City Hall - October 12, 2009

The WFP imagines its new New York (Page 6), Lynn Nunes, right, ponders his next step (Page 16)

Vol. 4, No. 7

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HOW HISTORY, LABOR AND LUCK MADE A COMPTROLLER— AND HOW HE HOLDS THEM TOGETHER FOR 2013

October 12, 2009

and Freddy Ferrer, left, commiserates (Page 19).

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OCTOBER 12, 2009

Forethought

Expand The Run-Offs his year’s dismal, abysmal voter turnout has prompted a new round of facile pleas to get rid of the run-offs that have been part of our city life for 32 years. In that time, there have been a total of seven run-offs—two for mayor, two for comptroller, two for public advocate and one for City Council president, before that position was eliminated.

In other words, not really enough to be a scourge on society, or a menace to either the electoral or fiscal well-being of the city. On the contrary, this year’s pathetic showing at the polls aside, they have largely been a good thing, helping solidify New Yorkers behind the eventual leaders that have emerged from often very large and very good fields.

Instead of knocking this straw man around in the media and the halls of government, people should be focusing on dealing with the greater problem of voter engagement. Our worry should not be that run-offs are silly because too few people turned out to vote. Our worry should be that too few people turned out to vote. The primary date needs to be

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changed, clearly, but efforts beyond that are necessary too.

The best way to improve the integrity of the electoral system is not to eliminate run-offs, but expand them. The principle behind run-offs is to ensure that the leaders elected to make decisions are people who carry the support of a substantial percentage of the people they govern. That is important for the three citywide officials, but it is important for our borough presidents, district attorneys and City Council members as well. If we are to believe, as every man and woman who has sought these offices, or who has held them, would have us believe, that these are critically important positions, then we should treat them that way. Borough presidents should not be able to win their jobs by gaming out minor inroads in wide-candidate fields.

Council members should not be able to make themselves representatives of an entire district by balkanizing the votes into tiny neighborhood appeals.

Take the 2005 Manhattan borough president race. In a nine-way race with three Council members, one former Council member, three Assembly members and two local activists, Scott Stringer picked up 23 percent of the vote in the primary. That put him well ahead of his closest opponents, but well behind what could honestly be called an overwhelming majority of support from the Democratic electorate at the end of that hard-fought race. For whatever positive or negative can be said about Stringer’s record since taking office, that 23 percent essentially guaranteed him a win in the general election, an all-butcertain win for re-election this year and a natural berth in the 2013 mayor’s race, if he wants it. In New York City politics, then, there is an eight-year job and a clear shot at Gracie Mansion without even a quarter of the vote.

The Council primaries this year show how pervasive the problem is.

In Flushing, Yen Chou became the Democratic nominee with 1,825 votes, 2

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The best way to improve the integrity of the electoral system is to do the opposite of what some shortsighted, reactionary advocates and officials have proposed: rather than eliminate run-offs, expand them.

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percent and 150 votes ahead of the man who came in second in the six-way field.

A few districts over, Karen Koslowitz picked up the nod to return to her old seat to the Council with 1,834 votes, 3 percent and about 300 votes ahead of her closest competitor. If they win the general elections in November, these women will not carry with them the resounding support of their districts as they vote on major questions of land use and the division of a $59 billion budget.

Perhaps they will, for the most part, do well, despite their lack of proven support at home, much as Stringer has.

But having the power of a convincing win would in itself have given them the power to do better.

There need to be more run-offs. Every splintered primary for borough president or Council where no candidate hits 40 percent should put the top two or three vote getters into a rematch election two weeks later, just like in the races for mayor, public advocate and comptroller.

To make our system better, to make democracy in New York stronger, this, and not a short-sighted, ultimately power-grabbing reaction to this year’s anomalous voter turnout, is the answer.

In addition to the value they would have in themselves, more pervasive run-offs would get people in the habit of paying attention to, and voting in, the run-offs when they come, unlike this year, when just 2 percent of the city supported each winner. Taken together with sincere voter engagement and a strengthening of the campaign finance laws, this is the way to improve New York politics.

(Sincere efforts to engage voters would not hurt either.) It may not be knee-jerk and easily digestible. But the right ways to really improve government rarely are.

A brave candidate for mayor, as both of the major party nominees claim to be, might raise all of these issues in the last few weeks before voters decide the direction of the next four years of this city.

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OCTOBER 12, 2009

Waiting On Possible Fossella Return, McMahon Gears Up For 2010 With Mitchell’s loss taken as a sign of weakness, polls floating disgraced pol’s name surface n early October, nearly a thousand Staten Islanders packed into a high school auditorium—and around two hundred angry residents were turned away at the door—to hear Rep. Michael McMahon say where he stood on the health care debate roiling the nation.

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Not among the throng, though perhaps most eager to hear what the freshman congressman had to say, was Vito Fossella.

Fossella, who retired last year in disgrace when his DWI led to revelations of maintaining a second family in Virginia, remains Congressional Republicans’ best shot at flipping back the district they held for nearly three decades.

Fossella is still beloved in Republican circles, and rumors have been flying in recent weeks that he is contemplating a comeback. His name has appeared in borough-wide telephone polls, but whether the surveys are from supporters or rivals remains unclear. No charges for them show up on his still open federal campaign account.

The first major chink in McMahon’s armor came with the September primary loss of Ken Mitchell, the congressman’s protégé and Council successor. Within days, Frank Fossella, an uncle of the former congressman and a Republican powerbroker, started calling his influential supporters to discuss where things might stand with borough politics.

After Mitchell lost, McMahon

persuaded his longtime staffer to forego a general election run on the Conservative line. He is planning to endorse the woman who beat Mitchell, Debi Rose, who is vying to become the island’s first black elected official. Such a move would endear him both to liberal votes and the African-American population that makes up a growing part of the electorate.

JERRY MILLER

BY DAN RIVOLI

“McMahon basically, I would say, dropped the hammer,” said a Staten Island insider close to Mitchell and the congressman.

The question remains whether Fossella family (either the New York or Virginia versions) could withstand scrutiny of a re-election campaign. The tabloids loved the story, throwing his face in the paper with every new story or revelation. As he suffered politically, the pressure at home was even fiercer. Meanwhile, McMahon is preparing for a tough re-election campaign regardless of who enters.

A member of the centrist New Democrat Coalition, he is trying to strike a balance between supporting his party’s agenda and pleasing voters

in his district that preferred John McCain over Barack Obama by two percentage points last November.

“I don’t think people will look at my record for singular issues,” McMahon said, “but rather for establishing myself as an independent Democrat in Washington.”

When Republicans attack him for supporting controversial legislation such as the federal stimulus package, McMahon reminds voters that he is a regular Staten Island guy who got potholes filled during his days on the Council.

He rattled off the number of teacher positions saved, firehouses that remain open and dollars lavished on the district for infrastructure projects.

“I think the effects of it are pretty clear,” McMahon said. “They’ll see positive results and see the local impact of what I’ve done that far exceeds my predecessors’.”

Rep. Michael McMahon has to clear a number of challenges and potential challengers to deliver Staten Island for the Democrats again next year.

CITY HALL On health care, McMahon is cautious, instead waiting to see a final draft of the bill. His top concern is the final bill’s price tag. McMahon also dismissed the idea that health care reform hinges on the public option, calling it a “lightning rod” in the debate.

“In my opinion, it has been greatly overstated by its opponents and supporters,” McMahon said.

But whatever grief McMahon receives from Republicans about supporting House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, it is unlikely the GOP will field a strong challenger to capitalize on a rough year for congressional Democrats.

The current frontrunner, political novice Michael Allegretti, has declared himself to little fanfare. Allegretti is a senior advisor on U.S. policy for The Climate Group, a non-profit that assists governments and organizations in reducing their carbon emission. His Republican bona fides include campaigns with Mayor Michael Bloomberg as a deputy field director and State Sen. Marty Golden’s director of operations.

The Staten Island Republican Party is holding out for a stronger challenge to McMahon, but popular elected officials in the borough have passed on the race.

“Honestly, we’ve been very encouraged locally in Staten Island and Brooklyn, and in Washington,” Allegretti claimed. “The support is there.”

Allegretti has met with the NRCC in Washington, D.C., and left a positive impression. A source at the campaign committee sounded optimistic about Allegretti’s prospects, calling the young recruit “appealing.”

So far, though, what most people are talking about when they talk about Allegretti is that he only recently moved to Staten Island from Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, which occupies a far corner of the district.

Allegretti is also unlikely to match McMahon’s fundraising prowess.

He has yet to file any financial records and refused to give any ballpark figures on the kind of cash he will bring to the campaign, while insisting that his fundraising team exceeded expectations.

But he was willing to talk about McMahon, whom he painted as a liberal in lockstep with House leadership.

“I think the voters of the 13th Congressional district are a conservative lot. That’s regardless of party affiliation,” Allegretti said. “He can position all he wants. He’s not a moderate Democrat.

This campaign will show that.”

As Democrats face a tough political terrain in the midterm elections, Allegretti’s efforts to tie McMahon to the national party may be his only hope, according to Richard Flanagan, associate professor of political science at the College of Staten Island.

