cops and teachers and other public servants in the city. … You seed it. In my administration… we’ve invested in community centers, cultural centers, etc. But the lion’s share of our efforts up until now have been housing. And we’ve incentive-ized low income housing, moderate income housing. We’ve created over five years over 1,000 new units of co-op housing where we’ve actually given money to developers, to bring that price point down to where a young family that’s entering the middle class is able to stay in the city, and we don’t lose them as a taxpayer, and we don’t lose them in the fiber of our city’s communities.

CH: Do you believe in giving tax breaks to developers as a tool to push the kind of development you want?

AC: Absolutely. We use it in commercial development. …

Wherever it makes sense, we should use it. However, I also think that we have to be true to the forces of the market. I don’t believe in giveaways. I think it’s important for us to let people compete and let the best deal be gotten.

CH: Where has it worked?

AC: Let’s take the Upper West Side of Manhattan, for instance. The Upper West Side has had a healthy balance of affordable housing and market rate housing— and you know the market in New York, I mean the market in New York is a bit out of control at the moment.

The Upper West Side is I think a good model for how you put working families and families on lower incomes right alongside people who are doing very well and have a relatively peaceful environment, where you create what I call an aspirational community. And that’s what we’re trying to do in the South Bronx.

Cities are the most efficient instruments and platforms for American style democracy, in terms of civic engagement, people talking to each other, seeing each other and being at the town hall, figuratively speaking. And I think they’re the best platforms and places for a free market. And I think that the fact that the activity is concentrated, if we can create the systems that make it efficient and clean, then it’s good for the environment. Instead of people, as we say in Spanish in the Bronx, shlepping between the suburbs and the city center. … We made the mistake in the middle of the last century where we started to encourage suburbanization, and now it’s hurting us and we’re having to come back.

CH: You have described a major need for integrating mass transit into development. What do you think of the mayor’s congestion pricing plan?

AC: One of the issues this raises is: is this a backdoor tax for working people and another way to just raise a half a billion dollars for the city coffers? Put that in context with our surplus and then you ask yourself “what does it really mean?” …

I think congestion pricing should be seriously examined. We should look at London. But London is not New York. Look at the population. Look at the layout of the city. We are a city of four islands, in effect. We have to ask ourselves, does it make sense, or are there other tools?

CH: Do you feel remorse about tearing down the old Yankee Stadium?

AC: That’s mean. Do you have a tissue? I’m getting ferklemt. I think we all have a sentimental connection to sporting venues that we’ve grown up with. Yankee Stadium was built in 1923, that’s when we started playing there, I believe. And it had several makeovers over the decades, and it got to the point where it didn’t make sense anymore to continue to put a new dress on this old body, and that what we really needed was a total makeover. I saw this as a planner as an opportunity to reshape a location of the city and create a new, vibrant location, to do a new community development exercise.

CH: By 2009, New York will have had 16 years straight of Republican mayors. Have Democrats regained the credibility with New York voters to win a mayoral election?

AC: It’s time for a new conversation. The Democratic message and the Democratic Party was trumped by a very smart Republican strategy which sort of cornered Democrats as softies and not interested in the economy. And I think that’s a bunch of hokum, but people bought it. Mike Bloomberg, a lifelong Democrat wraps himself in Republican clothing to get elected mayor of New York. And he understood that perception phenomena. He had loads of money, of course, and I think that helped him a little bit. He understood that people felt a sense of security with a Republican leader, for some reason. I think that’s beginning to break down. It’s beginning to break down in a lot of ways—what’s going on with our international engagement, for one.

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MAY 2007

CITY HALL sustainability needs for the city and state, questions of infrastructure are very much on the minds of New Yorkers. City Hall asked four people who will have their say on elements of these plans and others to share their thoughts about what needs to be considered, what needs to be changed and what needs to be preserved as the thinking develops.

www.cityhallnews.com

ISSUE FORUM:

SUSTAINABILITY With Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Gov. Eliot Spitzer both presenting plans of varying depth to address long-term

Congestion Pricing Talk Without Better Transit Commitments Will Go Nowhere

BY CITY COUNCIL MEMBER JOHN C. LIU EARTH DAY, MAYOR Bloomberg introduced a congestion pricing plan to discourage driving into Manhattan. While we all agree that more must be done to encourage commuters to switch from automobile to mass transit, the mayor’s speech lacked specificity on how New Yorkers living in neighborhoods without easy access to transit are supposed to leave their cars at home. Creating disincentives (tolls) without the proper incentives (fast mass transit) is putting the cart before the horse.

A well-intentioned but poorly designed policy is bound to fail and may even prove a setback to the cause of clean air and traffic relief it seeks to address. In 2002, the mayor proposed a dead-on-arrival proposal to toll the East River bridges without providing the transit alternatives required to build a citywide consensus.

That idea went nowhere, and disastrously pitted New Yorkers living in different boroughs against each other. Let’s learn from the past and avoid repeating the mistakes that have resulted in much ado about

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nothing.

Here is what the mayor can do to build consensus and reduce traffic congestion: make a commitment to provide all New Yorkers with a 30-minute ride to Manhattan. Specifically, all residents of the five boroughs should be afforded mass transit that would provide a 30-minute commute to Manhattan. This can be achieved by greatly expanding express bus service, access to commuter rail lines, and creating high-speed ferry routes.

Furthermore, the round trip fare for these mass transit modes should be no more than the $8 fee proposed for drivers entering Manhattan. To really entice commuters to leave their cars at home, the fare for a 30-minute transit ride should be no higher than the daily fee the mayor wants to charge motorists driving into Manhattan.

We should offer the carrot of better transit before imposing the stick of congestion pricing. New Yorkers drive to Manhattan because they don’t have attractive mass transit options.

Commuters in Queens and other boroughs drive for the most part because

taking a local bus for a half hour to the nearest subway and then riding the subway for an hour is not a real alternative to leaving the car at home. By offering New Yorkers in every neighborhood an affordable 30-minute ride to Manhattan, we can truly ease the congestion on our roads and sustain our city’s environmental and economic viability for the long term.

The mayor has tried to paint anyone not immediately buying into his plan as intractable opponents of sustainable development. That’s unnecessarily combative. Many elected officials are open to the mayor’s congestion pricing plan but not without a commitment to ensure drivers first be afforded real transit options.

Incentives must come before penalties.

Otherwise the talk of sustainability is nothing more than, at best a pipe-dream, and at worst empty campaign rhetoric.

Yes, we all want cleaner air and less congestion. These are all admirable longterm goals and people want to work with the mayor to achieve this vision. But before pushing further on congestion pricing—which elected officials are open to supporting—we urge the mayor to commit

to giving all New Yorkers real transit options. To impose fees on drivers without giving them specific alternatives would be unfair. So let’s first provide every New Yorker with a fast and affordable commute to Manhattan, much the same way the mayor feels every New Yorker should live within a 10-minute walk to a park. Mayor Bloomberg's vision for a sustainable city shows the direction. Now we need to work to make it truly about sustaining, and not constraining.

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John Liu is a Democrat representing parts of Queens in the City Council. He is the chair of the Council’s Transportation Committee.

Take Care of “Outer Boroughs” in Sustainability Plans

BY STATE SEN. SERPHIN MALTESE ECENTLY,

MAYOR BLOOMBERG unveiled PlaNYC, his vision for the sustained future of New York City.

He is to be commended for his foresight and the scope and breadth of the plan.

Clearly our infrastructure is old and in need of repair. We have applied Band-Aid treatments for too long and many things are in need of major overhaul. There can be no doubt that a plan for the future is essential here and now.

Not only is our population growing by leaps and bounds, but the impact of climate changes threatens the city as well.

Even now, when we are hit by a storm, as recently occurred, parts of our city become flooded. Add to that the predictions that we are past due for a major hurricane, and the need to expand the use of high level storm sewers becomes critical.

As the mayor pointed out, our water tunnels are ancient and decrepit. Failure to these systems could bring the city to a grinding halt. We must continue to develop back-up systems to ensure that we continue to have a quality water supply for all our citizens.

As the population grows, so does the need for energy. This causes increased

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costs, more air pollution and higher levels of greenhouse gases. The mayor’s overall plan to develop clean power, improve delivery infrastructure and institute conservation programs is right on target.

A major component of the mayor’s PlaNYC deals with transportation issues.

There is no doubt that our transportation infrastructure needs improvement. We clearly need to expand capacity on routes that are congested throughout all the boroughs. From buses and elevated lines to the subways, straphangers are complaining of congestion, while proving that improved transit attracts additional passengers.

I do disagree with the mayor’s propos-

al for congestion pricing. I firmly believe this places an unfair portion of the burden of reducing traffic in Manhattan squarely on the shoulders of our middle class and on my fellow residents of the so-called “outer boroughs.”

According to a study commissioned by the Queens Chamber of Commerce, congestion pricing would cost Queens residents and businesses an additional $300 to 350 million annually. Studies have also shown that the city would lose $1.5 billion in economic activity, millions of dollars in taxes and 15,000 jobs annually for every 20,000 fewer cars that enter Manhattan daily.

I believe there are other ways we can work to reduce congestion without sacrificing economic growth, like exploring the option of no fare hours and days.

Furthermore, our neighborhoods in Queens that are near mass transit stations are sure to be overrun by commuters driving in from Long Island.

I dislike the term “outer boroughs.” I am aware that Queens and Staten Island residents often do not consider themselves part of New York City, saying, “I have to go into the City,” when they are going to Manhattan. To further ostracize our boroughs’ residents would only deep-

en these perceived divides.

I believe we should explore using tax incentives to encourage companies to institute flex times to ease overcrowding.

There are many service positions that already need to be staffed round the clock, such as law enforcement, hospitals and the maintenance industry. It makes sense to provide incentives to employers and workers alike for taking the swing shifts.

I would like to caution against over development. We should not be destroying homes and our city’s history to put up McMansions or rabbit warrens to accommodate growth. I know that the mayor agrees that we have an obligation to our future generations to preserve these historic landmarks and buildings.

Finally on behalf of our grandchildren and theirs, I want to extend our appreciation to Mayor Bloomberg, Parks Commissioner Benepe and Queens Parks Commissioner Lewandowski for their visionary open space proposals, as well as their extraordinary parks accomplishments.

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Serphin Maltese is a Republican representing parts of Queens in the State Senate. He is chair of the State Senate’s Cities Committee.

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Without it, there would be an increase in air pollution and an increase in the cost of electricity. The report also concludes that based on currently scheduled plant retirements and demand growth projections by the New York Independent System Operator (NYISO), 1,200 to 1,600 MW from new projects not yet under construction could be needed by 2010, and a total of 2,300 to 3,300 MW by 2015.

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CITY HALL

www.cityhallnews.com

MAY 2007

ISSUE FORUM:

SUSTAINABILITY

Fostering the Innovation Economy in New York

BY PATRICK FOYE

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ENDING TO THE DEMANDS OF A

sustainable urban infrastructure is more than a quality of life issue. It’s an economic development issue as well.

In his State of the State message, Gov. Eliot Spitzer stressed the need to prepare the state to compete in the innovation economy—the knowledge-based economy of new businesses and new ideas that has become the driving force of job creation in the world today.

Innovation economy businesses are different from what might be called traditional “old economy” businesses. They are smaller. They are not tied down to locations because of a need to be close to certain natural resources, raw material sources or shipping centers.

In the “old” economy, workers went where the jobs were. In the innovation economy, companies go to where the workers are, which places a greater emphasis on the factors that enhance quality of life.

Last year, the New York State

Economic Development Council, a statewide business group, polled 700 regional leaders in business, government, higher education and economic development. The respondents said that the quality of life in an area was a critical competitive factor for attracting key personnel.

Translated, that means if an area does not have the housing and recreational opportunities and transportation alternatives that innovation economy workers demand, innovation economy companies will move elsewhere.

That’s the challenge facing us as we position New York to compete in the innovation economy. And it’s more than ensuring an adequate supply of open space, parks and outdoor recreation opportunities and transportation options, although those are certainly important.

The infrastructure needed to sustain New York in the innovation economy

includes addressing the challenge of affordable housing, or, to use another popular term, workforce housing. If our young people can’t find a place to live that they can afford, they will move elsewhere. And companies won’t be far behind.

Empire State Development, at the governor’s direction, is restructuring some of its debt to create a $50 million fund to promote affordable housing programs around the state. But we also need to explore ways we can partner with businesses on employerassisted housing programs, and with localities to encourage the construction of affordable homes.

This infrastructure also includes transportation improvements that make it easier, and more environmentally friendly, for people to get around. In New York City, this means making the Second Avenue

Subway line a reality, moving forward on plans to connect Long Island and Queens commuters to Grand Central Terminal and turning the Farley Post Office on Eighth Avenue—a building we recently bought— into Moynihan Station.

Infrastructure also means energy: power that is available at a competitive price and, to a large extent, created from renewable sources. We expect to become a leader in developing applications for this technology, working through a program underway at Syracuse University’s Center of Excellence in Environmental and Energy Systems.

“Innovation economy” and “sustainable urban infrastructure” are two terms not in the vocabulary of the visionaries who, starting in the late 1800s, built the city and the state into what it is today. But the terms reflect the spirit of those visionaries and now, just as then, creative thinking to tackle the situations jointly is necessary for the city not only to survive, but prosper.

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Patrick Foye is the downstate chair of the Empire State Development Corporation.

Putting Teeth Into New York City’s Regulation and Enforcement

BY ASSEMBLY MEMBER JAMES BRENNAN NEW YORK City is at a historic high. It is a building heyday—the biggest in 30 years. Residential building permits surged from 5,135 in 1995 to 15,050 in 2000 to 31,600 in 2006. While this construction boom creates welcome jobs and housing stock, it has absolutely outpaced the city’s ability to manage it.

The resulting costs in human life and damage to property and communities are shocking. Workers are dying in construction accidents; buildings are collapsing; adjacent properties are being undermined by excavation; and self-certifying developers are using bogus zoning exemptions to construct oversized eyesores that blight their low-rise neighborhoods.

A 2004 city comptroller’s audit found 51 percent of sampled building violations in 2002 were issued for hazardous violations but there was no systematic Department of Buildings (DOB) process for following up on hazardous violations.

OSHA reported eighty deaths from New York City construction accidents between 2002 and 2005. A 2003 city comptroller’s audit found errors in 67 percent of sampled self-certified construction plans. And in 2005, the DOB’s own mandated audits of a fifth of all selfcertified plans found 16 percent of them contained such serious errors that building permits had to be revoked.

The city’s regulation needs to catch up with its growth, and it needs to do it fast.

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ONSTRUCTION IN

In Assembly hearings on the Department of Buildings in the fall of 2006, I heard testimony from dozens of New Yorkers who recounted their fights against illegal construction, violations ignored by developers and story after story of properties that were seriously damaged because they had the misfortune to be next to construction sites. The anger and frustration of city citizens were palpable: they expressed unanimous disbelief that the agency charged with enforcing building safety can’t guarantee that plans and construction are legal and that the safety of the public and workers at the site is protected.

I have introduced a package of legislation in the Assembly, with companion bills introduced by State Sen. Frank Padavan, that will tighten regulation and

give the city new enforcement tools to address hazardous and illegal construction practices and protect public health and safety.

