City Hall - October 17, 2011 by City Hall News

The DOE dodges contract scrutiny from the City Council (Page 6), Hakeem Jeffries, below, is inching closer to a run for Congress (Page 18)

and WFP boss Dan Cantor, above, evaluates Occupy Wall Street (Page 31). Vol. 5, No. 16

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October 17, 2011

Bill de Blasio, George Soros and the war on Citizens United pg. 12

Daniel S. Burnstein

UPFRONT

The Mayor Of Wall Street leaders, a man who says the whole country is to blame for the housing collapse, not just the banks. Even if he agreed with the downtown protesters that banks are the

Bloomberg is sticking up for Wall Street because he truly believes someone has to. problem, he’s not going to take them on— because he’s the mayor of a company town. Bloomberg is sticking up for Wall Street because he truly believes someone has to. The numbers are the numbers: New York

mid-October to see Occupy Wall Street for himself, Bloomberg may well have wondered whether he was seeing the seeds of the same unrest that exploded in Cairo, Madrid and London. Even if

By The Numbers

3,000

2,716

Patents Issued to New York City Inventors, 1980–2010:

1,886

1,945

1,801

1,803 1,290

1,181

1,149

1,059

1,064

1,145

1,015

1,056

1,010

962

779

909

882

833

784

657

741

939

1,000

931

1,500

1,521

1,564

1,801

1,760

1,713

2,000

1,586

As the Bloomberg administration tries to make New York City a hub for high-tech innovation, the number of patents issued to city inventors has risen steadily.

2,500

500

2010

2009

2008

2007

2006

2005

2004

2003

2002

2001

2000

1999

1998

1997

1996

1995

1994

1993

1992

1991

1990

1989

1988

1987

1986

1985

1984

1983

1982

1981

30,000 1980

he day before Occupy Wall Street first besieged his city, Mayor Michael Bloomberg predicted the sagging economy could provoke riots in the streets. “That’s what happened in Cairo. That’s what happened in Madrid,” he said on a September Friday. “You don’t want those kinds of riots here.” It sounded like a metaphor, but the Adam Lisberg mayor may well have been speaking literally. Sources who know his thinking say Bloomberg was shaken by the August riots in London, a city he loves dearly, which showed no sign of festering unrest before neighborhoods erupted in flames. Which puts him in a box. Bloomberg knows there is something wrong in America; that’s why he considered running for president in 2008. Even if he can’t empathize with New Yorkers who lost their jobs or can’t pay their bills, he knows their problems are real. “There is an unemployment problem in this country that we have to do something about. There’s a mortgage problem we have to do something about,” he said last week. “It’s up to the elected officials to understand what it takes.” Yet Bloomberg is a creature of Wall Street, a fellow titan friendly with its

young radicals abandon their protest, the message has caught fire with the middle class: Regular people who play by the rules are struggling to get by, while banks that blew up the economy got bailouts and are profitable again. Bloomberg isn’t alone in being flummoxed by the protest. Democratic politicians who love to stand with crowds also love to ask bankers for money. But they’re not the man ultimately responsible for 8.4 million New Yorkers. It’s not easy being the mayor of New York City when you’re also the mayor of Wall Street. —Adam Lisberg, Editor alisberg@cityhallnews.com

teaches its kids, takes care of its sick and picks up its garbage with the taxes paid in large part by investors and bankers. The subways are filled with deli workers and secretaries and janitors who owe their jobs to the investors and bankers they serve. When he walked into Zuccotti Park in

Source: New York City Economic Development Corp.

The Month Ahead (Oct. 17–Nov. 11) Attorney General Eric Schneiderman speaks at cocktail event for the New York League of Conservation Voters Assemblyman William Boyland Jr.’s trial begins Sen. Chuck Schumer and Rep. Kathy Hochul attend Eleanor’s Legacy fall luncheon at Grand Hyatt

Gala for Central Labor Council President Vinny Alvarez and New York AFL-CIO President Denis Hughes

Council Speaker Christine Quinn speaks at ABNY breakfast at Sheraton Hotel

Campaign Finance Board holds hearing on proposed rules for disclosure of independent expenditures

EDC President Seth Pinsky speaks at Building Congress breakfast forum at Hilton New York

Farewell party for MTA Chairman Jay Walder at MetLife Building

M T CITY HALL

Christine Quinn honored at Empire State Pride Agenda and HRC New York PAC fund-raiser

19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31

W Th

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W Th

OCTOBER 17, 2011

UPFRONT

The best items from City & State First Read CITY & STATE FIRST READ is our morning email roundup of New York politics and government. Every day before 7 a.m. we deliver daily exclusives from City Hall and The Capitol, a curated summary of the day’s headlines, editorials, schedules and milestones—and short tidbits like the “Heard Around Town” items below. Not getting City & State First Read each morning? Visit www.cityhallnews.com/ﬁrst-read to subscribe.

• City Council Transportation Committee Chairman Jimmy Vacca insists he’s not against bike lanes, contrary to what newly released emails claim about him. The transportation site Streetsblog obtained messages from bike-lane opponents who said Vacca doesn’t like the lanes, and so hoped he would help them require more planning from city agencies and community boards. Nonsense, Vacca says: “We want to give community boards more of a say. Those who are supporters of bicycling do themselves more harm than good when they try to minimize community input.” Memo to biking groups that think community boards are another layer of anti-bike red tape: Remember that Vacca was district manager at a Bronx board for 26 years.

its overtime budget by hundreds of millions of dollars in every year of Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s administration, the report noted. The agencies involved in Liu’s audits generally agreed with recommendations to do better, and a Bloomberg spokesman declined to comment.

• Sorry, stalkers. The Mayor’s Office of Film, Theatre & Broadcasting fully digitized their film-permit applications in early October, so production managers can file to shoot movies and TV shows without ever setting foot in the agency’s midtown office. That doesn’t mean regular New Yorkers will be able to scan those digital records to see where the stars will be shooting, however. “There is

• City agencies aren’t following the rules designed to keep overtime payments down, a series of audits from Comptroller John Liu found. Audits of the law, health and homelessness services departments showed agencies failed to adhere to overtime caps, obtain waivers for extra overtime payments or even study why their overtime bills were rising. The city spent more than $1.1 billion on overtime in the last ﬁscal year, despite budgeting only $848 million for it—and in fact has overspent

www.cityhallnews.com Publisher/Executive Director: Darren Bloch

OCTOBER 17, 2011

EDITORIAL Editor: Adam Lisberg alisberg@cityhallnews.com Managing Editor: Andrew J. Hawkins ahawkins@cityhallnews.com Reporters: Chris Bragg cbragg@cityhallnews.com Laura Nahmias lnahmias@cityhallnews.com Jon Lentz jlentz@cityhallnews.com Photography Editor: Andrew Schwartz

a fine line between what we want to make available and having real-time information available for the paparazzi,” said agency spokesman Chris Coffey. “We have an advocacy role in getting film crews to come here, so we don’t want to be in a position where we’re announcing that 30 Rock is filming on 42nd Street and we’re giving the 20 people who stalk Alec Baldwin that information.”

• The hiring freeze Mayor Michael Bloomberg ordered recently should come as no surprise—he has ordered one in each of the last ﬁve years. Some of them have lasted for only a few days, while others have lasted for months, but it has become a routine part of his budget-management strategy. The new freeze will last “for the foreseeable future,” Budget Director Mark Page wrote in a memo to agency heads, though it exempts positions that affect public health and safety. Most of the previous freezes simply melted away without fanfare, as more and more new hires were approved

anyway, though last year’s freeze was modiﬁed so agencies can hire one new employee for every two who leave. “They have been extremely effective,” said City Hall spokesman Marc LaVorgna. “Head count is down by 16,000 over the last three years, in part due to these temporary freezes.”

• In the upcoming Nov. 1 jury trial of Assemblyman William Boyland Jr., the Southern District sought access to the legislator’s AOL email account as part of its pretrial discovery. According to documents ﬁled last week, the government is moving to quash a motion made by Boyland’s lawyer on his behalf to block access to the email, on the basis that AOL, with headquarters in Virginia, is outside the Southern District of New York. Counsel for the United States punched back, noting that an amendment to the occasionally infamous Patriot Act, allows “out of district warrants… be issued in non–terrorism related investigations.” Boyland’s motion to block access to his email, Southern District lawyers wrote, is “meritless.”

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CITY HALL

Andrew Schwartz

What’s the 311? The city’s catch-all information service is WORKING! Since the ﬁscal year began, its operators have ﬁelded more than 3.5 million calls on a variety of savory and unsavory topics. Here’s a sampling of what New Yorkers are calling about.

THE NEEDIEST • 2,045—Calls from enrolled tenants of the now-defunct Advantage Program, a rentalassistance program to move people out of homelessness • 1,058—Calls from landlords or brokers for help with the Advantage Program • 10,102—Calls made regarding SCRIE—a senior-citizen rentalexemption program Council members found was not being actively implemented by the Finance Department last month • 3,765—Calls about homelessshelter intake for families with children

LIVING/DYING (AND THINGS IN BETWEEN)

SHUT UP, NEW YORK

• 1,183—Calls made regarding a • 160—General bedbug inq night-noise survey uiries e nois ing • 4—Reports of dead ﬁsh • 174—Complaints regard in harbors • 19—Calls for information about from garbage trucks and bays the Potter’s Field cemetery on omplaints regarding noise • 23—Calls for informatio Com —C • 51— Hart Island n about the from animals other than dogs invasive plant hogweed • 478—Calls re: paternity• 39—Calls about abando • 13—Boat noise complaints acknowledgment forms ned ch e em nois ica n ls ctio stru Con 31— 4,9 • 324—Calls —Calls re: same-sex marriage • • 193—Wastewater-treatm complaints in New York City ent odor complaints nts plai com e nois • 1,721—Dog • 3—Newtown Creek odor • 26—Factory noise complaints complaints • 387—Ice cream truck noise • 260—Calls to report Asian complaints longhorned beetle infestation

• 6—Funeral-home pricing complaints

FUN (OR LACK THER EOF)

ELECTEDS

Andrew Schwartz

ation on • 10—Calls for inform MUTANTS • 2—Calls in search of City public rk Yo places to running for New barbecue • 11—Complaint ofﬁce s of radioactive mater • 1—Call searching for mayor’s ials a boat marina • 258—Calls to locate • 1— —Call in search of a sp senior staff rinkler to play in ntacting the • 134—Calls about co COME ON, IRENE • 3—Calls to ﬁle a datin governor of New York g-service information on for Calls —Calls 1,126— • complaint the mayor to • 109—Calls to invite hurricane evacuation • 162—Calls in search an event of botanic • 8,720—Calls for general gardens nding a letter • 926—Calls about se Hurricane Irene information • 1,157—Calls in searc to the mayor h of a zoo Hurricane Irene for Calls —Calls 2,488— • or an aquarium transportation information • 1,895—Calls regard ing beach closures due to health risks ANIMALS • 2—Complaints regard ing broken • 2,513—Calls to report abuse of NYC brand condoms animal other than carriage horse • 83—Calls to report abuse of BUSINESS AS USUAL carriage horse • 53—Calls —Calls about false advertising at area grocery stores • 65—Calls to report bats making • 5—Calls about false advertising contact with humans or animals at used-car dealerships • 181—Complaints of rodents in restaurant or other food-service establishments

CITY HALL

BUGS, RODENTS, PEST S, MISCELLANEOUS GROS S SMELLS

• 4—Ca —Calls lls for information about wild-animal exhibition permits BASEBALL the • 75—Calls for information about New York Mets • 68—Calls for information about Class A minor-league baseball team the Brooklyn Cyclones ut • 175—Calls for information abo the New York Yankees www.cityhallnews.com

JOBS • 640—Calls from people seeking employment at 311 call cen ters • 31—Calls about barbersh op license applications • 30—Calls about cabaret license applications • 71—Calls about licenses for ﬂea markets • 44—Calls about frozen-de ssert manufacturing licenses • 1—Call about weight-lossgroup license applications • 24—Requests for inform ation on beekeeping • 1—Call in search of inform ation about obtaining a coffee-r oaster permit

THE FOURTH ESTATE • 129—Calls from the media

AND…SCENE • 145—Complaints about movie ﬁlming crews in New York —Laura Nahmias lnahmias@cityhallnews.com OCTOBER 17, 2011

The Panel for Education Policy, seen here at a recent meeting, is not given enough time to review contracts before approving them, some members complain.

Courtesy of the UFT

Contract Killer DOE dodges outsidecontract oversight in new Council bill—for now BY ANDREW J. HAWKINS

he City Council hopes a new bill approved this month will shine a brighter spotlight on the billions of dollars New York City spends hiring outside contractors for city agencies— all of them, that is, except the largest and most expensive, the Department of Education. The Council approved the Outsourcing Accountability Act in early October after scandals like the CityTime payroll fraud exposed serious waste and criminality in the city’s multibillion-dollar outsidecontract services. Mayor Michael Bloomberg has vowed to veto the bill, arguing it will needlessly increase red tape, but Council Speaker Christine Quinn promises she has the votes to the override the veto. The bill will not, however, have much of an impact on the way the Department of Education doles out its outside contracts. Those contracts are approved by the Panel for Educational Policy, the oversight group that replaced the city’s Board of Education when the state Legislature handed control of the schools to the mayor in 2002. Eight of the 13 members are mayoral appointees, a fact that critics say stymies any meaningful debate over outside

OCTOBER 17, 2011

contracts. The panel is sometimes asked to vote on incomplete contracts, which some members say violates state law. “We’re not seeing the contracts at all,” said Patrick Sullivan, the Manhattan representative on the panel and a fierce critic of the DOE under Bloomberg. “The department will present to us summaries of what the deal is about, an outline of what they think the terms will be. But in many cases, the contracts aren’t even granted yet.” He added, “Rather than ask for approval of a contract, they’re asking for preapproval of something that they intend to do.” Spending on outside contracts at DOE has risen over the years, especially as the department ramps up its ambitious technology initiative, which aims to have 300,000 students at 75 schools using online learning tools within five years. The department’s contract budget is $4.5 billion this fiscal year, a 19 percent increase over the previous year. But as spending has increased, so have theft and waste. Federal authorities arrested a former technology consultant in April for allegedly stealing $3.6 million from the DOE to finance flashy cars and real estate speculation. In September, members of another technology firm, Future Technology Associates, were accused by the school system’s special investigator of pilfering $6.5 million from the agency. In both cases, authorities said the suspects pulled off their schemes because of “lax oversight.”