“The local tide won’t make it happen,” Flanagan said. “It’ll be the national tide.” drivoli@cityhallnews.com

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OCTOBER 12, 2009

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Working Families Prepares To Bite Into The Big Apple Broad strokes of agenda come into focus in wake of electoral victories

BY DAVID FREEDLANDER wo days after the run-off elections that saw both their candidates cruise to easy citywide victories, and two weeks after they swept a number of City Council races, a handful of Working Families Party-backed area politicians and allies gathered by the courthouse in Lower Manhattan to advocate for mandatory paid sick and family leave.

Hundreds marched over the Brooklyn Bridge, half of them high school students. There were the requisite “Si Se Puede” chants. A hipster marching band jammed with some of the older protesters banging on drums.

“I think,” said one man surveying the scene, “that we are looking at the future.”

Thanks to a superior field operation—albeit one that could be curtailed pending investigations by the Campaign Finance Board—becoming a favored WFP candidate has became the real contest this year, for the most part deciding well in advance who won the Democratic nominations, and, almost certainly, most of the elected offices in New York. For any who want to win or move up in the future, the message seems clear: before anything else, get right with the Working Families Party.

“You get Working Families, it comes with a package of the most professional grassroots operation out there,” said Simcha Eichenstein, director of political services with the Friedlander Group, who worked on several city campaigns this season against WFP-backed candidates.

“It’s not a fair game. It’s Mike Bloomberg running against Freddy Ferrer.”

The party has shown a willingness to target

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incumbents who they feel are not sufficiently energetic on their issues, as they did in the State Senate in 2008 when longtime liberal lion Marty Connor was unseated by the WFP-backed newcomer Daniel Squadron.

And being right on the issues has not shown to be enough to get the WFP endorsement or even to avoid being targeted in Democratic primaries—the WFP leadership admits that there is not too much ideological difference sometimes between those whom they energetically support and those whom they target.

“We want people in office who are not just going to vote the right way but who are going to be progressive leaders,” said Working Families Party executive director Dan Cantor. He mentioned the defeat of Connor, and added, “I’m sure that some of the incumbents who just lost never voted against many things that we might stand for, but they weren’t driving an agenda forward—and that’s the difference.”

The rise of the Working Families Party comes at an odd historical moment. Nationally, at least, organized labor is at its lowest in decades. New York City has become a global capital of financial and cultural elites, a city home more to the Carrie Bradshaws of the world than the Archie Bunkers. This is the city, after all, that is supposedly icing out the working class, to say nothing of the middle class.

Yet it is also a city where organized labor has a tighter grip over City Hall than it has had at anytime since the 1970s.

The rules have clearly changed. Take David Yassky.

The Brooklyn Council member was endorsed by all three major dailies, had the support of the Brooklyn

CITY HALL

Democratic organization, ran strong in the vote-rich neighborhoods of the Upper West Side and brownstone Brooklyn, and was backed by Sen. Chuck Schumer and, later, former Mayor Ed Koch—the rare politicians whose endorsements are supposed to actually carry serious sway. He had a record and a traditional base, and he barely squeaked into the run-off. Then he lost by 12 points.

Ever since the primaries ended, the city’s tabloid editorial pages and some of its more prominent businessfriendly and conservative thinkers have fretted that the WFP’s victories mean that the city will take a sharp leftward turn, and that this center of global finance will suddenly morph into a Socialist Worker’s Collective.

That is a line that those who have worked in city politics for years—and seen other groups come and go—dispute.

“The principles of the Working Families Party and the principles of the Democratic Party are largely similar,” said Council Member Lew Fidler, an ally of the Brooklyn Democratic leader but not so much the WFP. “It’s not like you are waking up someday and someone is asking you to become a Bolshevik.”

Cantor agreed, painting a picture of the group’s priorities that were largely in the mainstream of progressive thought in urban America.

“Something on responsible development, something on education and something on the climate crisis, and we can die happy,” he said, enumerating the group’s priorities, and adding, “It is a modest agenda, except in the American context where you look like you’re a crazy radical. What we’re talking about is Social Democracy 101—let’s try to have society be sensible and not just oriented toward the glitterati.”

Two of the items in this list—education and the environment—are also the top priorities of another major political player in town: Michael Bloomberg.

Cantor said he was open to the idea of charter schools, a Bloomberg education centerpiece. And many WFPbacked candidates have pushed for greater parental involvement, something that the state legislature in Albany addressed before re-authorizing mayoral control.

He also mentioned lowering the price of tuition at CUNY, something many officials see as a virtual impossibility at this point.

On the environment, Cantor acknowledges that the mayor’s record has been a pretty good one, but he would like to see more bike lanes, more bus rapid transit and more ferry service. All of these are issues that Bloomberg

CITY HALL

OCTOBER 12, 2009

give away such a precious social resource without demanding a social benefit.”

Often in development projects in New York, however, those principles are in conflict: the city must choose between whether or not they want developers to add more affordable housing or build lower in deference to community concerns. Plus, Bloomberg administration officials say, there is more agreement than some of their critics allege, but that say translating those kinds of principles into deals with private-sector developers and community groups is often easier said than done.

WFP allies, though, say that the Bloomberg administration has often favored developers over neighborhood concerns. Now in power, they vow to reorient local government’s priorities.

“It’s about making community concerns a core priority rather than an afterthought, and economic development geared towards that priority,” said Brad Lander, one of the WFP priority candidates who scored a convincing Democratic primary win with the party’s help. “If you start with increasing the tax base and letting the developer dream big, then yes, living wages are going to be a nuisance—but you can start with affordable housing, good jobs, sustainable neighborhoods and public amenities, and then gear development around that.”

But the Working Family Party may find even their limited goals harder than they have imagined. The graveyards of city politics are littered with big dreams that were dashed against the ponderousness of city government.

“There are a lot of good people coming in and they have a good progressive history,” said one veteran Council member. “But you get in and then it’s not as dramatic as you might think. I don’t know if [the Council] is going to change all that much.”

Their ability to move the needle of city policy may be further hampered, ironically, by their success.

Campaigning is always easier than governing, and party insiders may find themselves disappointed as their candidates try to reach out to other constituencies.

Forces like the Real Estate Board of New York and the

WILLIAM ALATRISTE

has championed.

What this points to, according to many longtime political watchers, is that for the moment, at least, the era of knock-down drag-out urban political fights is largely over. Gone are the days when New York was home to widespread political strife over education and housing policy. A new political consensus around safety, livability and what makes cities attractive for newcomers and residents appears to have emerged.

Some fissures in this happy picture are inevitable.

Partially due to his wealth, partially due to his approval ratings, and partially due to a City Charter that makes the mayor’s power unmatched, Bloomberg has been able to pull dissenters into his orbit and give cover to legislators who oppose him.

Now, with the Working Families Party planting its flag from St. George to Kingsbridge, politicians and interest groups may be able to look elsewhere for support.

“The Working Families Party and this coalition is creating an opportunity for a lot of disparate voices to come together and operate as a whole greater than the sum of its parts,” said one political operative. “For eight years, the aggregated sector of power has been in the mayor’s office, and you have a lot of different and often uncoordinated voices going up against that. What this coalition and this primary may do is to bring those different voices together and create a counterbalancing effect.”

One area where the party and the administration are likely to lock antlers is over development issues. The Bloomberg administration has presided over a building boom that has remade much of the city—at the expense, critics say, of neighborhood character, affordable housing and economic development.

“Responsible development is a huge one,” Cantor said, enumerating the party’s general principles. “Meaning from soup to nuts, it has to be built responsibly. The jobs that are created need to be good jobs. The housing that’s created needs to include a substantial amount of affordable housing. It needs to be sensitive to local neighborhood concerns. It’s got to be a democratic planning process as much as possible. We should not

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New WFP-backed Council members Jumaane Williams, Margaret Chin and Ydanis Rodriguez cheer at a worker’s rights rally.

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Independence Party are already lining up against what they see as a leftward onslaught.

“They can’t start overstepping their bounds,” says one Council staffer. “They can push what they want but, they bite off more than they can chew, they could lose it all.

They may find out that members will decide they would rather not have the WFP’s backing if it means having to be in lockstep with them all the time.”

Furthermore, after a series of electoral successes, the Party has attracted the attention of the Campaign Finance Board, which issued a ruling before the primary that it considered the WFP’s for-profit canvassing arm, Data and Field Services, to be an arm of the party. A deeper audit and further investigations are expected.

“Their last couple of years have been good but you have to wonder how much longer they will be able to keep it going,” said the Brooklyn political operative. “In the future, it won’t be the same for them, but the question is how much it will be restricted.”

The party will also run into difficulty pushing their agenda, political analysts say, due to a worsening economic crisis. New development has already slowed, and developers may not be able to take on extra burdens.

Tight budgets may slow a large portion of their agenda as well.

“I think they’ve got a problem because there is no more money,” said Kathryn Wylde, president of the Partnership for New York City. “You can’t get blood out of a stone. They face a real challenge because they have created an enormous expectation through their success at the polls. And in some ways it couldn’t come at a worse time.”

Wylde says after 35 years of working in the city, she is used to dealing with labor leaders who have often exerted an outsized role over city policy. But she sees the WFP, which is made up of over 60 unions and community groups, as a different entity.

“The leadership of organized labor has historically been more practical than ideological,” she says. “The Working Families Party has not been put to the test, but they are on a mission that doesn’t have a lot to do with solving the problems of the city.”

The next big hurdle for the WFP will be in the selection of committee chairs and the speakership.

