City Hall - October 25, 2010 by City Hall News

The odd coalitions on either side of the pension proposal from Howard Wolfson, below, (Page 6), Superfund development worries fester like the gonorrhea in the Gowanus (Page 10)

Vol. 5, No. 5

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October 25, 2010

and Jimmy McMillan, above, discusses his new life as a media star (Page 27).

BLACK TEA Inspired by Obama and enraged by Cuomo, Charles Barron seizes an opportunity for new power

OCTOBER 25, 2010

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With Paid Sick Leave Shelved, Progressives Plot Tactics For Next Move As living and prevailing wage fights loom, WFP, Council liberals, unions tread cautiously around Quinn

CITY HALL Brewer said she believes there is not much else proponents of paid sick leave could have done to get the legislation passed, noting that the Partnership for New York City spent $100,000 on a study deriding the bill as too expensive, which she believes swung the fight their way. “I think we tried everything,” Brewer said. “We pushed as hard as we could and got as much support as we could.” A source close to Quinn said that the decision on paid sick leave should not be seen as an indication that the speaker would scuttle other WFP-backed legislation, though there will be a continuing concern for the interests of small business.

Unions may also be more committed to the living and prevailing wage fights: The paid sick leave bill, while a top priority of the Working Families Party, was not expected to directly benefit members of supporters such as RWDSU or 32BJ.

RWDSU President Stuart Applebaum speaks at a prayer breakfast organized to push for the living wage bill. BY CHRIS BRAGG

ate last year, the passage of the paid sick leave bill appeared all but inevitable. The bill’s lead sponsor, Gale Brewer, had lined up a veto-proof majority of Council members. Fear about the spread of H1N1 virus was still prevalent. A slew of Working Families Party-backed candidates who just won Democratic primaries were set to join the chamber. Even before they arrived, an emboldened Council defied the mayor and killed the Kingsbridge Armory plan. Leaders within the business community privately wondered whether they should simply cut the best deal possible on paid sick leave before the Council could force their hand. A year later, Council Speaker Christine Quinn’s decision to shelve the bill has the progressives soul-searching and their allies weighing the future of the rest of the agenda that seemed inevitable just months ago, when Brad Lander and Melissa Mark-Viverito threw down the gauntlet with the formation of the Progressive Caucus. Some Council members privately express regret about not moving aggres-

sively for a vote on paid sick leave earlier, before the business community had time to mobilize and unify against it. As future fights loom, some progressives say that they were too conciliatory to Quinn, and played too much of an insider’s game in trying to sway her, rather than doing what they do best—mobilizing and organizing the public. Others say the time has come to more aggressively confront her. “There was a feeling that Christine Quinn had an interest in keeping her progressive base intact, and people who had supported her now have to re-evaluate that,” said one person close to the WFP’s paid sick days campaign. Even before Quinn killed the bill, unions’ strategy on one of their next big fights—the living wage bill—had shifted in reaction to how the paid sick leave’s legislative process was unfolding. On the weekend of Oct. 10, the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union and other groups organized 150 ministers of different faiths across the city to plead during services about the need for a living wage bill, in hopes of organizing this key constituency behind the looming fight.

During the Kingsbridge fight, that tactic worked, with a 500-person protest in front of the proposed development helping turn the tide and embolden Bronx officials. Proponents hoped that instead of having just Council members and interest groups pushing for the legislation, committed blocs of voters would push Council members to stay supportive of the bill, even in the face of an onslaught from the business community. Indeed, the fact that some of the 35 sponsors on the paid sick leave bill would ultimately have not voted to override a veto by Mayor Michael Bloomberg appears to have been the final death blow for the measure’s passage. The option of using sponsor’s privilege—the rule that allows a bill’s sponsor to put a bill to the floor over the objections of the speaker remains. But the chances of that would be unlikely, according to Brewer, who said she “absolutely” would use sponsor’s privilege if it had a chance of success. “My guess is that all 35 sponsors would not stay on the bill because of the reaction of the speaker and pressure from the chambers,” Brewer said, “and we would not be able to pass the legislation.”

RWDSU President Stuart Appelbaum said the debate over living wage would be very different than paid sick leave, because paid sick leave was seen as a mandate on small business, while living wage would simply make the city ensure that developers receiving taxpayer money provided better-paying jobs. “These things have very different rationales and reasons for them,” Appelbaum said. Unions may also be more committed to these fights. The paid sick leave bill, while a top priority of the Working Families Party, was not expected to directly benefit members of supporters such as RWDSU or 32BJ. As these unions fight for a living wage and prevailing wage, they are likely to expend more political capital in order to see their causes through. Though some thought the speaker was positioning herself for a 2013 mayoral run by catering to the business community’s desire to squash the bill, Quinn is still likely to be in the progressives’ corner on a number of causes, said Andrew Friedman, executive director of Make the Road New York. Friedman cited a bill the pro-immigrant group is pushing to end the Department of Corrections’ collaboration with Immigrations and Customs Enforcement in deporting undocumented immigrants as one such opportunity. “I don’t think this is a signal that Quinn is more towards the center rather than with progressive New Yorkers,” Friedman said. “I think we’ll be standing with the speaker on a number of other issues.” cbragg@cityhallnews.com

NYC HEALTH AND HOSPITAL CORPORATION PROGNOSIS:

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NYC HHC HIRES CONTRACTORS THAT FAIL TO PAY PREVAILING WAGES ON NYC PROJECTS! Company Name

Vishal Construction, Inc. (contract with HHC for Bellevue Hospital)

Rothstein & Hoffman Electric Services (held Requirements Contracts with HHC)

Biltmore General Contracting, Inc. (currently working in HHC facilities)

Kelly’s Sheet Metal, Inc. (15 years work with HHC at Bellevue Hospital)

Violations*

Debarred From Public Work Contracts For Five Years

Willful Violation of Prevailing Wage Rate Law Willful Violation of Prevailing Wage Rate Law In 2008 & Currently Working In HHC Facilities Debarred From Public Work Contracts For Five Years While Working In Bellevue Hospital

Patient: Your Tax Dollars Care: Project Labor Agreement with HHC and retain the skilled in-house work force Prognosis: Healthier Outcome for All *Bureau of Labor Law Investigation Statistics, New York City Comptroller Prevailing Wage Council, May 26, 2010.

HHC Woodhull Hospital Brooklyn, NY

Quality • Safety • Opportunity BUILDITUNION.COM

October 25, 2010

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CITY HALL

Few Takers For White’s Gavel At Economic Development Committee

andrew schwartz

Along with Contracts, once prominent position fades from view and desire in Council

By Chris Bragg

uring the 1990s, when chaired by Staten Island councilman Jay O’Donovan, the City Council’s Economic Development Committee was seen as one of the body’s more prominent chairmanships. That prominence continued under Council Member James Sanders, whose committee held oversight hearings on a number of important development projects, from the West Side Stadium to Atlantic Yards, under the pro-development Bloomberg administration. But after Sanders lost his chairmanship—he backed Bill de Blasio for speaker in 2006 over Christine Quinn—the committee fell into disrepair under Tom White, who for years had one of the poorest attendance records in the Council. In recent years, White’s illnesses exacerbated the decline. What is left of the City Council’s voice on economic development in New York is now seen as so insignificant that the chair White left open does not seem to be getting many takers among his colleagues.

Those members who have expressed interest are being told that the seat is being reserved for someone from the Queens delegation under the deal that originally made Quinn speaker. But no one from the borough appears ready to step up, even from what have traditionally been considered lesser committees. Everyone agrees that Finance, Land Use and its adjoining subcommittees have the portfolios with the most real power in the Council. The Economic Development Committee, though, is much like other committees, the primary role of which is often oversight and a bully pulpit. “The ability and ambition of a committee chair makes a huge difference,” said Baruch College professor Doug Muzzio. “It’s also the quality of the staff and the counsel.” Sanders said it would take a great deal of work to bring the Economic Development committee up to its old stature, because of staff departures since White took over. Sanders, whose own attendance and energy have earned him critics, has some experience with this: he took over the Civil Service and Labor Committee last year

from indicted ex-Council Member Miguel Martinez. Committees like these often lose experienced counsel or staffers, he said, noting he had to hire a new counsel for his committee after Martinez’s resignation. “People want to use their talents, and they quietly seek positions elsewhere,” he said. “As they should.” Economic Development is not the only committee suffering. One lobbyist who works for a number of non-profits, for instance, said they were having serious trouble getting any attention for requested tweaks in the city’s non-profit regulations because the chair of the Contracts Committee, Darlene Mealy, has refused for months to either meet with them or reply to inquiries. The committee was once prominent in the early 1990s under its first chair, Carolyn Maloney, who used the position as a stepping stone to her current seat in Congress. An advisor for Mealy declined comment on the status of her chairmanship. A member’s closeness to Quinn can also help determine the prominence of a committee, since the speaker not only appoints the chairs and hands out legislative

stipends, or lulus, but also steers bills to various chairs, at times saving the choice ones for favored members. At times, sheer savvy and ambition can take a committee from obscurity to prominence. Before he was elected public advocate, de Blasio raised his profile as chair of the General Welfare Committee. John Liu’s crusade against the MTA, coupled with a savvy media presence, did the same for the Transportation Committee. But generating headlines is not the only mark of a chair boosting a committee’s profile. Gale Brewer took the Technology committee from obscurity to higher profile, though her efforts remained mostly out of the spotlight. Transportation advocate Gene Russianoff said the only thing lost on the Transportation Committee, now under Bronx Democrat Jimmy Vacca, was a few headlines. “Liu was so ambitious, he’d put a press release out every day,” he said. “But Vacca’s a very strong chair in his own right. I didn’t see any ebb and flow in the transition.” cbragg@cityhallnews.com

CITY HALL

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Halloran Bill Would Alter Funding Allocation For Outer Boroughs Likely opposition from mayor, Manhattan members to change for claimed inequality By Chris Bragg

hough Queens is nearly five times the size of Manhattan and has 700,000 more people, Queens’ budget for its borough president’s office, libraries and its capital construction budget is often equal to or less than that of Manhattan, according to Queens Republican Council Member Dan Halloran. Halloran said this is just one of many inequalities faced by his borough—and he introduced a potentially risky bill at the Nov. 13 stated meeting to try and correct the problem. The bill would change the Council’s internal rules to require that funding be distributed solely on the basis of a district or borough’s population and geographical size.