The legislative package includes the following seven bills: • A7745 (Brennan)/S5422 (Padavan), The Department of Buildings Community Accountability Act, directs DOB to notify community boards and borough presidents of all construction permits and DOB actions in the district; requires DOB to file public reports on all construction accidents, property damage and dangerous buildings conditions resulting from construction activity; prohibits issuance of certificates of occupancy until all adjudicated fines and penalties are paid; and gives community boards the right to request 30 DOB audits annually and receive copies of any requested plans within 5 days.

• A7800 (Brennan)/S5223 (Padavan), requires timely re-inspection and correction of all hazardous building violations issued by the DOB. • A7755 (Hevesi)/S5407 (Padavan), converts into tax liens any unpaid, adjudicated fines levied for hazardous building violations.

• A7746 (Brennan)/S4603 (Padavan), gives the DOB the power to refuse to accept the filing of any documents by a person whom a hearing has found to have knowingly or negligently submitted false documents to the DOB, thus expanding the Department’s arsenal for curbing abuse of self-certification privileges. This bill is supported by the

mayor’s office.

• A7744 (Brennan)/S5410 (Padavan), requires, for the first time, city licensure of general contractors by a Contractors Licensing Board, composed of 13 members appointed by the mayor. This will allow the city to revoke the licenses of developer-contractors who are willful violators of laws involving safety, workers’ compensation, etc.

• A7748 (Brennan)/S5246 (Padavan), abolishes the exemption from the duty of contractors to shore up adjacent properties for excavation of less than 10 feet. The bill also compels developers to carry insurance for damage for construction, demolition and excavation.

This bill is also supported by the mayor’s office.

• A7747 (Brennan)/S5441 (Padavan), funds technical assistance grants of $500,000 to a not-for-profit organization in each borough to provide legal, technical and professional assistance in the public interest regarding zoning, planning, and building and construction issues.

This legislation will put teeth into Department of Buildings’ enforcement of the Building Code and Zoning Resolution.

With the city growing by another one million people by 2030, the city needs assurance that new construction will be safe, sound, legal, and in compliance with zoning.

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James Brennan is a Democrat representing Flatbush and Park Slope in the Assembly. He is chair of the Assembly Cities Committee.

CITY HALL

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Fate of Death Penalty May Lie in Court Decisions, Not Legislature Taylor case may override Senate GOP efforts again

BY NATALIE PIFER

A

FTER

THE

STATE

TROOPER

shootings in April, State Senate leaders renewed their push to put the death penalty back on the books.

But even if they pass something, the fate of the death penalty will likely still rest with the Court of Appeals through its deliberations on the case of John B. Taylor, expected in June.

Convicted for his role in the 2000 murder of five Wendy’s employees in Queens, Taylor is New York’s only remaining death row inmate. All the others have won their appeals to commute their death sentences.

Though former Gov. George Pataki (R) reinstituted capital punishment in 1995, it has effectively been dormant since 2004, when the Court of Appeals declared one of its sentencing elements unconstitutional in reviewing the case of Stephen LaValle. The court threw out his death sentence by a 4-3 vote. No one was executed in New York under the 1995 law.

Taylor will face a different court than the one which considered LaValle’s case.

Two justices who voted to strike down the death penalty have since retired.

Their replacements could swing the court’s ideology. Justice Theodore Jones, a Democrat, is Spitzer’s first appointee and Justice Eugene Pigott, a Republican, was Pataki’s last.

Despite the changes, the justices are still theoretically bound by stare decisis, a legal doctrine that holds precedent cases are to be followed by future courts.

Some say a reversal could damage the court’s legitimacy as an apolitical body.

“If the newly composed court does overrule LaValle, it risks the perception that it was simply because the court’s personnel has changed, and that suggests that the positions were not as reliable as we thought,” said James Acker, a professor of criminal justice at the University of Albany.

Conceivably, the Court could uphold Taylor’s death sentence without addressing the technicalities of the LaValle case.

In the LaValle decision, the court ruled

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MAY 2007

juries were coerced into voting for death because they were told a deadlock could mean a defendant would eventually be eligible for parole. By contrast, in Taylor’s case, the judge instructed that, in the event of a deadlock, Taylor would eli-

But if Taylor’s appeal is granted, capital punishment will remain unconstitutional unless and until the Legislature can agree on a reconciled bill. That seems unlikely, though, despite several attempts in recent years that started in the State Senate.

The Assembly voted down a Senate amendment to enact the death penalty for crimes where police officers are killed. Senate Majority Leader Joseph Bruno (R-Rensselaer) called on Gov. Eliot Spitzer (D) to persuade Assembly Democrats to relent and pass new death penalty legislation. Spitzer is publicly in favor of the death penalty.

When the State Senate tried to reinstate the death penalty two years ago, its bill died in the Assembly Codes Committee.

Joseph Lentol (DBrooklyn) said that he was among the Assembly members who were swayed from pro-death penalty stances by the hearings he held as Codes Committee chair to gauge public opinion.

Lentol called the proposal floated at the time “a quick fix of the death penalty law to make it constitutional.”

He predicted that what has become a slight Assembly majority against the death penalty will prevent the Assembly from accepting Senate legislation reactivating the death penalty. npifer@manhattanmedia.com

Lentol called the proposal floated at the time “a quick fix of the death penalty law to make it constitutional.” gible for parole only after 175 years.

Queens District Attorney Richard Brown (D) declined comment on the still pending Taylor case.

Acker expects prosecutors to argue that Taylor’s case falls outside LaValle’s scope.

If the court upholds Taylor’s death sentence, but does not reverse the LaValle decision, the case could serve to implicitly endorse the death penalty in multiple homicide or in combined felonies, such as rape and murder cases where the sentences can be stacked.

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8

CITY HALL

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MAY 2007

At the Head of the Table Allies with her father’s old foes, Dickens starts taking the reigns

BY CARLA ZANONI AT

THE

ANDREW SCHWARTZ

TIME

famous Sylvia’s Restaurant in Harlem on May 4 found Council Member Inez Dickens (D-Manhattan) sharing a meal with Rep. Charlie Rangel (D-Manhattan) and Percy Sutton, the former borough president.

They were there to welcome Irish President Mary McAleese to Harlem, in a room filled with the sounds of booming bagpipes and forks chiming rhythmically against plates piled high with fried chicken, home fries and grits. A large bowl of fruit at the bar went comparatively untouched.

Dickens sat at the head of her table, with Sutton to her right and Rangel one spot further down. McAleese addressed the crowd, thanked them for welcoming her to Harlem. Afterwards she called the visit the highlight of a trip which took her around New York and included a ceremonial reception by Mayor Michael Bloomberg (R).

And though the event was organized

by Rangel’s office, McAleese, unprompted, gives a nod to Dickens when told a reporter is writing a story about her.

“The Council member’s work can be seen throughout the streets of Harlem,” McAleese said.

Dickens led Sutton by the arm from the table to where photographers were eager to snap shots of Rangel, Sutton and herself. Dickens rubbed Rangel’s back.

When the flashes stopped popping, she signaled it was time to leave.

Born and bred in Harlem, Dickens grew up under the tutelage of her father, Assembly Member Lloyd Dickens (DManhattan). To her, Sutton is not just the famed Harlem political heavyweight, but something of a “father figure” in the years since her own father’s death. To Sutton, Dickens is “absolutely a dream.”

That relationship could not have been predicted 40 years ago, when Sutton and Rangel began their war with Lloyd Dickens. Vying for political control of Harlem, Sutton ran against Dickens repeatedly. Rangel ran against him once, in 1963, the year Sutton opted against making the race. Dickens beat them both.

They opposed him, Sutton recalled, “because he was an iron-handed ruler.

And when it was all over though, she was

herself in 2005, Sutton, Rangel and the rest of the Gang of Four—former Mayor David Dinkins and former State Senator and New York Secretary of State Basil Paterson—jumped on board. And they were not the only ones: she was backed by outgoing Manhattan Borough President C. Virginia Fields, Rep. Carolyn Maloney and State Sen. Bill Perkins, among many others.

These days, they and many others appear in the photographs covering the walls of her district office. Former Comptroller and 2002 gubernatorial nom-

left there.”

Though his relationship with Lloyd Dickens was never close, Sutton said, it helped seed his relationship with his old foe’s daughter.

“I learned so much from her father, by him beating me back while I was trying to beat him,” Sutton said. “And when it was all over, and he died, we worked with her very proudly.”

When Dickens—who had been a codistrict leader with Rangel for years and the leader of the Martin Luther King, Jr. political club—decided to run for office

CONTINUED ON PAGE 10

To Become a Female Political Heavyweight, Dickens Followed Strict Diet n the court of public opinion and the teeny-tiny voter booth, looks apparently do matter.

Council Member Inez Dickens (DManhattan) said she knows about that first hand. When she decided to run for office, she knew her excess weight would be an issue. So she lost it. All 130 pounds.

“It was one thing for people to come by my office as a community activist,” she said, “and another thing for them to vote for me for public office, so I decided to lose the weight.”

She beat a large field in her 2005 primary, in which all of the leading candidates were other women. After winning, she also went through several hairstyles before settling on her current closely cropped cut.

Dickens called herself a realist, and acknowledges that the public eye takes into account a person’s physical appearance as well as their politics.

“If all things are equal—if they feel that you’re intelligent and he’s intelligent—if you’re heavy and he’s not,” she said, “then you won’t be voted for.”

Lynne Weikart, a Baruch College political science professor, said that

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inee H. Carl McCall is there, as is former Vice President Al Gore. Bill and Hillary Clinton appear as well, each in a separate photo with Dickens. Toward the center is one of Dickens hugging Council Speaker Christine Quinn (D-Manhattan). Quinn signed it, “To the best friend a girl can have.”

During the slightly less than year and a half that Dickens has been in office, she has quickly amassed ever-growing clout in political circles. As the majority whip—a position she got within her first few days on the Council—Dickens is, after Quinn, the body’s second most powerful female member and highest-ranking African-American woman. Increasingly, she seems poised to take the reigns from the old Harlem guard.

And they seem happy to give it to her.

“It’s safe to say that no one has more experience politically than she does,” Rangel said, calling her one of his top protégés. “She’s not only mature, but she’s articulate and she’s done an absolutely outstanding job in the City Council and serves almost as a partner with the speaker.”

Dickens, however, insists that she sees herself as more of a civic servant.

“I really don’t look at myself as a powerhouse,” Dickens said. “I really just look at myself as what can I do for my community.”

To her, that community reaches far beyond the old boundaries of Harlem. As a woman, and moreover, a black woman, Dickens said she feels a responsibility not just toward her district, but citywide.

Inez Dickens in 2005, before she lost 130 pounds. because politicians are seen on television and the Internet regularly, a person’s physical appearance has taken on added importance. And weight is a big part of a person’s projected image, she said. People judge a person’s ability to serve on their ability to maintain their health.

“There is much more emphasis on health,” she said. “Even the president goes on a bike, does a three mile run. Clinton worked hard on losing that weight. Things have changed a lot.”

But, when it comes down to the sexes, Weikart said, women are more frequently on the receiving end of physical scrutiny.

Democratic consultant Scott Levenson said that it is obvious that women are under more scrutiny than men on all levels of government, mentioning what he said was an obvious contrast in the coverage of two of Dickens’s fellow Council Democrats.

“Everyone always talks about Chris Quinn dyeing her hair,” he said. “You don’t hear anyone mentioning David Weprin wearing a toupee.”

Republican political consultant Kellyanne Conway agreed, saying that for women, things go beyond just weight, hair and looks. She finds the very question of how to portray her sense of gender flummoxing: if a woman is perceived as too feminine or not feminine enough, it can signal her campaign’s downfall.

“Ignoring it’s like being a pregnant teenage girl,” she said. “You can ignore it for only so long, but it’s not going to go away.”

—CZ czanoni@manhattanmedia.com

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IMAMS SUING AMERICAN CITIZENS! A LAWSUIT THAT THREATENS OUR SECURITY On November 30, 2006, passengers aboard a Phoenix-bound USAirways flight reported suspicious activity by a group of Muslim Imams who attracted attention by praying loudly before boarding the plane, talking about Saddam Hussein and moving between seats. The Imams now want to sue the passengers who reported that the clerics were acting suspiciously.

Rep. Peter King has now taken action against this outrage by introducing legislation that has passed the House and now goes to the Senate to protect Americans.

CONGRATULATIONS CONGRESSMAN

PETER KING

REP. PETER KING

For Protecting New York City’s Security

As a result of this lawsuit, all of New York’s security can be put at risk by holding the threat of legal action over New Yorkers. This would have a chilling effect on any citizen who wanted to report a potentially threatening incident.

Combating crime depends on the involvement of all of us. Eyes and ears on the street are important components of effective police work. Combating international terrorism deserves the same vigilance from ordinary folk.

Congratulations to Rep. Peter King for having the courage to stand up to this threat.

“I think people should be free to go to law enforcement if they think there’s something wrong. You certainly should not feel that you cannot go and report something.”- 4/4/07 MAYOR MIKE BLOOMBERG “Rep. Peter King understood this threat and immediately went into action. He introduced an amendment which has passed the House that would give passengers immunity if they report suspicious activity in good faith.

We urge the U.S. Senate to follow suit and we ask that the New York City Council introduce and pass a Resolution in support of the King amendment.”

JOHN A. CATSIMATIDIS, Chairman/CEO, Red Apple Group/Gristedes

GRISTEDES Supports A Safe New York

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MAY 2007

CITY HALL

STATE OF THE UNIONS

Wobblies Look to Stand Strong Again

BY DAVID FREEDLANDER

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S THE LABOR MOVEMENT IN

America continues its backward retreat, New York has seen a surprising resurgence from the unlikeliest of places—the International Workers of the World.

The Wobblies, as the union is commonly known, have led two high-profile organizing campaigns around the city at a series of warehouses in Brooklyn and Queens and at Starbucks locations throughout Manhattan.

Though the members are still few, they have already attracted the attention of City Council Speaker Christine Quinn (D-Manhattan), who last month issued a strongly worded letter in defense of the nascent union to Starbucks Corporation CEO James Donald.

“I fully expect that you will allow these employees to consider independently whether to form a union, without outside pressure or intimidation from Starbucks management,” she wrote.

“Their efforts to organize are a democratic right and should be respected.”

Both the warehouse and the coffee shop efforts have been resisted by management, which has lead the IWW to file complaints with the National Labor

Dickens CONTINUED FROM PAGE 8

“Women are just getting accepted, and sometimes I question: Are we accepted on a lot of levels?” she asked.

From the mid-1970s, Dickens worked as a county, state and county judicial committee member. She served as a longtime Democratic district leader, the first vice chair of the New York State Democratic Committee, all the while sitting on the board of numerous Harlem foundations and agencies. She said she considers her previous experience and current political position as two sides of the same coin.

“What I’m doing now means that I have an impact on the law, on the policy,” she said. “What I did before still had an impact, but I was doing it from the outside.”

Prior to holding political office, she worked as a real estate developer as a partner at the family-owned Lloyd E. Dickens & Company. Dickens said her father always taught the family that political and economic involvement went handin-hand to improve their community.

“What my family did was provide

Relations Board. While the warehouse case winds its way through the bureaucracy, in March of last year the NLRB found Starbucks guilty of 30 violations of federal labor law, including threatening, intimidating, and firing workers who joined the IWW. “Our union is undergoing a resurgence right now,” said Starbucks Worker Union co-founder and IWW organizer Daniel Gross. “There were some tough years, but we are now back with a commitment to organizing again. We have enabled people to not accept the absolute power of their employer at work.”