Traditionally, county leaders have driven that process, but the emergence of the WFP and candidates who were backed by them instead of the county organizations makes the party something of a sixth borough in the city, and one that is much more cohesive and powerful than several of the existing county organizations.

“If you’re running for office, who would you rather have on your side—the Working Families Party or Vito Lopez?” said one operative. “Getting the Working Families Party means a lot more at this point.”

The new WFP-backed members will find out soon enough that politics is about making compromises, and so they will unlikely be able to do all of the WFP’s bidding.

Still, if the party is able to get a couple of key people in key positions, extract concessions during the speaker’s race and preside over a political universe where elected officials try to out-WFP one another, then the city may begin to morph into a different place.

For most of the Bloomberg administration, the focus has been on keeping the city on par with the Londons and Shanghais of the world, and to ensure that the best and brightest across all fields of human endeavor continue to flock here.

Cantor signaled a shift.

“You know, the rich and fabulous are going to be just fine. They don’t need a political party. Them that has gets in America. We don’t like that. There has to be a better way.” dfreedlander@cityhallnews.com

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OCTOBER 12, 2009

WFP Candidates Run, But WFP Appears Unlikely To Run With Them Spoiler fears force Jung to quit as Schulman, Davila and Griffith grasp for support

BY CHRIS BRAGG .J. Jung thought he had a clear second chance to win a Council seat.

An internal campaign poll showed that Jung, a Korean-American who finished second in the Democratic primary to replace John Liu, was in range to beat two Chinese-American challengers—one Democrat, one Republican—in the general election, if he ran on the Working Families Party (WFP) line.

On Oct. 1, Jung applied for campaign matching funds with a commitment to do just that.

There was just one problem: the WFP wanted no part of it.

Party leadership feared that Jung, one of their early top priority candidates during the primary, would serve as a general election spoiler for Yen Chou, siphoning off the liberal votes as she ran against a well-funded Republican challenger, Peter Koo. Chou’s campaign manager, Michael Olmeda, says he tried calling Jung four times to warn him that his union support had evaporated. But Olmeda says that Jung did not return the calls.

A day after Jung’s application for matching funds became public, much of the WFP slate, including Bill Thompson and Bill de Blasio, announced their endorsement of Chou at a packed press conference in Flushing.

Several days later, Jung issued a press release announcing he was, in fact, dropping out.

“He was between a rock and a hard place,” Olmeda said.

Jung’s departure comes even as three other WFP nominees—Lynn Schulman in Queens and Mark Winston Griffith and Maritza Davila in Brooklyn—have been similarly emboldened by the party’s success to continue their Council runs past their primary losses and apply for general election matching funds.

But as in Jung’s case, there appears to be little will within WFP leadership to boost any of the candidates running on Row E against the Democrats. And

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WFP forces moved quickly to edge S.J. Jung out of the race for John Liu’s Council seat, urging Bill Thompson and Bill de Blasio to make a surprise endorsement of Yen Chou. there is little appetite for taking on fights they believe they cannot win, according to a person who has spoken with WFP executive director Dan Cantor.

“These are people that are very much data-driven and strategic thinkers,” the person said. “They’re also into running winning candidates, and there’s not a feeling that any of them are viable.”

For instance, there is the expectation that turnout in the general election will be three or four times higher than in the primary, minimizing the effectiveness of the WFP’s renowned canvass operation.

So far, the WFP’s lack of enthusiasm has not deterred Schulman, who believes all the recent hype surrounding the WFP’s successful first major foray into city elections will allow her to pull an upset.

“A few weeks ago, the Working Families Party didn’t really resonate,” said Schulman. “Now, it does.”

In Schulman’s case, there is no strong Republican opposition in the district, and there remains a chance that the WFP will offer her limited support in the general election against Karen Koslowitz,

according to a union source.

Griffith, meanwhile, who is running again against Council Member Al Vann, is unlikely to get anything but token support from the WFP, said Dorothy Siegel, a member of the WFP executive committee who supports Griffith.

The fourth candidate, Maritza Davila, narrowly lost a primary to Council Member Diana Reyna. She did not get much WFP support during the primary and is not expected to in the general election.

In the past, the WFP has generally only taken on Democratic nominees in extraordinary circumstances. One such case was the 2003 election won by the WFP-backed Letitia James, the first third-party candidate to win a Council election since 1977.

After James Davis was shot dead on the Council floor, the Democratic endorsement went to his brother, who had a lengthy criminal record. In the election that ensued, James had the support of much of the Democratic establishment.

For all of its recent successes, the

WFP essentially remains a very strong interest group within the Democratic Party, say those close to the party, and they now must work together in several competitive Council races in Queens, on the mayoral race and on a number of races in 2010.

This includes a maneuver which threw the WFP ballot line to Democratic nominee Kevin Kim after a placeholder was nominated for a judgeship in the competitive general election race to replace Tony Avella on the Council.

The party remains leery of candidates putting their own ambitions over the party’s larger strategic goals. Evan Stavisky, a political consultant with close ties to the Queens County Democratic Organization, said the candidates now running on the WFP line were too emotionally invested from their lengthy primary runs to face the reality that they could not win—or that the WFP would not strongly support them.

“Some people have problems coming to grips with the fact that they lost,” he said. cbragg@cityhallnews.com

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OCTOBER 12, 2009

CITY HALL

ANDREW SCHWARTZ

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etired Chinese workers trailed John Liu’s every move, reaching out to touch his clothes as he passed.

As he greeted voters on the Bowery, cars honked and strangers screamed at him, pleading with him in Mandarin to let them take his picture.

Running late to a rally in Chelsea the day before the run-off, Liu attempted a quiet entrance as public advocate candidate Bill de Blasio ripped through his stump speech in front of roughly 200 United Workers. But when a crowd of mostly Chinese immigrants glimpsed him at the back of the room, they swarmed him, racing to be the first to get an autograph.

“Slow, slow, slow,” Liu counseled them, clambering his way up the podium.

Despite the frenzy, he kept an even keel.

Just another day on the trail for the man who, three months out from inauguration day, is already an icon.

“It was like,” recalled Assembly Member Micah Kellner, “campaigning with a rock star.”

At the start of his campaign for citywide office, the question was whether New York’s first Asian-American lawmaker could channel the devotion of his admirers into broad electoral success. Now the question is whether his win is evidence of a fundamental realignment in urban politics or a consequence of a conglomeration of circumstances and one-time deals.

Many of Liu’s supporters say the former, and hope he will run for and win the city’s top job in 2013, assuming Mike Bloomberg wins re-election this year.

“Trust me,” one politico said firmly as the results streamed in on the night of the run-off, “in four years, he’ll be the next mayor.”

First, though, he has to map out a path for the comptroller’s office and a gameplan for 2013.

“Can he move from Transportation Committee chairman to doing the work of the comptroller’s office?

That’s a big transition,” said Bob Olivari, a longtime labor operative who ran the ground game for one of Liu’s opponents, David Weprin, before supporting Liu in the run-off. “He could lose credibility.”

The more fundamental balancing act will be the political task of holding together his improbable coalition, preserving and enhancing the mechanics of a campaign that he and a few key players began setting in motion years ago, in which labor supported an non-traditional labor candidate, black and Latino voters united after years of division, lefty Jewish candidates were set aside by much of the lefty Jewish establishment, and an immigrant from Taiwan who had to relearn Mandarin became a hero of old-school progressive politicians.

“It’s a generational achievement,” observed Assembly Member Darryl Towns moments after Liu was declared the winner. “The new New York is coming of age.”

The genesis of Liu’s historic campaign can be traced back to an agreement reached over breakfast one morning in mid-February. Kevin Wardally, the nextgeneration Harlem political guru, was there. So were Kevin Finnegan, the political director of the health care workers’ union 1199/SEIU, and his counterpart at the Hotel and Motel Trades Council (HTC), Neal Kwatra. Bill Lipton, the deputy director of the labor-backed Working Families Party (WFP), participated as well.

But Liu ran the meeting.

Liu had been discussing and planning ahead for a citywide campaign with close associates and advisers for years. Supporters in the council have been plugging him for higher office from the day he first arrived at City Hall.

“He’s driven, and he’s going to move on to this thing and then the next thing. He has a sense in his mind of

LIU YOR

HOW HISTORY, LABOR AND LU AND HOW HE HOLDS THE

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To the surprise of many, New Yorkers elected the first Asian citywide before the first Latino. But the story behind the win is much more complicated than that.

RK CITY

UCK MADE A COMPTROLLER— EM TOGETHER FOR 2013

By Sal Gentile

OCTOBER 12, 2009

11

what he wants to accomplish,” said Evan Stavisky, a political consultant who attended Bronx Science with Liu and worked on his 2001 Council campaign. “That probably served him well when he was in the corporate world, and it definitely served him well when he decided to get involved in politics.”

Liu began late last year by running for public advocate, despite routine suggestions and even some pleading from his supporters that he run for comptroller. He had, after all, been an actuary, they reasoned. When the mayor succeeded in extending term limits the next year, the pressure intensified. Bill de Blasio, who had been running for Brooklyn borough president, jumped into the race, as did Mark Green. Labor unions, members of Congress and some of Liu’s closest allies on the Council tried to persuade him to switch races, in order to clear the field for de Blasio, labor’s candidate. The WFP and its constituent unions, primarily 1199 and HTC, led that campaign.