The Panel for Educational Policy was only given a day to review the contract for Future Technology Associates, Sullivan said. The company was accused of lying about its experience to get the no-bid contract in 2005, submitting false documents and vastly overstating how much it paid its workers. But when members of the Panel for Educational Policy requested more information about the FTA contract, Sullivan said, they were rebuffed. “They’ve never wanted to share any information, and they’ve always bristled at any oversight, even if it’s in the law,” Sullivan added. “And under Chancellor [Dennis] Walcott, it’s gotten dramatically worse.” The DOE did not respond to repeated requests for comment, but a September report in Gotham Schools said DOE counsel Michael Best claimed the panel’s contract-approval practices were in line with those of boards of education around the state. The Council’s new outsourcing bill requires city agencies to produce a costbenefit analysis of its contracting requests, a move that Quinn says will foster greater transparency and efficiency, but that may still not prevent outright theft of taxpayer dollars. “One can hardly imagine that, in the analysis of contracting out, you’d have a column that said how much criminality would be involved, potentially, in a contract,” Quinn said at the press conference announcing the bill. “This bill isn’t really focused on weeding out criminality in contracts. That’s an important thing,

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and that’s something we need to do in the way we implement contracts, background checks, things of that nature.” But the bill would have even less of an impact on the DOE because the agency technically isn’t under the Council’s jurisdiction—mayoral control is a state law, so the department is only subject to oversight by the Legislature in Albany. To that effect, Assemblywoman Cathy Nolan, a Queens Democrat who chairs the Education Committee, wants to amend the mayoral control law with more contract oversight. The 2009 reauthorization of the law required DOE to register its contracts with the city comptroller’s office, but only after they’ve been approved by the Panel for Educational Policy. Henry Garrido, assistant associate director at the public employee union DC 37, said the DOE also recently began reclassifying certain consultant contracts to obfuscate how much it spends on them, frustrating the intent of the law. “It seems to me that DOE follows their own rules,” Garrido said. Councilwoman Letitia James, an early proponent of the outsourcing bill, said she was disappointed the measure would have little effect on the DOE’s procurement process but is confident her colleagues at the state level can make a difference. Otherwise, she said, more scandals are sure to emerge. “We’re going to continue to have a number of CityTime incidents on our hands. The numbers are exploding,” James said. “We can’t seem to rein it in.” ahawkins@cityhallnews.com

CITY HALL

Cold Case Two city agencies sue each other to avoid contract talks BY DAVID SIMS

ontract negotiations between the city and municipal unions are often drawn-out affairs that descend into legal battles, arbitration and declarations of impasse. But for the detective investigators who work in city prosecutors’ offices, it hasn’t even gotten that far: After 40 years of bargaining with them, the city is claiming it doesn’t even employ them. About 300 detective investigators work for the city’s six district attorneys—one each in the five boroughs, plus the special narcotics prosecutor—and until recently bargained with the city’s Office of Labor Relations like most other municipal workers. But Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s office is now spending thousands of dollars in legal fees to back up its assertion that investigators are hired and fired by their DA bosses and should be negotiating with them, citing a change in civil-service law as reason for the turnaround. The DA’s offices, in turn, have hired outside counsel for the legal battle, which will be settled by the Office of Collective Bargaining in the coming months. Detective Investigators’ Association President John Fleming said both sides are trying to shirk their responsibilities— and sticking taxpayers with the bill. He wants 4 percent raises in each of the next two years, saying all other DA employees got similar raises in 2010. “They are trying to avoid negotiations with motion after motion,” Fleming said. “We’re always ready to sit down and do

what’s right. But there have been no negotiations.” When the union sought to declare an impasse and take the matter to a Public Employment Relations Board proceeding, Labor Relations Commissioner James Hanley said the city couldn’t be involved because it doesn’t employ the investigators. That set off a legal battle that required the services of two outside firms: Proskauer Rose (representing the mayor’s office) and Jackson Lewis (representing the DA’s offices, and led by the Queens DA). New York City has paid Proskauer Rose $726,502 for its services as of January, while Jackson Lewis has received $103,272, but neither side would say how much of that was spent on the detective investigators’ case. Queens DA spokesman Kevin Ryan said the city’s Law Department handled the procurement process for them: “That was the city’s decision when the OLR walked away and refused to have their own attorney…continue to represent the DAs.” Ryan said the fault lay with OLR for denying it employs the investigators, “despite the fact that the city issues and signs their paychecks, provides benefits, and handles a host of other employment issues for the detectives and other district-attorney employees.” He insisted the DA’s office was not avoiding negotiations by fighting the city’s claim. “There can be no meaningful negotiations without both the city and the districtattorney offices at the table,” Ryan said. “The city is a joint employer.… The city alone holds the purse strings and is the ultimate funding source for any financial package the detective investigators seek.” City Hall spokesman Marc LaVorgna said OLR had voluntarily bargained with detective investigators on behalf of the district attorneys in the past, until the Legislature took detective investigators from city bargaining laws and put them under state laws. With the union seeking the same negotiating pattern as the city’s other uniformed services, LaVorgna said, “the city has decided that it no longer wishes to be the bargaining representative for the District Attorney’s offices.” Fleming, for one, isn’t buying it, saying neither side ever tried to negotiate with his union in good faith. “We don’t care who it is,” he said, “as long as they have the authority.”

“We don’t care who it is, as long as they have the authority.”

News That’s Newsworthy NEW YORK PRESS ASSOCIATION

2010 Better Newspaper Contest Excellence Awards Coverage of Elections and Politics First Place & Second Place Coverage of Local Government First Place & Second Place Best Front Page Second Place

With additional reporting by Michael Mandelkern

Our Perspective As Poverty Rates Rise, So Do Calls for Living Wage By Stuart Appelbaum, President, Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union, RWDSU, UFCW

ince the launch of the Living Wage NYC campaign over a year ago, support has grown for the Fair Wages for New Yorkers Act, which would ensure that taxpayer money subsidizing large-scale developments would help create quality jobs for New York City’s communities. When the diverse coalition of union activists, community members and leaders, clergy, and elected officials who make up the Living Wage NYC campaign gather at Riverside Church on November 21 for a city-wide gathering, they will do so with the purpose of reversing some troubling economic trends in New York City. In September, new data from the U.S. Census Bureau showed us how dire the situation has become for working people in the city. The poverty rate in New York City is outpacing the increases in the country as a whole, rising to 20.1 percent last year, which is up from 18.7 percent in 2009. For children, the news was even worse. The poverty rate for New Yorkers under the age of 18 rose to 30 percent in 2010. The proliferation of low wages and poverty jobs is threatening the very fabric of our city, and stands to create an entire generation of workers who are relegated to lives where paying the rent and putting food on the table are a daily struggle. As workers fight for survival, deep-pocketed developers continue to profit from a city and a mayor who eagerly fork over taxpayer cash to fund the creation of developments that do nothing to give back to our communities. Certain people like the current way that redevelopment politics play out in our city, with the richest New Yorkers reaping skyrocketing profits at the expense of our communities. The Fair Wages for New Yorkers Act is the kind of game-changing legislation that keeps them up at night. Perhaps that’s why the Bloomberg administration just released a rigged study intended to slow down the living wage movement by claiming it will cost the city jobs. Economist James Parrot of the Fiscal Policy Institute calls the study — which is based upon an older version of the legislation, rendering much of the study moot — almost “deliberately misleading” and “so fraught with dubious assumptions it should be nominated for a science fiction award.” While the city is spending taxpayer money on sham studies and developments that do nothing for working New Yorkers, things are just getting worse. The Fair Wages for New Yorkers Act offers a real solution, one that many other cities have done successfully. The legislation won’t cost the city jobs; in fact, quite the opposite. It will create quality jobs that can build better lives for countless New Yorkers, instead of trapping them in low wage employment that propagates an unending cycle of poverty.

Visit us on the web at

www.rwdsu.org

editor@cityhallnews.com

CITY HALL

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OCTOBER 17, 2011

¿Si Se Puede?

Why the city’s Latino political base hasn’t produced a credible citywide candidate

Still, no Latino has ever held citywide office in New York. One potential candidate to be the first is Bronx Borough President Ruben Diaz Jr., who is young, charismatic and experienced but is little-known outside the Bronx—except for helping kill a plan to redevelop the Kingsbridge Armory in a dispute over wages there. Operatives said that Diaz’s stance on the armory would hurt him in fund-raising from the real estate and business lobbies, and that he had not courted liberal organizations widely enough to make up the difference. But he could make up the

By Laura Nahmias

ore than 860,000 of the city’s registered 4.2 million voters identify as Latino. But that sizable Latino voting bloc has yet to produce a credible citywide candidate for 2013, just as it failed to do so in 2009—a potential anomaly that seems to indicate a power vacuum in the Latino political community. A number of obstacles stand in the way—from what some consider to be Latino political subservience to Democratic machine politics, to a spate of scandals in the Bronx, to the relative youth and inexperience of Latino politicians in the outer boroughs. And though the potential that candidates will leap into the fray is still high, few are optimistic that one will emerge in time. “It’s a little bit unusual,” said Michael Jones-Correa, a government professor at Cornell University. “In almost every mayoral election cycle, there’s been at least a mention of a Latino candidate.” “There is a crisis of leadership in the Latino community,” said Jaime Estades, the president of the Latino Leadership Academy. “The Latino politicians, they just go through the motions.” Estades argued that Latino City Council members were content to follow policy positions set by Council Speaker Christine Quinn, who has eased away from progressive stances in recent years. Others said potential Latino candidates believe they must win with the support of county Democratic leaders before pursuing citywide positions. “The ‘wait your turn’ game of Democratic politics hurts the community’s possibility of growth in Latino leadership,” said political commentator Gerson Borrero, who said the city hadn’t had a reputable candidate since Fernando Ferrer won the Democratic primary for mayor in 2005. Ferrer suffered that year when he did not receive the backing of Assemblyman Vito Lopez, leader of the Brooklyn Democratic organization, said Councilman Fernando Cabrera. “Ferrer was a good example of ‘a house divided cannot stand,’ ” Cabrera said. But Ferrer himself said it was a mistake to think county leaders anointed candidates, and he strongly believed someone from the Latino community would run. “There’s a variety of ways you can get there,” he suggested. “You can get to be

OCTOBER 17, 2011

“There’s a new generation warming up in the bull pen, and they look interesting to me, and I like many of them very, very much, and they ought to be supported and nurtured.”

Thomas James

a very successful borough president, like I was. You get to be a very successful Congress member, you get to be a very successful senator or Council member, and you can do it without the help of county.” Others suggested that the city’s best Latino leadership was being groomed for state and federal office rather than citywide positions. Rising stars like Sens. Gustavo Rivera and Adriano Espaillat are said to have sidestepped city office altogether, leaving an age gap between older machine politicians and the young Latinos now filling the City Council. Espaillat, for example, is said to be considering running for a seat in Congress. The federal level has its advantages: Politicians can control funds for their districts without having to kiss the rings of local Democratic Party leaders. That strategy is not necessarily a nega-

tive one. Some Latino politicians said that while representation was crucial, the city would benefit from any minority or strong progressive Democrat winning in citywide office. Candidates such as Comptroller John Liu and Councilwoman Letitia James, who are seen as potential candidates for mayor and public advocate, respectively, share political positions with some Latino politicians on issues like immigration or poverty. “Black, Latino or Asian, I want to see a candidate of color making the best decisions to compete in a fair way and fulfill one of the citywide positions,” said Dominican Councilman Ydanis Rodriguez. Former comptroller Bill Thompson, who is black, is the only minority candidate to have declared for the 2013 mayor’s race, though Comptroller John Liu, who is Asian, may run for mayor as well.

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difference with matching funds when the time comes, suggested Scott Levenson, a consultant from the Advance Group who works with Diaz. “I think you’d be crazy to not recognize that someone like Ruben is poised to be our next generation of citywide leadership,” Levenson said. Another possible candidate is Adolfo Carrión Jr., the former Bronx borough president, who now heads the regional office of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development. He has more than $2 million in campaign funds left over from an aborted run for comptroller in 2009, and may try for the office again in 2013. Several operatives said it was too early in the race to declare a power vacuum. Ferrer scoffed at the idea of a crisis of Latino leadership. The lack of Latino candidates at this point, he said, was no big deal. “It just is—it’s neither positive nor negative,” he said. “I don’t think there’s any deep meaning here that we’re all missing.” He cited Diaz Jr., Espaillat and Sens. José Serrano and José Peralta as some of the potential candidates he was most excited to watch. “There’s a new generation warming up in the bull pen, and they look interesting to me,” he said, “and I like many of them very, very much, and they ought to be supported and nurtured.” lnahmias@cityhallnews.com

CITY HALL

THE BREAST CENTER NEW YORK DOWNTOWN HOSPITAL Dr. Robbi Kempner, Chief of Breast Surgery at New York Downtown Hospital, will sponsor our Hospital’s first Mammogram-a-thon at its new Wellness & Prevention Center, on Thursday, October 27th, from 8 a.m. until 6 p.m.