The bill would change the Council’s internal rules to require that funding for borough presidents, libraries and capital construction be distributed solely on the basis of a district or borough’s population and geographical size. The city’s charter revision discussed questions of how to distribute funds more equally between the boroughs. But Halloran argued that the panel, which was formed by Mayor Michael Bloomberg, would never actually approve such a measure for the ballot, since doing so would take away considerable discretion from Bloomberg in doling out funds. “The mayor would never let something like that happen,” Halloran said. Before this year’s budget season, Queens Borough President Helen Marshall put out a study highlighting inequalities between Queens and other boroughs’ funding formulas. Queens received $2.12 per capita to run the borough president’s office in 2009, while the Bronx got $4.09 and Staten Island got $8.73, according to data compiled earlier this year by Marshall’s office. For cultural organizations, Manhattan got about $15.92 per resident, the Bronx got $7.35 and Staten Island got $5.82. Queens got $1.76 per capita, the study said. Libraries in Queens get $77,000 less per branch than those in Brooklyn. Dan Andrews, a spokesman for Marshall, said a number of the borough’s delegation, such as Council Member Leroy

Comrie, had been receptive to equalizing funds for libraries and other cultural institutions, though the efforts were ultimately unsuccessful. “We definitely gained some traction,” Andrews said. Halloran’s bill would have to go through the Finance Committee, where Halloran said he expects it will see resistance. Manhattan members will likely oppose the bill, along with the mayor. Regardless, Halloran said he was trying to rally support from good-government groups and other outer-borough Council members. Though he had not seen the actual legislation, Council Member Peter Vallone, Jr., a Queens Democrat, said he agreed with the overall concept. “I don’t know how any outer-borough Council member could not support that goal,” he said. “What happened with the Queens Library this year [in the budget] is certainly a good example of not enough money going to the outer boroughs.” Halloran also said he is getting some reception for the idea from more liberal colleagues, including Diana Reyna and Jumaane Williams, both from Brooklyn. Halloran is also floating the even more politically risky idea of forcing Council Speaker Christine Quinn to dole out member items based on a district’s size and population, and not based on the speaker’s own prerogative. Language to do that, though, is not in Halloran’s current bill. Williams said he would be open to that idea as well. “I think the whole thing really needs to be looked at,” Williams said. Tony Perez Cassino, a member of the 2010 charter revision commission from the Bronx, said Halloran’s proposal would likely be unworkable because the Division of the Budget needs flexibility to move money between districts and boroughs based on their needs. He did suggest that provisions be put in the charter to prevent offices’ funds from being dramatically cut from year to year. On the other hand, Cassino said he would favor almost any system that would do away with the current method of doling out discretionary funding through the speaker’s office. Cassino pushed for such a measure during this year’s charter revision commission hearings, though the panel ultimately declined to take up the issue. “These are two very different things. Is the money given out by the mayor subject to pure politics? Yes. And there should be a little bit more insulation there,” Cassino said. “But the money given out by the speaker is subject to politics alone, and based entirely on loyalty to the speaker.” cbragg@cityhallnews.com

OctOber 25, 2010

Our Perspective

Living Wage Law Could Cure Pay Gap By Stuart Appelbaum, President, Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union, RWDSU, UFCW

ver the past few decades, the super wealthy have become unfathomably richer, while the real earning power of everyone else has become weaker. The middle class in this country, which saw its wages and buying power propelled to new heights as the economy grew in the decades following World War II, has seen its average inflation-adjusted hourly wage decline by more than seven percent since 1976. In contrast, the richest one percent of earners has seen its share of total U.S. income grow from 8.9 percent to an astounding 23.5 percent during that same time period. This is no way to run an economy. The rich have more than they will possibly ever need, and their mammoth earnings are doing little to create a healthy economic climate in the U.S.

Workers employed at subsidized developments would all have the right to earn a living wage in New York City, and a chance at a good middle-class life.

But the costs of growing pay inequality mean more than just a middle class that finds itself in danger of extinction. A recent study shows that the pay gap is increasing bankruptcy filings, and hurting the American family by raising financial stress and even divorce rates. Cash-strapped voters are becoming unwilling to support public services and the infrastructure, literally endangering the lives of those who drive across bridges, live near dams, or drive on our roads. At the RWDSU, we’ve become highly involved in the effort to pass living wage legislation. As one of the leading voices in the Living Wage Campaign (www.livingwagenyc.org), we are fighting for the passage of the Fair Wages for New Yorkers Act, a law which would guarantee that when the city gives businesses public subsidies, the jobs they create will pay at least a living wage. Workers employed at subsidized developments would be covered by the law. Retail workers, concession workers at stadiums, and cafeteria workers at office buildings would all have the right to earn a living wage in New York City, and a chance at a good middle-class life. The New York City Council has a real opportunity to level the playing field by passing living wage legislation. This law will bolster the economic strength of working families and help turn back the clock on three decades’ worth of the erosion of the middle class.

Visit us on the web at

www.rwdsu.org

OCTOBER 25, 2010

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CITY HALL

No United Front On Wolfson’s Union Pension Proposal Collective bargaining retool supported by Nespoli and Savino, but opposed by Mulgrew and McMahon BY CHRIS BRAGG

n a speech before the Association for a Better New York in early October, Deputy Mayor Howard Wolfson said that New York City had a historic opportunity to work with the next governor to cut runaway pension costs that are crippling the city budget. “The winds of change are blowing,” Wolfson said, “and the next governor will have an opportunity to deal with some of these problems in a way that past governors have not because crisis creates its own opportunity.” Under the Taylor Law, pension benefits for New York City’s public employees have since 1973 been determined in Albany, while the city can collectively bargain on provisions such as health benefits and salary increases. But Wolfson signaled that Bloomberg’s new ally, Andrew Cuomo, the almost-certain new governor, would be receptive to some changes. In reality, pension adjustments between the city and unions are still agreed upon with a wink and a nod at the bargaining table, then quickly approved by the Legislature. Still, Wolfson suggested that without any interference from a Legislature constantly trying to add sweeteners to their benefits, the city would be able to rein in its pension obligations. The fate of any bill granting New York the power to negotiate its own pension agreements would likely be in the Assembly, where most Democrats hold close relationships with public-sector unions. And so far, labor’s reaction to the idea is far from unified. Harry Nespoli, the head of the Municipal Labor Committee, which negotiates health benefits for all of New York’s public-sector unions, supports Wolfson’s proposal because it would allow unions more flexibility, since some unions might want to trade some pension benefits for other benefits. He said the Bloomberg administration has been courting him and other leaders to support the proposal, though it had inexplicably stopped those efforts earlier this year. Meanwhile, Michael Mulgrew, president of the United Federation of Teachers, panned Wolfson’s proposal, saying it showed a lack of understanding of why

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pensions were moved from the purview of the city in the first place: to take some of the passion involved in local politics out of the equation by moving them to the state level. “Does Mr. Wolfson have a degree in labor law? I think he needs to look into this a little more before deciding to open up the Taylor Law,” Mulgrew said. Other labor leaders, like Teamsters Local 237 president Greg Floyd, echoed Mulgrew’s opposition to the change. Fiscal watchdogs, who would lend credibility to supporting the proposal for both Cuomo and for Senate Republicans and conservative Democrats, are also divided over the proposal. The bill is supported by Carol Kellerman, president of the Citizens Budget Commission, because pensions would “become part of bargaining for better salary increases or some other term or condition” and the “balance of power” between public-sector unions and the

city would be different. But E.J. McMahon, of the fiscally conservative Empire Center, said the very reason that municipalities are not allowed to bargain their own pension benefits under the Taylor Law is that they previously had proven too generous. The Legislature has actually been more responsible with pensions, McMahon said, adding that Bloomberg had done little to rein in public-sector workers’ health care costs during his tenure—a cost that the mayor has collective bargaining power over. He said giving municipalities the power of pensions will lead them inexorably to sacrifice long-term fiscal health for short-term gain. “With all the harm that has been done by the Legislature, they’ve still done a better job with pension reform than mayors do,” McMahon said. The bill, meanwhile, could also have an unlikely Senate sponsor if and when it is ever introduced. Following his speech, Wolfson got a

call from Diane Savino, a former labor organizer who is generally regarded as one of the more union-friendly members of the State Senate. Savino, a Staten Island Democrat, said she expressed support for the idea, but also told Wolfson that in the end, the city probably would think better of it. During Bloomberg’s tenure, teacher salaries have gone up 49 percent. If pension costs were included in the collective bargaining equations, the mayor would likely shy away from large future increases, since he would not be able to blame Albany for rising pension obligations, Savino said. “[The city] would have to evaluate the entire cost, and that would impact their ability to negotiate salary increases,” Savino said. To McMahon, though, the fact that Savino is supporting the bill is reason alone not to support the legislation. “That,” McMahon said, “tells everything you need to know about the idea.” cbragg@cityhallnews.com

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Eva Moskowitz, right, mulls a 2013 comeback (Page 8), new Council Member Liz Crowley braves the harsh weather for her first day on the job (Page 18)

and Richard Ravitch, left, explains why everyone should get on board his plan to save the MTA (Page 23).

MARTY!

Vol. 3, No. 8

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January 2009

The Brooklyn BP on being overlooked, and what he plans to do about it

UFA ad in The Capitol 10-18-10_new layout 10/21/10 12:11 PM Page 1

Second Hand Smoke Kills Mayor Bloomberg and the city council want to ban smoking in public spaces in the City of New York because second hand smoke kills thousands every year. “When you breathe second hand tobacco smoke, you are inhaling a bouquet of arsenic, vinyl, chloride, cyanide, ammonia, benzene, and other toxins and carcinogens that threaten your long term health. ” — Mayor Michael Bloomberg “There is no safe level of exposure to second hand smoke, not inside, not outside, not anywhere. Second hand smoke causes cancer. It is a class A carcinogen, it is a killer.”

— Don Distasio, CEO Eastern Division, American Cancer Society

NEW YORK CITY FIREFIGHTERS AGREE “The truth is that New York City Firefighters inhale more toxic smoke at one fire than the average citizen’s exposure to a lifetime of second hand smoke.This is just another reminder that New York City Firefighters have the most dangerous job in America.”

— Steve Cassidy, UFA President

Photo credit First on Scene Photos

For more information visit: Uniformed Firefighters Association

www.UFANYC.ORG

OctOber 25, 2010

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Bloomberg Food Stamp Opponents Seeking Minority Politicians To Head Pushback

Beverage groups tap poverty advocates to oppose mayor’s soda purchase ban By Edward-Isaac dovErE

sk the American Beverage Association, the coalition of otherwise competing soft drink companies, how it is going to fight Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s proposal to bar purchases of soda with food stamps, and the answer is a hyperlink to a statement issued last week telling government to back off and stop targeting poor people. Also included: a suggestion to contact Joel Berg of the NYC Coalition Against Hunger. Berg said that he has not had any contact with the Beverage Association nor was he aware that the corporate representatives were recommending him to people. “It is a little uncomfortable, some of our allies,” Berg said. Not that Berg is letting that discomfort temper his own readiness for the fight. The persistent subtext, he said, is a callousness to the poor. “The left and the right are uniting around the one thing that they always unite around as elites, which is telling poor people what to do,” Berg said.

For the Beverage Association and its lobbyists, beating back the proposal that Bloomberg and Gov. David Paterson have submitted to the USDA is for the moment not so much about behind-the-scenes conversations with the small group of decision makers in Washington as trying to construct a public relations nightmare for the Bloomberg administration. This includes advocates for the poor, but it also includes a quiet effort by some of the lobbyists for Patricia Lynch

official,” said one elected official of color who received a call. “It appears that the effort to identify someone to denounce the proposal may have largely been based on race.” A call even went out to Assembly Member Karim Camara, who attended the press conference Bloomberg and Paterson held in Brooklyn last week to show his support for the proposal. Camara is an African-American, and represents a district that has a relatively

“It is a little uncomfortable, some of our allies,” Berg said. Associates to round up black and Latino elected officials as allies in the fight. Several Black and Latino legislators who supported the soda tax proposal have gotten the recruiting calls, creating some discomfort about why their help was being sought. “It’s not clear that the outreach was based on policy positions that had been previously adopted by the given elected

higher proportion of people on food stamps. “I’m not privy to their strategy—I’m just saying that part of it would be to hear from elected officials of color because of the disproportionate number of children from that community who are on food stamps,” Camara said. “It seems like it’ll become one part of their public relations campaign.”