But Liu and his advisers were skeptical until they were sure that Adolfo Carrión really was leaving for Washington. With that speculation ramping up during the months of the Obama transition, Liu’s advisers began poll-testing and focus-grouping a run for comptroller.

The Working Families Party sensed an opportunity to consolidate behind a slate. The party’s lead unions, such as HTC, recognized a chance to solidify their growing Asian-American constituencies and get behind a trail-blazing candidate. Wardally and Lynch could at last cobble together the winning coalition Liu had first pitched to them years ago.

Liu is a savvy deal-maker and relentless campaigner.

Mabel Law, a former aide and executive director of the Flushing Business Improvement District, said Liu was dogged in his courtship of her when he was ramping up his first, unsuccessful Council run in 1997. Law was a student and community activist, but largely apathetic about politics. Liu traveled from Flushing to the Upper East Side just to make his pitch to her as she got off the train to walk to class. At the time, she had no idea who he was.

He brought that same intensity to the discussions about his campaign this year, piece-by-piece bringing everyone together who “hatched the strategy of why this made sense,” said one person involved in the arrangements. The WFP, through Lipton, played the role of broker, and with the party’s blessing the blueprints were sketched.

When Liu met months later with the party’s executive committee, his nomination sailed, despite what had once been considerable support for one of his opponents, Melinda Katz.

“I think he was a very easy sell,” said Dorothy Siegel, an executive committee member who screened the candidates, explaining the thinking of the unions’ political directors. “I think he was sold already.”

J

immy Siegel was vacationing in the Hamptons, sipping coffee at the Amagansett Farmers Market on a Sunday morning in August, when he saw the headline blaring across the front page of the Daily News: “Ad Spins Yarn.”

Siegel, the visionary adman, had been brought into the campaign by Chung Seto, Liu’s closest adviser and, for several months, his campaign manager. Seto and Siegel had worked together on Eliot Spitzer’s 2006 campaign.

Seto and Wardally saw Siegel not just as an adman, but as the storyteller who could make Liu’s personal narrative convincing enough to appeal to black and Latino voters who may have been reluctant to vote for an Asian-American candidate.

“She realized that John had a good story, and that a lot was going to depend on how well we tell it,” Siegel said.

Siegel’s ads retold Liu’s past as a five-year-old

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DANIIEL S. BURNSTEIN

12

John Liu has a rock star following in the Asian community that he expanded into an unusual cross-racial coalition. emigrant from Taiwan, his years working in a sweatshop with his mother, his father’s decision to rename the family after the Kennedy clan. They were widely praised as the most compelling ads in the field, crucial to Liu’s appeal as the only candidate with a broad-based ethnic coalition.

Now they were being called a lie.

“When I saw that, I said, ‘Oh jeez, this is bad.’ This is the crux of our campaign.

This is the crux of John’s appeal,” Siegel recalled. “If people believe the story, this campaign’s in deep trouble.”

The ads were especially effective because they centered Liu’s narrative on his mother, an endearing figure emblematic of New York’s immigrant heritage. (Liu’s friends say he has never been comfortable discussing his relationship with his father, a bank manager who was convicted of embezzlement just months before Liu’s 2001 Council victory. He seldom mentions the relationship in public.)

Without his core narrative, they figured, fissures would almost certainly begin to show in Liu’s fragile ethnic coalition. The mechanics of the campaign would break down. Volunteers would be harder to recruit. Get-out-the-vote would not work as well. Knocking on doors in Harlem and Central Brooklyn would be more difficult.

“His personal story was our most powerful tool in recruiting both volunteers and identifying voters,” said Kirsten Foy, an official in the Rev. Al Sharpton’s National Action Network who joined Liu’s campaign as the citywide field director in May. A round of calls ensued.

Seto assured Wardally and Siegel that, for better or worse, Liu would stand by the ad. The architects of his campaign describe that decision as perhaps the most fateful of the

campaign.

“We were nervous in the first couple of days,” said a senior adviser.

In the immediate aftermath, Liu’s organizers monitored reaction from voters. Josh Gold, on leave from 1199/ SEIU to help run Liu’s field operation with Wardally and Foy, received regular reports from the campaign’s canvassers in battlegrounds like Central Brooklyn.

They asked organizers to pay attention to voters’ concerns, if they had any, about the story. They polled to see if people had a negative reaction. They prepared to recalibrate.

To the shock of all the political insiders who had initially predicted the scandal would end Liu’s campaign, the strategy of running forward without stopping managed to work. He kept retelling the story, even as reporters gaped.

“There wasn’t really that much reaction from the electorate,” Gold said.

The timing seems to have helped, Siegel added.

“It is the middle of August, when no one’s paying attention, everybody’s on vacation,” Siegel said. “I think ultimately it didn’t hurt us.”

Gold, Wardally and Foy poured the campaign’s remaining resources into fieldwork as the primary neared. Gold, a furtive behind-the-scenes operative who

which he had overseen.

Gold was essentially running two parallel field organizations: One for AsianAmerican voters in neighborhoods like Chinatown, Flushing and Sunset Park, and one for African-American voters in places like Harlem and Central Brooklyn.

The Asian-American get-out-the-vote machine was more conventional and comparatively less expensive. Unpaid volunteers were easier to come by, and the campaign focused primarily on getting already-committed voters to the polls.

Liu’s advisers compiled a database of about 50 targeted apartment complexes in heavily Asian neighborhoods, such as 10 Division Street near Confucius Plaza, where there were at least 500 registered Asian-American Democrats. On election night, canvassers were assigned to walk up and down the halls of the building, monitoring returns. Turnout in those districts reached as high as 67 percent.

The second effort, focused on nonAsian voters, was more extensive. Focus groups conducted by Wardally and Lynch in their offices on Lenox Avenue in Harlem told them that black and Latino voters could be persuaded to vote for an Asian-American for citywide office. They asked questions like, “Could you vote for an Asian-American candidate?” and showed them photos of Liu. Surprisingly, a lot of them already knew Liu’s name, thanks to his years marching with the Rev. Al Sharpton and other prominent black leaders against racially charged incidents like the Sean Bell shooting.

“They had seen him in their neighborhoods. They had seen him on TV with people they knew,” Wardally said. “We walked out of reviewing our research knowing we could make this happen if we weave this together right.”

“There are some folks taking up the ground that, ‘We just want to make it clear, Bill de Blasio is the labor-WFP candidate,’” said one elected official who supported Liu, looking forward to 2013. “And I think there are some folks who are saying, ‘That doesn’t really matter, because John Liu has his own base of support.’” had studied under former 1199 political director Patrick Gaspard, imported lessons from the Obama campaign’s getout-the-vote operation in Cincinnati,

Armed with Liu’s personal narrative and an army of local elected officials as validators, hundreds of paid canvassers did “persuasion work,” identifying voters who could be swayed.

“The strategy was always to broaden John’s base beyond the Asian-American base and give him exposure in Central Brooklyn, Harlem, the Bronx—the pockets of New York City where we knew that the coalition that needed to be put together was actually going to be found,” Foy said.

According to an exit poll conducted by the Asian-American Legal Defense and Education Fund (AALDEF), about 20 percent of Asian-American voters in the primary were newly registered. Liu’s advisers estimate that the campaign and local civic organizations enrolled as many as 20,000 of those new voters.

That figure includes culturally conservative Asian-Americans who were initially registered as Republicans or independents. Liu’s aides recognized years before the primary that an alarming number of Asian-American voters were not Democrats, and could not vote in a Democratic primary. Bloomberg’s 2005 campaign—on which Gold worked as an organizer—had enrolled many of them as independents. So Liu’s aides urged the Asian-American civic associations in places like Flushing and Chinatown that were registering new voters to transfer existing ones from the GOP to Democratic rolls as well.

On the night of the run-off, there was the sense of a political renaissance. AsianAmerican voters, through the sheer force of the political establishment and of Liu’s convincing personal appeal, had aligned in a way that shifted the city’s politics out of the provenance of traditional Democratic voters on the Upper West Side. The idea of a “minority coalition” had been changed in ways no one would have even attempted to do just a few years ago.

“When people have talked about organizing communities of color, they’re talking about blacks and Latinos,” said Margaret Fung, the AALDEF’s executive director. “Now, finally, there’s hopefully a broadened view about what that means.”

F

ive days after the run-off, John Liu sampled a Mooncake, a traditional Chinese pastry made of lotus-seed, egg yolk and crust at the Museum of Chinese in America on Centre Street.

He was being honored in a ceremony that coincided with the Zhongqiu, or “MidAutumn” Festival, a lunar harvest.

“I’ve been eating these for two weeks now,” he joked, carving out a small wedge with a plastic knife. “This is the only thing we had on the campaign trail, because people keep bringing Mooncakes.”

Liu’s victory is understandably a milestone for Chinese-American voters.

In his years on the Council, Liu was routinely celebrated by Chinese political

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organizations and considered a spokesman for the broader Asian-American community, though he says he sometimes found that mantle frustrating.

As a Council member from Flushing, it made sense to speak on behalf of Asian-Americans, since so many of them lived in his district.

As comptroller, he will represent a city that is 12 percent Asian-American. Latino voters, who make up as much as a quarter of the city’s population, meanwhile, remain without their first citywide win. If Thompson does not win in November, Liu will be the only non-white citywide official, which could, political reality being what it is, lead to some friction.