The established unions have largely ignored the struggle of baristas at Starbucks and of the workers at food warehouses in Brooklyn and Queens.

Forming a union under any circumstances is difficult. But forming one where the shops workers are largely undocumented as in the case of the warehouses, or where they are spread out over 8,000 stores across the world is to many unions, not worth the effort.

“No other union would dare touch Starbucks,” said IWW organizer and Starbucks barista Tomer Malchi. “The company is growing at an unbelievable rate and has this incredible PR machine.

We wanted a union that gave us autonomy.

affordable housing, good quality affordable housing, particularly at a time when no one had any interest in Harlem,” she said. “Nobody saw Harlem to be the diamond that everyone recognizes it to be now. Instead, everyone said, ‘Let’s get out of here, let’s move away, let’s leave it devastated.’”

The reminders of her father and his lessons on work discipline, loyalty and punctuality have become part of her fiber now that she has been elected in her own right. Never an early riser and frequently late as a child, now her colleagues on the Council rib her regularly for being so early to events.

But most of all, Dickens said her father taught her to always remember her roots.

“He used to tell me that no matter how you may grow, whether it’s financially or it’s politically, you are still a black person in America, in New York and in this community,” she said. “If you fail to bring along your community with your growth, you haven’t gotten anywhere, because it can be removed at any moment, anyone can take it from you at anytime.” czanoni@manhattanmedia.com

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ANDREW SCHWARTZ

Resurgent IWW breeds among New York’s Starbucks baristas and immigrant warehouse workers

The IWW has started building in New York again, appealing to immigrant workers like those who rallied in Union Square on May Day. It’s a very difficult environment to organize retail workers these days, but that’s where the organization needs to happen.”

The Wobblies got their start in Chicago in 1905, and peaked at around 100,000 members just before the start of World War I. Armed with the motto, “An Injury to One is An Injury to All,” the IWW had a vision for a complete transformation of the newly industrial society, one where workers had a strong a voice on the shop floor as bosses. The Wobblies developed a reputation for radicalism, organizing stoppages and actions across the country. By the 1930s, a relentless suppression campaign by the federal, state, and local authorities had decimated the union’s membership, and many joined to the new Congress of Industrial Organizations, which became incorporated into the AFL-CIO. The Wobblies have begun to rebuild by focusing their efforts on younger, more politicized workers.

“A lot of the kids who are organizing Starbucks are the same people who were involved in the anti-globalization movement in Seattle. It’s part of the gradual generational shift where the people who may once have been smashing the windows at Starbucks are now working there and trying to organize there,” said David Graeber, author of Fragments of An Anarchist Anthropology.

Graeber, an anthropology professor in addition to being an organizer for the IWW, gained some notoriety in May 2005, when Yale University opted against extending his contract with the school.

Given his history in anarchist advocacy and labor organizing, including advising the burgeoning Yale graduate student union, some believe the university’s decision on Graeber was politically motivated.

The Wobblies now number over 2,000 nationwide, and their ranks are growing.

Though this may not make it a movement, with only 7.4 percent of private sector working Americans in labor unions—down from over 30 percent in 1960, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics—labor advocates will take good news where they can get it.

“A guy or girl joins the Wobblies now out of a strong belief of progressive or

humane causes,” said Archie Green, author of “Wobblies, Pile Butts and Other Heroes.” “The American labor movement has shrunk so much. Wobblies still represent change.”

The International Workers of the World avoid the official imprimatur most unions seek from the federal government, preferring grassroots organizing and direct action against places of business, their suppliers, and their customers. They avoid contractual gains in favor of a greater respect from management on the job. Each Wobbly shop organizes itself however it pleases, with the IWW simply providing support as needed. No workers have to join even if the management recognizes the union, and no central office requires dues.

“We don’t play pragmatic games,” said IWW General Secretary Mark Damron.

“We don’t like other people to provide us answers or the government to provide us handouts. We all can take an active role in organizing our workplaces rather than wait for others to do it for us.”

Locally, that has meant throwing dirt on the reputation of Starbucks, a global corporation that has prided itself on its socially consciousness image—and which touts its place on Fortune Magazine’s list of the “Top 100 Companies to Work For.” The IWW now has a presence in 10 Starbucks stores in the city, and the starting salary for baristas has risen a dollar more per hour, to $8.75. On May Day, they opened the Gilberto Soto Memorial Workers Center in Elizabeth, New Jersey, named after the union organizer who was slain organizing truckers in his native El Salvador in 2004.

The center will host driver’s education and solidarity workshops and is the first place of its kind in the country.

But will it be enough?

“You might have a victory here or there in a particular Starbucks or in a particular factory but it is very limited compared to some of the big failures of the labor movement,” said Green. “I wish them every success but realistically they’ve taken on a tough job.” davidfreedlander@gmail.com Direct letters to the editor to cityhall@manhattanmedia.com

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Tourism Grows in Brooklyn, But Proof Proves Elusive Major effort high on hype and perceived success

BY ANDREW HAWKINS ISLAND. THE BROOKLYN Bridge. The New York Aquarium.

Brooklyn is bursting at the seams with potentially hot tourist destinations.

And according to city officials, tourism in the borough is booming.

“There’s no question about it that tourism is increasing,” said Borough President Marty Markowitz (D), who has made this a central focus of his administration.

But facts and figures to back up these claims are nowhere to be found, with NYC & Co., the city’s official tourism agency, or anywhere else.

There are signs of growth: more people than ever are visiting the tourism office in Borough Hall and exploring Brooklyn after disembarking cruise ships in Red Hook, the beep said. The Brooklyn Bridge Marriott has even doubled its size, ballooning from 376 rooms to 678 in a year.

There is not, however, an official count of the num-

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ber of annual visitors to Brooklyn, or amounts of revenue earned by the city, or the number of jobs created, leaving Markowitz and NYC & Co. without statistical support for their glowing assessments.

A small staff, a lack of resources and temporary office space has delayed NYC & Co. from producing boroughspecific numbers, said Kimberly Spell, vice president for communications.

“It’s up to our research department to develop specific mechanisms” to measure Brooklyn tourism, Spell said. “We want to make sure we do it right, and research takes money.”

More than 44 million tourists visited the city last year. The goal, Spell said, is to boost that number to 50 million by 2015, which would entail pumping more cash into the city’s $40 million-a-year tourism budget.

Highlighting the outer boroughs, particularly Brooklyn—the highest profile borough after Manhattan—is an important part of that plan.

“Ultimately, we want to make Brooklyn the actual destination of choice for tourists, with an optional side trip into Manhattan,” Markowitz said, only somewhat facetiously.

Last year, he traveled to London to hype Brooklyn at the World Travel Market Marty Markowitz has made Expo.

He opened a tourism office in promoting Brooklyn tourism Borough Hall and began producing glossy central to his administration.

CONTINUED ON PAGE 20

Responding to Supreme Court Decision, New Yorkers Look to Protect Abortion Access With late term abortion ban upheld, Spitzer and Nadler champion legislation to codify Roe v. Wade

BY COURTNEY MCLEOD SUPREME COURT’S RECENT RULING upholding a ban on late term abortions has again put the issue at the forefront of political agendas. And many of those agendas are based right here in the Empire State.

In the days following the Court’s mid-April decision, which some abortion advocates believed was the first major strike in an erosion of the federal protection of abortion by the Court with its two new members, Democrats from New York favoring abortion rights have moved to protect abortion access.

Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-Manhattan/Brooklyn) reintroduced a federal bill that would put the principles embodied in the Roe v. Wade decision into law, and Rep. Jerrold Nadler is leading an effort in Congress to Gov. Eliot Spitzer (D) proposed legislation that fy abortion rights into law. would update New York’s abortion laws, safeguarding abortion rights in the state should the procedure lose its but face a fight from Republicans in the State Senate.

Either way, analysts expect that the activity on the protection under federal law.

Whether either measure will be successful is anyone’s issue will force lawmakers reticent to take positions on guess. Nadler’s bill is sure to face a tough fight in the issue to be more public with their views.

“What we’re going to do is see where lawmakers up Congress—if it gets that far. And Spitzer’s legislation will likely get wide support in the Democratic-led Assembly in Albany stand on the question of Roe v. Wade,” said

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Robert Jaffe, executive vice president of NARAL Pro-Choice New York.

NARAL announced May 8 that the group would be targeting State Sens. Caesar Trunzo (Suffolk), Kemp Hannon (Nassau), Carl Marcellino (Nassau/Suffolk) and Joe Robach (Rochester)—Republican senators in marginal districts—in an effort to push the Senate’s GOP majority to bring Spitzer’s bill to the floor.

The Supreme Court’s decision upheld a ban on late-term abortions in all cases except to save the mother’s life, making no provision for an exception for the mother’s health, as was required under Roe. That failure to provide a health exception—in addition to the outlawing codi- of a specific medical practice—has supporters of abortion rights worried.

“This decision marks a dramatic departure from four decades of Supreme Court rulings that upheld a woman’s right to choose and recognized the importance of women’s health,” Sen. Hillary Clinton (D) said in a statement.

Both Nadler’s and Spitzer’s legislation would provide CONTINUED ON PAGE 18

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MAY 2007

Stem Cell Research Growing in New York, Advocates Say Panel expresses optimism that Spitzer-Paterson budgeting will prod federal government

BY EDWARD-ISAAC DOVERE

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the headlines and at the forefront of political debate, many questions about the potential, problems and pitfalls of stem cell research remain unanswered.

Answering some of these and setting an agenda to achieve faster progress on enabling the research were the goals of a panel convened by the New York Stem Cell Foundation held at the 92nd Street Y on May 3. The panel was moderated by WNYC radio’s Leonard Lopate and introduced by actor Michael J. Fox, the actor who became a stem cell advocate after publicly disclosing his diagnosis with Parkinson’s Disease.

“There’s a lot of misinformation out there,” said Kevin Eggan, an associate professor of molecular and cellular biology at Harvard University who specializes in stem cell research.

Eggan was joined on the panel by paralyzed artist and stem cell advocate Chuck Close, Stem Cell Foundation cofounder Susan Solomon, Lieutenant Governor David Paterson (D) and Harold Varmus, the president and CEO of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Hospital and a former director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

Since so much research is done with money distributed by the NIH and other federal organizations, the restrictions President George W. Bush (R) placed on

JOYCE CULVER FOR THE 92ND STREET Y

ESPITE NEARLY A DECADE IN

Chuck Close, Lieutenant Governor David Paterson, New York Stem Cell Foundation co-founder Susan Solomon, Harvard researcher Kevin Eggan and Memorial Sloan-Kettering President Harold Varmus joined Leonard Lopate for a panel discussion on stem cell research at the 92nd Street Y. stem cell research in 2001 have severely hampered the progress of stem cell research.

Though the research is admittedly preliminary, Eggan said the scientific consensus is that stem cells could be used to grow cells which would replace those no longer functioning, like those in the brain which lead to Parkinson’s or Alzheimer’s.

Some believe they could be used to help

Maloney Hosts Electronic Voting Hearing at City Hall

BY EDWARD-ISAAC DOVERE ep.

Carolyn Maloney (DManhattan/Queens) brought William Lacy Clay, her Democratic House colleague from Missouri to City Hall May 7 for a Congressional field hearing on the certification and testing of electronic voting systems.

New York is the last state not in compliance with the Help America Vote Act (HAVA), a federal law passed after the disputes of the 2000 presidential election. That law looks to create electronic voting systems, a move many New York officials resisted.

The slow movement drew some criticism, though it was defended by those who said they feared vote tally manipulation and other possible malfeasance which might be possible with computerized voting.

Many of the systems and machines purchased by other states have since had their viability called into question.

Maloney said she thought the state should feel vindicated.

“New York looks pretty smart these

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days because we focused on standards,” Maloney said at the hearing. “We didn’t buy machines that will need to be replaced by taxpayers.”

The state’s failure to comply with the HAVA regulations cost it $50 million in funds from the federal government, money which Bronx Rep. José Serrano (D) is trying to get restored through legislation in Congress.

Donnetta Davidson, the chair of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission called to testify at the field hearing, will ultimately oversee the fine or restoration of funds, which depends on the outcome of Serrano’s legislation.

Clay said he supported the restoration of the funds.

“You do understand,” Clay told Davidson, “they moved cautiously, as I appreciate and I know others do.”

Other testimony at the hearing indicated that New Yorkers could expect to see the old lever machines replaced by electronic voting systems by next year’s elections. eidovere@manhattanmedia.com

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cure blindness, paralysis and other disabilities. In addition, Eggan said, they could be used to grow cell cultures which would allow more accurate testing of new medications and treatments, since this would enable copies of specific cells from within the human body to be exposed to new procedures in laboratory conditions.

More research is needed to know exactly what stem cells can do, said Eggan, but Bush’s executive order and other restrictions put on annual budgets

by Congress have slowed the research and had an overall “chilling effect which is discouraging people to go into this field.”

A 2004 California referendum backed strongly by Republican Gov. Arnold INT. 551 A Local Law to amend the administrative code of the city of New York, in relation to an owner’s duty to purchase and install radiator covers.

SPONSORS: Council Members G. Oliver Koppell (D-Bronx) and Gale Brewer (D-Manhattan) “You have to have smoke detector, window guards, this is along the same lines,” said Koppell, who has proposed similar introductions before.

Schwarzenegger allocated $3 billion of state money to stem cell research.

However, due to intense and continuous wrangling over how that money should be distributed, and to whom, none of it has been spent to date.

“Even when they set up their bond act, they did not create a strategic plan,” he explained.

That, according to Paterson, was part of the reason he and Gov. Eliot Spitzer (D) shied away from putting a ballot referendum in front of New York voters, in addition to technical legal concerns about what kind of political contribution could be spent on a campaign to convince voters to support the measure.

They had every confidence that New Yorkers would back applying state money toward stem cell funding, but that would mean putting off any distribution of funds at least until after Election Day this November, the next time a referendum could be offered.

“Good government was not making a referendum and starting a fight we knew we could win,” Paterson argued. “Good government was starting the money rolling right away.”

New York put $600 million to stem cell research over the next 10 years, which Paterson said he hoped would open the door for a minimum of $1.5 billion additional funding, he projected.

A state stem cell board with its own bylaws is being created. Also in the works, Paterson said, is a cooperative to enable research sharing with scientists in New Jersey, Connecticut and Massachusetts—nearby states which have also put state money to stem cell research.

The lieutenant governor said this effort was in “the embryonic stage.” eidovere@manhattanmedia.com

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Koppell said he was motivated to reintroduce his proposal after learning about a 2006 lawsuit in which a landlord was not held responsible for the burns a child sustained by an uncovered Bills on the burner radiator.

The bill for the Council would require radiator covers designed with child safety in mind where young children reside.

— Natalie Pifer

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LOBBYISTCORNER McCaffrey Returns to the Fight, Advising Old Allies on Congestion Pricing Former Queens Council member says opposition to similar plan while in the Council helped win him contract

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to be putting up at least some of the money.

A former zoning subcommittee chair on the Council, McCaffrey held the seat representing Woodside, Sunnyside, Long Island City and Maspeth now occupied

by Eric Gioia (D). He has not sought elec-

politicians knock each other over en route to the podium to protest the mayor’s congestion pricing proposal, one former Queens Council member is helping craft a strategy to defeat the plan.