CITY HALL Darren Dopp, a spokesman for Patricia Lynch Associates, dismissed this, saying that the firm was building an argument on the merits of the proposal, and not on political theater. “This has nothing to do with race, and everything to do with a government that wants to tell poor people what they can eat and drink,” Dopp said. But from the administration’s point of view, the initial response to the proposal for a pilot program has been surprisingly reassuring, and the initial pushback without much substance. “I don’t know how you could be immediately against this, when you could say, ‘Let’s try this,’” said Robert Doar, the Human Resources Administration and social services commissioner. As the proposal heads to Washington for review, one man that both sides will be appealing to is Tom Vilsack, the secretary of agriculture, who oversees the USDA. Bloomberg spokesman Stu Loeser said the administration is optimistic that the USDA will approve the pilot program. The prospective pushback by poverty advocates and minority elected officials did not dampen that optimism, he said. “We are engaging with anyone and everyone, including the Beverage Association, on the merits of the argument,” Loeser said. “We’ve already seen significant support from people who are anything but the usual suspects, and have often disagreed with the mayor.” eidovere@cityhallnews.com

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OCTOBER 25, 2010

CITY HALL

Development Flows Slowly Along Gowanus And Newtown As predicted, Superfund designation supersedes building plans in Brooklyn BY LAURA NAHMIAS

And the worries have only continued to fester, like the gonorrhea in the Gowanus. The designation at Newtown Creek did not spur as much vocal debate as the Gowanus designation, but there is still potential for the label to have an adverse impact on the city’s hopes for economic development in the area, in Brooklyn and Queens, according to Marc LaVorgna, a spokesperson for the Mayor’s Office. The Bloomberg administration openly opposed the Superfund designation at Gowanus, advocating for an alternate cleanup plan that would allow prospective developers to voluntarily contribute funds for the work. The 140-year-old, four-mile-long canal is lined with thick sludge from years of toxic dumping, most from untraceable sources.

PHOTO BY JEFFREY/BRAINWARE 3000 FLICKR

uperfund designations at Newtown Creek on the Queens/ Brooklyn border in October and at the Gowanus Canal last March incited panicked waves among developers and city administrators worried over the impact the label could have on growth in the city’s most populous borough.

plants. Locals call the area “Stinkpoint.” More importantly, awareness has been growing of the massive oil spill, under the neighborhood’s northern end, since it was first discovered in 1978; over the past several years, environmental impact studies, news articles and a lawsuit from the attorney general’s office have helped publicize the presence of oil—an amount scientists have estimated to reach 17 million gallons, or three times the size of the Exxon-Valdez spill. According to Assembly Member Joe Lentol, who represents the part of Brooklyn affected by the designation, the Superfund label is a relief. “People are optimistic that something is finally happening,” he said of his constituents. Lentol, who grew up in Brooklyn and says he swam in Newtown Creek as a child, used to believe the designation would drive down property values in the area, he said. “My misgivings were that, you know, I don’t want the people of Greenpoint to think they’re living in such a contaminated place that they’re going to move out. I don’t want them to think that their property values would be lowered. It’s a delicate issue for people who live here. A lot of people remember Love Canal, and when they think of Superfund, they think of contamination. They think of people dying from cancer,” Lentol said. A report issued by the Environmental Protection Agency suggests the impact of the designation on property values is mixed, and changes from site to site, with some sites’ property values rebounding after designation, before the cleanup is complete. The exact costs, extent and time frame for cleanup at both sites is specula-

At Gowanus, Toll Brothers planned to stop building a $250 million development if the designation were approved, and when it was, they did. The Bloomberg administration was not pleased. The parties responsible for the pollution at Newtown, on the other hand, are well known—ExxonMobil, BP and Chevron, along with several industrial companies along the waterfront. The city supported the designation at Newtown because there was “no other way to clean it up,” Lavorgna said. One reason the designation at Newtown may have been less openly controversial is that locals already associate the neighborhood with toxicity. There is nothing wrong with the neighborhood’s water, but residents still use Brita filters anyway. The neighborhood is downwind from one of the city’s sewage treatment

tive until more research is done, said EPA regional spokesperson John Senn. Knowledge of the pollution and the Superfund label have not impacted average home prices in Greenpoint yet. Sales prices for two-family homes have risen over the past year from $771,449 to $799,386. The number of total home sales dropped off though, by about half, according to records from the city’s Department of Finance. But the city is still concerned over the future of development near Newtown Creek, according to the mayor’s office. There are 184 blocks and two miles of waterfront still developable in Greenpoint, as well as the possibility for up to 7,000 additional units of housing and 7.9 acres of open space along less than a mile of waterfront, LaVorgna wrote in an e-mail. Those plans are contingent on private investment to reactivate the East River and Newtown Creek waterfront. One part of the designation that has received little consideration is how it will affect the Queens side of the creek, specifically Hunter’s Point South, which was rezoned for development in 2008, LaVorgna wrote. The area is cited for 5,000 housing units, a new public school, $175 million worth of utility and road infrastructure and 10 acres of waterfront park, he added. Perhaps most crucial are $500 million in planned capital improvements for the area. Those projects could stall as the area comes under federal control, Lavorgna said. The cleanup might not be controversy-free even if it began that way. In midOctober, Queens politicians, including Borough President Helen Marshall, Assembly Member Catherine Nolan, Assembly Member Michael Gianaris and Council Member Jimmy Van Bramer, issued a

letter to the regional EPA coordinator taking the agency to task for what they perceived as a lack of attention to cleanup in the borough. Few of those issues were raised by constituents when the EPA opened up the designation to public comment, Senn said. “I will say that we got a lot more comments from the public about possibly putting the Gowanus Canal (more than 800) on the Superfund list than we did about possibly listing Newtown Creek (several dozen),” Senn wrote in an e-mail. The reason for the limited feedback was not clear, he said. But legislators say the designation in both areas cannot ultimately be held responsible for stagnation in development. Lentol acknowledged that 45 planned building projects have stalled in Greenpoint since the recession began. Those developments were the byproducts of two rezonings—one in 2005 to open up the waterfront to high-rise condominiums and increased affordable housing, and another in 2008 to entrench the lowprofile post-war housing in the neighborhood’s center. At Gowanus, Toll Brothers planned to stop building a $250 million development if the designation were approved, and when it was, they did. The Bloomberg administration was not pleased. Council Member Brad Lander, whose district encompasses parts of Gowanus, said he thought the developer might have had to pull out anyway, given the state of the economy. Other planned developments for the area, such as speculative plans for a Whole Foods, were never as concrete as the Toll Brothers housing development, he said. Both Lander and Lentol suggested the designation would ultimately be good for their neighborhoods. Lander hoped the EPA could contract out cleanup work to local firms, stimulating the local economy. Lentol hoped the Newtown Creek designation would clear the way for eventual residential rezoning of the areas directly adjacent to the waterfront. Those sites are currently industrial, but the waterfront has been desolate for years, Lentol said. “Everybody was waiting for industry to come back, and guess what?” Lander said. “It wasn’t ever coming back.” lnahmias@cityhallnews.com

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A Message from Louis J. Coletti, President & CEO, Building Trades Employers’ Association (BTEA) City Council Speaker Christine Quinn showed the kind of political leadership and courage that is too often lacking these days in announcing her opposition to the proposed Paid Sick Leave bill that would have required businesses with 20 employees or more to provide 9 paid sick days a year and smaller ones to provide 5 days a year. This bill would have been a devastating blow to the City’s business community which is still reeling from the effects of a terrible economy. For the construction industry, we are close to a depression with unemployment in the unionized building trades an unprecedented 30-40%. BTEA union contractors have serious financial problems with banks being unwilling to extend credit lines, little backlog of work and every day cost increases in utilities and other daily expenses. For the unionized construction industry, the bill would have been outright interference by government in the collective bargaining process. Paid sick leave is an issue to be negotiated between union signatory contractors and their respective trade unions-not imposed by government fiat. Ms. Quinn deserves a great deal of credit in understanding this issue and taking such a principled stance that will only help the business community recapture its balance. That’s what leadership is all about and that is why she serves as Speaker. That is not to say her City Council colleagues are wrong in trying to find ways to strengthen New York City’s middle class and their quality of life. It’s just that trying to legislate issues like paid sick leave and living wages is not the way to do it. Public policies like these will only serve to discourage economic growth-not encourage the growth of businesses and creation of new jobs. I would urge the City Council to focus its efforts on identifying ways it can spur economic development and create new jobs; what is the new sector of the economy that will lead us out of this economic morass? Have we targeted the city’s job training funds to train New Yorkers for those jobs? Are there tax policies that need to be revised to encourage economic development and growth?

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It has often been said, the best social program ever developed is a real job. Thanks to Speaker Christine Quinn, we can continue forward in the effort to do so.

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OctOber 25, 2010

CITY HALL

AG Race Could Change Calculus On City-State Balance For Statewide Races Primary results indicate suburban turnout, Latino voters are new keys to winning campaigns By Laura Nahmias

or decades, candidates have been using a clear strategy to win statewide elections that depends on pitting New York City against the rest of the state. The race between Eric Schneiderman and Dan Donovan, rare for being a statewide head-to-head general election between two residents of New York City, could be the end of that. Turnout for the race could show political consultants and campaign operatives whether the math for creating a successful statewide candidacy—a certain necessary combination of upstate, suburban and New York City votes—is the same as it has been for 30 years, or whether it has changed over the past several years because of increased voter turnout in the city among increasingly influential voter blocs, such as Hispanics and gay and lesbian voters. “For 30 years, upstate has voted way above its share. It is the weathervane of where public opinion is, and isn’t controlled by any one party,” political consultant and SUNY-Albany adjunct Bruce Gyory wrote in a memo he has been circulating. Today, Gyory says that candidates cannot afford to underperform in any of the voter-rich regions of the state—upstate,

suburbs and in the city. “To do well, you have to be a tri-athlete,” he writes. If history is any guide, the contest between the Democratic state senator from Manhattan and the Republican Staten Island DA will be close, much like some of the closest races of the last two decades—the 1994 Dennis Vacco/Karen Burnstein attorney general race, the 1998 Eliot Spitzer/Vacco race and the 2002 Alan Hevesi/John Faso comptroller race. In the past, Democrats typically had to pull at least 40 percent of the vote upstate and 45 percent in the suburban counties of Westchester, Nassau, Suffolk and Rockland to win, Gyory suggests, while Republicans have to pull at least 35 percent of the votes cast in New York City in order to take a statewide race. Liberal candidates performed better in Democratic primaries than in general elections, because primary turnout is greater in New York City than it is during the general election. The city holds 38 percent of the state’s registered voters, but rarely breaks 30 percent of the total vote in a general election. But that also means liberal candidates who win the primaries have to work harder to win over moderate upstate and suburban voters, whose votes are essential to a win because of higher turnout in