Liu will have to navigate all that and more if

According to an exit poll conducted by the Asian-American Legal Defense and Education Fund, about 20 percent of Asian-American voters in the primary were newly registered.

Liu’s advisers estimate that the campaign and local civic organizations enrolled as many as 20,000 of those new voters. he intends to preserve his coalition and position himself in a mayoral field—which, if polls hold, will begin to take shape at about 12:01 a.m. on Nov. 4.

There will also be competing political pressures, if he and Bloomberg are both elected. He will face off with a powerful and widely popular mayor, whose aides are clearly worried about Liu. One fretted about the coming “avalanche” and “usversus-them” friction between Bloomberg and Liu, largely absent from the first seven years of Thompson’s term.

The unions that helped Liu piece together his winning coalition will expect much, too. They want Liu to put his investigatory powers to work more aggressively than Thompson, scrutinizing the mayor’s use of private contractors or wading into corporate governance issues.

“John has both the predilection and the proclivity to do muckraking investigations that actually have a bottom-line impact on people’s lives,” said one union supporter. “And he’s not afraid of the cameras, either.”

At a buffet-style restaurant down the street from

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the Museum, over a plate of rice, tofu and water chestnuts—“of which I am not a huge fan,” Liu sheepishly conceded—the comptroller-in-waiting refuted the notion that he would have to display his independence from unions and the WFP. “I feel no need to go out of my way to demonstrate that,” he said. “To the extent that people climbed on board—and a lot of people did—I’m all the more gratified for it. I’m honored.

But I feel no need to justify anything.”

That will mean that Liu, much as he did this year, will likely have to run without the support of editorial boards (whom he dismisses as “the cognoscenti”). He may also have to forfeit the support of private-sector unions and the WFP to de Blasio, who is quite clearly their preferred choice for the next mayoral election.

But Liu’s supporters argue that Liu can tap into his own coalition, forged this year, with the support of municipal unions such as DC 37 and perhaps the UFT, and the might of a newly invigorated AsianAmerican electorate.

“There are some folks taking up the ground that, ‘We just want to make it clear, Bill de Blasio is the labor-WFP candidate,’” said one elected official who supported Liu. “And I think there are some folks who are saying, ‘That doesn’t really matter, because John Liu has his own base of support.’”

An early test of that base will come in November, during the mayoral election. The Thompson campaign is encouraged by Liu’s presence on the ticket, believing he can provide a much-needed jolt of energy and star power. “He will be with us, and he will be with us in a lot of places, and that will matter,” said Eddy Castell, Thompson’s campaign manager. “You’re going to have Asian-American turnout of historic levels.”

After lunch, Liu raced to City Hall, where he was featured prominently in a Democratic “unity rally” for Thompson. Half an hour before he arrived, Chinese-American supporters crowded the plaza, anticipating his arrival. The Thompson campaign passed out placards in Chinese. A couple that did not speak English hoisted a banner that read “Chinatown Supports Bill Thompson.”

As the backdrop took shape, several overzealous Liu supporters held up “John Liu for Comptroller” signs, rather than the “Thompson for Mayor” ones provided by the campaign. Liu, occasionally bewildered by the affection of his supporters, whispered quietly to his aides to swap the Liu signs for Thompson ones.

When his turn came to speak Liu delivered a broadside against the mayor, one that brought noise from the crowd far beyond anyone else who took the microphone, including the man at the top of the ticket.

“More important than anything, Bill Thompson will not be a mayor that thumbs his nose at the will of the people,” Liu said, approaching a crescendo.

“He wants to be mayor, not emperor!”

The crowd roared. Liu smiled, and offered a closing thought.

“The fact of the matter is, New York is ready,” he said. “New York City is ready for a change.” sgentile@cityhallnews.com

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The Nice Guy Edward “Beau Ned” Livingston, a smart, honest, hardworking mayor who served from 1801 to 1803, proved spectacularly that nice guys finish last. Specifically, he proved that nice guys get yellow fever, get massively ripped off, are forced to resign office to try and repay money that someone else stole, get falsely accused of treason and author a brilliant and progressive legal code that gets rejected.

But on the bright side: as mayor, Livingston was instrumental in Edward “Beau Ned” establishing New York’s public Livingston school system, helped found the 1801-1803 New York Academy of Fine Arts Democratic-Republican and laid the cornerstone of City Hall. He was appointed New York’s first Jeffersonian mayor after serving three terms in the House, and was unique in that he served simultaneously as both mayor and U.S. Attorney for New York.

During Livingston’s term, yellow fever struck the city. Rather than split town with the rest of the rich folks, the mayor stayed behind to visit the poor in the city’s hospitals. This proved an excellent way to get yellow fever, which the mayor soon did. When aides were sent to Livingston’s residence to fetch his supply of Madeira wine, which was thought to be a cure, they found he had given his stash away to the poor. (Talk about charity.)

Little did poor Beau Ned know, while he spent the summer of 1803 laid up with yellow fever, a clerk was stealing $40,000 in tax revenue from the federal attorney’s office, of which Livingston was head. Although innocent, the mayor stood up and took responsibility for the stolen funds. He spent almost 30 years paying it back.

In the immediate term, Livingston resigned as U.S. Attorney, resigned as mayor, handed over all of his property to be sold in repayment of the money he did not steal and moved to New Orleans to try and rebuild his ruined career.

Louisiana was a mixed bag for the ex-mayor. On the down side, he was falsely accused of treason in connection with Aaron Burr’s shenanigans agitating for a pre-Civil War secession by the North, and lost much of his Louisiana property in a land dispute with President Thomas Jefferson.

On the up side, he was elected to the state legislature, where he spent three years authoring a groundbreaking legal code. Fittingly for Livingston, the only copy was destroyed by fire as it was about to go to the printer. Two years and a second draft later, he completed what is known today as the Livingston Code, a progressive criminal law focused on prevention rather than punishment of crime.

Brilliant and ahead of its time, the Livingston Code remains one of the most influential legal documents in American history. The state legislature rejected it.

Nonetheless, the document brought the former mayor significant international fame. (Not everyone has a town in Guatemala named after them in honor of their penal code.)

Beau Ned went on to serve as secretary of state under Andrew Jackson, as well as minister to France. He died in 1836, just six years after finally repaying the old clerk’s debt.

—James Caldwell

14

OCTOBER 12, 2009

CITY HALL

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The Center n the nearly eight years since Michael Bloomberg was elected mayor, 870,000 babies have been born in New York City, and 400,000 people have died. More than 5.8 billion car trips have been made into and out of the city. Forty thousand new buildings have been started. The fire department has battled more than a quarter million blazes and people have reported 180,000 robberies to the police. John F. Kennedy International Airport has seen 2 million takeoffs and landings. The Yankees and Mets have played almost 2,600 times, while Staten Island ferries have logged enough nautical miles to go to the moon and back three times. On 19,000 occasions, St. Patrick’s Cathedral has celebrated Mass. Ten billion shares changed hands at the stock exchange.

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A SELECTION FROM

When New Yorkers head to the polls in November, they will decide whether the mayor will spend another four years in office. Whatever the outcome when the votes are counted, an election is a time to size up how the city has changed—is it better, worse or just plain different?—during the Bloomberg era.

New Yorkers live in a metropolis, but they dwell in a neighborhood, probably in a section of city consisting of a few blocks. It’s there that they live, shop, catch the subway to work and bring the kids to school, and it’s where the city’s successes and failures are most keenly felt.

One such area is ZIP code 11237 in Brooklyn.

One of New York’s 300-odd ZIP codes, 11237 has the distinction of containing, according to the Department of City Planning, the geographic center of the city of New York, on the block of Stockholm Street between Wyckoff and St. Nicholas avenues. When the federal government last counted in 2000, there were 48,642 people living in the ZIP, which comprises the northern half of the neighborhood of Bushwick.

A lot has changed in 11237 during Bloomberg’s time as mayor. Reported crime is lower and the schools are posting better scores. Thousands of manufacturing jobs have vanished and housing has become harder to afford. Most of the changes have roots that go years deep, and some are the product of forces well beyond any mayor’s control. But city policy has played a role in all of it. Over the past eight years, there has been real progress against old problems in Bushwick, and new problems have emerged.

This is a look at some of what has happened in one ZIP code since 2001. What follows might not encompass the full story of the wider city. But it is part of that larger tale.

MAKING THE

GRADE While some parents and educators have doubts about the value of standardized tests and their effect on children and classrooms, there’s no denying that the number of students passing such tests in Bushwick’s schools has increased under Mayor Bloomberg.

Source: NYC Department of Education, Furman Center

Students in Bushwick Schools Performing at Grade 70% 60% 50% 40% 30% 20% 10% 0%

NG

DI

A RE

MATH

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AUTO THEFT

LARCENY

BURGLARY

ASSAULT

ROBBERY

10%

15

Change in Number of Crimes, 2001-2008

0% -10%

-40% -50% -60% -70%

83

-30%

PRECINCT

-20% NEW YORK CITY

Reported major felony crimes decreased in the 83rd Precinct, which covers most of ZIP code 11237, from 2001 to 2008. The percentage decrease in rapes in the 83rd was considerably greater than the fall citywide. Local larcenies, however, rose against a citywide reduction.

20%

RAPE

DOWN

30% MURDER

GOING

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Source: NYPD

Foreclosures per 1,000 One- to Four-Family Homes 70

IC

K

60

BU SH

W

50 40 30 20

Y

10

NEW

RK YO

CIT

0

HOME

REMEDY?