A CALL FOR www.nyCdIA.COm

Please call (212) 312-5179 on weekdays between 9 a.m. and 5 p.m. to schedule your screening mammogram appointment for that day. Most insurance plans will be accepted. In 2010, an estimated 207,000 U.S. women were diagnosed with invasive breast cancer. In 2010, there were more than 2.5 million breast cancer survivors in the U.S. “A mammogram takes ten minutes and can save your life. If problems are found early, new treatments can be most effective.”

Early detection saves lives! For an appointment with Dr. Kempner, please call (646) 588-2578

WELLNESS & PREVENTION CENTER

JUSTICE

The Detective Investigators’ Association of the City of New York (DIA) represents a unique segment of the law enforcement community — District Attorney investigators — who are employed by the five District Attorneys’ and the Special Narcotics Prosecutor.

“Even though

We are police officers who trace our roots back to Thomas E. Dewey’s handpicked “Rackets Busters” of the 1930s when we successfully tackled organized crime and political corruption in New York City.

raises for

Today, our more than 300 investigators are still handpicked by the District Attorney and must possess significant law enforcement experience to be considered for the position. We work alongside the NYPD, the State Police, FBI, DEA, and Homeland Security, conducting some of the most sensitive investigations involving complex frauds, political corruption, organized crime, family violence, narcotics trafficking, and gang homicides.

bargain with

Recent events have threatened the ability of the District Attorneys to retain our most qualified investigators. The City of New York and the District Attorneys are ignoring their obligation to Detective Investigators by refusing to meet at the bargaining table to work on a successor deal to a long-expired contract. Collective bargaining plays a critical role in defining the workplace. It affects working conditions, recruitment, and retention strategy. It is a staple for any democratic society.

the District Attorneys have provided all other employees, they refuse to Detective Investigators. The District Attorneys have taken the extreme measure of hiring private counsel to fight the union. This is not a prudent use of public

Even though the District Attorneys have funds.” provided raises for all other employees, they refuse to bargain with Detective Investigators. The District Attorneys have taken the extreme measure of hiring private counsel to fight the union. This is not a prudent use of public funds. Such actions have no place in a City with such a proud tradition in labor relations. New York is not Wisconsin, Ohio, or New Jersey. The shortterm effects have already been felt — morale is at an all-time low and the most seasoned Detectives are already starting to leave. The long-term effects will truly be devastating. Our Detectives are the primary investigative arm of the District Attorney. The criminal justice system, the community, and the City cannot afford to lose Detective Investigators under any circumstances.

170 William Street, New York, NY 10038 Telephone: (212) 312-5000 www.downtownwellness.org CITY HALL

The City of New York and the District Attorneys CANNOT continue to shirk their responsibilities. We deserve justice. — John M. Fleming, President www.cityhallnews.com

OCTOBER 17, 2011

Andrew Schwartz

back from viewers is on social media. The sample is skewed.

CH: Nicole, you work for an

For NY’s leaders in government, business, public affairs and the media

entirely online news organization, yet television and print publications have based their reports on your stories. How have you built that following, and what impact do you think your organization has on the news industry?

Nicole

The Evolution of the New News Cycle

n the first panel of a four-part series sponsored by City Hall and AT&T, six panelists—Ben Smith of Politico, New York City Deputy Mayor Howard Wolfson, NY1 morning anchor Pat Kiernan, MWW Group CEO Michael Kempner, DNAinfo editor Nicole Bode and Nick Judd of the Personal Democracy Forum’s techPresident blog—weighed in on the opportunities and challenges facing media and government as they struggle to master the digital tools of the future. What follows is an edited transcript.

City Hall: Can anyone control a message any more?

Ben Smith, reporter, Politico: The White House constantly gets derailed. It’s both the day in and day out. They’ve ended the practice of just trying to put out one message and stick to it. They’ve given in to the idea that there’s just endless

OCTOBER 17, 2011

incoming and you are just giving out files. A small thing can always get magnified into a big thing.

CH: Given the new forms of instant media, how do public relations firms keep track of the various different news accounts that media outlets release all day and night? Michael Kempner, CEO, MWW Group: So much of it is out of your control, but so much is in your control, as well. It has always been speed to market. It was always about the first 24 hours. Now it’s closer to the first 24 seconds. How do you communicate across all screens, pretty much at the same time, pretty much before someone else has the opportunity to set the debate? The control isn’t what it used to be, but more so than what people would assume. CH: Howard, did you make a conscious decision to turn your Twitter feed

into a medium to confirm or refute the factual accuracy of stories?

Howard Wolfson, deputy mayor for governmental relations and communications: It’s sort of a conscious decision. You have a different role and responsibility in government than you do on a campaign. Your voice on a campaign can be a little edgier, a little more confrontational. When you work in the government and you are paid by the taxpayer, you have a different sense of obligations and responsibilities. CH: Pat, how representative is a conversation on Twitter of the city’s general sentiments on current issues? Pat Kiernan, anchor, NY1: We can be fooled into thinking the conversation on Twitter is a proxy for the feelings of the electorate. This group that is actively engaged in this 24-second news cycle is not necessarily representative of the audience out there. Most of the feedback I get

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Bode, senior editor, DNAinfo: If you influence the influencers, if you make information available to the people who make information available to the rest of the people, then you build your credibility through the credibility of other people who trust you enough to share your information. It’s almost like a mini newspaper, just on Twitter.

CH: Do you think Twitter could have the same impact that community newspapers did 40 years ago? Bode: It’s so stunning how people have reached out and been so desperate and thirsty for news. People tell us we are the CNN of Washington Heights and Inwood. It’s just because there are particular kinds of street areas where they weren’t getting that sort of coverage before. CH: Nick, who is using this technology but aren’t considered insiders? Nick Judd, associate editor, Personal Democracy

Forum’s

techPresident

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Kempner: It’s less about the tools of

Kempner: It seems like this is some

the moment, because they will change, than about how people use the tools. People like Ben; to those that follow him and read him, I would say he has a big role in influencing the influencers. Those who are credible sources to other people are magnified. For us it’s a combination of relevancy of trust and influencing the influencers.

massive revolution, but it’s really a fast evolution. I think some industries are better than others in trying to figure it out. I thought it was the dumbest thing in the world, and then I use it and still think it’s kind of dumb, but I use it because I need to, and then I learned why it’s not dumb.

Audience member: How does a

CH: Are bloggers the new filter

news organization’s budget impact how much news they are able to cover?

of media? What forms of media do communications apparatuses worry about?

Nicole Bode blog: People of color are more likely to be on social media. You have the real-people conversations people are having on Twitter about things tangentially related to politics. They are talking about their paychecks; they are talking about rent; they are talking about where they are going out at night and chatting with their friends, but they aren’t necessarily part of the insiders’ group.

Wolfson: You have to be beyond just the people who are reading the newspaper. There’s enough capacity to worry about anything. We don’t have a

Kiernan: I have 15,000 followers on Twitter, and over the course of a weekday morning over one million people will tune in to me on NY1 at a given point. When you’ve got them for 15 or 30 minutes, you have to make the right decisions on what

facts into an argument already so shaped by partisanship doesn’t tend to change people’s mind.

CH: Does the conversation start with people who are influential in social media or traditional news outlets? Wolfson: If you are below the age of 40, you are much more likely to get your news online. You can bet that as those people age, they’re going to decide to become avid TV watchers like their parents, or you can bet that they’ll decide to stay online, and their nightly audience will shrink. I’ll take the bet that they’re going to stay online. People are getting their news elsewhere. There are other means and platforms that have risen in importance.

Smith: There’s a huge audience of people that know as much as the insiders. There are no real insiders. You could probably put anyone in this room on CNN or one of the morning shows, and they would know as much as any random commentator out there. CH: Pat, how do you decide what to air on television within the limited amount of broadcast time available?

Michael Kempner

Howard Wolfson New York City version of Politico yet. With the exception of NY1, we don’t have a version of a 24/7 cable industry devoted to covering politics in New York in the way that MSNBC is doing on a national level. If this is what you do, and you love it, consider us lucky to be in the last city in America—probably forever—that has four daily newspapers covering us on a daily basis.

CH: Ben, has a modern-day reporter’s news judgment changed?

Smith: Some of the reporting is observational but isn’t interesting. You used to have to imagine your audience. It’s nice

energy do you spend focusing on Twitter while reporting or working for a public relations firm?

community-board meetings. I don’t think that has changed in politics. You have to be at a place with a person to get news. Once you have that foundation, then you can get into the instant forms of communications. Being on the ground matters.

they need to get out the door. Twitter alerts you to stories. It’s an instant method of feedback in your balance of a particular story.

CH: Michael, how do you reach out to a mass audience through the multiple forms of new media?

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past the group think among those engaged in the political conversation and stay rooted in basic reporting?

Smith: Twitter isn’t a new conversation; it’s just taking place there. It shapes this consensus, and everyone is talking about the same thing. If you are outside of the conversation, it doesn’t fit. Introducing

Smith: Is The New York Times a business? Is NY1 a business? The media hasn’t always been the greatest business, but it’s always managed. I know local blogging is a great business.

Audience member: How much

Bode: There is no news without the

CH: Ben, how important is it to go

Nick Judd

Bode: There are plenty of places that are happy to just get some kid out of school. In terms of the legacy of where this is going to end, I don’t think we’ll really know for another 5 or 10 years yet. I think time will tell.

CH: Nicole, do you get higher-quality interviews from community-board meetings than from monitoring chat rooms?

Pat Kiernan

Kiernan: This is the discussion of a lot of blogging. It is still often originating its content off of old media. In terms of the number of journalists working at those enterprises versus the traditional, it’s a fraction. I don’t think anybody has come up with a business model yet.

Smith: My job as a reporter has

Ben Smith when you don’t have to imagine the audience because you know exactly who they are. You know a lot of them personally; you hear from them directly.

CH: Michael, how hard was it to keep up with the changes in technology?

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changed. What was once a publisher’s job has become a big part of a reporter’s job. I email out my story; I put it on Twitter; I engage with people in various ways. This used to be a function carried out by guys lugging stacks of paper around.

Wolfson: I can have that conversation with you publicly and say, “Hey, you got this wrong.” That is an escalation of what was frequently a private conversation, but it is more and more the case that people who are written about have recourse in a public way. OCTOBER 17, 2011

FULL DISCLOSURE By Chris Bragg

Bill de Blasio, George Soros and the war on Citizens United Daniel S. Burnstein

OCTOBER 17, 2011

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CITY HALL

ne autumn night last year, about 50 people gathered in the sprawling Fifth Avenue apartment of billionaire financier George Soros for a panel discussion on a topic that was roiling the liberal political establishment. The U.S. Supreme Court had issued its Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission decision in January, allowing individuals, unions and corporations to engage in unlimited spending on political campaigns. Secret corporate cash funneled through shadowy nonprofits had immediately flooded the country’s political system, helping Republicans win a record number of seats in Congress. Soros and his cadre were looking for a way to fight back. One of the three panelists was Public Advocate Bill de Blasio, who after less than a year in the city’s secondhighest-ranking office was already considered a leading Democratic candidate for mayor. He had become one of the Left’s leading voices on the impact of Citizens United, and had a compelling story to tell of how he was using his poorly funded, little-known office to fight back. Over the previous year, de Blasio had used his seat on the board of New York City’s pension funds and the bully pulpit of his office to cow Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, Citigroup and J.P. Morgan into disclosing their political contributions—and in some cases, to agree to not make such donations altogether. “I really didn’t know Soros before this,” de Blasio recalled. “At the end of it, I talked to him a bit, and he expressed some appreciation for the notion of finding a constructive way to address this. He said, ‘Stay in touch,’ and we did.” He added, “Then we went to his staff and said, ‘Look, we’re trying to build this out nationally, and here’s an idea how to do it.’ ” The resulting arrangement has given de Blasio an unprecedented platform to try to stem a flood of corporate money that he contends will corrode American democracy. It has also given him some strange allies to do so: He works in a taxpayer-funded office; his effort is funded through a related nonprofit that benefits from a close connection to government; and his main benefactor, Soros, funnels millions of dollars to his favorite causes through some of the same campaign-finance loopholes he aims to close. De Blasio is walking a tightrope, pushing an ambitious national campaign to restrict money in politics while perhaps becoming a cog in a larger effort funded by a single-minded billionaire. But the public advocate strenuously disputes the idea that Soros’ backing has made him a proxy in the longrunning war between the Left and Right. “We had been doing this for a year before the funding ever existed,” de Blasio said. “This is work that’s been going on, in one form or another, since Watergate.”