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those areas. Schneiderman knows he needs upstate to win, said campaign spokesperson James Freedland, who said the candidate has been stumping around Buffalo and Rochester in the weeks leading up to the general election. The same math makes it much harder for deeply conservative candidates to win statewide races. Some combination of suburban and New York City votes is necessary to win, which proves too steep for many far-right-leaning Republicans, the paper says. Donovan is seen as a centrist, but he faces an additional challenge in being from Staten Island, said Freedland. Since he has no upstate or suburban base he can count on, he will have to win at least 35 percent of the New York City vote in order to take the race. Schneiderman is polling higher than Donovan in the race, but he will have to capture almost twice the percentage of upstate votes he took in the primary to guarantee a win, according to the formula. Donovan conceded he had little chance of winning over New York City voters. “My plan is to be realistic, and put my trust in the campaign as to how to win it,” he said in a recent conference call with reporters. “There are certain areas that I know I won’t do as well as my opponent in voter registration.” Donovan said he plans to campaign in Buffalo and Long Island to galvanize voter turnout there. “Realistically, with all of the factors taken into account, one thing … that’s difficult to measure is the anger voters have,” Donovan said. “Those voters will be out west.” But while both candidates are sticking to the formula, it remains possible that the New York City vote could become more important in statewide races. The city defied its normal patterns in the last two elections, when voter turnout, spurred by interest among Hispanic, black and younger voters to cast their ballots for Barack Obama, propelled the city’s vote to more than 30 percent of the total vote, according to political consultant Jerry Skurnik. Any candidate hoping to rely more on city voters has to turn out those minority blocs, he said. Turnout fluctuates more among Latino voters from year to year, and Latino

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voters cast ballots more readily in races where they have a personal interest in the candidate, he said. “I’d be very interested to see what they do” this year, Skurnik said, when there are no statewide Latino candidates on the ballot. That could give Schneiderman an advantage with the city’s 1.1 million Latino voters, said Freedland. His former Senate district in Washington Heights had a high Latino population. Donovan also could get a down-ballot boost from voters enthused or angry enough to turn out for gubernatorial candidate Carl Paladino. Paladino’s primary win over Rick Lazio was fueled by heavy voter turnout in Western New York. Paladino also could create what Gyory’s report called a “frontlash”—increased Democratic turnout from voters who just want to vote against Paladino—effectively giving a boost to the other Democratic candidates. One voting bloc that could turn out for a “frontlash” would be the city’s LGBT voters, offended by Paladino’s statements on homosexuality last month, though the state does not keep records of LGBTidentified voter numbers the way it measures Latino or black identified registered voters, said George Simpson, spokesperson for the Empire State Pride Agenda. If the formula holds true, political analysts say the Schneiderman-Donovan contest will be decided in the suburbs, where neither candidate has any measurable advantage. But Nassau and Suffolk counties have a fast-growing Latino population, the largest behind the city’s population, according to John Mollenkopf, a professor who has studied increases in Latino voter registration in New York City as director of the CUNY Graduate Center for Urban Research. Those voting blocs are as important for candidates to monitor as shifting voter attitudes in the three regions, Mollenkopf wrote in an e-mail. “Mathematically, one could win an election in New York City without Latino votes, but any reasonable candidate would want to get a good share of such a large and growing voting block,” Mollenkopf said. “Since Hispanics and blacks mostly tend to vote in similar ways, you would not want to alienate this near-majority of the vote.” lnahmias@cityhallnews.com

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OCTOBER 25, 2010

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CITY HALL

TheInspiredBlack Tea Party by Obama and enraged by Cuomo, Charles Barron seizes an opportunity for a new black power By Edward-Isaac Dovere their tamers. Less than two weeks before Election Day, Cuomo arrived at City Hall to try presenting a deliberately different picture with the release of his urban agenda, the sixth and thickest of his policy books. Nydia Velàzquez, James Sanders, Nick Perry, Bill de Blasio, Felix Ortiz, Gustavo Rivera, Velmanette Montgomery, Al Vann, Denny Farrell, Diana Reyna, Guillermo Linares, Yvette Clarke and John Liu surrounded him. “This is our pathway,” Clarke said, “I don’t think this is a Johnnycome-lately act,” de Blasio said. “I have been working on the urban agenda my… whole…life,” Cuomo said, bristling at the mention of Barron. Sanders and Perry asked him to autograph copies. The book’s three parts and eight chapters aside, many black and Latino political leaders still agree with Barron—that Cuomo’s heart is not in it enough. Almost none of them will say so publicly. Even Liu, just a few days before the press conference, was expressing his concerns. “Charles’ message is very potent and focused. That doesn’t always result in

a broad coalition. Nor is it necessarily his intent,” said Liu, who himself built a cross-minority coalition to win the comptroller’s race and become New York’s first Asian citywide official. “He’s on the ballot to focus attention in this election season on some of the issues. I share some concern about these same issues also—disparities for minorities in jobs, in housing, in some of the educational components of our system.” Barron says this is a direct consequence of having only white politicians on the Democratic ticket. When presented with this argument, Liu said Barron had a point. “Right,” Liu said. “Absolutely correct.”

t first glance, the Freedom Party looks like every other Charles Barron vanity project. He yelled about Marty Markowitz whenever he got the chance, but chickened out of a challenge to the Brooklyn borough president in last year’s election. Instead, he ran for a third term on the Council that he himself voted against allowing, on the argument that

ANDREW SCHWARTZ

rustration—the economy is a mess, and no one seems to be getting much help. Anger, too—this has been going on for years, and the government keeps getting worse. Anti-corporatism. Disgust with special-interest influence in the political process. The Democrats are in power at every level, especially in New York, and nothing is changing. And in this year’s elections, the Republicans and Democrats are all the same. Close your eyes, change the accents, and you could be at just about any tea party rally. Open them, and you are at the Nazarene Congregational Church in BedStuy, sitting on a creaky pew, listening to Dr. James McIntosh lay out the Day One agenda he wants to see for the man he is backing for governor, City Council Member Charles Barron, and the Freedom Party ticket. It starts with releasing the Tawana Brawley papers, and a full pardon for Alton Maddox, the lawyer who lost his license after alleged misconduct when representing her as she accused six men, including several cops, of rape—in 1987. Put the NYPD in receivership, McIntosh says. No more symbolic power for the black community, by which he means black elected officials who he believes sell out the community. Actual power, by which he means people he supports winning, then increasing government services instead of shrinking them, raising taxes on the rich instead of cutting them, and telling white people that they are no longer in charge. McIntosh, a psychiatrist who is the co-chair of the Committee to Eliminate Media Offensive to African People (CEMOTAP), is speaker number three of the night, adding heat to the warm-up for Barron in front of the audience of about 100 mostly, but not entirely, older black activists. Next up is Felipe Luciano, who rambles through a long speech about the kinship he feels with the black community, how he hugs gang-bangers when he sees how angry they are, and finishes with an acrostic explanation of why Barron’s campaign matters: P is for Pressure, A is for Access, R is for Rectification, T is for Tenacity. He gets distracted on a tangent and leaves the pulpit before he gets to Y. McIntosh, though, laid out the clearest battle cry of the night, even more direct than the “Have you heard the news? We’re going to give them the blues,” chant that got going a few times. “We’ve registered for Obama,” McIntosh said, “now let’s vote for Freedom.” Andrew Cuomo—or as McIntosh and others in the Freedom Party sometimes call him, “Little Mario”—has never fully overcome his credibility gap within the black community. With Carl Paladino easily ruled a non-threat, Barron got poetic, comparing blacks who stay with the Democrats this year to pigeons who fly back to their coop, elephants who do not stampede away from the circus and lions who do not bite off the heads of

he could not find anyone else to serve his district as well as he would. He endorsed Al Vann’s primary challenger last year, making an enemy out of a hero of many in local black politics. He launched a run for speaker that got Al Sharpton’s endorsement and faded as soon as it became clear that he could not even ignite a conversation about Christine Quinn’s reelection to the job. After Quinn, Barron is probably the best-known member of the City Council, but rarely for the kind of behavior that most people want to attract. Except Barron, of course. Name the issue—inviting Robert Mugabe to the floor, or defending Plummer, his then chief-of-staff, when she made a crack about assassinating Leroy Comrie when he voted against naming a street after Sonny Carson, are some of the greatest hits—and Barron is, proudly, purposefully and sometimes almost giddily, for whatever reason, seems to stir up the most controversy (a word almost always used alongside his name, but never without his contesting it). Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., Arthur Eve and yes, even David Paterson—there is a tradition of black political leaders who churned results out of government. Not Barron. Despite securing funding for two major park renovations, a housing complex and the two largest solar panels in the city (he says he was drawn to the Council because of its land-use power), nearly nine years in, he has not been engaged with any major legislative issue, though he has certainly been making noise about them. In just the most recent example, he was nowhere to be found when Vann and Leroy Comrie butted heads with Vornado over the percentage of guaranteed MWBE contracts for its new tower in midtown, but he made a speech about it anyway on the Council floor, which probably got more attention for the situation than it ever could have managed otherwise. But it is noisemaking where he has always excelled, like at the seven-way gubernatorial debate, where he was more polished than Carl Paladino, more coherent than Jimmy McMillan and more consistently substantive (while lining out his clearly impractical “radical redistributions of the wealth so that we can have more wealth off of the abundance of this state” proposals) than Cuomo. He has struck a chord in the black community and a little beyond, earning him sometimes reluctant praise, a pile of pledged votes and the growing sense that he might be in very good shape—and this inspires reactions ranging from pride to fear to disbelief to disgust—to get the 50,000 votes which would give him and the Freedom Party a ballot line. And so the search begins for Luciano’s left-off Y. The idea started with Jitu Weusi, an activist who came up through Al Vann’s old African-American Teachers Association and several African liberation movements. Weusi had been thinking about the

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CITY HALL idea for a while, talking it over with Bob Law, a former radio executive who had worked on Jesse Jackson’s presidential campaigns and been the New York director for the Million Man March. Cuomo’s selection of Bob Duffy as his running mate was the final straw, and Barron’s op-ed in the Amsterdam News, “Mississippi Returning: New York State Dems Choose White Leadership,” was the final piece. Weusi and Law both knew him, knew how well he propels himself toward attention, and knew he could mobilize the select group of people they believe will get them past the 50,000 mark. Weusi called to pitch the idea and, naturally, Barron agreed. Law signed on as the campaign manager. Weusi became one party co-chair. Viola Plummer, the former aide forcibly (dismissed from Barron’s staff by Christine Quinn) who sometimes seems like Barron’s very own Cardinal Richelieu, became the other co-chair. Alton Maddox helped connect them with Eva Doyle, the education activist who gave them a foothold in the Buffalo black community as the lieutenant governor candidate, and with Ramon Jimenez, the activist former Worker’s Compensation board judge and writer who connected them with Latinos, particularly in the Bronx, as the attorney general candidate. Organizing all this would be something different. There are preliminary plans for a Freedom Party convention in January to craft a platform that will be aggressive, but palatable. Already, they are starting to talk about alliances with some of the more leftist unions, and outreach to people in the hip-hop community like Russell Simmons and Jay-Z to help bankroll the efforts, for now dependent on scattered events like the evening in the Nazarene church that raised $2,000 at most. At the seven-way gubernatorial debate, Barron presented a platform that, practical or not, was more specific than anyone else’s on stage, Cuomo’s included: no cuts to social welfare programs, a progressive tax structure, revival of the commuter tax, instituting a stock transfer tax, adding black history to the public-school curriculum, eliminating charter schools, ending mayoral control, full payment of the Campaign for Fiscal Equity, a ban on hydro-fracking, increasing MWBE state contracts, abolishing the MTA and canceling fare hikes. He dodged only on gay marriage (he has said previously that he supports only civil unions himself but refused to answer at the debate because he said the Freedom Party has yet to take a position). “The racism is in the budget,” he said, explaining the underlying message on stage—and then in classic Barron form, berated reporters in the spin room for putting his candidacy in a racial frame. There are visions of sparking a national movement—but first, once the positions are all clarified and codified at the Freedom Party convention, Barron envisions hundreds of thousands of people following him to Albany under the