After the fires and riots of the 1970s, Bushwick rebuilt itself in large part by developing private homes on vacant lots. The entrance of homeowners helped stabilize the neighborhood. But now, 11237’s community district (Brooklyn Board 4) has the third highest rate of foreclosure, and home losses have accelerated faster there than in the rest of the city.

Source: Furman Center

TALKING For a look inside the 11237 Zip Code and its many changes over the last eight years, go to citylimits.org

16,000

CASES

14,000

Continued federal and local welfare-reform efforts have reduced the rolls of people on cash assistance since 2001. At the same time, the number of people receiving food stamps has increased—reflecting some combination of increased need and easier enrollment.

10,000

12,000

Benefit Recipients in 11237

8,000 FOOD STAMPS

6,000 4,000

WELFARE

2,000 0

Source: NYC Human Resources Administration

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OCTOBER 12, 2009

Four Votes Shy Of Surprise Win, Lynn Nunes Claims A Different Kind Of Victory At 24, near-miss White challenger says he is far from done with politics

BY SELENA ROSS ven before Sept.

15, Lynn Nunes was fairly accomplished.

The 24-year-old Richmond Hill resident—who still lives with his parents in the home he grew up in—had gotten his real estate license at age 17, a year before he could legally close deals, and was already presiding over a staff of 10 at his own real estate firm.

“I’ve always been sort of ambitious and involved in things,” said Nunes calmly from behind a wraparound desk in his bustling office, while an older assistant brought coffee.

Being ambitious and involved had much more to do with almost knocking off Tom White than anything else. Without the backing of the county party, the Working Families Party, any prominent elected officials or local civic groups, Nunes came within four votes of a shocker upset win that would have put him on the Council.

The district where Nunes nearly pulled off his unprecedented upset stretches across Jamaica, Richmond Hill, Rochdale and South Ozone Park in Eastern Queens. It has seen its fair share of political intrigue over the years, including Allan Jennings and the videotapes of him throwing a chunk of metal at a reporter’s head and being fined for sexually harassing his staffers.

This is the district where in 2005, with White coming back from term limits exile to beat Jennings, accusations flew over whether Albert Baldeo did or did not pull a gun, a part of Queens that is familiar with the Serph Maltese-Joe Addabbo showdown, with Anthony Semenerio and the odd saga of the special election for his seat that thanks to Gov. David Paterson was on, then off, then on again.

This year’s race was no different. Jennings was back on the ballot, along with Ruben Wills, who gotten into a fight with Jennings on his way to submit petitions to the Board of Elections, after, he alleges, Jennings lobbed a homophobic slur at him.

ANDREW SCHWARTZ

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Nunes raised $109,000 with matching funds, second only to White, and according to his campaign staff, the young entrepreneur spent hours poring over past election results to micro-target apartments in each neighborhood.

“It all comes down to hard work. We had a lot of challenges,” said Nunes. “The thought that running is only for millionaires or the wellconnected is gone.”

Nunes spent weeknights in high school sitting through community meetings, but his nly o other foray into electoral politics came last year. He led voter registration drives for Barack Obama and ran against White for district leader, losing badly.

But despite two races against White, Nunes insists that he is not running in protest against the Council member.

“It’s not necessarily about him losing his position,” said Nunes. “It’s about what I thought I could bring to the table.”

Nor was Nunes’ campaign simply a youth movement.

Retirees joined in as well, pitching their fellow old timers on the energy and accomplishments of someone younger than their children.

“There was this passion

in his voice about what he wanted to do for the people in the neighborhood,” said Pat Mair, a 56-year-old former city employee. “And it really impressed me. I said, ‘This guy is serious.’”

Some people found it hard to take the recent college grad as seriously as he took himself, as Nunes learned when he tried to win endorsements. But he hit the streets, with his supporters claiming that already by the spring he was more of a neighborhood presence than White, whom they had mockingly started to call “the invisible man.”

“I think it was the face-toface contact,” said campaign treasurer Pedro Cepeda about how Nunes pulled off his feat.

“He’s a lot more mature than a lot of 24-year-olds. It wasn’t like it was an acting role, and then taking off the cape at night.”

Having lost by a painfully small margin, Nunes only conceded defeat on Oct. 6, pulling back from a threatened legal challenge over the results.

After the primary it had been hard to forgive himself for losing, Nunes said.

“All those times that I decided to take the day off, or the hour off,” he moaned.

Days afterwards, he was still fielding calls from many supportive voters who had not registered properly or had encountered other unexpected problems at the ballot box.

For the time being, Nunes says he will remain nipping at White’s heels as a community activist.

“Hopefully he takes this as a sign that he’s not doing the best job ever, and he steps up,” he said.

White did not return calls asking for comment.

In the long term, Nunes promised to stay in politics, but refuses to say when, and for what, he might run next. eighbors N who have gotten used to seeing him around the community, though, will not miss him.

“You’ll see me next week, next month, in a few months,” he said. sross@cityhallnews.com

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Gangster of New York Marinus Willet was sort of like the Clint Eastwood of New York City mayors. Only instead of the American West during the 19th century, or the homicidal streets of 1970s San Francisco, the American Revolution was the stage on which Willet established himself as one brawling S.O.B. Actually, Willet, who was the greatgrandson of Thomas Willet (New York’s first mayor) got a taste for action several years earlier during the French and Indian War. As a militia member in 1758, he distinguished MARINUS WILLET himself in expeditions against the French 1807-1808 strongholds of Fort Ticonderoga and Fort Frontenac.

It was in 1765, though, when the colonies started seriously beefing with Britain, that Willet came into his own as a hard-charging patriot. In response to the Stamp Act, he co-founded the Sons of Liberty, a group of radical, unruly working-class men who advocated a “shoot first, ask questions later” response to British rule.

While the Sons were not the only patriotic group formed at that time, they were by far the best known and most respected. And they definitely had the coolest name. (Was anyone really going to go with a gang named “Vox Populi” or the “Sons of Neptune” over the Sons of Liberty?)

Among other things, the Sons were the first organization to call for an outright repeal of the Stamp Act. Despite public unrest over British taxation, the group, who were fond of parading through town burning their enemies in effigy, were seen as dangerous by many, and the other (i.e., more boring) patriot groups spent much of 1765 trying to reign in Willet and his gang.

Already significantly notorious, Willet really made his name during the Revolution. When word of Lexington and Concord reached New York in 1775, the Sons of Liberty responded by stripping a peacefully withdrawing Royal Irish Regiment of their weapons right in the middle of Broad Street and raiding a British arms depot to prevent the weapons from being sent north to Boston.

By the end of June 1775, Willet was a captain in the Continental Army. He went on to take part in the Invasion of Canada, the Battle of Monmouth, the Battle of Quebec, the Battle of Oriskany and an expedition against the Six Nations, among others. He served as a lieutenant-colonel in Washington’s army and by 1780 was commanding all forces in the Mohawk Valley, where, in 1783, he was credited with conducting one of the last hostile expeditions against the British. One historian later dubbed Willet “Defender of the Northern Frontier.”

Not surprisingly, Willet’s post-war political career was somewhat overshadowed by his war-hero status. Nevertheless, he was elected to the Assembly and Common Council (today’s City Council) in 1783, and also served as sheriff before assuming the mayoralty in 1807, after DeWitt Clinton was removed from office. In 1811, he ran unsuccessfully for lieutenant governor.

Not one to be boring even in dying, he put that off until the age of 90, unusually old for the time, especially among those who had lived hardcharging lives like Willet’s. He was buried as a Revolutionary hero at Trinity Church; his funeral reportedly drew a crowd of some 10,000.

Considering that New York’s population in 1830 was about 202,589, Willet’s funeral stands out as one of the big events in New York history, right up there with the Simon & Garfunkel concert in Central Park.

—James Caldwell

CITY HALL

www.cityhallnews.com

OCTOBER 12, 2009

Road Rage In Mayor’s Race Sadik-Khan a menace to some, magnet to others enjamin Lim, a 26-year-old web developer in Midtown, is an avid cyclist who says he votes Democratic “99.9 percent of the time.”

For months, Lim paid little attention to the mayor’s race—until he heard Comptroller Bill Thompson say he intended to fire Janette Sadik-Khan, the plucky, bikefriendly transportation commissioner, if elected in November.

Suddenly, Lim had a stake in the race.

“Many of my friends have expressed the same sentiments and many of them are registered Democrats,” he wrote via e-mail. “Even some of my friends who don’t ride bikes love [Sadik-Khan] and are voting for Bloomberg as a result.”

Lim created a Facebook page called “I’m voting for Bloomberg because I love Janette Sadik-Khan,” which has grown to over 100 members so far.

“That’s obviously not going to swing an election,” Lim noted, “but it was nice to see that I wasn’t the only person who felt this way.”

Since Thompson vowed to ax SadikKhan in the first Democratic primary debate, he has escalated his rhetoric, promising to remove some of the bike lanes that Sadik-Khan has made a linchpin in her effort to transform the city’s streetscape.

“I favor bicycle lanes, however, you are hearing the complaint all over the city of New York, because the communities have not been consulted,” Thompson said.