Walter McCaffrey, term limited out of the Council in 2001, has been working as advisor and strategist to Keep New York City Congestion Tax Free, committed to blocking Bloomberg’s plan. He said his opposition to a similar proposal in the 1990s while on the Council helped win him the job now.

McCaffrey’s group argues that the congestion pricing plan would constitute an extra tax on the backs of residents who cannot afford to pay, arguing that Walter McCaffrey is helping lead the opposition some drivers could face to Bloomberg’s pilot program. up to $5,000 annually in new fees. Emphasizing senior citizens as tive office since leaving City Hall, instead the hardest hit, McCaffrey also singled focusing on congestion pricing and out those seeking medical treatment as advising several nationwide corporations being hit hard. He said that two thirds of in addition to lobbying work. He would Queens residents see doctors in not disclose his client list.

McCaffrey said he is done with elecManhattan and many cannot use public transportation because of the effects of tive politics, whether it be for some new office or an attempt to return to his old the treatment.

“Those folks who have to take their seat once Gioia is term-limited out of it cars into Manhattan are those who have himself in 2009.

“Thank you, been there, done that,” he incomes of $40,000 to $45,000 a year,” he said. said.

He is hoping his lobbying skills and He is not just leading the opposition, though. He is also working with the knowledge of the legislative process group to create alternative congestion pays off to block the congestion pricing elimination proposals. These include plan. The plan is gaining substantial having Manhattan construction sites opposition in the public sector, with polls make entrances that take up less street showing most city residents being room, putting parking notches in the against it.

McCaffrey said he is beginning to see sidewalk for buildings and building more more city and state legislators leaning rapid bus lanes.

McCaffrey notes that while these pro- toward opposing the proposal, and not posals have not been endorsed by just in Queens, where the opposition first Bloomberg, the mayor has agreed with the sprouted more than a year ago, and group in ramping up enforcement of cars remains strongest today.

“The Queens community was involved “blocking the box” and creating gridlock.

Started by the Queens Chamber of at the early stage,” he said. “This is now Commerce last year, Keep New York City broad-based geographically.”

Congestion Tax Free is currently funded by private contributors. He declined to johncelock@aol.com specify who they were, but a consortium Direct letters to the editor to of Manhattan garage owners is believed cityhall@manhattanmedia.com

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ANDREW SCHWARTZ

BY JOHN R.D. CELOCK

MAY 2007

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The Mogul Mayor and the Media of America.

“In many ways,” Sulzburger said, “the mayor is one of us.” ndeed, when Bloomberg takes to the podium on the other side of the stage, he custom tailors a favorite from his current stock of speech lines for his special relationship with the crowd.

The page one story to bring back to their hometowns, he said, is that life expectancy is now higher in New York than the rest of the country.

“The question is what explains this remarkable success,” he said. “Obviously, a great mayor. In case you forgot to put that in paragraph one and the headline, I wanted to help you a little bit.”

Jokes aside, Bloomberg’s time in office has been marked by, among other things, an ongoing attempt to determine exactly which stories about his administration are covered. This is, of course, nothing remarkable for a politician—every political reporter has been bullied at least once by an official or aide—but Bloomberg’s take is that his time at the helm of Bloomberg LP and Bloomberg News gave him a deeper understanding of what the media is meant to do, said his former communications director, Bill Cunningham.

He summarized the mayor’s thinking as “I’m reporting to the people through you.

Here’s the topic we’re talking about today.”

According to Cunningham, Bloomberg believes reporters have an obligation to their bosses and consumers to report whatever it is that he puts forward as the news of the day.

He also puts a major premium on his own time, setting aside predetermined amounts for press interaction, and likes to keep them in City Hall’s Blue Room, the traditional press pen. Reporters who do not know this quickly learn it: those who try the time-honored tradition of ambushing politicians on the steps of City Hall or on the way out of an event looking for comment get nothing. He keeps his lips firmly closed before and after his prepared statements and the time he has determined he will set aside from questions. Reporters who try to get him to do otherwise are lucky to get eye contact. If he says anything, it is only to point out his press secretary, trailing close behind.

He does not do many one-on-one interviews. When he does, he keeps them mainly off-the-record. Those looking to get him to sound off on any hot button issue of the day, whether Anna Nicole Smith or Don Imus or anything else, face an even tougher task. Unlike Ed Koch, who drove his press secretaries mad by

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stomping on his own headlines with pontifications on nearly any topic posed to him, Bloomberg refuses to engage topics which he feels are beyond the purview of city agencies. Or, at least, not much.

“It’s not important to him to play that game,” Cunningham said.

Those who do seem to quickly lose his respect, as he rarely takes pains to hide.

“In Mike’s mind, the press corps knows how long a press event lasts, they know there’s one general press event a day where they can ask a question,” Cunningham said. “So if you waste it on the latest celebrity in the news, Mike would wonder what your priorities are.”

He is a long way from Koch, who held so many press conferences—almost all of them followed by secondary availabilities at the nearby radiator—that his press secretaries recall several reporters begging that there be fewer. He is a long way as well from Rudolph Giuliani, who alternated between intense sparring with reporters and constant access, to the point of calling in traffic reports to local radio stations when they held up his motorcade.

Those were the days of the “ubiquitous message, the ubiquitous mayor,” recalled Cristyne Nicholas, Giuliani’s press secretary for his 1993 campaign who went on to spend nearly six years running the administration’s press office.

“If there ever was a message that he needed to get out, all we needed was to walk down the hall, and it was instant press conference,” she said.

But Bloomberg is also a long way from Mayor Abraham Beame, who usually had one interview with reporters each year, and is often remembered as a man who deliberately hid from the press, leaving them to deal with his press secretary instead.

For Bloomberg, “there’s a respectful distance between the mayor and the media,” Nicholas said. “You’ve got someone who’s acutely aware of how the media works and what they react to, and now he’s being covered by them.”

Sulzburger seems convinced of Bloomberg’s heightened awareness of how the media works. But for reporters who cover Bloomberg regularly, like Daily News City Hall bureau chief Michael Saul, not so much.

“I don’t think his background as a media mogul evokes much sympathy among members the press corps,” he wrote in an email. “Sometimes, I think, reporters are perplexed when someone who owns a media company (and employs so many talented reporters) seems to have trouble understanding how reporters tick, or that the questions reporters ask don’t reflect their opinions

loomberg is an unlikely media star. Bloomberg is an unlikely media star. He lacks the chiseled looks of a politician like John Lindsay. He wears finely-tailored, expensive suits, though not flashy ones. He wears finelytailored, expensive suits, though plain ones. He likes to stand with his arms fully crossed in front of him, one hand firmly grasped around the opposite arm’s triceps. He is, depending on who is giving the assessment, either shy or reserved or well-mannered or patrician. One way or another, he generally pulls back from the spotlight.

He is no stranger to traditional show business, either. Aside from his careers in business and politics, he produced the film adaptation of Arthur Miller’s Focus just before he entered the 2001 campaign. Thanks to a few cameos on The Apprentice and Law & Order, he is even a member of the Screen Actors Guild.

Each time, he played himself.

“I’m still waiting for the Oscar, Emmy, whatever they give out,” he joked, as he prepared to sign a new anti-film piracy statute meant to protect his fellow union members.

He continues Giuliani’s tradition of appearing each Friday at 10 with John Gambling on WABC Radio, where he schmoozes and muses about New York and the news of the moment, laying out his opinions on the airwaves and parrying with callers to the show.

Gambling, who himself is the thirdgeneration radio host in his family, said that other than showing the mayor the cough button and other technical aspects of being in the studio, he never had to offer much advice.

“He’s a natural,” Gambling said.

In some ways, Bloomberg does whatever he can to avoid press coverage. In others, he does whatever he can to appeal to it, usually pairing his speeches with slick slide shows and other carefully prepared multimedia packages, whether on the large flat screen television he keeps in

B

ANDREW SCHWARTZ PHOTOS

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 1

country free,” as he told the reporters in the Blue Room May 1.

The question of what counts as quality, as Bloomberg regularly makes clear, remains in dispute.

In April, he said that second only to his longtime adversaries at the United Federation of Teachers, the main obstacle to his education reform agenda was “the newspapers that can never find anything good enough. They’re in favor of change, but they’ve yet in their whole publishing history seen a change that was good enough.”

As recently as May 4, he was still complaining to a Regional Plan Association luncheon about the stories done on the expensive bicycle he purchased during the 2005 transit strike. This was just one of the many stories he thinks reveal some reporters as petty, too often looking for the easy story.

“What would have happened if the courageous people of the past got hauled into court, got beaten up in the press?” he

“

asked the luncheon crowd, pledging not to back off his congestion pricing plan.

Nonetheless, the mayor maintains a decent relationship with reporters, said David Seifman, who has covered four mayors over his 25 years reporting from City Hall for the New York Post.

More than anything, Seifman said, that is a consequence of the good times in the city and the mayor’s generally high approval rating and not about coming to embrace the press’s role in his own life.

When he does go in front of reporters, Seifman said, “you don’t get a sense that Bloomberg really particularly enjoys

read verbatim, and followed by only a few questions, after which he quickly rushes from the room. That leaves the firm impression, Seifman said, that Bloomberg thinks meeting with the press “is certainly part of his job, but it’s not as important as other parts.”

His administration insists it focuses on policy over politics and personality.

He and his aides like to cover reporters in charts and figures like a recent report delineating how the claim that 96 percent of his 2005 campaign pledges were fulfilled. He is a man who helped pioneer a system at Bloomberg News of automated

In many ways,” said New York Times publisher Arthur Sulzburger,

on an issue.”

In the abstract, Bloomberg speaks glowingly of the press, with statements like “quality journalism is what’s kept this

“the mayor is one of us.” these sessions.”

They are usually short, consisting mostly of prepared comments quickly

article writing (and even automated television and radio reports) by merging preset data fields.

In his 1997 autobiography, he explained his view of business reporters, both among those he employed at Bloomberg News and those who covered him for other publications.

“Journalists are just like you and me— well, sort of,” he wrote. “They try to do their jobs and get home to their kids. If you make filling inches and minutes easier for them, they’ll help you every time.”

The business press is very different, though, explained former Koch press secretary Maureen Connelly. Articles about him in the business press usually put him “on the receiving end of accolades,” concerned with examining “why he was a success, looking at the formula of his success.”

Connelly paused.

“That’s not the approach of political reporters,” she said.

Seifman agreed Bloomberg is still defined by his experience with business reporters.

“That has colored his view of the press,” he said. “It hasn’t colored our view of him.”

CONTINUED ON PAGE 16

The Mogul Mayor and the Media CONTINUED FROM PAGE 15

the Blue Room or just about anywhere else. He is sensitive to how presentation can sell policy, turning to public relations firms and other professionals to help craft that appeal. There is a focus on the big elements—as when he presented his sustainability plan on Earth Day under the giant whale at the American Museum of Natural History, complete with a 155page glossy book. The smallest detail gets attention as well, like the little green pins handed to guests at the door.

He does not need to court the press.

He is the mayor of New York, often called the second most visible politician in America. Whom he has dinner with is news. How well he speaks Spanish is news. That he calls his 98-year-old mother daily is news.

Reporters will come to him, and if they do not, he and administration officials suggest, he does not care. (Not that he is unaware of how hard they try: Ed Skyler’s weathering four years as press secretary earned him a promotion to deputy mayor.)

Especially with term limits preventing him from seeking reelection in 2009, those around him suggest, he is loose, free, able to do whatever he wants without fear of how any of it will play in the press. He may have grown more comfortable in front of reporters, but he has also grown more comfortable ignoring them, and certainly ignoring whatever they produce about him.

The battle lines are drawn. He will do what he thinks is right, and he will not plead his case in the press.

That is, if they disagree.

When they agree, it is another matter entirely, as is clear from the 61 articles his staff picked for the news section of the just-re-launched MikeBloomberg.com, or what has become his standard rebuttal to the politicians who oppose his congestion pricing plan: all the newspaper editorial boards are for it, he argues, offering that up as justification that he is right.

Bloomberg has made it clear that he wants to be a crusader. He has a vision to change government, politics, public health programs. Now he wants to redefine the world’s attitude to global warming.

But Bloomberg, the man who with his company radically redefined worldwide financial journalism 20 years ago with up-to-the-minute stock information on the famous Bloomberg terminals also seems to be on a subtler crusade to gently prod reporters back on track.

Doing so is a necessary part of his approach to governing, as he hinted at in his autobiography, writing “poll after poll shows that most people rank elected and appointed officials at the bottom of the ‘most respected’ list—right down with us journalists (where maybe I can

CITY HALL

www.cityhallnews.com

MAY 2007

Ready to Play Nationally? he story about Mayor Michael Bloomberg (R) which may have already received more coverage than any other is one that publicly, he constantly insists is one that does not exist: his much-speculated about but never quite dismissed interest in running for president next year.

He fanned the flames in early May by re-launching MikeBloomberg.com, the domain name which hosted the websites for his 2001 and 2005 campaigns. As many noticed, though the site provides little information not already available on nyc.gov, it does give him a new way to reach out to the public without taking his chances with the media filter, often the scourge of politicians looking to start a new campaign.

Bloomberg’s press secretary Stu Loeser dismissed this idea.

“The website, if you read it, actually contains a whole lot of news stories about him,” Loeser wrote, via email.

Of course, of the 61 that are there (not counting the press releases and speech transcripts), few contain anything but wholly positive reviews of the mayor and his administration’s efforts.

The website re-launch came the same week as a New York Post story hinting at his plans to run for governor in 2010, a story Bloomberg quickly and convincingly shot down, using decidedly different language than he has ever used to

T

understand the general contempt).”

He explained what he sees as the media’s mission, and his role in getting it there to the Newspaper Association of America convention.

“I’ve always believed in our democra-

rebut reporters’ question about his purported White House bid.

If he did want to kill the story, his response to Fred Dicker’s speculations demonstrate that he knows how. If he did not like the constant stream of stories positing him in the Oval Office, observers agree, he would probably have silenced Deputy Mayor Kevin Sheekey, his campaign advisor and the man who has constantly re-sown the seeds with reporters.

The experience of being mayor, after all, has taught him how to handle any story, argued George Arzt, who covered three mayors as a reporter and then served as a press secretary for Mayor Ed Koch (D).

“If you’re in the media capital of the world, you can’t really say ‘let my press secretary handle it like they do in Washington,” he said.

“You have to be your own press secretary, so it’s your own instinct.”

Were Bloomberg to run, he would certainly have more experience with the press than most first-time presidential candidates, given his years as mayor and his business experience running Bloomberg News.

But as for whether he is prepared, said Daily News City Hall bureau chief Michael Saul, the answer is “Absolutely.”

Still, warned Maureen Connelly, also a press secretary for Koch, “it would be a different dynamic.”

Under the constant media exposure of a presidential campaign, his eagerness to preserve his privacy cy, we need the fourth estate to tell the people what’s really going on. That’s the future of this country, if I can do that,” he said. “I do have a vested interest, in all fairness, in the fourth estate: that’s how my daughters eat. But also I have a vested interest in being an American.”

But though the media remains close to his heart and very much on his mind, his press secretary, Stu Loeser, said he can keep the disagreements at arm’s length.

might cause problems. The local press has come to accept his tendency to disappear on some weekends, without disclosing any details. Whether the national press corps would ever be so accommodating remains a question.