Freedom Party banner during next year’s budget season, inspired by the Working Families Party’s (which he slams as a captive of the Democratic Party) example in knocking off Marty Connor and Pedro Espada. “We begin to mobilize, and not just have a demonstration, but we begin to mobilize and put pressure on someone we can take out of office. We can take a senator out of office now. We can take an Assemblyperson out of office now,” Barron said. “Now we can punish people politically. We couldn’t do that heretofore. We could talk, we could demonstrate, but they know they could win re-election, so they don’t care what we call them—we could call them sell-outs, Uncle Tom-this and Aunt Jemima-that, but they don’t care because they know that you don’t know how to beat them, because you don’t have the electoral expertise to take an incumbent out. We’ll be able to do that, and thus we’ll be able to influence policy better that way.”

arron has a devoted following of black activists and journalists on deadline scrambling for an attention-grabbing quote, but it is more than former Panthers who have been uneasy with him serving as a self-appointed spokesman for the black community. Like with the Vornado deal on MWBEs, Barron puts himself at the center of every issue he touches. It certainly calls attention to whatever he is talking about. It also gets his face on TV and his name in the paper. It thickens the ranks of the people who hate him, like the many who poured outside cash into Ed Towns’ 2006 election account purely to keep Barron out of Congress. And he has clearly not penetrated as deeply as he would like to believe, given the blank stares which greeted mention of his name and the Freedom Party at events like the parolee voting protest at the Board of Elections in early October. Ramon Velasquez, a parolee who will be voting in November for the first time in 32 years, had never even heard of Barron or the Freedom Party. “Governor Cuomo,” Velasquez said, when asked whom he was backing. “Because of his father.” But among a growing group of politically active blacks, many of whom are not otherwise disposed to him, the Freedom Party has hit on an idea that enough people believe in to create a deep-seated reluctance to say all the things they want to say about the man who all the magical thinking in the world still will not make disappear. Both because they know how many of their constituents are connecting with Barron’s message and because they cannot help but agree with Cuomo’s failings themselves, they are holding their tongues, for the sake of the Freedom Party cause. Even the clear enemies: Towns declined comment. Vann declined comment.

“This Barron thing is a sensitive issue,” explained a press aide for another politician, also declining. At the debate, where Cuomo seemed alternatively amused, blissfully ignorant of Paladino’s answers or his strange bathroom break, and willing to embrace the absurdity of it all by endorsing the basic thrust of the Rent Is Too Damn High platform, only Barron seemed to get under his skin, even before the cameras went live. “Governor Barron,” the candidate said slowly into the microphone on his Nehru jacket, dropping the pitch of his voice

October 25, 2010

ron this year. Add in Greg Meeks’ district in Queens, add in the groups the lieutenant governor candidate, Eva Doyle, is connected with and mobilizing in Buffalo. Add in some Latino supporters courtesy of attorney general candidate Ramon Jimenez, who is tapping little patches of power in the Puerto Rican community in the Bronx and beyond. Add in a few hundred from Rochester, Syracuse, Mt. Vernon and Newburgh, a couple from Ithaca, where a local black studies professor has already pledged to send people the Freedom Party’s way, add in a scattering of votes from little cities and towns that

“We could talk, we could demonstrate, but they know they could win re-election, so they don’t care what we call them—we could call them sell-outs, Uncle Tom-this and Aunt Jemima-that, but they don’t care because they know that you don’t know how to beat them,” Barron said. so that it resonated through the Hofstra gym. “It’s distorted,” Cuomo quipped, questioning the sound check. Though the idea of Barron actually winning might be distorted from any reality, the idea of him successfully forcing a conversation during this year’s election and beyond, if he gets the ballot, has believers across the spectrum of the black leadership. “I don’t really evaluate the quality of the messenger. I evaluate the quality of the message, and his message is appropriate,” said Dr. Roscoe Brown, a former Tuskegee Airman and president of Bronx Community College, whose relationship with Barron has had its ups and downs over the years. Brown is voting for Cuomo, but he encourages the Freedom Party effort nonetheless, explaining, “any political party that expounds ideas relating to the quality of life has to be listened to.” Jumaane Williams, the freshman Brooklyn Council member, pushed back on the idea of Barron as an imperfect messenger even harder. The time for a Freedom Party is here, Williams said, and all the people who agree with him but wish someone other than Barron was the public face of it have no right to complain. “Obviously, Barron is who he is. But why didn’t someone else do it, then? If that’s how they feel, then they should have done it,” Williams said. “If you carve out the loudest parts of it, most people would agree with what he’s saying.”

heir math is simple: Barron got 15,000 votes in his 2006 Congressional race against Towns. Then, across Bed-Stuy and the rest of Central Brooklyn, they count five key Assembly districts (one of them represented by his wife, Inez Barron) that produced 35,000 votes each for Barack Obama in 2008—a good chunk of which they believe will be there for Bar-

Barron admits he has never even heard of before, and the ballot line is theirs. Hey, they point out, they already put together a challenge-proof 43,000 petition signatures—though making the ballot seems like less of an accomplishment these days than it might have before people realized that Kristin Davis, Warren Redlich, Howie Hawkins and Jimmy McMillan did it too. Still, the Freedom Party leaders are not alone in thinking that this might be their year. “He’s only talking to a very small audience. He’s not talking to every registered voter in the state. He’s talking to approximately 750,000 households to try to get less than 10 percent of them to show up and vote their anger,” said Kevin Wardally, a political consultant who works with Democrats and specializes in turning out minority voters. “This year is totally unpredictable— but yes, it’s in the realm of possible.” Getting 50,000 votes by cross-endorsing a gubernatorial candidate is pretty easy. The last time it happened was 2002, when Tom Golisano made his last run for the Independence Party. The last time it happened without millions of dollars funding the effort was 1998, when Betsy McCaughey was the last Liberal standard bearer, Michael Reynolds got 56,000 votes for Right to Life and “Grandpa” Al Lewis got the Greens 52,000 votes. That was also the year that the Working Families Party made the ballot, thanks to a full-scale redirection of resources from Peter Vallone’s gubernatorial campaign, once the Democrats had finally abandoned the pipe dream of him as a competitive candidate against George Pataki. Talk to Barron about the model he sees for the Freedom Party, and he cites the WFP, which he believes they can replicate both in terms of their success in making the ballot in 1998 and in growing into a definitive player in New York politics in the years since. “You’re talking about an effort that was

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October 25, 2010

CITY HALL

Between Barron And Other More Prominent Panthers, Differing Views On Legacy

Most people who know anything about Charles Barron know him as a former Black Panther. It is the third sentence of the official biography on his Council website, it is a key part of the identity that he has cultivated, and that most people have internalized. At the church in Bed-Stuy, his Panther background was introduced by the event emcee as something that white people talk about to stoke fears, but it is not something that Barron tends to brag about, even in the segment of the black community where it is a badge of honor. The middle child between two older sisters and two younger brothers, Barron was raised in a household that did not put much stock in activism. His father, a World War II veteran, was an interior decorator. All his mother’s succession of low-paying jobs fed was Barron’s own sense of injustice. But he was surrounded by it out on the streets around the Lower East Side projects where he grew up, or reading the Autobiography of Malcolm X and Elijah Muhammad’s Message to the Black Man. He started leading block parties, little bits of organizing, pushing back on the cops. Still just 16, as he tells it, the neighborhood started looking to him. “Even when I was playing on the basketball team, I would become the players’ coach—something always thrust me into leadership,” Barron said. “We had a group that used to organize social events—I became the leader of that. I used to play the steel pan when I was a teenager—I played the lead pan.”

well organized, had a lot of resources and had both money and brainpower and infrastructure behind it, had the support of the top of the ticket, got a lot of positive press—and even then it barely squeaked by,” said Marc Lapidus, a political consultant who, along with Wardally, was one of the architects of the WFP’s 1998 effort, which cleared the 50,000-mark only on the machine recount. Barron’s collection of aides and aging activists is cooking up plans to canvass Starrett City, LeFrak City, Co-op City, the home turf in East New York, major subway stations. Sometimes they say that they lined up all their building captains long ago, sometimes they spend campaign rallies saying they need to start lining up building captains. There is, theoretically, a field strategy being planned, but, their protestations aside, there is little evidence that they have either the volunteer manpower or the money to do the things that getting 50,000 bubbles filled on Election Day normally requires. More than anything else, Barron and the Freedom Party have hinged the effort

Hard as it may be to believe given the nature of Barron’s political career since, he remembers debating with the Panthers about being too much of a public presence. How could they be true revolutionaries if they put a sign on their door at the office on 121st Street? How could they be so open? By the time Barron showed up and started taking the black history courses that were the rudimentary introduction to the Panthers, they were at the far edges of their heyday. The FBI had infiltrated and was starting to make arrests. Barron remembers being there in 1968, though he sometimes says 1969. The Panther 21, a group of leaders arrested for conspiracy to blow up several department stores and the New York Botanical Gardens, were in prison on April 2 of that year. Justified paranoia was beginning to take root. A rift between the East Coast/West Coast factions that would eventually prove fatal was already taking shape. Barron learned the 10-point program, from Point 1—We Want Freedom. We Want Power To Determine The Destiny Of Our Black Community— on down: more employment, an end to capitalist abuses, better housing, revised curricula in schools, exemption from military service for blacks, an end to police brutality, amnesty for all blacks in prisons, black juries for black defendants, to Point 10—We Want Land, Bread, Housing, Education, Clothing, Justice and Peace. The Panthers sold newspapers, served breakfasts to children, held rallies. Barron remembers being a part of all of that between 1968 and 1971. But when the police came to round

people up, he was not on the list. He is sensitive to how this affects his credibility with other Panthers. “Lucky for me, because I was young, I wasn’t in the leadership. But most of the leaders of the Panthers say, ‘You was in the Panthers?’ I was just one of the soldiers. Nobody knew me, and so I didn’t get in that kind of trouble, because I wasn’t in the leadership,” Barron said. Barron was 18 by the time he first arrived at the Harlem headquarters in 1969, and going on 22 by the time Huey Newton and Eldridge Cleaver went to war, inflamed by letters forged by the FBI, over the leadership that eventually led to the collapse. He was young, but not too young to be in the leadership or among the FBI targets. After all, Mark Holder, the Panther whom Barron credits with recruiting him, was just 17 in 1972, the year he was convicted of a revenge murder in the Newton-Cleaver feud. Holder was a subsection leader in Harlem. Many of the more prominent Panthers have moved into other areas— Kathleen Cleaver is a law professor at Emory, Bobby Rush is a congressman from Illinois whose most recent big achievement was getting Microsoft, Intel and eBay to sign on to the online privacy bill he wrote. But neither time nor his own low-level beginnings stop Barron from drawing a straight line between his time as a Panther and his current career. “When I read the 10-point program of the Black Panther Party, it’s the same thing I’m talking about now: housing, health care, stop police brutality, end the wars, peace—same thing,” Barron