Thompson’s comments ignited a firestorm of disbelief and anger among transportation buffs across the city, many of whom view Sadik-Khan not as some dispensable government hack, but as a visionary who understands the importance of sustainable, liveable streets.

But Thompson’s stance has earned him praise in other circles. Sean Sweeney, the director of the SoHo Alliance, a civic group, says that those who believe that bike lanes are being “shoved down our throats” will undoubtedly look more kindly on Thompson.

“That’s wonderful,” Sweeney said of Thompson’s promise to remove SadikKhan. “It has invigorated me to work harder for Mr. Thompson’s election.”

Sweeney says he doubts fans of SadikKhan like Benjamin Lim will make much of a difference at the ballot box.

“There is no vast public outcry for bike lanes or public streets or closing off Times Square,” Sweeney said. “Why this crazy emphasis on turning the Big Apple into Portland?”

The Bloomberg campaign accused Thompson of playing politics. “Mr. Thompson continues to criticize without

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“Everybody wants that space,” Sandler said. “Parkers, truckers, drivers, cyclists, skateboarders. It is the most competitive space in the city.”

Sadik-Khan’s successful efforts to transform streets into pedestrian plazas and create hundreds of miles of bike lanes has also earned With his bid for a third her the enmity of a growing term already steeped number of politicians and in some controversy, community groups who having voters feel that claim these projects have not the government is making been properly vetted in the changes without their input community. And some of these and giving local leaders criticisms have blossomed a point of contention into outright hostility toward is precisely the kind of Sadik-Khan.

“The commissioner is political issue Bloomberg playing games,” said Jan Lee, does not need. a small-business owner and executive vice president of the Civic community boards. Another bill would Center Residents Coalition in Chinatown. require the department to publicize “This woman thinks she’s god.” certain details of its plans and to submit Lee supports Thompson’s bid for mayor them for community board approval. because he believes the comptroller will Sadik-Khan declined comment through be more transparent in his efforts to a spokesperson, but some DOT employees improve the flow of human and vehicle privately grumble that most of these traffic. criticisms are coming from politicians who “He will have a new commissioner,” Lee have either lost their jobs, like Gerson, or said. “I would encourage Bill Thompson vying for jobs that are out of reach, like to expose the fact that all the agencies Thompson. Nonetheless, a great deal of have a lack of transparency.” administration time and effort has been While the debate rages on, the Council going to soothe local politicians whose constituents are unhappy with the bike lanes and other changes. Top officials have been dispatched to make peace in neighborhoods across the city. With his bid for a third term already steeped in some controversy, having voters feel that the government is making changes without their input and giving local leaders a point of contention is precisely the kind of political issue Bloomberg does not need.

But hundreds of community hearings and public meetings are held every month to discuss new and ongoing projects, DOT staff say, as well as to assess the efficacy of completed projects, such as new bike lanes and pedestrian plazas along Broadway.

The ascendency of cycling in the city’s consciousness has been remarkable, said Teresa Toro, chair of the transportation committee in Community Board 1 in Brooklyn. But the DOT still has not done enough to tie cycling to a larger effort to promote safe, liveable streets, she says. And this may account for much of the vitriol that is being lobbed at Sadik-Khan.

“More people would understand if it applied to more people,” Toro said. “If [Bill Thompson] really understood the goals of the liveable streets movement, Transportation Commissioner Janette Sadik-Khan has become a political I actually think he would embrace it as lightning rod, forcing top administration officials to spend time repairing well.” relationships with local leaders as her boss runs for re-election. ahawkins@cityhallnews.com

offering vision or coherent strategy for how he’d tackle small business—killing congestion or air pollution” said campaign spokesperson Andrew Doba.

Iris Weinshall, Sadik-Khan’s predecessor, was never such a political lightning rod, and the idea that a number of votes may hinge on whether the transportation commissioner remains in her job is still unusual and hints at the over-sized role Sadik-Khan is playing in New York politics.

George Arzt, a veteran Democratic political consultant, said Thompson appears to be making a grab for working class, outer borough votes with his calls to remove bike lanes and dump SadikKhan.

“It’s a 718 issue, as we used to say,” said Arzt. “He sees this as an advantage to do something for the car drivers, many of whom hate the bicycle lanes and are fearful of running over a cyclist.”

Ross Sandler, a New York Law School professor who served as transportation commissioner under Mayor Ed Koch from 1986-1989, said that vast improvements in public safety over the past 20 years have increased competition for public space, which goes towards explaining SadikKhan’s controversial role in the political landscape, as well as the growing clamor for her removal.

ANDREW SCHWARTZ

BY ANDREW J. HAWKINS

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is taking steps to throw some roadblocks in Sadik-Khan’s path.

Council Member Alan Gerson, who lost his bid for re-election in last month’s primary, says that while Sadik-Khan has made some truly visionary improvements to the city’s streets, her aggressive methods have inspired him, as one of his last acts as a Council member, to introduce legislation that would curtail some of the DOT’s ability to initiate street construction projects without first consulting with Council members and

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OCTOBER 12, 2009

As Monserrate Trial Plods On, Rare Bursts Of Drama As Karla Giraldo gave her long, rambling and frequently contradictory testimony in the trial of her boyfriend, Sen. Hiram Monserrate, two identically dressed, frizzy-haired women sat off to the side, staring at the stern-faced legislator through matching pairs of binoculars.

As the long and often humdrum assault trial plodded along, the sketch artists, Andrea and Shirley Shepard, a mother/ daughter team who use binoculars to capture the tiniest detail, proved to be an

entertaining distraction for the dozens of reporters, family members and curiosityseekers gathered in Room 306 of the Queens County Court House.

Monserrate himself looked bored at times, glancing occasionally at his BlackBerry or wiling away his time writing notes to his lawyers on blue Post-it notes.

The only two moments of high drama came when Giraldo rushed from the courtroom in tears after having viewed a few seconds of the security camera footage from the night the alleged assault happened, and when a reporter was briefly ejected from the courtroom for failing to silence his cell phone.

Giraldo, of course, returned to finish her testimony, rolling her eyes and wagging her finger at Assistant District Attorney Scott Kessler. The reporter, Michael Frazier from Newsday, also was eventually allowed to enter again.

During the prosecution’s questions, much was learned about Giraldo: that she was born in Ecuador, that she leases a 2007 El Dorado, that she has made a few movies and that she has had elective plastic surgery before.

“What are they going to do next, waterboard her?” grumbled Wayne Mahlke, Monserrate’s chief-of-staff.

During her testimony, Giraldo repeatedly insisted that Monserrate accidentally, not intentionally, cut her face, prompting Queens Supreme Court Judge William Erlbaum to remind her not to offer such information without first being asked. She blamed the district attorney, for harassing her, and the staff at Long Island Jewish Hospital, who she says called the police because her boyfriend is a known politician.

“They arrested him right away when they realized he was a politician,” Giraldo said through a translator. “Anybody can understand that.”

Meanwhile, the Shepards put the final touches on their sketch, showing Monserrate with a dagger-like nose and piercing eyes and Giraldo with pink-pursed

CITY HALL

www.cityhallnews.com

End of the Road

lips. From the bench, Judge Erlbaum, depicted as something from a cross between Santa Claus and Colonel Sanders, peered over from above.

Liu’s Wayback Machine There he is: John Liu with long, shaggy hair. John Liu with acne. John Liu in a faded newspaper clipping, rabblerousing on a mid-1980s college campus.

Those photographs, and many other artifacts of John Liu’s adolescence, are on display at the Museum of Chinese in America, which had its grand opening on Sunday, Oct. 4. As part of the ceremony, Liu was honored for his victory in the Democratic primary for comptroller. As a student at Binghamton University, where he was president of the Chinese-American Student Association, Liu had worked with the museum’s founders to bring an exhibit on the history of Chinatown back to campus.

In preparation for the ceremony, the museum’s directors had prepared a biographical video of Liu, with photos from his youth surreptitiously provided by his aides.

As he watched on one of the multiple television screens showing the clip, even Liu seemed surprised that the museum had obtained some of the pictures.

“How did they get that?” he asked more than once. (They were provided by one of his closest aides, Chung Seto.)

After watching the five-minute video, the gathered dignitaries paraded into the “Bloomberg Special Exhibitions Gallery” (yes, that Bloomberg) for a ceremony honoring Liu. Rep. Nydia Velázquez recalled how she had been urging Liu to run for comptroller since at least late last year. Margaret Chin, Democratic Council nominee, said she owed her victory in part to Liu’s success.

Even Council Member Alan Gerson, Chin’s vanquished rival, showed up to praise the museum’s work.

“I’m not being a politician,” he said. “I don’t have to be anymore.”

Socialist Mayoral Candidate Battles Capitalism, Fundraising Benchmarks, Wind Frances Villar, the mayoral candidate running on the Socialism and Liberation party line, held a Wednesday press conference in front of the Board of Elections to protest the fundraising benchmark needed to participate in the citywide debates. However, she ended up battling not with Mayor Michael Bloomberg or Democratic nominee Bill Thompson, but with the wind.

What started off as a slightly breezy morning event became somewhat more difficult to arrange when a gale-force windstorm swept the city and blew aside the best-laid political plans.