“D

id you hear the big news?” de Blasio said, immediately after sitting down for a late lunch at a downtown boulangerie he favors because the menu has calorie counts. “We got a Republican state rep from North Carolina,” he said, beaming like a kid at Christmas. “And quite Republican, I’m told.” It was the first concrete step toward making his national crusade truly bipartisan: Until recently, it consisted only of seven Democrats from five states, including New York State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli. De Blasio launched the Coalition for Accountability in Political Spending, or CAPS, this spring, but the effort really took shape in July with a $400,000 contribution from Soros’ nonprofit, the Open Society Institute. The entire budget for de Blasio’s office, by contrast, is $2.2 million. The money went to the Fund for Public Advocacy— a nonprofit founded in 2002 by then Public Advocate Betsy Gotbaum to supplement the public advocate’s

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shrinking budget with private support—though it had never accepted a grant this size before. CAPS is the vehicle de Blasio hopes to use to combat Citizens United across the country—franchising it to the offices of politicians, union leaders and other leaders who sit on state pension-fund boards. Those pension funds are major stockholders in corporate America, de Blasio explained, and when they vote their shares against large corporate spending in politics, their voices matter. To lend credibility to the Democrat-heavy initiative, Kate Coyne-McCoy, the recently hired executive director of CAPS, has been trying frantically to get a Republican elected official—any Republican—to jump on board. Coyne-McCoy first tried to get a big-name Washington, D.C., Republican lawmaker to commit, with no luck. Then she mined state legislatures until she found a Republican state representative in North Carolina named William Current, who had sponsored a bill to limit the influence of money in politics. Before signing on, Current asked for Coyne-McCoy’s résumé, and was not exactly impressed. He is against samesex marriage and abortion; Coyne-McCoy had spent the prior 12 years training candidates backed by EMILY’s List, the abortion-rights group with one of the country’s biggest 527s, a lightly regulated type of political spending group that can take unlimited donations. A former congressional candidate, she is also known as something of a liberal firebrand in her home state of Rhode Island. “We had some tense conversations,” Coyne-McCoy said of Current. “We both like cooking collard greens, we both like oysters, and we both believe in the principle that corporations are not people—and that’s probably all we have to talk about.” De Blasio insists his cause is above partisan politics. The grant proposal he submitted to Soros’ Open Society Institute said CAPS would have bipartisan makeup and leadership; with its ties to his taxpayer-funded office, it must be apolitical to be legal. Yet in the months since Citizens United opened the floodgates, most unregulated donations have come from corporations and gone to Republican candidates—so curbing it would essentially help Democrats, who have seen less help from newly unlimited union spending. De Blasio argues that regardless of politics, it makes sense to focus on political money spent by corporations, since their donations far outstrip those from unions and individuals. “The individual money is bad enough and counts for a lot of the change we’ve already seen,” de Blasio said. “Corporate money is the much bigger sum that must be kept out of the system. And that was what animated this effort from Day One.” He does not deny that CAPS is staffed with longtime liberals, or that most of the money he is likely to raise from the project will come from left-leaning donors. Yet he insists he is committed to goring anyone’s ox, from Left or Right, if they insist on keeping unregulated, anonymous donations in politics. Before last year’s congressional elections, for example, he sent letters to 16 issue-oriented nonprofits asking them to disclose their anonymous electioneering efforts—most of them leaning right, but some to the left. De Blasio has lofty goals for CAPS in next year’s elections: Introducing campaign-finance-reform bills in at least a dozen states; getting at least a quarter of the S&P 100 companies to commit to altering their campaignspending policies; lining up one trillion dollars’ worth of government pension-fund investors who will prod corporations to reform their political giving policies; and securing the backing at least two elected officials from every state, including as many Republicans as possible. Those goals also play into the larger partisan dynamic. In a post–Citizens United world, even a billionaire like Soros or cash-flush public-sector unions cannot compete

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Strange Bedfellows De Blasio’s campaign-finance reformers know the loopholes

ome of the people involved in Bill de Blasio’s efforts to blunt the Citizens United campaignfinance decision do not exactly come from good-government groups, but they do have deep connections in the country’s liberal political circles. That’s a helpful quality in the underfunded office, which has its paltry budget supplemented by the nonprofit Fund for Public Advocacy, but it creates some glaring ironies: Many of the people now working with de Blasio to get money out of politics used to try hard to get money into politics. In July, de Blasio hired Kate Coyne-McCoy to be the executive director of the Coalition for Accountability in Political Spending (CAPS), a project of the fund. The firebrand former Rhode Island Democratic congressional candidate had previously worked for EMILY’s List, training women who support abortion rights to run for office. In 2005 EMILY’s List launched a lawsuit that successfully overturned some disclosure requirements in the McCain-Feingold campaign-finance law, in what was seen as a precursor to Citizens United. Now Coyne-McCoy’s main focus is to round up both Democratic and Republican elected officials who will support CAPS. De Blasio also appointed several well-known liberals to the fund’s board, including public relations maven Ken Sunshine and Harold Ickes, the former deputy chief to President Bill Clinton. Ickes left the White House in 1996 amid a probe into his involvement in the president’s questionable campaignfinance practices. Ickes went on to run the Media Fund, a 527 group funded by George Soros that supported Sen. John Kerry’s 2004 presidential campaign—an effort that escalated the money war between Left and Right. He did not respond to requests for comment. De Blasio described Ickes, a former colleague in the administration of Mayor David Dinkins, as a “true mentor,” but one with no daily operations role at the fund. “He brings a wealth of management experience to the board but is not involved in the day-to-day operations,” de Blasio said. In March, de Blasio hired a senior policy advisor, James Berger, who had previously served as vice president of a secretive Washington, D.C., public relations firm called LawMedia Group. The firm has a reputation for ghostwriting “Astroturf” coalition op-eds for large companies, obscuring their influence in federal lobbying efforts. De Blasio said Berger had not worked much, if at all, on anti– Citizens United efforts and had left at the end of August. Of course, these types of connections to Washington Democratic power brokers can also be helpful for de Blasio’s own campaign fund-raising. Last December Ickes, Sunshine and former congressional candidate Reshma Saujani—who a month later would land a job in the public advocate’s office—served on the host committee for a posh de Blasio fund-raiser at the Waldorf Astoria. —Chris Bragg OCTOBER 17, 2011

De Blasio hired aide who hired his wife

ast January, Bill de Blasio hired high-profile former congressional candidate Reshma Saujani as Deputy Advocate for Special Initiatives, with the responsibility of overseeing the office’s nonprofit arm, the Fund for Public Advocacy. But for all her fund-raising skill, connections and smarts, Saujani’s hiring rankled some within the small, poorly funded office—especially since she initially came into the public advocate’s orbit after hiring de Blasio’s wife, Chirlane McCray, as a well-paid consultant on her campaign for Congress. Still, both she and de Blasio said her hiring was simply a natural fit. “As I got to know Reshma, she had a real track record of tremendous relationships, and she had done good work,” de Blasio said. “I was seen by a lot of people as the Wall Street candidate, and Bill has often been seen as the labor guy,” Saujani said. “But we’re both a lot more complex and have broader relationships than that. You can’t pigeonhole either of us.” The relationship began during de Blasio’s 2009 campaign for public advocate, when he spent $1.56 million on mailers produced by the Mack/Crounse firm in Washington, D.C. Six months after he won, McCray, a onetime speechwriter for former comptroller Bill Thompson, landed a job as a senior vice president at Mack/Crounse, though the company apparently does not have a New York office. A month later, McCray landed her first client—Saujani, who was running against longtime Upper East Side Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney. She was the first Indian-American to run for Congress, and the race attracted major attention for Saujani’s embrace of the financial sector, where she used to work as a hedge-fund lawyer. But much like the rest of the city’s Democratic establishment, de Blasio ended up endorsing Maloney. Following Saujani’s lopsided primary loss, de Blasio created a new $67,000-a-year position for the 35-year-old. Saujani, who has said she is interested in another run for political office, has since brought on two former high-ranking campaign aides to serve as the Fund for Public Advocacy’s two staffers. All three are getting paid with taxpayer money, though Saujani said they would at some point transition to the fund’s payroll. It is unclear how much de Blasio’s wife was paid for her work on Saujani’s campaign, since neither her name nor that of Mack/ Crounse appears in the campaign’s Federal Election Commission reports. Saujani said McCray was paid through a Mack/Crounse subsidiary called Blue Works. Records show the campaign paid $210,000 to the company, which was formed weeks after McCray joined Mack/ Crouse, and which listed its address as Mack/Crounse’s office. De Blasio said the chain of hiring was a natural connection. He and his wife had a long relationship with Jim Crounse of the Mack/ Crounse Group dating back a decade, he said. Saujani’s background as a bundler for Hillary Clinton, her work as a financial-sector attorney and her connections in the South Asian community made her a great fund-raiser, he said. “There are three different people involved here, and I have my own individual realities with all three of them,” de Blasio said. “To me it all makes total sense.” Saujani has been highly effective since landing the job, growing the Fund’s treasury $50,000 to $625,000. Besides leading the fund’s anti–Citizens United efforts, Saujani runs a citywide survey of the needs of immigrant business owners, who often are unaware of government services available to them. The fund is also conducting a three-year study of special-education needs in the city and promoting the DREAM Act, which would allow the children of some undocumented immigrants to become permanent residents. “I’m a little bit of a nerd, and I like to talk to as many policy wonks as I can around New York City,” Saujani said. “So I don’t like to reinvent the wheel. I like to identify where the gaps are.” —Chris Bragg

OCTOBER 17, 2011

e Blasio is a big man in a small office. At a lanky 6’6”, de Blasio towers over other elected officials at press conferences. His aides often have to rush to raise microphone stands before he speaks. At one event this spring in Brooklyn, City Council Speaker Christine Quinn tried to speak after him, but her face was completely obscured by a huge “Public Advocate of New York” sign on the podium. “You have to wear your platforms when you’re with Bill,” Quinn joked. But Quinn, who may face off against de Blasio in the 2013 Democratic mayoral primary, has often had the last laugh: She and Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who has repeatedly called for eliminating the public advocate’s office, have continually slashed de Blasio’s budget. During de Blasio’s nearly two years in office, his efforts to combat Citizens United have brought the only shred of national attention to his otherwise obscure post. On a local level, he is best-known for creating a watch list of deadbeat landlords and for weighing in on virtually every issue imaginable, one of the few real powers he possesses. His press aide debriefs him on the news every day at 6 a.m. He subsequently has opined on everything from Palestinian statehood to reports of a decades-old bar brawl involving Republican Congressman Michael Grimm to whether a bike lane should be installed in Bay Ridge. “Just the other day, I had a press release about potholes,” de Blasio noted when asked whether Citizens United was outside the scope of his office. When the Supreme Court issued the Citizens United decision in January 2010, de Blasio had been in office less than a month, already under threat. Bloomberg would soon appoint a charterrevision commission that could recommend eliminating the office; Comptroller John Liu, the other citywide officeholder, suggested usurping de Blasio’s position to become second in line for succession to the mayor. De Blasio could have established his place in the political firmament by focusing on meat-andpotatoes local issues instead of a complicated topic with questionable political value for 2013. But the cause seemed an emotional one for de Blasio. He found out about Citizens United when he was live on Brian Lehrer’s WNYC radio show discussing Bloomberg’s State of the City address. With no advance preparation, he immediately dissected and denounced its implications, showing an insight few others seemed to possess at the time. “I was stunned,” de Blasio recalled. “When

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Sebastian Derungs/Wikipedia

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with vast corporate treasuries that are disproportionately helping Republicans. And there are relatively few ways for Soros and others on the Left to fight back: The decision was so broadly written that there is little chance for appeal. Congress could act, but the chances of that happening are practically nonexistent. That has left statehouses and local pensionfund boards as the battleground for the Left’s burgeoning movement to shift the political calculus back—and de Blasio, by choice or by circumstance, is on the frontlines. “Wealthy individuals have always spent their billions on politics, whether it be the Koch brothers or George Soros,” said Baruch College political science professor Doug Muzzio. “But Citizens United fundamentally alters the playing field. Even George Soros can’t compete.”

George Soros

lawyers I knew started to tell me just how total it was, I literally felt like this was one of the breaking points in my time as an American citizen.” De Blasio says he first became alarmed about the pervasive role of big money in politics while managing Hillary Clinton’s 2000 campaign for Senate. Nearly $70 million was raised and spent on the race. He has also long been involved in causes favorable to unions, helping found the laborbacked Working Families Party in 1998. After his election to the City Council in 2001, de Blasio sponsored a bill allowing unions to give more money from their treasuries to political candidates. They can give $2,750 each, while corporations cannot give any money directly to New York City campaigns. In 2009, de Blasio won a hard-fought citywide election for the public advocate’s office with the strong backing of the WFP. He relied on Data and Field Services, a for-profit campaign operation run from the WFP’s office, leading to a federal probe into whether the party significantly undercharged for campaign services. The WFP later agreed to sever its relationship with the company, and was cleared of any wrongdoing. And as de Blasio eyes a 2013 run, most pundits believe his best and only shot at Gracie Mansion lies in running to the left and affixing himself to the muscle and money of his union allies. But in his efforts to combat Citizens United, he has affixed himself to one of the biggest political spenders of all.

oros has given away an estimated $7 billion for a range of causes, according to his official website, but he may draw the most attention for his largesse to progressive political causes in America. The reclusive Hungarian billionaire, who did not respond to requests for comment, has given heavily through his Open Society Institute since the 1990s in support of campaign-finance reform, including to a dozen groups that spurred the 2002 McCainFeingold law. In fact, it is difficult to find a campaignfinance group without at least some Soros backing. At the same time, Soros has donated millions to Democratic partisan efforts. In 2004, he poured $23 million into generically named 527 groups— groups that were once seen as a major loophole in the campaign-finance system—that attempted to unseat President George W. Bush. Four months after Citizens United invalidated parts of the McCain-Feingold law, Soros made his first donation to one of the so-called

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“Super PAC”s that can now receive unlimited corporate, individual and union contributions, giving $75,000 to a proDemocratic group. In a New Yorker article last year, Soros’ spokesman said his boss’ heavy spending to influence American politics is different from that of the Koch brothers, David and Charles, who have spent heavily to bolster Republicans and build up the Tea Party. Soros discloses his giving on the Open Society Institute’s publicly available tax returns, unlike the Koch brothers, he said—and while the Kochs give to causes that help their business interests, Soros gives on principle. To the far right-wing, Soros has become an evil overlord with a shadowy worldwide influence; websites are filled with conspiracy theories about how he spends his money. His involvement in de Blasio’s efforts might make Glenn Beck run to his chalkboard and start drawing Venn diagrams. Last year, for example, de Blasio pursued a case against the Minnesota-based Target Corporation. The company gave $150,000 to an organization spearheaded by the state’s Chamber of Commerce, which then spent to help Tom Emmer, the anti–gay marriage Republican nominee for governor, who had also opposed a law combating bullying of gay youths. In response, de Blasio’s office organized a rally in protest with MoveOn.org—a pro-Democrat group that Soros has given $2.5 million. The ensuing bad press for Target led to slippage in its stock price, forcing the company to make concessions on its campaign-spending policy. This summer, in advance of Target’s annual shareholders meeting, de Blasio went even further, threatening to use his spot on a city pension-fund board to force out members of the company’s board of directors if Target didn’t promise to ban most corporate donations. De Blasio didn’t attend Target’s shareholder meeting, but others with Soros connections did. Mike Dean, the director of Minnesota Common Cause, whose parent organization has received millions from the Open Society Institute, spoke at the meeting on behalf of an activist shareholder group called the Tides Foundation—which got about 5 percent of its total $112 million budget in 2009 from the Open Society Institute. The list of Soros-funded groups working with de Blasio is long: Common Cause’s national office; the advocacy group Public Citizen; the D.C.-based Center for Political Accountability. That group got almost half its funding from Soros in 2008, and is now deeply involved in New York City’s main pension fund’s efforts to rein in corporate political influence. The relationship is close enough that the 600-word sample shareholder resolution that the pension fund sends corporations, banning them from making most campaign contributions, is taken directly from the Center for Political Accountability website. De Blasio strenuously disputes the idea that his office has become a pawn in a larger war between Right and Left.