said. “It’s just now, it makes more sense to be involved in electoral politics, ’cause that’s where the power and the resources are.” Other former Panthers have not been able to see such a clear connection between their work 40 years ago and Barron’s co-option of the legacy. Among the people who were in the leadership— the ones in charge while Barron was out with the low-level Panther volunteers selling newspapers—Barron can provoke skepticism, frustration and not a small amount of bitterness. Until now. Take Eddie Ellis, a former top spokesman for the Panthers in New York who spent 25 years in jail after being nabbed as part of the FBI’s COINTELPRO. Like Bob Law, who went down to Alabama to help get the original Panther movement started and then returned to Brooklyn to build it up, Ellis does not remember Barron from the Harlem headquarters, but he has become very familiar with Barron since. “With the Panthers, there was a 10-point platform, and out of that came a program—housing, breakfast, self-defense—organized all over the country, educating, and there is some tangible legacy of that,” Ellis said. “In Barron’s case, there is no platform, and there are no programs. There’s rhetoric. And the rhetoric sounds good, because the rhetoric is good. But there isn’t a program or a platform beyond that.” “The Freedom Party could be that,” Ellis added, optimistically. “But it’s still in its infancy.” —EIRD

on free media. While almost completely outside of mainstream view, Barron has been the hero of the Amsterdam News, op-eds in the Brooklyn-based black nationalist newspaper Our Time and radio programs that he regularly phones into all over the state, like Gary Byrd’s in Buffalo. Among the dedicated consumers and targeted audience who are his prime voters, Barron and the Freedom Party have become a media sensation. “The Freedom Party is almost like an underground movement,” said Eddie Ellis, the former Panther who now hosts a weekly radio program on WBAI. “If you’re not in the community and you don’t have your pulse on the community, you could really miss it.”

sing and dance at the Inner Circle: he can do it, but it never quite seems comfortable or sincere. Towns’ staff is beginning to telegraph a retirement that could come as early as next year, and no one doubts that Barron will be in the race for the seat when it comes. Particularly in a special election, the Freedom Party power will become obvious pretty quickly, as Barron begins printing campaign lit while Hakeem Jeffries, Darryl Towns and Tish James are still banging around in the county committee for a nomination. But the real test will be 2013, in the term limits extension-delayed turnover elections. Then, Barron makes clear, he is hoping to endorse Bill Thompson and use that to draw attention to the idea of black empowerment and his new ballot line as a Working Families Party-type validator, galvanizing the kind of black-brown coalition which, at least to date in Big Apple mayoral elections, remains as mythical as flushed alligators prowling the sewers. Other people will run too, he hopes, some of them with the Freedom Party

line, some of them only on it. Among them will be Jumaane Williams, who last year knocked off an incumbent in the Democratic primary with the WFP’s support. For his 2013 re-election, Williams said he will be seeking the Freedom Party line too, in the hopes of running on all three. “I think we need some more pushes, and this is another push,” Williams said. Williams, who is 34, is one of the few black leaders, especially among the younger generation, to publicly ally himself with Barron—at all, and certainly in this year’s governor’s race. The Freedom Party is right, he said: minorities are being taken for granted, their concerns are being ignored, and the discussion can only be forced by forming a new party. To Williams, that is reason to fill in the Barron bubble on Nov. 2. So the Freedom Party will have Williams as a candidate, and it will have Charles and Inez Barron. Supporters say they expect the new line to encourage a crop of new leaders to rise up and run for local positions around the state—school

t is not lost on anyone that the Freedom Party will provide the organizational framework for Barron’s next run—for Congress or, if not, for Brooklyn borough president. Asking Barron to deny this potential self-interest side effect is like asking Mike Bloomberg to

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CITY HALL board seats in Syracuse, say, or the Mt. Vernon City Council. It may not go much further than that. Any politician hoping for wider appeal will likely have trouble with the optics of taking Barron’s line, and already anxiety is mounting among some black politicians about how to manage keeping an empowered Freedom Party at arm’s length. Will Bill Thompson want to be embraced by Barron? Will any candidate hoping to represent a not overwhelmingly minority constituency? Which is why already, Law and Weusi have been quietly making clear to fellow black activists that they expect Barron’s public role within the Freedom Party to be diminished post election. Aware of how toxic their gubernatorial nominee can be, they are looking to build an independent identity that he will be part of, but not overwhelm. Barron does not contest this much—the Freedom Party, he says, would exist with or without him. Not that this is likely to make much of a difference. Whatever his official position in the Freedom Party, Barron will always have power as its original galvanizing force, and will certainly remain the man most associated with it for years to come in the eyes of the general public. Even without him, people like Weusi, Law, Plummer, McIntosh and the rest of the party’s leading activists are the kind of people that politicians aiming for crossover appeal try desperately to avoid. “It’s a collection of radioactive individuals—you can probably see them standing together in a group from outer space,” said one prominent African-American political leader, who insisted on not being identified. “It isn’t that they’re going to take you to the left: they’re going to take you to another planet.”

week and a half after Freedom Party protesters successfully forced Cuomo into retreat from the Harlem subway stop appearance, Barron and his core supporters were back at Uptown Grand, the block-deep upscale restaurant across the street from the Adam Clayton Powell State Office Building and four blocks up from the old Black Panther Party headquarters.

BuTLEr ASSoCiATES

OctOber 25, 2010

The Sharpton-Barron Relationship Is…Complicated True, Rev. Al Sharpton has not endorsed Andrew Cuomo and hinted that he might support Charles Barron and the Freedom Party. There may be more than politics involved: Sharpton has told a few people that the nice thing about having an institutionalized Freedom Party is that it would get the black nationalists off his back. Sharpton and Barron have had a complicated relationship for years. It started in jail 20 years ago, when they spent 25 days together after being arrested in a protest about Tawana Brawley. Since then, their paths have crossed and diverged many times, though they always seem to have a connection, whether uniting in endorsing Mark Winston Griffith in his Council primary against Al Vann or in Barron’s short-lived run for Council speaker. Often, Sharpton is held up as something of a Ghost of Christmas Future for Barron. Sharpton, of course, used his runs for Senate and mayor as the bridge between his old activism and his more mainstream role as spokesman for the black community, and his 2004 presidential run to raise issues much in the same way that Barron is aiming to do this year with the Freedom Party. “I recall there was a time when people dismissed Rev. Sharpton, and then the power structure came to realize that he has a constituency, and a constituency that appreciates

The evening doubled as a 60th birthday party for Barron and a fundraiser for the Freedom Party. There was a painting of Audrey Hepburn with her Holly Golightly cigarette holder and pearls in the men’s room. There was a full contingent of Dec.12 movement women in their blue scarves, former Manhattan Borough President C. Virginia Fields, Independence Party leader Lenora Fulani and Assembly Member Keith Wright (briefly) among the crowd. There was Barron, in a fancier Nehru jacket than normal, with embroidered edges that ran from the collar down the center. As always, he raised his fist in the air as he entered. Uptown Grand made for a higherdollar haul than the events they hold at Sista’s Place, Plummer’s jazz café and restaurant in Bed-Stuy that doubles as the Freedom Party headquarters. But the Cornish game hen and grilled salmon with braised leeks on the menu also seemed to chafe Barron, who cherishes his up-from-

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him speaking up for those that are marginalized,” said Assembly Member Karim Camara, urging consideration of Barron’s resonance in the black community. Barron says they have each staked out different territory, and that he has no interest in joining forces with people like Newt Gingrich or Joel Klein, as Sharpton has. “Me and Sharpton have a mutual understanding that our politics are different. He’s civil rights and he’s going to be all over the place, developing whatever relationships he needs to develop,” Barron said. “I totally disagree with the relationships with Gingrich and Joel Klein. That to me is unacceptable. Those people are diametrically opposed to what we’re about. But we’ve agreed to stay in our different lanes.” He immediately quashed any suggestion that a more mainstream future like Sharpton’s was awaiting him. “If that happens, I totally lost my mind. I need to be committed. That means I need a lobotomy, they’d need to do something to my brain, because I’ve lost it,” Barron said. “No, I don’t see that happening at all. Never.” Sharpton, who has been spending the last few weeks crisscrossing the country on a National Action Network voter-registration drive, was unavailable to speak about Barron. —EIRD

the-streets image—“I’m broke,” he said, ending his speech at the Nazarene church for his birthday rally (no mention of his $112,500 Council salary and his wife’s $79,500 Assembly salary that probably puts them well within the group of people he says should pay more taxes). “I have no class. So I just thank god for my bougie revolutionary friends. I don’t know which fork to use at the table. I had to stop and watch which fork everyone else was using. I’m really out of place, but I’m trying. I’m doing my best to fit in,” Barron told the crowd. “But this is what we deserve.” He slipped into his stump speech: 50,000 votes will give him the ballot line, 300,000 votes will make a real statement, 1.6 million votes will make him governor, and he will turn the Executive Mansion over to the homeless. “I’ll tell you how you can find out whether I won or lost,” he said. “I don’t want you to turn on your TV at night. Leave your TV off, don’t buy any newspa-

pers. And I want you to go to the airports, and if you see a long line of white people, I won.” They laughed. “This is an idea whose time has truly come,” Barron said, wrapping up his remarks. “That’s why they’re nervous. Because they’re going to go back to their masters and the masters are going to say, ‘I thought you had the black vote locked up. And I thought you had the Latino vote locked down. What happened? How did this Freedom Party emerge?’” Lamont Carolina, a Barron staffer who is running the Freedom Party’s volunteer coordination, sat watching the speech from the back, smiling as his boss riled up the hundred or so people sitting at their tables, cheering on and joining in the chants. “It’s potential energy,” Carolina predicted. “It’s like a bottle of soda: once you shake it up, you never know what’s going to happen—it’s going to explode.” eidovere@cityhallnews.com

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Vol. 5, No. 3

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September 27, 2010

OctOber 25, 2010

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CITY HALL

Photos by Andrew Schwartz

and Jay Townsend, left, and Joe DioGuardi, above, speak (Page 23).

The Woolworth Kitchen was the place to be on Oct. 12, as hundreds from the political world took a short break from the campaign season to raise their glasses to this year's list of the RisFlavia DiLonez, Marcel Florestao and Samantha Park ing Stars. We wish we could run every photo, but here are few. Join us every month for more at the City Hall networking cocktail hour. For more, e-mail us at editor@cityhallnews.com.