“We have a billionaire mayor who

EDWARD-ISAAC DOVERE

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In the end, there was just a small makeshift podium in a sparsely filled, small campaign headquarters on Park Avenue South as Mark Green arrived to give what he swore would be the last, last concession speech of his life. The small Styrofoam bowls of pretzels and Hershey’s miniatures, along with a few 20-oz. bottles of soda, were what the campaign staffers had put together as a party, reminding reporters who called earlier in the day for the location of the event that Bill de Blasio’s open-bar party was just across the street.

Snacking on what was there, about 20 supporters and Council Member Lew Fidler, who had been cleared by the front desk security, sat patiently. Each new visitor was cleared with Benjamin Kallos, the campaign policy director. He knew most of the names, but not a small group of well-wishers who were looking to come upstairs.

“We’ve got three supporters I’ve never heard of before,” he said to no one in particular, trying to find someone who recognized their names.

Around the same time, a call came in to campaign manager Anne Strahle.

“We won Northshore Towers,” she said with an almost optimistic sigh, fielding a report from someone watching the machines being opened in the Queens gated community.

But the election results running along the bottom of the screen on NY1 told a clear tale, even as Strahle pressed campaign attorney Jerry Goldfeder for signs of hope.

Goldfeder frowned.

“If it’s 60-40 at 12 percent and it’s 60-40 at 24, and it’s from all over the city, that’s where it’s going to stay,” Goldfeder said, then added, “give it 10 more minutes.”

Fifteen minutes later, NY1 called the election for de Blasio, who ultimately won 63-37. By the time his enlarged headshot came onto the screen, no one in the room was paying attention.

Former Council Member Ken Fisher arrived, shaking his head over the simultaneous loss in the comptroller’s race by David Yassky, who had succeeded him in the Council representing Brooklyn Heights. Fisher knows the sting of losing personally, having gone down to Marty Markowitz in the Brooklyn borough president race in 2001.

“What’s with that Council seat,” Fidler said, with a cynical laugh. “There’s no mazal in it.”

Later, after Green delivered his short speech, Fidler commiserated with him, too. Two candidates backed by the Working Families Party had won, and Fidler did not seem pleased by the results.

“Not a good day for the Democratic Party,” he said, shaking hands with Green as the candidate digested the end of his seventh campaign and fifth loss and headed out the door. believes in using money to brainwash the public,” she said, her voice mostly drowned out under the weather. “But I refuse to sit down and let developers and outside interests ruin this city for the average working family.”

A few campaign flyers slipped from a worker’s hand and spread out down Rector Street. As Villar looked on, she said that maybe the weather was a sign of

the force of her campaign.

“The city and mayor may try to pretend that we aren’t here, but we are making ourselves known throughout the city with strong campaigning,” Villar said.

“Why else are Bloomberg and Thompson so afraid to debate little ol’ me?”

by John Dorman, Edward-Isaac Dovere, Sal Gentile and Andrew J. Hawkins.

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CITY HALL

www.cityhallnews.com

OCTOBER 12, 2009

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ANDREW SCHWARTZ PHOTOS

The Veteran

ew people know the experience of running against a popular billionaire incumbent mayor better than Freddy Ferrer. Every time the Bloomberg campaign fires off a press release criticizing Bill Thompson on education or leadership, Ferrer can say he has been there, that he too has felt those stings.

But New York has changed in the past four years. And Bloomberg has not, Ferrer says, leaving open the question of whether this time, an underfunded underdog candidate like Thompson can prevail.

Sitting in his office at Mercury Public Affairs, Ferrer discussed the race, the mob and Thompson’s advantages. And mustaches.

What follows is an edited transcript.

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City Hall: What do you think is different about conditions now as opposed to 2005?

Freddy Ferrer: Eight years is the difference, and declining economic conditions. Look, I don’t think Mike Bloomberg can credibly make the argument in 2009 that, “I’m the guy with the plan for 400,000 new jobs, I’m the guy with the plan to relieve this, I’m the guy with the plan to build more housing,” when he hasn’t done the job in eight years.

And it seems to me that this time around people are going, “If you haven’t done the job in eight years, what leads me to believe you should be trusted with it for another four? If you can’t do it in eight, you can’t do it!”

CH: How has the mayor changed as a candidate from four years ago?

FF: I don’t think he’s changed at all. I think his modus operandi for conducting the campaign is precisely the same. Spend everything you can, to nail down as much support as you can, because that kind of money buys a lot of support and even a considerable amount of people, and, you know, be a salesman. But I think after eight years New Yorkers are scratching their heads going, “Hey, wait a minute.”

Not only was the term limits power grab objectionable enough, and it’s probably the straw that breaks the camel’s back in this case, but then we begin to look at all those policies. “I have an MTA plan.” Well, where have you been for the last eight years? “I have an economic development plan, I’m going to produce 400,000 jobs.”

Again, where have you been for the last eight years? And by the way, the debacles!

Let’s see, apart from the fact that cranes fell down on people, and how many people needed to be killed and property needed

to be damaged before you figured out you needed a new commissioner at the department of buildings? As it turns out, the Luchese crime family got hold of a city agency? And this isn’t the cause of a major scandal in this city? Excuse me? But not only are apparently politicians at City Hall asleep on their jobs, but so are newspapers.

This isn’t a major scandal in this city? Come on!

CH: So with all this at his disposal, what do you think Bill Thompson’s best strategy is?

FF: Husband his resources. He’s not going to outspend Mike. You know, it’s like trying to pick off multiple warhead missiles with a slingshot. You’ve got to husband your resources and spend it where it has the greatest effects, and count on your grassroots, and count on the fact that this is eight years later.

CH: Will he have grassroots support?

There is some speculation that the Working Families Party does not see him as a priority candidate.

FF: Yeah I’ve read that. Look, I don’t know what to make of that. You know that’s chatter. It’s not like the ruling council of the Working Families Party doesn’t have Bloomberg people. Sometimes people spin this stuff in the media and expect New Yorkers to be taken for complete idiots.

But I guess, you know, they do and they bet on short memories of New Yorkers.

CH: What kind of assets do you think the other citywide candidates can be for Thompson going forward?

FF: Oh, I’m very impressed with our ticket. It’s diverse, not only ethnically diverse but geographically diverse, and I think it’s something that offers new

hope to the middle class in this city and to those who aspire to be, or remain in the middle class. I think Bill gets a lot of strength from it. But Bill is a mature, surefooted presence, and I think together with Bill and Bill de Blasio and with John Liu, I think that makes it a very good ticket, a very attractive ticket this year.

CH: Does he need to be more of a firebrand?

FF: I am the last guy you should ask about that. You know everybody’s style is their own style. But I know Bill, and I served with him, so I mean, you get to know somebody well when you serve with them.

And you know what, we sat together and served in the same government, when he was deputy borough president to Brooklyn and when he was president of the Board of Education, this is an uncommonly decent and accomplished public servant, and I served with a great many people in government. He’s uncommonly decent and principled, and accomplished.

CH: Some of your endorsed candidates did not make it through the primaries…

FF: In a multi-candidate field, you pick somebody. David Weprin and I go back a very long time. I like him, he’s a decent guy, he wasn’t in the hunt. I happen to like and admire John Liu, so that was easy.

And I’m glad he won. Look, Bill de Blasio and I have been friends a while, he was one of the first to support me in 2005, and I was very proud to be with him.

CH: What about the Council races in the Bronx?

FF: Look, I don’t know about the conflict, I mean I supported Maria [Baez] because that’s my home Council district, I know her. And I was frankly offended that what I smelled there was the odor of retribution, you know? I went to the leadership of the party and I told them, “Look, I’m going to go with Maria,” and they said, “Well we’ve been getting a lot of complaints about her.” More than [Larry] Seabrook? What are you talking about? You know, I knew what this was. And they threw the kitchen sink at her, for god’s sake. So, losing by 73 votes, it’s still a loss, but it’s not one where she needs to skulk away.

CH: There remains a lot of animosity in the Bronx, politicians literally getting

into fights. Can the borough ever be unified?

FF: I truly don’t know. I didn’t get the wild inconsistency of having someone like Seabrook as your candidate and then going against Baez. I didn’t get it. Look, I just don’t think I understand it. But I’m not terribly active in party issues, and I haven’t been for quite some time. You can ask the last three or four county chairmen—I’m a pretty independent guy and always have been.

CH: Mark Green said he would never run again, yet this year he did. How about you?

FF: No, no. Look, the time I spent in public service was a great blessing to me and one of the biggest privileges anyone could ever have. Being borough president for almost 15 years is like being mayor of your home town. And it is still moving to me, to be on the subway and see people who respond to me and think I did a good job, and even those supporters that thank me for it all these years later. That was a thrill to be in public service and to try to accomplish some things. But my time in public service is done. If I can help others, like our new borough president, who I hope will be our new mayor, I’m more than happy to do it. And I think it’s a privilege to be able to assist in that way.

But for me, public service, you know, there’s a time when you need to step away.

CH: Do you see yourself as an Ed Koch figure?

FF: No. I still love the game. I love watching it, I love commenting on it, I could even coach it. I fell out of love personally, like a lot of pro athletes, with playing it. And not because it wasn’t a worthy thing to do, but there comes a time when, hey, I’m into some other things.

And it’s nice when, look, when you’re in public service and you’re in a position to get some things done, wow, there’s no better feeling in the world.

CH: Were you disappointed that Thompson shaved his mustache?

FF: I will not share with you what I told him. On matters large and small my conversations with public servants tend to remain confidential.

—Andrew J. Hawkins ahawkins@cityhallnews.com

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