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“Common Cause has been a respectable organization for 30 years,” he said. “I can tell you, they’re not doing this because of George Soros.” But what if the situation were reversed? If Republican House Speaker John Boehner set up a nonprofit arm of Congress, funded by the Koch brothers, with the aim of limiting the political influence of unions? “I think I already addressed your question,” de Blasio responded, a little testily. “We’re going to be equal-opportunity in who we’re going after.”

ut even some staunch de Blasio supporters see contradictions in these types of arrangements. Bill Samuels, the reform-minded multimillionaire funder of the New Roosevelt Initiative, a Democrat-friendly New York independent expenditure group, has already endorsed de Blasio for mayor in 2013. After mulling the question, Samuels said that while de Blasio’s efforts were worthy, he was wrong to focus only on corporate influence. “I am pleased that he is spending political capital on this issue, which does not really register with the average voter for 2013,” Samuels said. “But when I meet the next time with Kate Coyne-McCoy, I’m going to bring up the fact that targeting one group in isolation is not fair.” Some people on the Right also dismiss de Blasio’s arguments. “Over the past decade, George Soros has been a pervasive force that has outspent the vast majority of American corporations,” said Brad Smith, the Republican former chairman of the Federal Elections Commission, who runs the conservative Center for Competitive Politics. “I don’t know why you would say corporate spending is more corrupt or unequal than that by George Soros. It really seems like a pretense to effectively silence political opposition.” Yet the battle is growing louder. After watching the Republicans’ success in 2010, Democrats are copying their formula, setting up Super PACs that can take both unlimited corporate and union contributions, as well as political nonprofits that can take uncapped, undisclosed donations. Priorities USA, a group supporting Democrats cofounded by a former spokesman for President Barack Obama, is modeled after Crossroads GPS, the Karl Rove-founded group that washed the 2010 elections with secret Republican campaign money. When de Blasio began his anti–Citizens United efforts, Republicans were the ones primarily exploiting the decision. Now both parties are doing so, putting de Blasio in a more complicated position. He said he opposes the creation of Priorities USA. But he understands why Democrats would not unilaterally disarm in the money war. “I’m not comfortable with a Democratic group that doesn’t disclose,” de Blasio said. “I would urge people not to give to them.” “But,” he added, “I know some people will. And I certainly understand why.” —Chris Bragg cbragg@cityhallnews.com

THE CASE AGAINST SAM CHANG: NEW YORK DESERVES BETTER Initially hailed as a visionary for his fast, cheap and prolific hotel model, hotelier Sam Chang is having trouble keeping the wool over New York City’s eyes. The outpouring of code violations, the increasing number of grievances and mounting evidence of illicit business practices have far exceeded the large number of properties that he has developed in the last decade. Working within the confines of his own underground economy, Mr. Chang has dramatically altered the way that hotel properties are built, sold and operated, with serious consequences for New York and its middle class. Disregarding New York City Zoning Codes Catering to the budget traveler, the so-called “hotel king of New York” successfully built a multitude of hotels in areas originally zoned for manufacturing and industrial uses. Dancing around loopholes in City codes, Mr. Chang, for example, put up dozens of hotels in the garment district of Manhattan. In a direct effort to curtail these questionable activities, the Hotel Trades Council, which represents workers at most large hotels in New York City, persuaded the Bloomberg administration to create special permits which require City Council approval prior to building hotels in manufacturing districts. Racking Up Building and Safety Violations Despite the benefits for tourists, the consequences for New Yorkers of Mr. Chang’s actions are grave across the board. In an effort to curtail fair practices in all areas of his business, Mr. Chang became one of the few hoteliers to also control the developer’s and construction manager’s side of his operations. Mr. Chang owns a majority stake in Tritel Construction, a company that has astonishingly accumulated over 207 serious building violations, prompting the Buildings Department to issue stop-work orders for failure to maintain safety equipment and safeguard people and property on his sites. In fact, the company’s work in building the Element Hotel at 311 West 39th Street , inflicted damage on neighboring properties and forced their tenants to evacuate the endangered structures. The majority of Tritel’s violations remain unresolved. Unloading Unfinished Properties Once the violations starting adding up, Mr. Chang came up with a surefire way to deal with the Department of Buildings. In the cases of the Sheraton at 370 Canal Street and the Hyatt Union Square, Mr. Chang simply stopped work on the properties and sold them unfinished. Unloading stalled sites proved profitable, as he consistently made deals relieving him of loan responsibility. Prosperity at the Expense of New Yorkers As Mr. Chang continued to prosper, telling Fortune magazine in 2006 that he has $200 million in cash, New York City’s middle-class workforce was struggling to make ends meet. Using non-union subcontractors like EMC Contracting, Mr. Chang was able to avoid union labor and ensure that the employees working on his hotels were paid sub-standard wages based on a racially-biased, two- or even three-tiered compensation system. In 2006, New York City officials began an investigation into EMC’s standard practices of underpaying hundreds of immigrant workers and utilizing a compensation scale based entirely on race. While Mr. Chang alleged to know little about EMC’s dealings, employees on the site stated publicly that, as the general contractor, he was in fact dictating the orders. Reneging on a Deal to Use Union Labor In 2007, Mr. Chang succumbed to pressure and signed a contract with the NYC Building and Construction Trades Council agreeing to use union labor to build 99 Washington Street. But helping the City rebuild the desecrated downtown area following the 9/11 tragedy and providing New Yorkers with jobs they so desperately need proved difficult for Mr. Chang. As signed contracts mean little to him, Mr. Chang checked out early on the deal and reneged on his commitment to provide contractors and New Yorkers with fair and equitable job opportunities. Disregarding State Regulations Mr. Chang‘s disregard for the State’s legal system doesn’t end at the construction phase. One of his properties, 440 West 41st Street, attracted the attention of the City’s Office of Special Enforcement, which tracks illegal hotels. The building’s residents alleged that Mr. Chang and the management were renting out the property as a short-stay hotel, despite the lack of a certificate of occupancy qualifying it for hotel use. Mr. Chang hasn’t stopped in New York. His hotel group was caught up in an investigation in Connecticut involving price fixing and the practice of “call-arounds,” in violation of the State’s antitrust and fair trade practices act. Mr. Chang paid a $50,000 fine to settle the matter. The Effects of Building an Underground Economy While Mr. Chang’s wealth continues to grow, New Yorkers are deprived of job opportunities and fair wages, and taxpayers absorb the financial burdens of having city and state officials work to curtail his blatant disregard of ethical business practices. Mr. Chang must realize that gambling with New York’s safety and economy is not just a cost of doing business; he is setting a dangerous precedent that simply cannot be tolerated.

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OCTOBER 17, 2011

FORTY U ND E R FO RT Y

Paul Thomas, Emily Arsenault and Ross Wallenstein

Dan Levitan and Rachel Goodman

Preston Niblack, Tanisha Edwards, Mike Keogh and Jeff Rodus

Juan Manuel Benitez and Maritza Puello

Ben Kallos and Morgan Pehme

OCTOBER 17, 2011

City Hall recognized its crop of 2011 Rising Stars earlier this month with a cocktail reception at the Woolworth Kitchen in Manhattan, where some of the sharpest young minds in politics and government rubbed elbows with some of the most experienced. Some in our new group of Rising Stars met for the first time; others got advice from Rising Stars from previous years; and everyone shared their pride in how young voices in politics and government are making their mark on New York.

Johanna Greenbaum, Andrew Moesel and Anthony Milano

Councilwoman Gale Brewer and Joshua Bocian

Jesus Gonzalez, Julissa Santiago and Julio Gonzalez

Socrates Solano and Eddie Marrero

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Anthony Constantinople and Tatiana Deligiannakis

Tiffany Raspberry, William Davis, Paul Proulx and Noah Budnick

Bruce Gelb and Roger Scotland

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Los Angeles Wage Ordinance and NYC 251-A: Major Differences Remain Attention City Council Members: Smart Growth and Economic Development Fund Our Infrastructure, Schools, Parks, Police and Firefighters Development is unique to each neighborhood and borough. Reject a blanket approach to economic policy! NYC BILL INTRO 251-A

KEY PROVISIONS

(as modified)

Duration of the Requirements Incentive Trigger Amounts Scope of Financial Assistance Covered

Pervasiveness of Defacto Lien

Reporting Burden

Threshold for Small Business Applicability

10 years from date of the assistance

L.A. ORDINANCE 172336 5 years from the date the assistance reaches the threshold

$1 million inclusive of all city, state or federal funds

$1 million city assistance in any 12-month period

Including but not limited to: bond financing; tax abatements; TIF; filing fee waivers; energy credits; environmental clean-up; targeted tax incentives (including municipal code Section 485 B)

Applies only to recipients of City Financial Assistance, service contracts & public leases and licenses

Applies to tenants and subsequent tenants, contractors, sub-contractors

Does not apply to tenants and subsequent tenants or contractors

•Annual certiﬁcation and statement of compliance required by the CEO or CFO for all businesses on the premises •Payroll records must be maintained for the duration of incentives and up to 34 years •Reporting subject to criminal penalties •Includes tenants, future tenants, contractors and subcontractors

•No mandatory annual reporting •Provide the City access to the work site & payroll records to verify compliance if requested •Compliance required only of employer receiving incentive/beneﬁt •No criminal penalties (Sec. 10.37.6 Enforcement)

•Small businesses with less than $5 million in gross revenues including parent entities, subsidiary entities and other entities controlled by the parent entity. •Aggregate of incentives over time captures small projects

Small Business Exemption for contractors under a public lease/license if annually-adjusted gross revenues are less than $454,016 @ 7/1/09. Waivers possible for economic hardship but must be approved by Council resolution.

Serving the Global Retail Real Estate Industry

1221 Avenue of the Americas • New York, NY 10020 www.ICSC.org

Aaron Short

THE WAITING GAME

Hakeem Jeffries, center, seen here with Erik Dilan, left, and Rafael Espinal, right, is still undecided on whether to run against Rep. Ed Towns next year.

With money and star power, Hakeem Jeffries is still reluctant to take the plunge BY AARON SHORT

ill he or won’t he? Assemblyman Hakeem Jeffries saw his stock rise after a three-way Assembly race in Brooklyn last month, but he is still looking for a way to avoid a confrontational run against Congressman Ed Towns—unless he has no other choice. Jeffries, who filed papers with the Federal Elections Commission in early October launching a new “Jeffries for Congress” campaign committee, is said to be still wavering about declaring his candidacy for the Central Brooklyn seat Towns has held for 28 years. Jeffries recently met with Towns’ chief of staff, Al Wiltshire, and informed him about his new committee but did not discuss his plans for the future, sources say. Towns and his staff believe Jeffries is leaning toward a run, but they remain puzzled. “We’re scratching our heads—we don’t know,” said one Towns ally. “We do not know why it’s taking so long.” Public officials are divided on whether Jeffries will wait until 2014 to make a move, or decide the time to act is now. “He has more money on hand than Ed—if I had a fund-raising advantage over an incumbent, I’d go for it,” said Councilman Erik Dilan, who is contemplating a congressional run himself against Rep. Nydia Velázquez. “But I’m a little bit baffled—maybe he doesn’t want to take a chance. He likes a more conser-

OCTOBER 17, 2011

vative approach.” Even Jeffries’ own staff acknowledged he is still undecided and has not shared a timetable for announcing his candidacy—and would not comment on the race beyond that. Regardless, Jeffries can count on a diverse array of supporters, even for Brooklyn. He remains a favorite not only of Brooklyn Democratic Leader Vito Lopez—a colleague on the Assembly Housing Committee who would likely back him—but the next generation of Democratic leaders, including reformers like state committeeman Lincoln Restler and party loyalists like Councilman Steve Levin. Jeffries would also have the support of progressives in Fort Greene and Clinton Hill, and increasingly mobilized groups of Hasidic voters in South Williamsburg. And Jeffries’ legislative accomplishments in Albany, including stop-and-frisk and drug reform and ending prison-based gerrymandering, have inspired loyalty from the Working Families Party, Lambda Independent Democrats and SEIU Local 32BJ. Meanwhile, Towns can likely count on support from congressional allies, including Velázquez, Sen. Chuck Schumer and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee—perhaps setting up an unusual confrontation between Washington and county leaders. But reelecting Towns wouldn’t be easy. This summer, Towns campaigned hard for his daughter, Deidra, in a special election to replace his son, Darryl, in the