The similarities between reporters in City Hall and those covering national politics exist, said Jim Rutenberg, who covered Bloomberg for the New York Times and now works as that paper’s White House correspondent.

“He’s probably in some way has to be well-equipped only in that the New York press corps is probably one of the roughest local press corps there is, and one of the biggest,” Rutenberg said. “It’s as robust a local press corps you can imagine, and probably the closest a local press corps can come to the national.”

But, Rutenberg said, the relationship Bloomberg has grown used to from the personalities in Room 9 who have regular access to him is one the mayor will have to take care not to assume exists with the national press corps, if he decides to make a run.

To appeal to national reporters, he said, the mayor may have to shed some of the thick skin he has developed over the past six years.

In New York, Rutenberg said, “the back-and-forth is a little rougher.”

—EIRD eidovere@manhattanmedia.com That is not an argument that The Daily News’ Saul is ready to buy. He has covered Bloomberg longer than any other reporter in the city, starting with the 2001 campaign.

“The mayor often says he wants reporters to press elected officials with tough, probing questions,” Saul wrote, via email. “Yet, when reporters grill him, he can be extremely defensive and, at times, petulant.”

Bloomberg, the man who with his company radically redefined worldwide financial journalism 20 years ago with up-to-the-minute stock information on the famous Bloomberg terminals also seems to be on a subtler crusade to gently prod reporters back on track ANDREW SCHWARTZ

16

“While there are times that the mayor—like any other prominent person in the public eye—disagrees with his coverage, he doesn’t feel it’s personal,” Loeser wrote, via email.

Not that Saul does not sometimes feel for the man.

“To be fair, though,” he admitted, “we’re a surly bunch.” eidovere@manhattanmedia.com

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$120,000

www.cityhallnews.com

MAY 2007

17

State By State

$100,000 $80,000 $60,000 $40,000

PAY RAISES FOR STATE LEGISLATORS have long been in the offing. The last ones came in 1999, putting salaries at $79,500 (not counting bonuses for chairs and other leaders which can provide up to an additional $30,000 per year) for jobs which provide up to six months out of every year for other work.

By the figuring of the National Conference of State Legislators, New York has one of the four most active state legislatures in the country, in close company with California, Pennsylvania and Michigan. Legislators here are the third-highest paid—while just $150 annually behind Michigan’s, they get $31,380 less than California’s.

Even as criticisms continue to fly about the Legislature, the Republicans in the State Senate have passed a bill which would create a commission to determine new salary bumps for legislators and judges, initially with full Democratic support, then with all the Democratic names pulled from the bill. Meanwhile, a bill quietly introduced by Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver (D-Manhattan) would raise the base salaries to $96,000. That would still put them $16,000 behind the City Council, but well off compared to the average salaries for state lawmakers in the $15-30,000 range—or the $100 per year New Hampshire lawmakers get.

A look at how New York compares:

$20,000 0

Time on the Job (1)

Category of Legislature* * Statistics are broken into three main categories, with shaded colors representing intermediate points.

Compensation (2)

Staff per Member (3)

80%

$68,599

8.9

70%

$35,326

3.1

54%

$15,984

1.2

Notes: 1. Estimated proportion of a full-time job spent on legislative work including time in session, constituent service, interim committee work, and election campaigns.

2. Estimated annual compensation of an average legislator including salary, per diem, and any other unvouchered expense payments.

3. Ratio of total legislative staff to number of legislators.

Source: National Conference of State Legislators

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MAY 2007

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CITY HALL

Upstate Kingmaker Positioning for Statewide Bid Modeling himself after Bloomberg, Buffalo Mayor Byron Brown has consolidated an upstate African-American powerbase—and made it his own

BY JOHN R.D. CELOCK

S

ITTING IN HIS OFFICE IN THE

mammoth City Hall which dominates Niagara Square in the city’s downtown, Byron Brown is a long way from the streets he grew up on in Hollis, Queens. Now, he is a former three-term state senator and current mayor of Buffalo—and an increasingly major force to be reckoned with in the politics of Western New York.

And more than becoming a kingmaker in his first 18 months as the leader of the state’s second-largest city, his name has started appearing frequently in discussions of statewide candidates in the very near future.

While beginning to exercise his political muscle, Brown has to face the challenges of governing a Rust Belt city. A financial control board overlooks his every move, the city’s economy is stagnant, the downtown business district empty in the middle of a weekday afternoon, disgruntled police officers threatening a “blue flu” and students rushing from the city center as soon they finish school are all problems cramming Brown’s plate.

He knew these would be problems.

These, he said, are precisely the kind of issues which got him into the mayor’s race two years ago.

“The city needed an advocate to

Abortion CONTINUED FROM PAGE 11

overarching protection to abortion access. Nadler’s Freedom of Choice Act would codify Roe v. Wade, which made abortion legal in all cases before viability and for the life or health of the mother thereafter.

Nadler, who has introduced the bill several times before, though never successfully, speaks of the bill with meas-

restore confidence to the city,” he said.

Brown admits there are problems. And he admits that in his efforts to solve them, he has looked to an unlikely role model: Republican Mayor Michael Bloomberg. ”Bloomberg has managed city government more like a business, while having the recognition that it is not a typical business,” Brown said. “He has succeeded in governing New York City in an effective way.”

Shortly after his 2005 election, Brown sought out Bloomberg for advice on how to manage the city. Brown knows that a billionaire media baron and a career politician who has spent over two decades working his way up the Buffalo political ladder make an odd pairing. But that is exactly what appeals to him.

In their first meeting, Brown recalled, Bloomberg asked him a series of questions regarding the intricacies of city government. When Brown stumbled over several of the answers, Bloomberg cautioned him to master the arcane details of local government and the data driven aspects of running the city.

As with any other Buffalo politician, economic development dominates Brown’s agenda. Facing a stagnant economy, Buffalo has turned to casino gambling, a project Brown inherited from his predecessor. He vows to use any statewide influence he has on economic will happen, even with a new Democratic majority in Congress, remains unclear.

Spitzer’s legislation, named the Reproductive Health and Privacy Protection Act, would update New York’s current abortion laws and establish a fundamental right to privacy in matters of reproductive health.

New York has a long history of promoting abortion rights. The second state to legalize abortion (after Hawaii), New York legalized the termination of fetuses in 1970, three years before abortion

“What we’re going to do is see where lawmakers up in Albany stand on the question of Roe v. Wade,” said Robert Jaffe, executive vice president of NARAL Pro-Choice New York. ured optimism about this introduction.

“It will get a lot of support,” he said.

“Whether it passes is another question.”

Currently, at least 78 other members of Congress have signed on as co-sponsors of the bill, 11 of them New Yorkers.

In order for the reintroduced legislation to get to the House floor for a vote, it has to make it out of the House Committee on the Judiciary. Whether that

became legal nationally with the Roe v.

Wade decision. The 1970 law legalized abortion up to 24 weeks, or afterwards in order to protect the mother’s life.

Given the Roe v. Wade decision, no new state statute was passed since 1970.

However, that law does not include the right to privacy created under Roe, which found that a woman’s health is between her and her doctor. Spitzer’s proposed bill

issues.

“I am looking to improve the economy of Buffalo and Western New York,” he

said. “I want to make sure the issue of the upstate economy is heard by Gov. Spitzer and his administration.”

Brown has some company in the Buffalo region among those being eyed as possible statewide contenders, like Leecia Eve, the former Clinton aide who made a preempted run for lieutenant governor last year. Also seen as having their eye on statewide runs: Niagara County Legislator Kyle Andrews (D), Rep. Brian Higgins (D), former Secretary of State Christopher Jacobs (R) (and momentary lieutenant governor running mate for William Weld last year) and Assembly Member Jack Quinn III (R).

His stature as the de facto political leader of Western New York stems from multiple factors, most beyond his control.

Beyond being mayor of the region’s largest city and media market, the capacities of his office give him more power than any other regional Democrat on the state or local level. That Erie County Executive Joel Giambra—a Democrat turned Republican golden boy blamed for the county’s fiscal meltdown—is not seeking reelection and has dismal poll numbers, helps Brown, too.

None of this was expected when Brown arrived in 1976 to attend Buffalo State College. Thousands of students, many from the New York area, pass through Buffalo colleges each year. Only a

would incorporate that right to privacy and safeguard a woman’s right to an abortion and to use or refuse contraception.

Late-term abortions, like those which were the subject of April’s court decision, would still be banned.

Pro-choice advocates have applauded the legislation, including Family Planning Advocates of New York State President JoAnn Smith, who argued that the Court’s ruling “demonstrates how important it is for New York to safeguard women’s health and reproductive rights. While this law does not create new rights, it makes important clarifications that will protect existing medical practice.”

But opponents say Spitzer’s bill goes too far.

Kathleen Gallagher, director of antiabortion activities for the New York State Catholic Conference called the legislation “extreme and radical in the sweeping changes it proposes.”

Though Spitzer claims he is just out to codify the Roe v. Wade protections, Gallagher said his bill “would do far more than that. It would make abortion virtually immune from any reasonable state regulation or restriction.”

These, she said, “are all currently permissible under Roe.” Abortion opponents are pushing bills that would limit abortion access by

requiring mandatory counseling, a 24hour waiting period, and parental notification in the case of a minor seeking an abortion. And a piece of legislation called the “Fetal Pain Prevention Act” would require doctors to offer information about fetal pain to pregnant women seeking an abortion after the 20th week.

In addition to Spitzer’s and Nadler’s pieces of legislation, which would provide sweeping access, there are also more specific bills related to abortion making their way through Albany. There is a bill that would require hospitals that train doctors to also provide abortion training, and State Sen. Eric Schneiderman (DManhattan/Bronx) has proposed a bill to prohibit pharmacists or pharmacy chains from refusing to dispense emergency contraception.

That bill was scheduled to come up for a vote the day of the Supreme Court’s decision. To date, Schneiderman’s proposed law has failed to make it out of committee.

“This is an issue we’re going to take to the campaign trail,” Schneiderman said.

“We’re going to do whatever we can to ensure that New York State is clearly and strongly pro-choice.” courtney.mcleod@gmail.com Direct letters to the editor to cityhall@manhattanmedia.com.

Buffalo Mayor Byron Brown has quickly become a major political player in Western New York, and is thought to have statewide potential.

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CITY HALL

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Brown vs. the Coppolas: Becoming a Kingmaker, Buffalo Mayor Stomps on Family ollowing State Sen. Anthony Nanula’s (D) 2000 resignation to become Buffalo city comptroller, local Democrats tapped Buffalo Council Member Al Coppola for Nanula’s Senate seat representing Buffalo, Niagara Falls and two suburbs.

Byron Brown had announced plans to seek the seat, arguing an African-American should represent the region in the Senate.

Coppola easily won the special election, but then lost to Brown in the September primary and the November general election.

Coppola unsuccessfully opposed Brown in the 2002 and 2004 primaries, both times as the Republican candidate. In 2005, Coppola briefly opposed Brown in the Democratic mayoral primary.

After Brown resigned from the Senate to become mayor, he announced his support of Buffalo

F

small percentage stay.

Brown methodically moved up the ladder, holding staff positions with the State Assembly and City Council, before joining Erie County government to head the Equal Employment Opportunity program.

After losing a race for the county legislature in 1993, he bounced back two years later, unseating a longtime incumbent to win a seat on the City Council.

During this time, he joined with Grassroots, a growing African-American political organization, which was engaged in a generational war with the political organization aligned with then-Assembly Member Arthur Eve, long the dean of African-American politics in the area.

Brown and his allies tried to get Erie County Democrats to nominate him in the special election for a State Senate seat in 2000. They passed him over, but he beat their choice in the open September primary election later that year.

Brown eased through the mayoral campaign after his main party competition, Assembly Member Sam Hoyt, dropped out of the race.

His time in office has not been so easy.

He is currently locked in a battle with the city’s control board to reduce their influence over his administration’s finances.

Implemented by the state in 2003 after $92 million went missing from the city treasury, the board can veto his fiscal decisions and impose hiring freezes at will. Brown claims the city has met the conditions for the control board to shift to an advisory role, a notion the board is fighting.

Brown has also had two successive crises embroil his administration earlier this year. His first deputy mayor and chief political operative, Steven Casey, was accused of blocking a city inspector from stopping the construction of a building by a donor to the mayor. A construction

Council Member Antoine Thompson to succeed him in the Senate. But local Democratic leaders instead picked Buffalo Council Majority Leader Marc Coppola, cousin of Al, to run for Senate. While Marc Coppola successfully battled Buffalo School Board member Christopher Jacobs in a surprisingly close special election, Brown and Thompson laid the groundwork to oppose him in the primary.

On the way to the primary, Al Coppola announced his candidacy for the Senate, arguing that his cousin was not as qualified for the Senate and that Marc was the wrong Coppola. Thompson, with Brown’s strong backing, defeated both Coppolas in the primary and was unopposed in the general election.

—JRDC johncelock@aol.com Direct letters to the editor to cityhall@manhattanmedia.com. worker later died on the site in March.

The case is being investigated by state and federal officials.

Shortly after the Casey crisis broke it was discovered that Brown’s teenage son, who only has a learner’s permit, borrowed the mayor’s car and subsequently crashed it into several parked cars. The case, which was caught on the security cameras of a nearby college, has been solved with a local attorney paying a fine for Brown’s son to the state.

But he says he is undeterred, and continues to take strong positions about Buffalo, often putting them in context of improving the whole state.

“I think that as we continue to strengthen the Empire State, if upstate is a significant part of that, we will restore New York State to its rightful position as one of the strongest states in the nation,” he said.

That is the kind of talk which has helped rocket his name into the forefront of discussions about possible successors to Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D), should she win the presidency next year and vacate her Senate seat. The current speculation is that Gov. Eliot Spitzer (D) would like to tap an African-American as a replacement. Since the other statewide officials all hail from downstate, an upstate politician could prove enticing to Spitzer. Brown is the highest-ranking politician to fit both these criteria.

And he does nothing to dampen that talk.

“I am flattered and appreciative that people would think of me in that way,” he said, noting that he is supporting Clinton in the race for the White House. “I would not rule it out.” johncelock@aol.com Direct letters to the editor to cityhall@manhattanmedia.com.

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MAY 2007

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MAY 2007

CITY HALL

Gun Advocates and Legislators Set Sights on New Battles in Albany Saying Bloomberg has underestimated state gun lobby, Schneiderman plans new coalition YORK LAWMAKERS WERE deep in the fight against illegal firearms and gun violence long before Cho Seung-Hui sparked a new national debate on gun laws by shooting 32 people at Virginia Tech in April.

Looking to build on Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s (R) nationwide push to rid the streets of illegal guns, State Sen. Eric Schneiderman (D-Manhattan/Bronx) is gathering a coalition in Albany committed to passing a series of gun restrictions.

“People in New York City do not get the power of the National Rifle Association (NRA) in our state,” Schneiderman said. He and his allies know they will eventually find themselves up against New York’s powerful gun rights lobby.

Schneiderman plans to demand an honorary membership fee from fellow lawmakers looking to join his Legislators Against Gun Violence coalition. Anti-gun

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INT 559 A Local Law to amend the administrative code of the city of New York, in relation to creating criminal and civil penalties for damaging items of religious worship or religious articles that are contained on private property.