Joel Schnur and Karen Becker

Bianca and Ben Geyerhahn and Jennie Berger

Jerry Skurnik and Mark Botnick

Errol and Patrice King, Marco Carrion and Ephraim Cruz

Councilmember Dan Halloran and Ken Fisher

CITY HALL

Kassandra Perez and Lisa Sotel

Jason Otano and Andrew Moesel

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OctOber 25, 2010

Noe Burgos and Raquel Gutierrez

Imani Farley, Flora Mendoza and Daniel Abrahson

Michael DeLoach and Nathan Smith

Michael Maher, Karen Becker, Mike Casertano, Eric Kuo, Jonathan Chung and Sakina Halilu

Karoline Katus and Andrea Buteau

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OctOber 25, 2010

CITY HALL

green ny Hydro-Fracking, Bioheat And Cost-Effective Solar Mapping ISSUE FORUM

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’m very fortunate to serve not only as the Chair of the Council’s Committee on Environmental Protection, but also as a member of Mayor Bloomberg’s Sustainability Advisory Board. These positions have put me in the center of many exciting and important environmental sustainability policy initiatives that I’ve been proud to work on with Council Speaker Christine Quinn and my Council colleagues, and with Mayor Bloomberg and his environmental sustainability team. The following are some brief highlights from our recent efforts: The Council and the Bloomberg Administration have been fighting a relentless battle on several fronts to protect New York City’s irreplaceable water supply from the inevitable degradation that we believe would result from the introduction of an environmentally harmful natural-gas drilling technique known as hydraulic fracturing, or hydro-fracking. The Council’s work over the last two years on the hydro-fracking issue has drawn attention throughout the country and helped to make hydro-fracking the emerging national issue it is today. Our work was covered by Dan Rather in his national news show Dan Rather Reports and was featured in the Sundance awardwinning documentary Gasland, which appeared on HBO throughout the summer. So far, in addition to the national attention we have drawn to this issue, our efforts have led the Paterson administration to afford additional protection from hydro-fracking to the city’s water supply and prompted the State Senate to pass a first-in-the-nation hydro-fracking moratorium bill. I urge all New Yorkers to stay informed on this issue. What if the 1.1 million homes and other buildings that use heating oil in New York City replaced 2 percent of their heating oil with bioheat vegetable oil and saved the burning of 20 million gallons of dirty heating oil each year? That is exactly what the Council and the Bloomberg administration did with the passage and signing of my bioheat bill this summer. Buildings account for 79 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions, and using cleaner heating oil is a great way to reduce not only greenhouse gasses, but other pollutants that lead to high rates of asthma and respiratory disease. This will, without a doubt, save homeowners money and encourage private local investment in bioheat and other alternative fuels, as well as create new green-collar jobs at a time when New York needs this

investment the most. Just as Presidet Obama installed solar panels on the roof of the White House, we are pursuing ways in which New York can become more solar with three bills that I introduced. The NYC Solar Map bill requires the city to create a Solar Map, accessible to the public online, showing estimated size of building rooftops, potential of roofs to produce energy with different types of solar systems, estimated energy and cost savings and estimated emissions reductions. A second bill requires the city to conduct a feasibility study for city-run buildings, especially schools, to explore solar capabilities and to install them when found to be cost-effective. The third bill requires the city to create a pilot program to award 15 property owners with solar technologies. According to the USDOE, solar is one of the most cost-effective renewable technologies and “a typical residential solar waterheating system reduces the need for conventional heating by about two-thirds.” This reduces electricity costs, fossil-fuel consumption to heat water, and environmental impacts. These three bills, and many others like them under consideration at the Council, were inspired by and were borne out of an initiative to green the city’s buildings and building codes. All New Yorkers owe a debt of gratitude to them and to the Council’s Housing and Buildings Committee Chair, Erik Dilan, who is doing terrific work in shepherding the Green Code bills through his committee.

James Gennaro, a Democrat representing parts of Queens, is chair of the City Council Committee on Environmental Protection.

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Con Edison Making the Apple Green Q. Why is Con Edison encouraging customers to conserve and use energy efficiently? A. I think it’s safe to say there aren’t many companies that encourage customers to use less of their goods and services. But we do. We provide lowcost energy-efficiency surveys. We will help customers pay for improvements to their heating and cooling equipment or duct and air sealing. If you have a second working refrigerator, we will pay you $30 to remove and recycle it. When we pick up the second refrigerator, we’ll also take old wall or window air-conditioning units and pay you for those too. These are just some of the programs we offer for residential and business customers. Getting people to use less energy also allows us to postpone expensive infrastructure projects or system expansion, which saves money for our customers too. It all fits with our company’s commitment to contribute in any way we can to conserving energy and preserving the environment. Q. How do you measure progress when it comes to your environmental initiatives? A. There are a lot of metrics that show our progress. Our greenhouse gas emissions dropped 36 percent, or by about 2.4 million tons, between 2005 and 2009. Most of this was due to the use of cleaner-burning fuels and improvements at our steam plants and substations. We’ve also invested in a greener fleet of vehicles. More than 40 percent of our vehicles use alternative-energy technology. Q. Con Edison has spoken very proudly of its smart grid program. Is there an environmental benefit to that? A. Yes, with our smart grid pilot project in northwest Queens, customers can monitor and potentially improve their control of energy use. A smart grid will allow for the integration of greener sources of energy, such as wind power and solar power, as well as accommodating electric vehicles. At the same time, the new technology and infrastructure upgrades that come with the smart grid will help our reliability.

ISSUE FORUM

GREEN NY

CITY HALL

Green Infrastructure Plan Confronts City’s Oldest Environmental Challenge BY CAS HOLLOWAY

Craig Ivey, President of Con Edison Q. What else is Con Edison doing to encourage and explore greater use of renewable sources of energy such as solar and wind? A. One of Con Edison Inc.’s subsidiaries, Con Edison Development, and a company called Panda Power Funds just broke ground on a 20-megawatt solar electric generating station in Pilesgrove, NJ. It will be one of the largest solar farms in the United States and have the capacity to power more than 5,100 homes with clean, renewable energy. We’re working with the city of New York to reduce the amount of time it takes applicants to get approval to install solar panels. And, along with the Long Island Power Authority, we’re part of a public-private partnership studying the potential for a major wind farm off the Rockaway Peninsula in the Atlantic Ocean. Q. What do you think has led to your company’s success in the Green area? A. It starts with our commitment. We believe we have an obligation to be a responsible environmental steward, a genuine leader in the utility industry and the larger corporate community. We’re concerned about global warming and dedicated to making New York a comfortable, pleasant place to live and work. We also realize that because we power New York City, others notice what we do.

ast month, Mayor Bloomberg unveiled the NYC Green Infrastructure Plan, a comprehensive approach to improve harbor water quality by capturing and retaining stormwater runoff before it enters the sewer system. The aim is to confront one of the city’s oldest environmental challenges: combined sewer overflows. When New York City’s sewer system was designed back in the mid-19th century, it was state of the art. Stormwater (what comes from rain) and wastewater (what comes from households) was combined in the same pipes and discharged into the harbor (later, the City began to treat the water before releasing it). This design is also used in other large cities in the Northeast and Midwest, and it works perfectly on a dry day and many rainy days. But when it rains heavily, the torrent of stormwater overwhelms the system, and safety mechanisms that were installed to protect the city’s 14 wastewater treatment plants divert a mixture of pre-treated stormwater and wastewater into the harbor. This is called a combined sewer overflow (CSO). We are already moving in the right direction. After years of investment, including more than $7 billion worth since 2002 in treatment plants and sewer upgrades, our harbor water quality is at its best in a century. We know this because we have been monitoring New York City’s surrounding waterways for 100 years, and all the key indicators show it improving year after year. For instance, DEP now captures an ever greater amount of overall CSO volume—from approximately 30 percent in the 1980s to over 72 percent annually today. We have done this by investing in endof-the-pipe solutions—tanks and tunnels that can store the excess water until the rain stops, and then pump it to a treatment plant when the flow rate returns to normal. We call this “grey infrastructure” because the large tanks and tunnels that hold CSOs are built with steel and concrete. In some cases, grey infrastructure is the most cost-effective approach to CSOs, and a number of projects are under construction or in operation. But New York City’s density—which is good for the environment in many ways—means that locations for siting multimillion-gallon tanks are limited, and construction costs are extremely high. For example, the 50-million-gallon CSO facility we’ll soon open at Paerdegat Basin in Brooklyn cost nearly half a billion dollars to build. And it will only be used on the 60-70 days every year when it rains. We owe it to New Yorkers to do bet-

ter. “Green infrastructure” uses natural features, like green roofs, and adds structural designs, like porous pavement and tree pits, to absorb and retain stormwater where it falls—so the excess water never enters the sewer system in the first place. This addresses the root cause of stormwater runoff—impervious surfaces—rather than trying to capture and hold stormwater after it has become a problem for the sewer system. And green infrastructure has many benefits beyond just capturing stormwater. Trees and other plants shade and cool the city (reducing energy bills), improve air quality and increase property values. In very tough budget times, we need to achieve as much with every dollar as we possibly can—Mayor Bloomberg’s Green Infrastructure Plan will do that. The potential benefits are tremendous. Our new plan, which combines certain cost-effective grey solutions with $2.4 billion in green solutions over 20 years, will cut CSOs by more than 12 billion gallons per year by 2030—a 40-percent reduction—which is 2 billion gallons more per year than the current all-grey plan (currently required by the state). And all of this would be achieved for $2.4 billion less in public spending than the current plan requires. But our fate is not entirely in our hands. We need the State Department of Environmental Conservation to approve the Green Infrastructure Plan so that we can move forward. We have already begun those conversations, and I am confident that with the support of DEC Commissioner Pete Grannis and his committed team, we can get the paperwork done quickly so we can start greening the five boroughs. To see the plan in its entirety, visit www.nyc.gov/dep.

Cas Holloway is the commissioner of the New York City Department of Environmental Protection.

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CITY HALL

GREEN NY Reducing, Reusing And Recycling For A Sustainable NYC ISSUE FORUM

BY JOHN DOHERTY

hen I joined the Department of Sanitation 50 years ago, I could not envision that the young man who had just been appointed sanitation worker would forge a long and rewarding career that would twice lead him all the way to serving as the city’s sanitation commissioner. A lifetime of experience and commitment to keeping our city clean has given me a deep appreciation for the magnitude of such a daunting challenge. To meet that challenge and do so in an environmentally friendly way, it is not enough to pick up more garbage. We must also work to reduce what we throw away, which in New York City is 11,000 tons of solid waste from households and institutions each day. Mayor Bloomberg has tackled the disposal of such massive quantities of waste through his landmark 20-year Solid Waste Management Plan (SWMP), which provides a clean and cost-effective method of disposing the city’s refuse by rail and barge, thereby decreasing collectiontruck traffic and improving air quality.