Assembly. But she finished a distant third, securing only 23 percent of the vote. And Towns’ quixotic bid to become the district’s state committee leader this past spring reportedly turned off rank-and-file Brooklyn Democrats. Even Velázquez conceded that her colleague could be vulnerable next year due to “anti-incumbent” sentiment among voters. But Towns loyalists insist he is a crafty campaigner who knows how to pull votes from senior-housing complexes throughout central Brooklyn—and argue that Deidra Towns’ defeat is apropos of nothing. “Jeffries may be a congressman in the future, but the data points from this special election add nothing of real value to the viability of Jeffries’ campaign, particularly if he runs against Towns in 2012,” said Prospect Heights District Leader Chris Owens. And the veteran congressman is still capable of raising vast sums of campaign money quickly. He raked in $1.6 million in 2010 and has collected $262,000 since June for next year’s race, though he only has about $50,000 cash on hand. Jeffries’ fund-raising filings will be revealed Oct. 17, but several sources estimate he could have collected about $200,000 by that time. The race also hinges on two X-factors: redistricting and Councilman Charles Barron. The 10th Congressional District is one of six districts in New York protected under the federal Voting Rights Act,

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which means it must remain a majorityminority district and can’t be carved up too much. But state legislators could make the district friendlier to Jeffries—for instance, by swapping Crown Heights and Prospect Heights in the neighboring 11th district with Canarsie and Flatlands— when lines are redrawn early next year. And the whole process could end up in federal court. “[Jeffries] could benefit, depending on what the district looks like, but the impartial arbiter could be the Department of Justice,” said political consultant Hank Sheinkopf. To complicate matters further, Barron is contemplating a run whether Jeffries officially declares or not. The East New York councilman called Towns “very wounded” after the special election, and said the seat was ripe for him to take. “I don’t think Hakeem has the spine to run against Towns unless there’s some deal being made where Towns would drop out and give it to him,” said Barron. “I don’t see Hakeem putting his [Assembly] seat on the line unless there’s something going on. If Hakeem really runs against Towns, then the fix is in. He would never have the spine to challenge Towns without Vito behind it.” A spokeswoman for Jeffries declined to address Barron’s comments, except to say that Jeffries is a “son of Crown Heights” and represents all parts of his district effectively. editor@cityhallnews.com

CITY HALL

Why Bloomberg Needed Haggerty Election Day operation was vital in a newly majority-minority city BY BRUCE GYORY

o paraphrase Churchill, the case of what John Haggerty did or didn’t do for Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s reelection two years ago remains a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma. But with the benefit of hindsight it’s a little easier to understand the challenge facing the Bloomberg campaign in 2009—and why it needed Haggerty on Election Day. Conventional wisdom holds that Bloomberg was first elected in 2001 because Mayor Rudolph Giuliani threw his post–9/11 cloak around the novice’s shoulders. But there was a far more diverse foundation for Bloomberg’s narrow victory over Mark Green. Giuliani was essential in delivering outerborough white Catholics to Bloomberg, and his active endorsement also helped Bloomberg carry the Jewish vote. However, that was not enough for victory, as the share of the total vote cast by white voters declined from 55 percent when Giuliani first won in 1993 to 52 percent in 2001. According to exit polls from 2001, Bloomberg garnered 47 percent of Latino

votes (with many Latinos still seething over buttressed an aura of invincibility but knew Green’s playing the race card in the runoff it faced a 5-point race—and closing. In other words, turnout would be key— against Fernando Ferrer), and 25 percent of black votes, while comfortably carrying which is where Haggerty came in. The the Asian vote (then only 2 percent of the mysterious Queens Republican operative total electorate). Without this impressive was in charge of “ballot security.” Bloomberg campaign workers have minority support, Bloomberg testified that meant making would never have been elected. sure supporters didn’t face Four years later, running funny business at polling against a Latino candidate, places, but the term has historiBloomberg still did very well cally been a euphemism for among minority voters. He Republican voter-suppression snared 47 percent of blacks, 35 efforts, discouraging minorities percent of Latinos (Bloomberg from casting ballots. targeted the growing non–Puerto Bruce Gyory Bloomberg unquestionRican portion of the Latino vote, led by the Dominican community) and a land- ably directed $1.1 million toward Haggerslide margin among Asian voters (who grew ty’s operation, and Haggerty unquestionto about a 3 percent share). In 2005, the white ably used the bulk of that money to buy vote was probably just under, or right at, the a house. But testimony in his ongoing grand-larceny trial has not yet established 50 percent threshold. But heading into November 2009, Bloom- whether Haggerty’s operation was aimed berg faced real troubles. Polls showed at helping lock in the votes of white minority and liberal voters were sharply outer-borough Bloomberg backers, or at against extending term limits, minorities made discouraging the votes of New York City up 54 percent of the electorate, and John Liu’s minorities who had soured on the mayor. If, however, Haggerty simply pockcampaign pushed Asian turnout to 7 percent of eted the money because he didn’t think the total, up from 3 percent in 2005. The Bloomberg campaign, with its Bloomberg needed a full-throated ballotsophisticated polling data and bottomless security operation, he not only arguably budget, surely saw this as worrisome by late broke the law but he didn’t realize what October 2009. Campaign manager Bradley the demographics show: New York City Tusk was remarkably candid on this point is changing, and in 2009 minority votes in postelection interviews: The campaign made the difference.

Bloomberg’s opponent Bill Thompson, who is African-American, won 77 percent of the black vote, 61 percent of Latinos and 29 percent of white voters—including 29 percent of white Catholics, a group that never gave anywhere near as high a margin to black candidates David Dinkins or Carl McCall. Thanks to Liu drawing Asians to the Democratic line, Thompson also narrowly defeated Bloomberg in the Asian community. Turnout drove the tipping points for victory. Given New York City’s growing minority majority, if Thompson had increased his strength to 87 percent among blacks, 66 percent among Latinos and 60 percent among Asians—while nudging his share of the white vote up to 31 percent—he would have pulled off an upset for the ages. Whether Haggerty beats the charges or not—and whether or not the full truth emerges about what Bloomberg hoped to accomplish at polling places on Election Day—the trial bares one clear truth, that as former Mayor Ed Koch said, the case cries out for systemic reform of our campaign-finance system. New Yorkers deserve better than profligate and hidden campaign spending so susceptible to misuse. Quite sad: Bloomberg aspired to being more than a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma. Bruce Gyory is a political consultant at Corning Place Consulting in Albany, and an adjunct professor of political science at SUNY Albany.

here are plenty of reasons to visit the Central Park Boathouse, from the legendary crab cakes to the spectacular views and the fun of taking a gondola ride on the lake. And recently, Boathouse workers and management reached agreement on a new contract: one that is fair to all and will keep the Boathouse a star Central Park attraction for years to come. So take advantage of everything this wonderful City destination has to offer. Central Park Boathouse East 72nd St. & Park Drive North New York, NY 212-517-2233

CITY HALL

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OCTOBER 17, 2011

Covanta_CQ_FullPage.pdf

3/17/09

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In the search for renewable energy sources, you are bound to run into some garbage. According to the World Economic Forum report “Green Investing,” Energy-from-Waste is one of the eight large-scale clean technologies that is helping to shape a lower-carbon infrastructure for the world. It’s more than rubbish. It’s renewable energy. Reduce. Reuse. Recycle. Recover Energy-from-Waste. www.covantaenergy.com

ISSUESPOTLIGHT

GREEN NYC Hearst Tower

Too Easy

Bein’ Green?

Certification level: Gold Location: 300 West 57th Street Features: Rainwater collection and circulating water for heating and cooling

Certification level: Platinum Location: Sixth Avenue and 42nd Street Features: Insulating glass, automatic lightdimming, recycled concrete materials

A simple plan to reveal buildings’ energy use could shake up the green-building industry By Jon Lentz

ew York City’s buildings, long the city’s biggest pollution sources, are slowly being cleaned up by an array of new initiatives, from a phaseout of dirty heating oil to revamped building codes. One of the more intriguing green strategies—and easily one of the cheapest—is simply to post each building’s energy use online for all to see. Such a move could have a transformative effect on the city, environmentalists and architects say, giving valuable information to tenants while prodding owners to invest in cleaner, greener design. “Con Edison measures energy use every month, so why don’t we use that to give a building a green rating?” asked Henry Gifford, a New York City architect. “When will the first contest for the lowest Con Edison bill be held? How can everybody be running around and saying that energy is important to our economy, to world peace and to the planet, and not be measuring it?” In fact, New York City is already taking steps in that direction. By of the end of July, large buildings with over 50,000 square feet were required to report their energy and water use to the city. Energy use in commercial buildings will begin to be posted on a public website in 2012, with residential buildings following suit in 2013. That strategy builds on a similar initiative for cityowned government buildings, which had their energy use posted on the city’s website last month. “A couple of years ago there were some changes made in the building codes in New York City, and those were really focused on taking information and putting it into the hands of people who can make decisions,” said Andrew Darrell, the New York regional director for the Environmental Defense Fund. With city tenants armed with detailed information about a building’s energy use, owners and operators may have to clean up their act, said Richard Leigh, director of research for the New York branch of the U.S. Green Building Council. “This is going to have a totally extraordinary effect, we’re completely confident, on building performance in the city,” Leigh said. “Because all of a sudden, when a tenant is thinking about moving into a building, they’re going to be able to look up the energy use in that building and tell an owner

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Bank of America Tower

The Empire State Building Certification level: Gold Location: 350 Fifth Avenue Features: Floor-by-floor energy-management systems, radiator insulation, refurbished windows

National Audubon Society Headquarters

The Solaire

Certification level: Platinum Location: 225 Varick Street Features: Low-flow water systems, natural daylight, under-floor air distribution Certification level: Platinum Location: 20 River Terrace Features: Green roof, solar panels, in-house watertreatment center

Seven World Trade Center Certification level: Gold Location: 250 Greenwich Street Features: Ultra-clear glass windows, highefficiency air filtration, steam-to-electricity turbine generators

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OCTOBER 17, 2011

they don’t want to live in a building that’s an energy hog.” The city’s building stock has plenty of room for improvement. Buildings produce about 75 percent of the city’s carbon emissions, according to Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s PlaNYC sustainability program, the driving force behind the green campaign. The vast majority of the city’s existing buildings are expected to still be standing in 2030, prompting the push to improve them and not just set stricter standards for new construction. “As we saw from things like the Empire State Building retrofit, most buildings in New York City could be upgraded to reduce their energy consumption by as much as 40 or 50 percent,” Darrell said. “So basically we’re wasting close to half of the energy that we use.” The new energy disclosures for large buildings will also begin to fill a gap in the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) ratings, which certify new or retrofitted buildings if they meet a wide range of environmental benchmarks. A relatively small number of high-profile buildings in New York City, such as the Bank of America Tower and the Hearst Corporation’s midtown headquarters, have been awarded plaques for their efficient and sustainable construction and design, but some critics have blasted the ratings for failing to measure actual energy use. Some of that criticism is warranted, acknowledged Leigh, whose U.S. Green Building Council colleagues in Washington, D.C., oversee LEED certification. However, the program is broad-based, taking into account other factors like use of recycled materials and selection of building sites that minimize environmental damage, Leigh added. And updates to the program give more weight to energy efficiency while also requiring newly certified buildings to submit energy use, though still not publicly. That continued lack of disclosure is largely why Gifford is so critical of the LEED program, which he calls “my industry’s excuse for building really, really bad buildings, and for everyone to hide their actual energy bills.” If LEED’s certification plaques—silver, gold and platinum—aren’t based on actual measurements and can’t be revoked, they are of little value, Gifford argued. “All these plaques should be attached with removal screws,” he said. “Otherwise there is no incentive going forward for a building’s owner, occupants or operators to do anything properly.” New York City’s new disclosure rules could start to change the equation. Of course, the rules only cover about half of the city’s square footage and a slightly smaller percentage of its greenhouse-gas emissions. And it’s an open question how clear or accessible the energy use figures will be, and how easy it will be to compare buildings, when the information is eventually posted. “If you’ve ever tried to figure out your energy bill and what goes into it, your electricity bill and how to bring it down, it’s a hard thing to do,” Darrell said. “If you had the information in your hand, and if it showed up in an easy-to-understand way—if buildings were graded almost like restaurants, which are graded on the cleanliness of their kitchens—why not grade buildings in New York City the same, according to how much energy they save?” jlentz@cityhallnews.com

OCTOBER 17, 2011

Losing Steam

Does Con Edison’s steam system deserve a boost as part of a green agenda? By Jon Lentz

elow the surface of Manhattan, buried among the water mains, electrical wires and telephone lines, is a hidden element of the city’s green infrastructure: steam. The system is not powered by renewable resources like solar or wind. It doesn’t get any state subsidies or incentives. It’s not among the 132 sustainability initiatives in Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s PlaNYC. The city’s underground steam system, however, still bolsters New York City’s status as one the greenest cities in the country, and deserves a growing role in the city’s energy market, its backers say. One reason is that much of the steam, which Con Edison uses to provide heat, hot water and cooling to about 1,800 customers in Manhattan, comes from its highly efficient East River Generating Station. The plant relies on a process called “cogeneration,” capturing excess heat generated during energy production and converting it into steam. “Con Edison has put a lot of effort over the past decade or so to upgrade the steam system,” said Morris Pierce, an assistant professor of history at the University of Rochester and the university’s energy manager. “The East River plant is a very efficient system, unlike a typical plant that dumps all its heat into

the river. It’s probably one of the more efficient plants in the country.” Another environmental benefit is the design of the system, whose 105 miles of steam mains and service pipes between 96th Street and the Battery make it the largest of its kind in the country. Unlike small boilers installed in buildings across the city that generate heat on site, Con Edison produces steam at large centralized power plants. That allows for more stringent emissions controls and more efficient heat generation. “A gas boiler is going to be about as clean, either if we’re operating it or if the customer’s operating it,” said Charles Viemeister, Con Edison’s section manager for steam business development. “The only thing that differentiates us is the regulations that we operate under, and the control systems we have in place far and away exceed anything that’s required of a local boiler.” The company is touting its environmental benefits as it seeks state incentives to encourage greater steam use. Subsidies for steam-powered air conditioning were phased out several years ago, but Con Edison is lobbying for new ones to help maintain demand throughout the year, particularly in the warmer months when it has excess capacity. Con Edison is also positioning itself to take advantage of the city’s phaseout of No. 4 and No. 6 heating oil, two dirty fuels used to heat many buildings. Instead of replacing the