Sponsor: Council Members Vincent Gentile (D-Brooklyn) and Peter Vallone (D-Queens) In response to a rash of Anti-Semitic incidents in New York City, the City Council passed a bill in 2004 increasing fines from $10,000 to $25,000 for vandalizing religious properties.

The new bill would take penalties for religious vandalism a step further, imposing fines Bills on the burner or jail time for for the Council vandalizing or damaging religious items on someone’s lawn or front door.

Gentile introduced the bill after hearing stories from his district about religious statues decapitated and Jewish mezuzahs ripped off of doorposts.

“I’ve heard cases where religious articles are stolen, defaced and vandalized,” Gentile said. “It’s more than vandalism,” he added. “I believe it rises to the level of a hate crime.”

If the bill passes, vandals would face a year in jail or a $500 to $2,500 fine, depending on the severity of the defacement.

— Andrew Hawkins ahawkins@manhattanmedia.com

:

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AGENDA

advocates will also be invited to join.

The goal is to pass a package of bills that would, among other things, allow law enforcement to collect better data on illegal guns while imposing tougher restrictions on ammunition sales.

“The goal is to cut through the gun lobby’s propaganda and get hearings on some simple bills,” he said.

But while calling the planned coalition’s aims “modest,” he promised an aggressive effort.

Gun groups are already mobilizing their opposition. The NRA on both the national and state level, the New York State Rifle and Pistol Association and Safari Club International—a $23 million organization with five chapters and over 1,000 members in New York alone— vowed to join the fight.

“It’s the same tired bills, over and over,” said Tom King, president of the New York State Rifle and Pistol Association. “They don’t even know what they’re introducing half the time.”

Two years before he declared the sustainability proposals in his PlaNYC the centerpiece of his remaining time in office, Bloomberg spent much of his second inaugural address vowing to focus on combating illegal gun traffic. He has had some success—new state laws which he lobbied hard for increased the penalty for felony gun possession and closed a legal loophole he felt enabled easier gun sales.

But he has faced more resistance in Albany than he seems to have expected, which Schneiderman and others attribute to underestimation of the gun lobby’s power beyond the city limits.

Meanwhile, Bloomberg has taken his fight against illegal guns nationwide, helping organize a group of more than 200 American mayors. In an apparent sign of the amount of effort Bloomberg wants poured into the campaign, he has made Deputy Mayor Ed Skyler the administration’s point man.

The bipartisan Mayors Against Illegal

Guns launched a media campaign last month appealing to Congress to roll back the Tiahrt Amendment, a legal provision that restricts the access of cities and law enforcement to important data on illegal firearms. Gun groups want to uphold the amendment because they say it protects gun owner privacy.

“These restrictions are being driven by political considerations, not law enforcement realities,” Bloomberg wrote in a recent letter to U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales asking him to reconsider the amendment.

Even though Schneiderman and others paint the gun lobby as well-financed, well-connected and influential, gun advocates would rather be seen as small town conservationists.

Ken Schwartz, a spokesman for Safari Club International, said his organization, with 53,000 members worldwide, is most famous for partnering with the Girl Scouts of America to distribute 100,000 birdhouses in New York.

“Lawmakers in Albany know us as the ‘birdhouse guys,’” Schwartz boasted.

But at the same time Safari Club International is part of a well-oiled lobbying operation, with enough cash available to have lobbyists in Albany and Washington during most legislative sessions. They also work in tandem with national groups able to mobilize members at a moment’s notice when existing gun laws are threatened.

Such letters, emails and petitions are what almost put an end to Alexander “Pete” Grannis’s nomination as commissioner of the state’s Department of Environmental Conservation (DEC).

Pro-gun groups charged that the longtime Assembly Democrat from Manhattan was an anti-gun, anti-sportsman downstate liberal who shows “outright contempt for all outdoor recreational activities,” according to an NRA alert from February, latching on to comments he had made about hunting years earlier.

“We have to judge a politician on his

voting record, and there was not a single anti-hunting bill that Grannis did not sponsor or endorse,” said King, the progun advocate.

The nomination was delayed and thought to be in jeopardy, but despite the barrage of correspondence urging state senators to oppose his nomination, Grannis was confirmed 32-18 on March 31. Still, traditional collegial courtesy in confirmation votes appeared to have been ignored in the push against him.

Looking back, Grannis dismissed the gun lobby’s opposition to him as bizarre and said he was shocked by the close vote.

“People I truly respected and worked with for years voted against me, and it’s because the gun lobby has Republicans running scared,” he said.

That lesson from Albany and the forces already amassing to take on Schneiderman’s nascent group—coupled with the resistance to Bloomberg’s antigun campaign across the country—has kept the mayor and his administration deeply concerned, said Bloomberg’s criminal justice coordinator, John Feinblatt.

“The gun lobby is a very powerful force,” Feinblatt said, “even after Virginia Tech.” ahawkins@manhattanmedia.com

Tourism

Jersey. Ads encouraging travelers to visit Brooklyn have gone up in both LaGuardia and Kennedy airports.

“We have to have the money to advertise in the key markets,” Markowitz said.

As to how much, Markowitz guessed that would be “somewhere in the millions.”

Despite the lack of official numbers declaring Brooklyn tourism a success, travel agents have noticed promising trends.

“From a reservation point-of-view, I’ve definitely seen an upswing,” said Caylin Sanders, owner of Brooklyn-based Escapemaker.com. Sanders is working with Borough Hall to develop travel pack-

ages for tourists interested in including Brooklyn in their New York getaways.

With a majority of visitors to New York hailing from the U.K., Markowitz has been pushing to include Brooklyn in holiday packages provided by England’s megatravel agency Virgin. However, a Web search of Virgin’s 13 different New York excursions yields no mention of Brooklyn.

Having returned from London’s tourism convention optimistic, Markowitz sounded a note of realism on the future of Brooklyn tourism.

“Sure there’s an increase,” he said. “But we’re nowhere near our potential.” ahawkins@manhattanmedia.com

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 11

materials boasting Brooklyn as the borough that “puts the ‘new’ in New York City.”

Then came the Holy Grail of promotions in January: the borough was named to the Lonely Planet “Go List” of picks for the top 10 hottest travel destinations for 2007.

Since then, tourism officials have advertised Brooklyn as a destination in local newspapers across the country, including Florida (where a large population of retired former Brooklynites now reside), Ohio, Connecticut and New

ANDREW SCHWARTZ

BY ANDREW HAWKINS

State Sen. Eric Schneiderman plans to charge legislators an honorary fee for joining his gun restriction group.

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INFLUENCE • EDUCATE • PERSUADE Reach New York’s Most Influential Leaders Alternative party candidates navigate their ways to November (Page 3), Bill Perkins, right, gets the benefits of incumbency in his first run for State Senate (Page 15),

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October 2006

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and Rep. Anthony Weiner, left, heads

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• Utilize City Hall as a cost-effective venue to enhance and reinforce your organization’s lobbying and advocacy campaigns.

to his favorite

Queens deli (Page 19).

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STATE OF THE UNIONS

INDEX: Spitzer Cabinet Speculation Underway Page 2

Struggle to Provide Voting to Disabled Page 4

Issue Forum: Big Box Stores Pages 6, 8

Finding Funding for Adult Literacy Programs Page 9

The October Poll: Which Council Member Would Have the Best Survival Skills on a Desert Island?

Page 18

Traditional Politics With a Union Twist Strike and stalled contract negotiations motivate Toussaint opposition

Loose Laws for Leftovers

BY COURTNEY MCLEOD

T

he Transport Workers Union’s new leader will be announced sometime after the secret mail-in ballots are counted on December 15th.

But leading up to the election, a leadership struggle is underway that has the potential to shake things up for the union—and maybe even the city.

Current President Roger Toussaint, who became a very well known figure due to last December’s transit strike, is runCONTINUED ON PAGE

4

BY JAMES CALDWELL

F

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• Directly target policymakers at a high volume unable to be achieved by traditional lobbying methods — and grab their attention.

heldon Silver may be the Assembly speaker, but there are not many people who ever hear his voice.

The man in the trench coat may be an unlikely leader, but as the top statewide Democrat during the 12 years of the Pataki administration, just about everyone agrees that he has developed into one of the most

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Several former allies of Transit Workers President Roger Toussaint are challenging against him in this year’s union election.

ailed political campaigns leave many things in their wake, including, often, a lot of money. In the case of the three unsuccessful Democratic candidates for attorney general, each has campaign funds left.

Now that the race is over and the dust has settled, they get to decide what to do with it. And CONTINUED ON PAGE

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CITY HALL

www.cityhallnews.com

MAY 2007

EDITORIAL

A Necessary Tax President/CEO: Tom Allon tallon@manhattanmedia.com

CFO/COO: Joanne Harras jharras@manhattanmedia.com

Publisher: Alex Schweitzer aschweitzer@manhattanmedia.com

EDITORIAL Editor: Edward-Isaac Dovere eidovere@manhattanmedia.com

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which directly and indirectly work as seed investments for further growth, are essential. Congestion pricing (which, of course, would only be a backdoor tax for the people whom it did not prod onto public transportation) and the commuter tax are perfect examples of this.

This is not about city interests versus state interests, and certainly not about one party versus the other. The facts support it: when New York thrives, the whole state thrives. What makes the city run more efficiently and profitably in turn provides money to do any number of other things which need to be done.

The commuter tax died its absurd death in the service of a Democratic bid to win a Rockland County State Senate seat in 1999. For a couple more dollars left in each suburbanite paycheck, the city has lost nearly $5 billion to date.

Think what that $5 billion could have bought. The first phase of the Second Avenue Subway, necessary to preserve the city’s economic engine, is expected to cost $3.8 billion. The police department needs to have more money for salaries to ensure they can continue attracting people to keep New York safe and secure.

Every agency that contributes to the local infrastructure needs the cash to make sure that the city works when and how it needs to work.

Given the history, guessing what happens next for congestion pricing is not hard: clear-

ince the mayor proposed congestion pricing as part of his long-term sustainability plan, many have looked to discredit the proposal by calling it a backdoor commuter tax.

They are right: it is a commuter tax, and it should be.

Eight years after the Legislature fleeced the five boroughs in what is surely one of the most ridiculous triumphs of short-sighted politics over necessary policy, it is about time.

And while we are at it, the time is ripe to consider reinstituting the original commuter tax, as State Sen. Tom Duane and Assembly Member Linda Rosenthal recently introduced a bill to do.

The taxes which provide government with the funds that enable people to achieve more than they could otherwise,

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All letters must be identified with the author’s full name and, for verification, phone number. Anonymous letters will not be published.

Substantive letters addressing politics and policy will receive top priority.

Submit your letters by e-mail to cityhall@manhattanmedia.com, or contact our staff writers directly with the email addresses at the ends of their articles.

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Toss Term Limits

members stop worrying about building a The good thing about term limits at constituency on the first day of their secthe City Council is that [fill in the name of ond term. State legislators have no term a Council member] is gone. The bad limits, so they’re not leaving, and there aren’t enough seats in thing about term limits those three city-wide is that [fill in the name] offices for 51 Council is gone. members. If yours isn’t As an author, I often calling you back these meet people who tell days, that may be why. me they would write a I’m sorry that book themselves if Christine Quinn won’t be only they had two pushing to end term limweeks free. Term-limitits. I understand the ed politics is something P problems she faces, but I like that: People who think it’s worth the try. aren’t in The Game INDEX: Gang of One Last one left standing, Rangel guides the old Harlem machine And yes, I know it isn’t imagine they could win Paying Forward R my job on the line if I if only they had two W oppose term limits. weeks free.

But it is my city. I But politics is not a game, it is a serious profession, and just voted against term limits. Both times. as my mother told me that living together And I would again because I think we is not the same as marriage, being a dis- need not only new guys but the old, okay, trict leader or a civic activist is not the old-er ones to remember what did or didsame as sitting down each week to write n’t pan out last time and the new ones to say, that’s no reason not to try again. and enforce laws.

It works in every other field. It should In addition, the two-term limit produces one-term legislators. With the in politics as well.

CAROL ANN RINZLER exception of those who think they can lasso a state or city-wide office, Council NEW YORK, NY below, has set his sights on State Supreme

Court (Page 25) and Rep. Nydia Velázquez, left,

chooses a favorite spot in Brooklyn for her

Power Lunch (Page 27).

Simcha Felder

discusses the political advantages of humor

and his citywide ambitions (Page 8), Trial Lawyers lobbyist

Vol. 1, No. 11

www.cityhallnews.com

April 2007

Dan Feldman,

The Organizer g She calls it open government. Some members call it political maneuvering.

Christine Quinn navigates a new take on the job of Council speaker.

BY EDWARD-ISAAC DOVERE

eople notice when Christine Quinn walks into a room.

She has a strong presence, with her natural Irish politician’s sense of the power of personal contact and a laugh that often rings through whichever room she is in, no matter how large.

But even if she did not, she would turn heads. Not only is

she winning praise around the city for her work as Council speaker, but she is the first woman to hold that job, and the highest-ranking openly gay official in New York’s history. The sleek bob of bright red hair helps, too.

She has traveled quite a distance since first coming to City Hall as a housing activist in the late 1980s. In those days, she CONTINUED ON PAGE

16

City Council delegation helps broker Irish peace accords

Page 10

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Larry Penner, the most prolific letters-to-theeditor writer in New York, steps forward

Page 12

Where Are They Now? tracks down Betsy McCaughey

Page 22

The April Poll: Which Council Member would make the best dinner party host?

Page 22

BY CARLA ZANONI

ight before Rep. Charlie Rangel’s (D) April 4 book signing event at the Lincoln Center Barnes & Noble began, former Mayor David Dinkins (D) sat alone in a pale green room off stage. Two neat stacks of books waiting to be autographed were piled on a table with the face of his longtime friend, the Harlem congressman, beaming at Dinkins.

Rangel entered through the private set of stairs to the auditorium. His handlers gave him explicit directions to open the rear door and turn directly into the room.

“The audience won’t see you,” one bookstore employee explained.

Rangel smiled, opened the door and walked straight to the audience, calling out “Hello, hello” to all.

The first of the evening’s mulCONTINUED ON PAGE

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Putting the price tag on PlaNYC

BY ANDREW HAWKINS

ith a million more New Yorkers expected by 2030, Mayor Michael Bloomberg (R) is planning an overhaul of the city’s aging infrastructure in the hopes

ANDREW SCHWARTZ

City Hall is published monthly.

Copyright © 2007, Manhattan Media, LLC

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LETTERS

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ly, the Senate Democrats gunning for the four Republican seats in the outer boroughs and surrounding area of New York are not going to support a bill they think puts their efforts to win their chamber at risk. Clearly, those lining up for the 2009 citywide elections are going to continue vacillating between noncommittals and objections to Bloomberg’s plan. Clearly, we are in danger of politicians of every stripe inadvertently selling out the long-term needs of this city in service of their own immediate electoral gains.

And maybe one of these people will be elected mayor or comptroller. And maybe the Democrats will get the majority of the upper house.

Maybe.

Look how far that kind of thinking got the Democrats in 1999. Not only did Kenneth Zebrowski lose to Thomas Morahan, who remains in office today, but four election cycles later, they remain three seats short of a majority. (And if not for Eliot Spitzer’s hard campaigning and general discontent with the GOP, which helped Andrea Stewart Cousins and Craig Johnson win, they would probably be even further behind.)

And we are still short that $5 billion.

There are at least a thousand ways for congestion pricing and the many other worthy elements of Bloomberg’s PlaNYC to get scuttled on the rocks of parochial political interests in the months and years ahead. And along the way, we will get to see whether the people New York has sent to the City Council and Legislature are elected leaders or shortsighted, self-serving politicians.

Rep. Charles Rangel.

CONTINUED ON PAGE

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Silver a Leader, Not a Bully “Sitting willingly outside the Closed Doors” criticizes the legislative leadership for conducting closed budget negotiations.

Comparing them to schoolyard bullies (who, unlike the speaker and majority leader, are not elected), the author sarcastically takes them to task for not involving the other members of the legislature in the talks.

As residents of New York State, we expect our elected leaders to act on our behalf in developing budget priorities and funding badly-needed programs. In a state encompassing 62 counties and a population of 19 million people, the process of doing so will undoubtedly be contentious. We need to rely on the legislative leadership.

We need not constantly bash our leaders for the “process.” The budget is out, fully visible and we have a record of this spending. Wanna make changes? It is there for next year, and people should say what their priorities are.

Strong leadership should not be confused with being a bully. In fact, Shelly Silver’s history is one of trying to build consensus.

BOB TOWNLY NEW YORK, NY

CITY HALL

www.cityhallnews.com

MAY 2007

23

OP-ED

Let’s Keep New York the Capital of the World were simply not big enough to compete with America in everything. Now we are faced with the economic rise of China and India, countries whose populations are larger than our own. Americans will have to be four times as productive just to match them in overall economic activity.

Yet, America has the ability to continue its leading economic position—even in an increasingly competitive global economy, if we can adopt the domestic reforms necessary so we can take advantage of the economic opportunities presented by dramatically expanding scientific knowledge.

Maintaining efficient capital markets is the key to being able to maintain and expand this scientific and technology based entrepreneurial creativity that has made America the most successful and prosperous economy in the world—and New York its financial capital.

We can maintain this leadership role by taking these first steps:

BY NEWT GINGRICH merica’s ability to win—and not just compete—in the global economy depends in part on our having the world’s most efficient capital markets. Substantial reforms in this area will be required for America to continue to be the most successful economy in the world and the best source of high paying jobs with enough economic growth to sustain the Baby Boomers and their children when they retire.

Substantial reform will also be required if New York is to remain the financial capital of the world.

Last year, the U.S. financial exchanges attracted barely one third the share of the volume of global initial public offerings that they had in 2001, while the share by European exchanges expanded by 30 percent over the same period. A 2005 press report by the London Stock Exchange attributed one reason for its success by citing that “about 38 percent of the international companies surveyed said they had considered floating in the United States. Of those, 90 percent said the onerous demands of the new Sarbanes-Oxley corporate governance law had made London listing more attractive.” And just last month, Europe’s financial exchanges (including Russian and the east European markets) surpassed the U.S. in stock market value for the first time since the First World War. These are indications that America is becoming a less and less desirable place to do business for companies that in a global economy have increasingly attractive alternatives of where to locate and where to seek capital financing.

In financial markets, as in other areas, the United States has no choice but to transform or decay. We must make the bold changes required to enable our capital markets to flourish and our economy to

A

win in the global marketplace or we will cede our leadership position to others.

Capital markets reflect the underlying real pace of progress in America that has been driven by the discoveries of scientists and technologists, brought to the marketplace by entrepreneurs in the form of products and services. We have flourished and lead the world because we have provided an efficient capital markets system to finance the aggressive development and marketing of the opportunities created by science and technology. Countries that have ignored these opportunities or hamstrung their financial markets have fallen behind in standards of living and quality of life.

America is facing a serious challenge to our economic superiority for the first time since we surpassed Great Britain around 1840. Over the last 160 years we have been the most dynamic economy in the world. While Germany and Japan could challenge us in some areas, they

ODDS&Ends Who will win the 2008 presidential election? Who will lose? Who will drop out by the end of the month?

Nearly two dozen Republicans and Democrats may have their political futures riding on the outcome of next year’s presidential election, but many more people have a lot of their own money riding on the race.

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 the next person to measure drapes in the Oval Office.

Intrade lets people buy shares in the candidates’ futures. Ladbrokes gives odds to bet against. As of the beginning of May, here is where things stand:

• FUNDAMENTAL OVERHAUL OF SARBANES-OXLEY. The good intentions of Congress have met with the law of unintended consequences. The explicit and implicit costs of Sarbanes-Oxley compliance are staggeringly high and far exceed the benefits. It is evident that this law requires a fundamental overhaul.

• REIN IN STATE ATTORNEYSGENERAL. The blackmail model of Attorneys-General championed by Eliot Spitzer while New York attorney general, which mugs companies without going to court, is a job killer. These practices must be stopped. The Constitution is clear that the federal government sets the framework for the national economy. Congress and the Executive Branch have a constitutional duty to protect that role from encroachment by state attorneys-general searching for headlines.

• LITIGATION REFORM. Edwards Deming once warned that litigation was

one of the greatest threats to the American economy. Today, the law is being changed from an instrument of justice into an instrument of extortion and redistribution. Americans are learning to treat litigation as a lottery, to sue rather than settle, and to turn American civil life into one of conflict and suspicion.

Litigation reform will involve: making arbitration preferable to litigation; losers pay; prohibit law firms from bringing class action lawsuits; ban lawyer advertising; fixing the fraud and abuse in mass tort litigation; and securities litigation reform.

The entrepreneurial character of America’s economy is being endangered by too much regulation, unconstitutional assertions of power by state actors, and a lawful employment litigation system.

Americans do not have to settle for decaying gracefully. We have it within our power to change. The Big Apple can get even bigger and wealthier, along with the rest of America. But it will require citizens who are willing to put an end to the status quo and demand real change from their political leaders in Washington.

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Newt Gingrich represented Georgia as a Republican in the House of Representatives from 1979-1998. He was the Speaker of the House from 19951998. Currently, he is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and author of Winning the Future: A 21st Century Contract with America. welcomes submissions to the op-ed page. A piece should be maximum 650 words long, accompanied by the name and address of the author, and submitted via email to cityhall@manhattanmedia.com to be considered.

*** PRESIDENTIAL ODDS ***

DECLARED PRICE ON ODDS ON REPUBLICANS INTRADE LADBROKES ---------------------------------------------------------JOHN MCCAIN 21.3 6 TO 1 RUDOLPH GIULIANI 30.6 7 TO 2 TOMMY THOMPSON 0.9 N/A DUNCAN HUNTER 0.2 66 TO 1 MITT ROMNEY 17 10 TO 1 SAM BROWNBACK 0.6 33 TO 1 RON PAUL 0.5 66 TO 1 MIKE HUCKABEE 2.4 33 TO 1 JIM GILMORE 0.2 N/A TOM TANCREDO 0.4 N/A ---------------------------------------------------------*** Data as of May 4, 2007.

----------------------------------------------------------

DECLARED PRICE ON ODDS ON DEMOCRATS INTRADE LADBROKES ---------------------------------------------------------46.3 2 TO 1 H I LLARY CL I NTON BARACK OBAMA 31.1 4 TO 1 JOHN EDWARDS 8.3 7 TO 1 BILL RICHARDSON 2.6 28 TO 1 CHRIS DODD 0.5 N/A JOSEPH BIDEN 0.7 33 TO 1 DENNIS KUCINICH 0.1 N/A MIKE GRAVEL 0.2 N/A POTENTIAL PRICE ON ODDS ON ENTRIES INTRADE LADBROKES ---------------------------------------------------------AL GORE 10.1 7 TO 1 JOHN KERRY 0.4 50 TO 1 FRED THOMPSON 16.8 10 TO 1 NEWT GINGRICH 2.8 N/A MICHAEL BLOOMBERG 1.1 20 TO 1

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CONTINUED FROM PAGE 1

the politicians and their fundraisers.

In one of his first executive orders, signed on Inauguration Day, Spitzer set personal fundraising limits of $10,000 per donor, per election cycle, for himself and Paterson.

But the executive order could prove to be confusing for donors and the public, Paterson admitted.

“I think people who drafted the proposal didn’t understand it was a four-year cycle,” Paterson said. “I don’t think some of the fundraisers have totally understood it.”

Donors are not being told, for instance, that the $10,000 limit applies to Spitzer and Paterson as a single fundraising entity, not to each individually.

Technically, each will run separate campaigns until the 2010 primaries.

If and when their campaigns join, contributions from individual donors exceeding $10,000 would have to be returned.

For instance, if a donor gives $8,000 to Paterson and $3,000 to Spitzer before the primary, $1,000 will have to be reimbursed. Who will assume the responsibility of returned donations—which could lead to competition for some of the bigger donors—is unclear.

Campaign committees cannot transfer leftover cash to other campaigns, said Spitzer’s government press secretary, Christine Anderson. But money can be

transferred to political action committees (PACs) for use in future campaigns, as Sen. Hillary Clinton (D) is doing for her presidential run, Anderson said.

If and when the Spitzer and Paterson campaigns are combined, “it will be interesting to see how this plays out,” Anderson said.

Future races notwithstanding, the lieutenant governor said better coordination was needed to ensure that donation returns are minimized.

Assuming everything goes right, both Paterson’s birthday party, which will be held SCOTT WILLIAMS at the Penn Club on West 44th Street, and Spitzer’s party, at the Chelsea Piers Lighthouse, Top donors who give $10,000 will be promise to be star-studded—and lucra- bestowed the status of chair and granted access to a VIP reception. Those who tive—events.

At Spitzer’s party, which will feature give $5,000 will be designated co-chairs jazzman Wynton Marsalis, those who and also invited to the reception.

Paterson is not on Spitzer’s host compledge to raise at least $25,000 for the event will be able to attend a VIP recep- mittee, though the governor is on tion and private dinner with the gover- Paterson’s. He is joined by Attorney nor. Those who raise at least $100,000 General Andrew Cuomo (D), City through individual donations and Comptroller William Thompson, Jr. (D), bundling of other contributions will and Rep. Charles Rangel (D). (Notably, State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli (D) receive four seats at the private dinner.

“We encourage our supporters to was not on an earlier version of reach out to their colleagues and friends Paterson’s invite, up on his website, but and ask them to be involved with the cam- was on the one put in the mail.)

Already, Spitzer knows he will be in paign,” Spitzer’s campaign finance direcAlbany that night and unable to attend tor, Allyson Giard, wrote in an email.

Paterson’s requests are more modest. his right-hand-man’s birthday bash,

MICHAEL BLOOMBERG’S CONGESTION pricing plan has drawn some pretty vociferous criticism. But that is nothing compared to the rioting and mass protests which greeted the implementation of a new transit system in Santiago, Chile earlier this year.

The Chilean capital’s new bus system, dubbed Transantiago, put private companies in control of the municipal bus system and created new fare zones which made for cheaper trips within zones and slightly more expensive ones for travel between zones.

The plan was meant to encourage the use of mass transit, reduce pollution and to reduce bus wait times. Traffic had been labeled as the biggest cause of pollution in Santiago. The new system was modeled after one in Bogotá, Colombia.

Problems began even before the new system was implemented. Days before the February debut, new bus and subway transfer cards had not been printed and distributed and some new bus lanes yet to be planned.

The actual implementation of the system started weeks of sporadic rioting. The new system had few stops near hospitals, poorly defined and followed routes, overcrowding, rampant fare evasion and system-wide abuse of the buses. Chilean President Michelle Bachelet, who helped design the new system, faced a sudden 13 point drop in opinion polls and the majority of the country held her personally responsible for the meltdown.

A hallmark of the Transantiago system is the state of

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ELSEWHERE Santiago, Chile

Changes to Transportation System Spark Street Riots John R.D. Celock the art dispatch system, which includes GPS devices, neither of which worked when the system debuted.

Those on the edges of Santiago complained that bus service in the new regime was nonexistent.

The subway system in Santiago was not spared problems. An influx of 900,000 new riders in the first month under Transantiago led to major overcrowding, leading the head of the subway system to ask the elderly and those with medical conditions to stay away.

Violent protests raged for weeks, and included a raucous hearing at the national congress building.

Coverage of the controversy was the top national story for weeks, and the troubles have touched the world of celebrity as well: Iván Zamorano, one of the country’s soccer superstars, was recruited to do promotional work for the Transantiago. When public opinion about

according to Giard.

How much cash a candidate raises tends to reflect future political aspirations. Some are speculating that Paterson could be tapped to replace Clinton in the Senate if she is elected president, among other possibilities, while Spitzer is thought to have his own designs for the presidency.

Possible internal divisions may explain the differing domain names the governor and lieutenant governor have selected for their campaign websites: Spitzer2010.com sets the stage for Spitzer’s re-election to governor, while PatersonforNewYork.com is notably more vague.

As they deal with the joint fundraising limit, a grab for cash and donors could be on the horizon. And though as the lieutenant governor, Paterson might be at a disadvantage to the higher-profile Spitzer, political consultant Kevin Wardally, for one, warns against underestimating him.

“Paterson is not a political neophyte,” he wrote by email. “I don’t believe it’s realistic to think that Paterson could be put ‘in a box,’ and if he were, he might not stay there long.” ahawkins@manhattanmedia.com

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the new system ran sour, people began attacking the national sports icon, prompting Zamorano to recant his support in a nationally televised press conference.

With all that has happened, many have taken to calling the new system Transanfiasco.

Some Chilean experts blame Bachelet and her government for not educating Santiago residents on how to use the new system, which they deemed confusing. Other experts predict that while the implementation phase resulted in rioting and sudden dislike for the once popular Bachelet, the pluses of the system will win over residents in the end, once the kinks are worked out.

Nonetheless, a month after the Transantiago meltdown, Bachelet sacked her transportation minister—a lesson Bloomberg’s new Department of Transportation commissioner, Janette Sadik-Khan, might want to take to heart.

Rumors, after all, are circling that former Commissioner Iris Weinshall exited in part due to her opposition to creating congestion pricing. And after chatting with former DOT Commissioner and current MTA Executive Director Lee Sander at the Regional Plan Association’s luncheon May 4, Bloomberg joked about the task ahead of Sadik-Khan in his address to the group.

“I don’t want to put any pressure on you,” he said. “I was just kibitzing with Lee Sander, he could come back.

Iris Weinshall is not that far away—don’t screw it up.”

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Will There Be New Life for the Death Penalty?

Though the three men may all support executions, a new law seems unlikely to pass here are some things that the pub- to do with. Mayor Michael Bloomberg lic responds to the way a bull is opposed to the death penalty. For a reacts to a red cape. One of them while, Mario Cuomo earned grudging is the death penalty, a political trap of the respect from all those who hated the death penalty.

They highest magnitude. admired him for sticking This is one of to his guns in the face of those rare issues that the death penalty mob. can give even the most When George Pataki confident politician a made an issue out of it major case of agitain 1994, however, it may tion. New York City have just tipped the liberals do not like election in favor of the the death penalty Republican. Gov. for all the right reaEliot Spitzer favors sons. It is adminisY LAN the death penalty. tered unfairly, it is racially HARTOCK suspect, it doesn’t seem to deter mur- Speaker Sheldon Silver supports the derers and there are many who just death penalty, as does the powerful don’t think the state has any business Senate Majority Leader Joe Bruno. killing anyone. There are others who That means that the famous three men are ambivalent about the death penal- in a room who control almost every ty. If their kid was killed by some jerk decision are in agreement.