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heating-oil boilers with cleaner ones that burn natural gas, some customers could switch to steam. “In all of these No. 4 and No. 6 oil conversions, there’s over 4,000 buildings in the steam footprint that burn 4 and 6 oil,” explained John Catuogno, Con Edison’s department manager of steam customer and business services. “So instead of barring that fuel, they could take steam. That’s a market that we feel we can enter and we can compete with.” Steam has its drawbacks, of course. An explosion of a steam pipe killed one person in 2007, prompting the company to install new monitoring equipment and upgrade its safety protocols. Though the system has been modernized, much of its design dates back to its arrival in the city 130 years ago, said Pierce, and it’s now less efficient than similar systems that use hot water instead of steam. Demand for steam has also tapered off in recent years as a result of lower energy use during the recession and improved building design. But Con Edison expects to have relatively steady demand over the next two decades, partly because steam is an “energy of choice” for many bigname customers, said Catuogno. “It’s no mistake that most of the major landmark buildings, museums, hospitals within our footprint and some prestigious universities use steam,” he said. “Could you imagine if we had to put a stack on the Empire State Building or the United Nations?” jlentz@cityhallnews.com

CITY HALL

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EXPERT ROUNDTABLE Green New York

DAVID BRAGDON

JAMES GENNARO

CARTER STRICKLAND JR.

Q: How green is New York City?

DB: Statistically, it starts from a strong position, simply because of the population density and the good transportation system. It also has historically had a strong parks system, and our acreage of parks is fairly high for an American city. Those are statistical acts of history.

JG: New York City, by virtue of the large concentration of people that we have and the large mass-transit system that we have, is a very green city. Mass transit is the key to that. The carbon footprint of the average New Yorker is much smaller than someone who would be from a city that doesn’t have the mass-transit system we have and not the same concentration of folks. Those facts notwithstanding, New York City is doing amazing things that New Yorkers should be very proud of with regard to making the city much greener. In 2007 the New York City Climate Protection Act put in the mandate to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions within the city government sector by 30 percent by 2017, and in the city overall by 30 percent by 2030. The mayor’s PlaNYC is really a trigger for a lot of things, because in order to make the greenhouse-gas reductions that we need to by 2017 and by 2030, that creates a mandate for us to do many things to make sure we reach those targets.

CS: It depends on how you measure it, but certainly one standard measure is greenhouse-gas emissions per capita. On that we’re doing pretty much better than anyone else in the whole country, four times better than average.

Director, Mayor’s Office of Long-Term Planning and Sustainability

Q: Is the city getting greener? DB: Those are the things within our control, and the answer to that is definitely yes. We are adding parkland; we are creating more alternatives to the automobile in a city where the public transportation is already quite robust; we’re trying to add more alternatives; and we’re trying to create more energy efficiency. By all those measures, the city is becoming greener.

Q: What more needs to be done? DB: I think solid-waste reduction is the area where we have the biggest room for improvement. We still send a disproportionate share of our solid waste to landfills long distance. So we have a fairly expensive, as well as carbon-intensive, solid-waste disposal system. Both for financial and environmental reasons, waste reduction is an area we need to improve on, whether it’s recycling or alternative means of reducing waste.

Q: What other challenges does the city face? DB: I think we have funding challenges in terms of natural habitats and park restoration and the stewardship of our natural assets in places like Jamaica Bay, where there hasn’t always been the funding to take care of the ecologically sensitive lands that we have. The long-term maintenance of our public transportation system and the financial stability of the MTA is a real Achilles’ heel for the whole region, both environmentally and economically.

Q: What will Mayor Bloomberg focus on over his last two years in office? DB: The administration is on a strong trajectory, in terms of parks and in terms of alternative transportation and in terms of green infrastructure to avoid combined sewer overflows. Those are all strong initiatives that are well under way, that were launched earlier in the term. He wants to finish strong on those earlier initiatives. In terms of additive ones, I think you’ll see the administration making more of an emphasis on solidwaste reduction in the final two years of his term.

OCTOBER 17, 2011

Chairman, City Council Committee on Environmental Protection

Q: What more needs to be done? JG: To be a truly sustainable city, we have to make sure that our pure drinking water supply is clean in perpetuity, and there’s a real threat from hydrofracking, even in this newest iteration of the state’s plan, which doesn’t specifically protect the city’s critical water-supply infrastructure. Myself and the Bloomberg administration have said thank you for having the city’s water-supply watershed taken off the table with regard to doing fracking. But the critical water-supply infrastructure that carries the water down is at risk from this activity.

Q: What is the risk? If you’re doing hydrofracking adjacent to these watersupply tunnels, they are not pipes in the ground. They’re like borings in the rock. It’s not like the water is encased in some sealed pipe and things that you can’t penetrate. Water-supply tunnels are basically borings through the rock that are made smooth with a kind of skin coat so the water is able to flow through it smoothly. It’s very susceptible to any kind of contaminant that might be in the ground. Ordinarily you wouldn’t have any contaminants that far down in the ground, but in the age of fracking that’s, like, a whole different story. Now the state is offering a one-thousand-foot buffer, and they won’t have wells within a thousand feet of our critical water-supply infrastructure. DEP’s asking for seven miles, which is 37,000 feet, so we’re very apart on that. I’m not even sure that seven miles is going to do the trick, as a geologist.

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Commissioner, Department of Environmental Protection

Q: Is the city getting greener? CS: We’ve planted 500,000 trees on the way to a million trees. We’ve released something that I’m particularly proud of, the New York City Green-Infrastructure Plan, which commits $1.5 billion to handling storm water in a more sustainable way. There’s obviously the Greener, Greater Buildings Plan. And all of this has led to a real reduction of 13 percent in citywide greenhouse gases since 2005. That’s a pretty remarkable achievement.

Q: What more needs to be done? CS: What you saw in the most recent version of PlaNYC, which just came out in April of 2011, was a new chapter on solid waste, and that will get more attention. That’s pretty clear. Otherwise, what we plan to do over the next two years is really scaling up what we’ve set out, in terms of green infrastructure. We’ve done a lot here at DEP in working with other agencies and laying the groundwork; not least of which was the 10-year capital budget we got through last year, which sets aside, in the next 10 years, $735 million for green infrastructure. We’ve also started working with the parks department so that green streets that are built now will be built to absorb storm water.

Q: What is your department focusing on? CS: We’re doing a lot with air quality. One thing that is not well-known is that we regulate air emissions in the city to the extent they’re not reached by the state and federal government. We’ve done a lot. This year we adopted new heating-oil regulations. Heating oil is responsible for about 14 percent of fine-particulate-matter emissions in the city, and we’re getting rid of the dirtiest fuel. That is going to have an enormous impact, in terms of public health. The Health Department estimated that it will save hundreds of lives annually. That starts up in 2012. Following up on that, we’re taking a look at our air code and bringing that up to date. New York in the 1970s had a very innovative air code, and a lot of attention and energy went into the state and federal side, and we are circling back to our local air code to see what we can do to bring it up to speed, not only in terms of emission controls that affect folks locally but in terms of streamlining some of our permitting processes, so that while we achieve cleaner air, we’ll make it easier for businesses going forward.

CITY HALL

About 25 PERCENt oF thE PowER usEd iN NEw YoRk CitY ANd wEstChEstER, with ViRtuALLY No EMissioNs. Now thAt’s RiGht FoR NEw YoRk. You have a right to know that about a quarter of the electricity in New York City and Westchester is generated by the Indian Point Energy Center, with virtually no greenhouse gas emissions, and at lower cost than other sources in the region. Indian Point’s operations are constantly reviewed by independent experts at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC). We’re also among the most thoroughly reviewed nuclear energy facilities in the U.S. Indian Point has invested over a billion dollars to upgrade and strengthen all our operations in recent years. We have layers upon layers of safety and security systems, so there are back-ups to the back-ups. Every day, we plan and train to expect the unexpected. An equivalent gas-fired power plant would emit millions of tons of pollutants a year into the air we breathe. And the independent experts in charge of New York’s electric grid have said that the city could face rolling blackouts throughout the New York area without Indian Point. All of us have a right to know why Indian Point is Right For New York.

RightForNewYork.com

Indian Point Energy Center

WE’RE RIGHT FOR NEW YORK

“Green NYC” Scorecard THE ISSUES

“One underlying reason for the approach was realizing that we’re going to have about a million more people come to the city in the next 20 years. We’re benefiting now from the investments of past generations, and so, for present and for future generations, we are making investments today that will reap benefits for years to come.”

Transit funding The city’s mass-transit systems make it an energy-efficient place, but it’s unclear where money will come from to keep them running. Comptroller Tom DiNapoli reported that the MTA’s plan to borrow nearly $15 billion for capital spending would put stress on its already strained operating budget. “We’ve got to find a way of finding a sustainable, permanent, comprehensive funding pot to keep our subways, buses and commuter-rail systems in good operating condition and modernized as appropriate,” said Eric Goldstein of the Natural Resources Defense Council.

—Carter Strickland Jr., Commissioner of the city’s Department of Environmental Protection, on the mayor’s PlaNYC sustainability initiatives

KEY PLAYERS

Solid-Waste Management

THE ADMINISTRATION

One new PlaNYC initiative takes on the thousands of tons of garbage produced here each day. Exporting it to out-of-state landfills by train, truck or barge is taxing on the environment and costly for the city, prompting a look at newer ways to convert trash to energy. But possible use of “conversion technologies” is opposed by some environmentalists, who fear they won’t be cleaner or safer than incinerators; they focus instead on the city’s lackluster recycling rates. Others say new methods deserve a chance. “The city is now proposing a couple of pilot conversion technology projects,” said the New York League of Conservation Voters’ Marcia Bystryn. “We should explore them and see what works and doesn’t work.”

Mayor Michael Bloomberg has led the charge on sustainability, launching more than a hundred initiatives in his pioneering PlaNYC and establishing himself as America’s greenest mayor. Cas Holloway, who injected a focus on sustainability at the city’s Department of Environmental Protection before being promoted to deputy mayor, is seen as the top player on green issues within the administration. David Bragdon oversees the mayor’s innovative sustainability office, and new DEP Commissioner Carter Strickland Jr. is pushing efforts for cleaner air and water.

THE CITY COUNCIL James Gennaro, who chairs the Council’s Committee on Environmental Protection, has been a close partner with the Bloomberg administration on environmental issues, and has often pushed for more aggressive legislation than the mayor has proposed. City Council Speaker Christine Quinn has also played a key role in passing green legislation, making her the greenest of the potential mayoral candidates for 2013.

Hydrofracking This controversial drilling procedure could get the green light in 2012, but not in New York City’s unfiltered watershed. But some fear that gas wells built as close as 1,000 feet to the city’s unique system could contaminate drinking water flowing into the city. State officials could revise the latest hydrofracking blueprint, which they defend as the safest in the nation. Councilman James Gennaro said the city had to present “a mountain of science” for the state to exclude the watershed, and will do so again to push for a much larger buffer. “The city is doing a lot of basic science on the impact of fracking to make sure that we’re wellprotected,” Gennaro said. “This is very, very basic stuff.”

THE ENVIRONMENTALISTS The New York League of Conservation Voters is the key player on the electoral side of environmental issues. The New York office of the National Resources Defense Council plays an influential role on policy matters in the city, as does the local branch of the Environmental Defense Fund, which was particularly effective in getting new regulations to phase out dirty heating oils in New York City buildings. In addition, dozens of geographically based neighborhood groups, from the Bronx River Alliance to the Gowanus Canal Conservancy, have lobbied for policy changes affecting the quality of life of local residents.

Indian Point Gov. Andrew Cuomo wants to shut down the this nuclear power plant, which sits 35 miles up the Hudson River. But the city has concerns about where 2,000 megawatts of replacement power would come from, with one report showing it would require a 5 to 10 percent rise in electricity costs—a figure disputed by state officials. The state says extra power could come from new transmission lines or new or repowered power plants, but others say that will take years. Still others point to the loss of clean energy. “In the near to probably midterm, if you close down Indian Point, there will be more CO2 emissions, and air quality will go down, simply because the replacement power will not be as clean,” Bystryn said.

499,517: Number of trees planted since 2007 200: Acres of parkland added in past four years 13: Percentage drop in greenhouse-gas emissions since 2005

Transportation Alternatives isn’t strictly an environmental organization, but it has played a critical role behind the bike lanes all across the city, a bike-share program, and other city initiatives that benefit pedestrians and cyclists. A segment of the financial community, such as Deutsche Bank, has also embraced energy-efficiency initiatives for buildings.

Less Haze on the Horizon 16

A decline in the asthma-inducing pollutants from diesel exhaust

Air Quality Standard

15 Concentration, ug/m

BY THE NUMBERS

THE OTHERS

14 13 12 11 10 9 8 7

Downstate average pollution for fine particulate matter 1999 2000 2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010

Source: New York State Department of Environmental Conservation

OCTOBER 17, 2011

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CITY HALL

VOICES

Green New York

Michael Gianaris State Senator, Queens Q: Is New York City getting greener?