Then there’s the state’s attorney high on drugs, many people see no reason why the murderer should be kept general, Andrew Cuomo, who is right alive for years at the taxpayers’ beside his father on the death penalty expense. I recently heard one person and its attendant risks.

And it should be noted that New say, “We put down wild dogs, why don’t York’s highest court has declared the we do that with heinous murderers?”

This is one that politicians—particu- latest death penalty statute unconstitularly Democratic ones—want nothing tional.

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P U AC ST E RS IS VP LI M BY IT M ED AY

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The debate is always reignited when something really bad happens. When Lemuel Smith, a convicted rapist and murderer, killed prison guard Donna Payant, there were many who said, “What is going to stop this guy from killing again? He already has a life sentence.” There’s been a recent spate of police deaths in the line of duty. There was an upstate state trooper and two auxiliary policemen in New York.

When this happens, legislators and others start proposing the death penalty for those convicted of killing a police officer or a prison guard. They reason that there are some people, like cops and corrections officers, who put themselves at risk in a way that most citizens do not. That, of course, leads other to ask, “Why not senior citizens or children who are murdered by monstrous sexual deviants?”

Needless to say, with Spitzer envisioning his own presidential run somewhere down the line and Cuomo eyeing Spitzer’s current job, the death penalty issue is a minefield. After all, the rest of the country seems to be a lot more conservative than blue state New York.

Spitzer, who had been severely criti-

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cized by the Republicans for being hypocritical on his own fund raising activities after criticizing them for blocking campaign reform, was out in California on a fundraising trip. He flew back to New York on a red-eye in time to attend the funeral of a New York State trooper who had been killed in the line of duty. This gives him yet another chance to reinforce his own death penalty views with New York’s upstate conservative voters.

With the New York State Senate ready to tip Democratic, it is probably now or never for death penalty proponents to make a new death penalty law happen. But with homicides having shown a general decline despite the officer shootings, my imaginary friend Benny the Bookie will give you odds against it happening.

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For more on Albany, it’s WAMC.org.

Alan Chartock is the president and CEO of WAMC/Northeast Public Radio and the executive publisher and project director of The Legislative Gazette.

Bloomberg Could Face Jersey Militia

Morgenthau’s Man on HBO

Will congestion pricing soon have Ed Skyler riding a horse through Battery Park, shouting “the Jerseyians are coming the Jerseyians are coming”? Congestion pricing may spark a border dispute with the Garden State. The last time that happened, militias were readied.

New Jersey officials oppose Bloomberg’s congestion pricing plan, which would impact Garden State drivers using the Hudson River crossings.

The Jerseyites also argue that Bloomberg’s plan to use the proceeds to help finance a new Hudson River train tunnel, a top priority for the state, is a way to double tax New Jersey residents, who would be contributing to their state’s portion of the tunnel’s cost.

They could take it to court, as in the

The end of HBO’s “The Sopranos” means the end of a secondary job for Dan Castleman, chief of investigations for Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau (D). Castleman not only served as the technical advisor for the acclaimed mobster series, but had a small on-camera role as well, appearing in eight episodes since 2002 as the prosecutor out to put Tony and the rest of the crew behind bars. Well-known for his toughness on the job, Castleman seems to have brought some of that to his character as well—in this season’s premiere, he dismissed another prosecutor as chasing a “popcorn fart” charge against Soprano.

fight over Ellis Island. But technically, the military option exists.

New Jersey’s last border dispute came in 2005, over a new pier in the Delaware River for a natural gas facility. Delaware officials claimed the pier jutted into their territorial waters, using a map designed

by William Penn. New Jersey said the river had been reallocated in the early 20th Century.

A Delaware legislator introduced legislation calling on Delaware Gov. Ruth Ann Minner (D) to ready the state’s National Guard to defend “against encroachments on territory” by New Jersey. New Jersey’s then-Acting Gov. Richard Codey (D) jokingly responded that the Battleship New Jersey was trained on Delaware, and that New Jersey would win the war.

To create his congestion pricing pilot plan, Bloomberg must first win approval from Albany. Whether he will then have to call on Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to help ease tension with Trenton if and when that happens remains to be seen.

Permits for the Pants-less?

Strippers and strip club owners may have to apply for employment permits under their legal names if Felix Ortiz gets his way. The Brooklyn Democrat wants the Labor Department to create a “dance performer” permit and registry where dancers would be fined up to $50 for dancing without a permit. Ortiz said that in part of his district, Sunset Park, illegal basement run strip club operations have become commonplace. That is why he wants to set maximum fines for unregistered dancers at $2,000, which he thinks will ensure performers are of legal age, citizenship and not “victims of severe forms of sex trafficking.”

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Maloney: Movie Portrayal was Thrill of a Lifetime Rep. Carolyn Maloney (DManhattan/Queens), had a recent brush with show business as well.

She did not get Meryl Streep to play her, but Maloney did get the pleasure of seeing one of her legislative triumphs immortalized on film.

Lifetime’s “A Life Interrupted,” which premiered April 23, was based on the story of Virginia housewife Debbie Smith (played by Lea Thompson), who advocated, along with Maloney, for legislation that would process the nationwide backlog of untested DNA rape kits. Maloney sponsored the bill and was instrumental in getting it passed.

Directors did a good job at depicting the painstaking process of law-making, she said, though there was a bit of artistic license.

“In the movie they have her coming to me and asking me to do the bill,” Maloney said. “It was reversed. I had a hearing on the use of DNA to convict and exonerate and she came and testified at my hearing.”

Watching actress Lynn Adams portray her on film was “extraordinary.”

“She dressed like me. My husband thinks that her mannerisms were like mine,” she said. “She must have studied some tapes, I guess.”

No word from Lifetime on whether bids are out for scripts about other Maloney bills, though she had some suggestions.

Rosenthal Special Elections Report Due Assembly Member Linda Rosenthal (DManhattan) plans to release her report on special election reform before the June 5 special election to replace Alexander “Pete” Grannis, who left the Assembly to become Gov. Eliot Spitzer’s Department of Environmental Conservation Commissioner.

Rosenthal—who herself first came to office last February in a special election to replace Scott Stringer—introduced a bill which would create primaries and designating petitions in April. At one and a quar-

ANDREW SCHWARTZ

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Second Time’s the Charm Though he did not sign an affidavit of residency, Mathieu Eugene was sworn in to the Council May 9, after winning his second special election for the same Brooklyn seat (his first win was voided, after questions arose about his residency in the district).

Eugene was greeted with several rounds of applause, with nearly as many people in the chamber cheering for him as the 2,332 who voted for him April 24.

His first thank you went to Una Clarke, the former Council member and current lobbyist for Mercury Public Affairs. Eugene praised his family, offered “muchisimo gracias” to the crowd in Spanish. The first Haitian-born Council member then switched into his native French to tell the crowd that he had made history, and they would continue to make history if they worked together.

Eugene faces another election for the seat in just a few months if he wants to stay on the Council beyond the end of the year. ter pages, the new bill is 16 pages shorter than her original, introduced less than a month after she first arrived in Albany.

“This one is much better,” she said.

The report, Rosenthal said, is the product of a Special Elections Task Force convened by her staff. It will contain sampled data from other states and detailed analysis of her proposals.

Race for Grannis’ Seat Coalesces Meanwhile, in that June 5th special election to replace Grannis, Democratic candidate Micah Kellner, whose Democratic opponents all dropped from the field, could make history just as Gov. Eliot Spitzer’s bill to legalize gay marriage is likely to come up for full debate. If elected, he would be the first openly bisexual member at either the city or state level (though not the first in the country: Michael Huffington, the former Republican congressman from California and ex-husband of liberal blogger Arianna Huffington, disclosed his bisexuality in 1998, four years after losing a Senate race and leaving office, and Evelyn Mantilla is currently the deputy majority leader of the Connecticut House).

Bisexuals are an often overlooked segment of the LGBT community, especially when it comes to politics: there are now three openly gay Assembly members, but at a Jim Owles Democratic Club event in early May, Kellner took some ribbing from Allen Roskoff, who joked that because he was bisexual, Kellner would only get half the votes of the members.

Kellner laughed this off. He and Roskoff are old friends, he said, and the comment was only a joke.

Kellner said he was open about his bisexuality long before deciding to run for Assembly.

“My sexuality was not something I was going to run away from,” he said.

In more news from the race, Republicans have settled on Gregory Camp, an assistant district attorney in New York County District Attorney Robert Morgenthau’s office, as their candidate.

Though the district leans heavily Democratic, the party might invest heavily in the race. Kellner is having a May 21st fundraiser, with tickets going for $250 each. Members of the host committee are paying $1000 and co-chairs $2000 each.

Passing Former Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Harold Tompkins died May 2 in Delray Beach, Florida, from pneumonia.

He held a number of positions, from assistant attorney general to New York County Civil Court judge, before being elected to the Supreme Court in 1998.

Tompkins is most noted for cases he has dismissed: in 1995, he threw out a libel case against a former aide to President Ronald Reagan, and in 1999, he tossed out a defamation suit against comedian Jerry Seinfeld. He retired in 2003.

—by John R.D. Celock, EdwardIsaac Dovere, Charlotte Eichna, Andrew Hawkins and Carla Zanoni

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BACK & FORTH

Inside Dominic Carter His self-published memoir about an abusive childhood on the shelves, the NY1 anchor makes himself the headline Dominic Carter has been reporting on the news of the city for nearly 25 years and has been hosting NY1’s political talk show “Inside City Hall” for 15. After his mother died six years ago, Carter decided to do some reporting on himself and his family. The result is his book, No Momma’s Boy. Carter talked with City Hall about his book, his life and being a political reporter.

Q: So how does someone get from your childhood to where you are now?

A: You have to understand, I’ve been brainwashed my entire life, but in a positive way. As you read in the book, OK, so my mom has problems. I don’t know what’s going on. I’m a kid I don’t know. So, my grandmother steps in to raise me and my aunt steps in. She’s always been my maternal figure. They brainwashed me so effectively I honestly didn’t know that I was an illegitimate child. I knew that there was no man in my life, but they surrounded me with love. There was poverty, but there was love from the external members of my family.

So, from an early age it was, “You’re going to college, you’re going to college, you’re going to college.” I went to college and I realized college was not as hard as I thought it would be. I always thought that guys like me couldn’t make it. I get to college and I find out that it’s not as hard as I thought it was.

With each step along the way, my confidence has been building. I went from “I don’t belong. I don’t fit in,” to, “I do belong. I do fit in. I can excel and I can be very good.”

Q: How do you prepare to be on the show?

A: The very first thing I do when I get up in the morning is look at the headlines. If something catches my eyes, I read it right then and there. If I don’t stop, I’ll go have breakfast then go down to my office and then read the papers. And I’ve got to read everything, because in my business, in terms of a television person, everybody tries to spin you. As a rule of thumb, I try not to listen to spin and leave it to the producers to listen to it. I try to remain isolated and removed from the spin.

I have to know everything that’s going on, because in a live situation they could say anything and if I don’t know what’s going on then they can’t be checked.

Q: And you need to be able to call someone on things….

A: Exactly. And call them on it immediately, because if I don’t call them on it immediately I will be greatly criticized, in terms of the blogs. You know, “Oh, Dominic let

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this person go by, let that go by.”

Q: How much has that dynamic changed your job?

A: Dramatically. When I started they weren’t really around and so the reaction you get would come the next day or after the show, but with the blogs, to a degree, they help keep you honest. I try not to let outside influences affect me, but I do read them. Even when they’re critical of me, I’ll look at it and ask if this person is raising a good point. Did I really drop the ball here? Was there a bias here? And I’ll try to think about it. I really do.

Q: When you moderated last year’s comptroller debate between Alan Hevesi and Chris Callaghan, some people were critical of your moderation. In reading your book, you talk about working to remain objective, but also compassionate toward you sources. Do you feel empathy for your political sources?

A: I definitely felt sympathy for Hevesi. You wouldn’t believe that watching the debate, but to be honest with you, I never understood why Hevesi did that debate. Particularly with me. He said during the debate, “Dominic, you’re a good journalist, but that’s an unfair question.” In a million years, I would have never done that debate with me, because we’re in a live situation and I’m fair, but I’m thorough.

I felt bad, because I’ve known Hevesi for 20 years. And he’s a good man. What happened in his situation, that’s on him. But he’s a good man who found himself in a bad situation and needed to be held accountable.

I was a little annoyed with Chris Callaghan, the Republican candidate, because after the debate they had to find a way to spin his weak performance. It was obvious that some consultant told him to say, “Well, I loved that debate between Dominic and Hevesi.” The fact that I had to be so aggressive is because he didn’t step up to the challenge.

Q: You had less time to prepare for that one than for the debate between Hillary Clinton and John Spencer. Did that affect the way it went?

A: In the business I am in, the public doesn’t really care about your personal situation. But my son suffers from epilepsy and was in the hospital. The day I flew to Rochester for the Hillary debate, my son had been hospitalized the day before. No one knew any of this, but when I came home from Rochester after that Hillary debate, I was spending several nights overnight at the hospital with my son. When you have epilepsy they hook up all these wires on your head. It’s a very ugly situation.

I was dealing with that situation for Hevesi and Hillary.

Q: In telling your memoir, do you think that you can further awareness about abuse and mental illness?

A: I found out as a television host, there’s a lot of celebrity and attention that’s paid to you. I know why society does it, but to me, I frankly don’t get it. But it is what it is. I am taking my credibility as a high-profile journalist

ANDREW SCHWARTZ

Q: Journalists aren’t usually part of the story. What does it feel like to insert yourself?

A: I was greatly concerned in the beginning. This has been a life long secret that I wouldn’t tell anyone. And now all of a sudden, I am willing to tell the whole world, because I am happy and I am free for the first time in my life.

and I am saying that these are issues we need to pay attention to. Mental illness, I venture to say, affects every person reading this in one shape or form. We can all be in denial and act like it doesn’t, but somewhere along our family liens, mental illness is affecting someone.

What happens to the innocent children of mentally ill people? These are things we don’t deal with. I could have been murdered. Very simply, I would have never made the papers. I wouldn’t be the guy who’s here today, questioning the most powerful politicians in the world.

Q: Has this process brought you further along in forgiving your mother?

A: Yes. If I had known as much as I do now, I would have told her, “It’s okay. You were not in full control of what you were doing.” So, for so many years I despised my mother. In order to go on living as a human being, I had to forgive her in order to start healing myself, because if I didn’t it was going to kill me on an emotional level.

Q: What has the difference been in covering these different administrations? Has the tenor been different for you?

A: The tenor has been like night and day. You could say whatever you want about Rudy Giuliani, but he was great for my business. And he was great, to a degree, and I can’t believe I’m admitting this, for my career. Me and him have had some legendary public battles that have been written about and played on NPR and so on, but I wish him well as a presidential candidate, just as I wish Hillary Clinton well and all of the other ones. But, it’s like night and day.

We have a businessman in City Hall now. He’s not as interested in the media or as interesting a character as Rudy Giuliani was.

Q: Describe your life today in three words: A: Fascinating. Exciting. Tremendous. But wait, I have to give you three more: A Dream Come True. That’s four words [laughing]. Dream. Come. True.

—Carla Zanoni czanoni@manhattanmedia.com

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For an extended transcript of the conversation with Dominic Carter, go to

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