Marcia Bystryn President, New York League of Conservation Voters Q: Where does the city need to be greener?

It’s not green enough, but I think it is getting greener. The mayor has been aggressive in pushing a number of policies through PlaNYC that are moving us in the right direction incrementally, whether it’s the million trees or the new building-efficiency requirements, that sort of stuff. He’s been aggressive in trying to make the city greener, but it’s moving too slowly for my taste.

Eric Goldstein Director of New York City Environment, NRDC Q: How well has the city done in reducing pollution? In terms of air quality, we still violate standards for ozone, which is a regional pollutant. Although over time, in general, ozone levels have improved, particularly since the modern environmental movement in 1970. We have fewer smog days when there are air-pollution alerts than in previous decades. This goes above and beyond the mayor. It really goes to the Clean Air Act and reductions in pollution from motor vehicles. Particulate-matter problems still persist; that’s one area where the Bloomberg administration has been moving in the right direction, in terms of beginning the phaseout of dirty home-heating oil, No. 6 oil. Probably the two biggest issues in terms of air quality are ozone smog, which is a general motor-vehicle pollutant, or from power plants—and it’s difficult to control at the regional level—and then soot, or particulate matter, which comes primarily from diesel pollution and diesel combustion, as well as from home-heating oils. We’re making some progress there.

Nobody really likes talking about solid waste. PlaNYC 2.0 is the first time they took up solid waste. The fraction of the waste stream that’s picked up by the city is neither environmentally sound nor economically sustainable. It is a huge fraction of the budget, and it is likely to go up. There are a whole host of negative environmental impacts to it. And this is a very controversial issue in the environmental community. The environmental community has always cared very much about recycling, as it should. We need a more robust recycling program. But the truth of the matter is, there will always be a residual fraction that is not recycled in this city—not in any, for that matter. Conventional wisdom has been that conversion technologies are evil or wrong. I think it’s time to take a look at that.

Andrew Darrell New York Regional Director, Environmental Defense Fund Q: What more needs to be done? There’s still a huge amount of low-hanging fruit in the energy sector in New York, whether it be for the fuels that drive the power plants and make our electricity, or the fuels we use in our buildings to generate heat. There’s so much we can do to both save money and save the environment at the same time. We are essentially leaving money and jobs and economic opportunity on the table and causing more pollution than we need to, simply by not being as efficient as we can be in our buildings and our transportation networks.

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Steven Cohen Executive Director, the Earth Institute at Columbia University Q: How green is New York City? It’s the most energy-efficient place in the United States. To the degree that energy efficiency is an important green value, it’s very important. And it’s energy efficient for two reasons: the amount of mass transit that’s used here as a way of moving around, and the fact that most people in New York City live in multifamily dwellings. Sort of Paul Simon’s old thing—one man’s ceiling is another man’s floor. When you do heating, that’s really valuable. Also, New Yorkers live in less square footage than people do in other parts of the country. So those are all things that make us green. We have some of the best water of any place in the United States. Our waterways, because of advanced sewage treatment, are better than they’ve been in over a hundred years. Sewage-treatment plants like the North River plant have made it possible for you to bicycle along the Hudson River and walk there, where a generation ago you wouldn’t have wanted to do that on a hot summer day.

Q: What more needs to be done? I think we could do better on congestion. PlaNYC tried to get congestion pricing in as a way of increasing support of mass transit and reducing vehicular traffic where it’s most problematic, and we couldn’t get it through the politics of Albany. One of the most scarce resources we have in this region is space on streets, particularly south of 59th Street in Manhattan. The plan of trying to encourage more mass transit by improving it and charging people for coming in would have helped a lot, and that’s still something that should get back on the agenda.

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OCTOBER 17, 2011

obert Tierney, chairman of the Landmarks Preservation Commission for nearly a decade, discussed the selection of historic districts and landmark buildings at a recent breakfast sponsored by City Hall and Greenberg Traurig at Manhattan’s Club 101. What follows is an edited transcript.

sand a month. We have an incredibly dedicated staff of preservation people who process these and work with owners. Many of them, 30 to 40 percent, can be processed quickly, within 24 to 72 hours.

City Hall: What does the commis-

We will be able to have architects not only file online but also to have that kind of dialogue that we think results in a fair system, basically in front of the screen with all the interested parties in and out of government.

sion do?

Robert Tierney: One way to oversimplify is: We make new landmarks, and we regulate the old ones. Then we continue that process. Since I’ve had the great privilege to be the custodian of this agency, we have done 32 historic districts, and 19 have been outside Manhattan.

CH: Some critics say you stifle development, while others say you don’t do enough to preserve the city’s heritage. RT: That sounds like what I hear all the time. CH: How have you dealt with the backlog of applications? RT: We issue and process about 10,000 permits a year. That’s almost a thou-

OCTOBER 17, 2011

CH: Can people file online? RT: Filing online is about to happen.

CH: How do you know if that process is done quickly enough?

RT: You work with people and you hear from the community—the preservationadvocacy community and neighborhood groups and the Council and others— and they’re not shy. They let you hear. Unlike ULURP in [the Department of] City Planning, thank goodness, there’s not a seven-month timeline, because it’s too complex, in the best sense.

CH: Is part of the process deciding if the feel of a place is worth preserving?

Andrew Schwartz

Preserving Landmarks R

RT: Yes. You’re absolutely right. CH: That could be incredibly subjective. RT: It is. The landmarks law is designed to allow for a fair amount of expertise and discretion on the part of the 11 members of the Landmarks Commission, who are appointed by the mayor for three-year terms. When you walk down the street in Brooklyn Heights or Crown Heights in the district, you look at the row houses and you get a sense of, “This is really what was happening in the mid-19th or late-19th century. Let me learn more about it. Let me feel what this was like.” CH: Do you allow bold, brash new structures in historic districts? RT: We do. You don’t have to go the historicist route, if you will. It’s not

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just, Let’s throw in a Calatrava—I love Calatrava—just because it’s radical. What we have done is—just as the case has to be made for a historicist intervention, for a contemporary intervention—make the case. Bring in the architect. Show how it does relate to the street.

CH: How has the definition of a landmark building changed? RT: In the last nine and a half years, we’ve done a lot of designations of modernist buildings. A lot of people think landmarking is just row houses in Brooklyn Heights, and from the 19th century. The modernist buildings designated since I have been here include One Chase Manhattan Plaza; Skidmore, Owings and Merrill; Manhattan House white brick buildings—who knew?— in the 60s on Third Avenue. There’s an education curve that we have to undertake when it comes to more unconventional and sometimes difficult buildings. People disagree with these modernist determinations. The O’Toole Building’s a great example of that. Ultimately you rely on good design; you rely on good architects; you rely on the strength of the materials; you rely on how it connects to the district it’s located in—the sense of place. editor@cityhallnews.com

CITY HALL

BACK & F O R T H

Family Man

hen he’s not pushing back against right-wing accusations that the Working Families Party is paying Occupy Wall Street protesters, Executive Director Dan Cantor is struggling with how to capitalize on the movement that has gone national. To that end, the labor-backed party has helped organize several parallel demonstrations to amplify and accentuate the Occupy Wall Street message. But helping the protesters find their political footing may prove more challenging for the veteran community organizer. Cantor spoke about conservative misinformation, whether opposition to the millionaires’ tax will cost Democrats the support of the WFP, and why he may need to buy an air mattress soon. What follows is an edited transcript. City Hall: What are the next steps of this movement? Dan Cantor: We have no idea what the next steps are. It’s quite fluid. This has been an inspired and inspiring development. We owe the Occupy Wall Street folks a huge debt of gratitude. They have shined a light on the corrosive inequality that more or less completely defines American life today, and in so doing made everybody’s life a little bit better. We are trying to be as supportive as we can. Obviously we participated in that exciting community and labor march last week, and we’re looking to do more. But I’d be kidding you if I knew what the next steps were. One crucial thing is for us to help find political support so they’re able to stay there for as long as they want. We have to make sure that they’re able to stay there in the cold weather—that means tents. CH: What’s your impression of how this movement is being managed from within? DC: It’s complex, and perhaps cumbersome at times. But on balance, magnificent. They are sharing information internally pretty well. And facing all the problems that a growing movement faces. I’m sure it’s frustrating at times, and I’m sure it’s exhilarating at times. Like life itself. CH: As a political organizer, what advice do you have for them? DC: It’s a good question, and I’m not really sure. This is not an electoral movement, and doesn’t need to be. Listen, the Tea Party movement for those first couple months, and their allies in the Murdoch press—I don’t know if your editor will allow you to say that, but I’m saying it— have dominated the discussion in American politics. They said that the economic problems we have in the nation are essen-

CITY HALL

tially government’s fault. The far right, of course, blamed the holders of bad mortgages—the Glenn Becks of the world [did]. What Occupy Wall Street has done is to say, “That is not true.” The source of the economic crisis, the reason for this yawning inequality, is the financial sector gone berserk. They don’t need to think electorally; they’re thinking bigger than that. It’ll be up to people like us to try to capture this moment and give it some electoral meaning. And if we’re half as good as the OWS folks are, we’ll do pretty well.

democracy and equality. They talk a lot about Citizens United down there. We barely have a democracy, with the role corporate cash is playing. Things can change in a hurry. CH: Is this movement good for Democrats? DC: I’m not sure. It’s good for Democrats who are willing to fight the banks and stand up for equality. It’s good for Republicans, too. There’s a strain of Republicans who are anti–Wall Street. Is this good for them? Maybe. Too soon to tell. CH: What are people who are watching most of this unfold on television missing about the movement? DC: We are inundated with emails from people around the country wishing they could be there. So I think some of it is definitely breaking through. And of course there are Occupy efforts in many other cities. They’re trying to build on it. There is something special about being right on Wall Street, so you don’t get quite the flavor of that. I think the message is getting through. The “We are the 99 percent” thing—it’s breaking through. And that’s a very powerful theme.

CH: Some conservative pundits have started a “We are the 53 percent” mantra to counteract that message, CH: How do you use this movement arguing that many in America pay without squashing its grassroots more in income taxes than they receive in deductions or credits. nature? DC: I feel like these are creative and What’s your response to that? determined people, mostly young, but DC: You’re aware enough to know not all. They bring some new energy and what utter bulls--- that is, right? So I’ll ideas, and we bring our ideas and our say it for you. God gave us brains for experience. And so far it’s been a pretty a reason, and I wish even right-wingers happy marriage. They’re thrilled to have would use them from time to time. the expressions of solidarity and mate- People pay payroll taxes; they pay sales rial support that’s emerged. We’re thrilled taxes; they pay excise taxes; they pay to provide them. I think the relationship property taxes, whether or not they will only get denser, and there will no own their home. This notion that the doubt be missteps along the way. But tax burden in America is mostly borne there’s a huge amount of good will here. by the wealthy is beyond stupid. If you The right wing is starting to attack this, actually look at the data, the higher obviously. Both the mainstream right on income you are, the less percentage the Sunday talk shows, and the lunatic, you pay in actual taxes. So we need to extreme right on the blogosphere, [are] stop repeating what is an utter falsegetting very upset about this. And for hood. The right, for them it’s an article good reason, because it’s giving a lie to of faith; data doesn’t matter. But we their whole worldview that has until now live in the reality-based community. To gone largely, but not entirely, unchal- answer your broader questions, it’s inaclenged. A lot of people have said what a curate, and it shows how worried they fraud the Tea Party view of the crisis was. are. Listen, the great American middle This is the first time the conversation has class—that was a great accomplishchanged to: How unequal a society do we ment. And Goldman Sachs and Jamie really want to have? The right’s view is: Dimon at Chase, they don’t particularly The more unequal, the better. And our care. They’re a global business now, view is different. So this is a nice shot in and they don’t particularly need a solid the arm for anybody who still believes in middle class to enjoy fabulous wealth www.cityhallnews.com

and riches. We disagree with them. We think it would be good if people had a decent opportunity and reasonable amount of security in their lives. If that’s a radical idea, then Occupy Wall Street is radical. But I happen to think it’s a mainstream, American idea. CH: Gov. Andrew Cuomo and legislative leaders have said the millionaires’ tax is a nonstarter—they’re not going to renew it. Do he and other Democrats risk losing the support of the WFP if that holds true? DC: I think right now our task is to make sure the public is educated about what’s going on. Unemployment is getting worse, not better. And therefore we need both Washington and Albany to figure out how to deal with this central crisis, which will have the net effect of helping the overall economy, as well as individual people’s lives. CH: But obviously renewing the millionaires’ tax would go toward accomplishing one of the central arguments of the Occupy Wall Street protesters. DC: That’s certainly true, and we do favor reinstatement of the millionaires’ tax, with the funds used for the retention and creation of middle-class jobs. Now, there’s a world of work that needs doing, and a boatload of people who want work to do. So we don’t think this is a complex question in some ways. CH: When you talk to the protesters in Zuccotti Park, do you get a sense that they have any confidence that the government can change? DC: To be honest, it’s a mixed bag. There’s a lot of different views down there. There’s certainly a sense of hopefulness at OWS that says, Yeah, things can change. They wouldn’t be standing out in the cold rain if they thought it was all just for naught. The specific path forward? If they know what it is, they haven’t told me. They’re confident that when citizens are engaged and in motion and building a community and trusting each other and sharing information and educating each other, good things can happen. CH: Any plans to spend an overnight in Zuccotti Park? DC: That’s a good question. I haven’t done so yet. But I won’t be surprised to find myself down there. I’d have to get myself an air mattress. I’m not as young as some of these folks. —Andrew J. Hawkins ahawkins@cityhallnews.com OCTOBER 17, 2011

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