The mayor’s overall environmental vision for the city is clearly explained in his PlaNYC, a sweeping plan for a successful, sustainable city in the 21st century. While the issue of clean and safe waste disposal has been addressed through the SWMP, waste reduction remains one of the city’s most challenging goals. The sustainable city of the future must dispose of its waste in an environmentally and fiscally responsible way while constantly working to reduce its volume. Recycling, as we now know it in NYC, began as a voluntary program in 1986 and became mandatory three years later. Today the department collects nearly 2,000 tons of paper, metal, glass and plastic recycling every day. But we’re not satisfied with that, and we’re continuing our outreach efforts to the public so we can grow our recycling rates. One of the largest expansions of our recycling law—the result of hard work between the mayor and the City Council—was enacted in April. The measure will expand plastic recycling to include non-biodegradables, such as yogurt and take-out containers; a new textile recy-

cling initiative; a voluntary take-back program of unused residential paint; and two studies: one to analyze commercial recycling practices, and the other to examine how to improve food waste com-

posting. Equally important, the new law includes a significant expansion of the successful and popular citywide Public Space Recycling Program. The program will triple the number of street-corner recycling bins to 1,000 throughout the five boroughs over the next decade, affording pedestrians the opportunity to recycle on the street rather than tossing bottles, cans and newspapers into our 25,000 litter baskets. The Mayor’s goal of maintaining our city’s competitive edge is largely based on achieving the sustainability goals of PlaNYC. Sanitation has successfully partnered with New Yorkers before to make our city clean—today it’s dramatically cleaner than it was 35 years ago. Now, we must continue to work together to reduce, reuse and recycle what we can so that our city can become cleaner, greener and even more sustainable for future generations.

John Doherty is the commissioner of the New York City Department of Sanitation.

TALL BUILDINGS ARE POTENTIAL DEATH TRAPS • In the event of an emergency any building over 25 stories is a major hazard for Firemen • Tall buildings are energy guzzlers without operable windows • The concentration of density at one point causes enormous congestion • Overdevelopment is the kind of human activity that causes GLOBAL WARMING. Committee for Environmentally Sound Development More Access

P.O. Box 20464, Columbus Circle Station New York, NY 10023-1492

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OCTOBER 25, 2010

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Amid All The Medicaid Reform Plans, Not One Prescription For Success Seen

espite the best intentions of Albany legislators, substantive reform of the state’s unsustainably large Medicaid system seems unlikely to happen next year because of wide divergence among legislators and health care officials over what reform should look like. Medicaid is expanding at an unsustainable cost to the state, with enrollment ballooning from 2.8 million to 4.8 million people over the past decade, and costs expected to top $52 billion in this fiscal year. The program takes up a third of the state’s budget, and will pose more of an obstacle in the next fiscal year, when a temporary increase in federal matching funds expires, leaving New York with a multibillion-dollar hole to fill and few meaty state-sponsored programs left to cut. “The state is facing a mammoth deficit, they’ll have a deficit this year as big as the one next year, and if you don’t touch Medicaid, you’ve eliminated a third of the budget from possible cuts,” said Lt. Gov. Richard Ravitch, who authored a widely praised report calling for the program’s overhaul. And so the election-year flood of overhaul plans from gubernatorial candidates, potential senators and sitting lawmakers, all with their plans that analysts agree are, for one reason or another, completely unviable. “You’re talking about a byzantine system,” Ravitch said. Pundits and health care officials have already written off as implausible the plan proposed by Carl Paladino, who has said he would slash $20 billion from the program. The amount he plans to cut is more than the state currently provides for the program, and would threaten the “health and safety of millions of New Yorkers,” if enacted, wrote Gov. David Paterson in a statement he issued condemning the proposal. But the Cuomo plan could be just as much of a non-starter, say many health union leaders, state lawmakers and health policy experts. As outlined in his “New NY Agenda,” Cuomo’s five-point plan appears more modest, though the three pages he devoted to the problem mentions no dollar amounts. Several of his proposals rely entirely on changes at the federal level, over which he and the Legislature will have no control. Cuomo also may be hampered by his strong relationship with the state’s largest health care union, 1199 SEIU. In 2006, Cuomo won the race for attorney general

with broad-based support from the union, which has staunchly opposed any spending cuts, and still does, according to SEIU 1199 political director Tom Finnegan. The union was also instrumental in stopping ex-Gov. Eliot Spitzer’s Medicaid reform plan in 2007. The Greater New York Hospital Association declined to comment on either Cuomo or Paladino’s plans, but did comment on a portion of a plan written by Lt. Gov. Richard Ravitch that makes multiple recommendations, including one that mirrors one of Cuomo’s: removing the power to set reimbursement rates for health care providers from the Legislature and handing it over to an independent body, either a Medicaid Inspector General, in the Ravitch report, or a panel appointed by the governor in the Cuomo plan. “That recommendation takes ability away from the Legislature and puts it under one person,” said Brian Conway, spokesperson for the Greater New York Hospital Association. He said unilateral control over rate-setting was tantamount to tyranny. “It just needs to be checked and balanced. There’s nothing evil about the legislative process,” he said. Finnegan agreed, adding that neither proposal made clear why rate-setting power needed to be taken away from the Legislature. The union said they were willing to work with Cuomo, but remained opposed to any spending cuts. Both groups insist that efficiencies can be found in Medicaid fraud audits and in measures taken to reduce the overall costs of health care, from the sugar-sweetened beverage tax they lobbied for last year to medical malpractice law reforms. The former is opposed by the beverage lobby, and the latter faces stiff opposition from the state’s trial lawyers, making any substantive changes to those policies fraught with complications. There is little indication the Legislature would be ready to give up rate-setting power even if the governor has the political will to take on Medicaid spending. At a panel to discuss the budget last month in Manhattan, Ravitch asked State Sen. Liz Krueger whether she would be willing to cede the power. Krueger deferred. “I’m only one senator, so I don’t know how to answer that,” she said. But Krueger’s colleague, Senate Health Committee Chair Tom Duane, has indicated the Legislature needs to keep some sort of oversight. How comprehensive an oversight that would be and whether there would be DAN SMITH

BY LAURA NAHMIAS

veto power as part of the oversight would be important factors in his support of such a measure, Duane said. On the other side of the aisle, State Sen. Kemp Hannon, the Long Island Republican who has chaired two Medicaid Reform Task Forces and chaired the Health Committee under Republican control, said changing the rate-setting process seemed unnecessary. Instead, Hannon said he would advocate limiting eligibility categories as a way to achieve savings. “Just in the last year, we have made several expansions to Medicaid,” Hannon said. “In a time when you have money, those might have been justified. In the past two years, we have expanded in the state. We have to look at that.” Despite the disagreement about which route to take to reform, Hannon said the need for a massive Medicaid overhaul is more pressing than ever. But Duane said the best solution would not be cuts, but to find a way to educate taxpayers about the necessity of raising taxes to pay for the program’s costs. “Do we really want to impoverish middle-class people by forcing them to pay a tremendous amount of income and assets toward long-term care for loved ones?” he said of a cost-cutting proposal that would require spouses to contribute assets to nursing-home costs. “Or we could decide together that it’s worth all of us paying a little bit more so that more New Yorkers have access to high-quality care without being impoverished.” The Cuomo administration has made much of an exponential increase in the state’s ability to collect on Medicaid fraud investigations, from about $50 million in

CITY HALL 2006 to more than $500 million last year, according to a release from the Office of the Medicaid Inspector General. But other lawmakers say fraud collections make little difference in the state’s overall spending. Collections on fraud cases have totaled just 1 percent of the total state and federal expenditure on Medicaid this year—some $50 billion. The problem with reforming the program is the program itself, which has grown from a small safety net for the state’s poorest individuals to an expansive catch-all that covers one in four New Yorkers, who will be loath to cut their own benefits, said Daniel Birnbaum of the United Hospital Fund’s Medicaid Institute, an organization studying the state’s Medicaid System. “There is a health care growth problem in this country,” Birnbaum said, adding that the state program’s growth was slow compared to the growth of health care costs nationwide, about 5.7 percent in New York over the last decade compared to 6.9 percent nationwide. The lack of specific cuts addressed in the Cuomo plan left one political insider to speculate the governor would rather sacrifice other parts of the budget than address the thorny issue of decreasing spending and risk jeopardizing the goodwill of 1199. “There’s a line you don’t cross, and Cuomo will make changes to health care at the expense of the state’s education budget,” the insider said. If there are to be changes, they will have to come from the next governor, said Ravitch, who released his own Medicaid plan in the hopes of providing the grounds for a new debate. But in an interview several weeks after the plan was released, Ravitch stuck to his characteristic weariness when asked about the plausibility of reform in next year’s legislative session. “It’s really going to be up to the next governor to decide what he’s going to push and isn’t going to push,” Ravitch said. “I’ve not heard from either of the candidates, and I have no idea what their level of interest is.” Three years ago, before he was named lieutenant governor, Ravitch watched his plan to save the transit system get ignored, and saw the same thing happen to his budget salvation proposal earlier this year. Citing the disruptive cuts the Legislature passed this year, Ravitch is sounding yet another alarm about the devastating consequences of doing nothing. “The governor could do some things, but most of those things require legislative action,” Ravitch said. “Part of my purpose in issuing that report was, as much, to educate people. I’ve been astounded in the last year, how few people you would think would understand something about Medicaid don’t understand anything at all.” lnahmias@cityhallnews.com

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CITY HALL

Blue Jay

Political Mutton Chops

here may have been seven candidates on stage at Hofstra University for the gubernatorial debate, but only one seemed to make an impression on the bored and frustrated audience: Jimmy McMillan, leader of the Rent Is Too Damn High Party. With his mutton chops, his gloves, his nunchucks and his rapid-fire, blog-friendly sound bites, McMillan quickly stole the show, even spurring Democratic frontrunner Andrew Cuomo to agree that the rent was indeed rather elevated—or as he modified the line at a press event several days later, “the rent is too darn high.” The following days, though, were filled with the kind of coverage usually reserved for serious candidates. Reporters found that McMillan’s own rent was not that damn high. In fact, it seemed almost affordable. And the blogs were busy digging up comments McMillan made about Jewish landlords that seemed anti-Semitic. (He has since apologized for offending anyone.) In between interviews for MSNBC, CNN and other media outlets, McMillan talked about his debate performance, his respect for Carl Paladino’s military service, and his love for salad. City Hall: You seem to be stealing the show. Jimmy McMillan: The people are overwhelmed by what I’m here to do. The only people who were not is the newspapers that want to know what I pay in rent. And it’s disturbing to people who are trying to support me. I will not answer my personal questions when it comes to what I am here to do. I’m not like a regular politician. I’m having a great day ignoring them when it comes to me. CH: Do you feel like they’re playing “gotcha” games with you? JM: You said it exactly. They are hoping that I slip or say something. Because somebody—as a private investigator, you know this is what I do very well— somebody is working with the Republican or Democratic Party to make me lose this thing, and we didn’t get a voter that did that. And now they are doing small things to take their ticket away from “The Rent is too Damn High.” But guess what? It’s too late.

CH: What happens now? JM: We have a week left after next week and it’s not even a good week. The people have turned out overwhelmingly to support me. I just want to stay on message. And if I slip—like everyone else I’ve known, I have watched them make mistakes—I will lose this race. But that is not going to happen because I know how to stay

awake. I’m a professional. And I know how to give out the issues concerning what I’m here to do. We can talk about anything else concerning me once this election is over. But that’s why I’m going to stay on message. And I’m going to stay on message. CH: Did you expect this response? JM: I had no idea what I was doing. I was just being me, I was just being me… what I do and when I come to City Hall. I was just being me. I had no idea that the world would be fascinated with me being me. And if the people let me be me… I’m not a rich man. I’m not a politician. I’m not going to try to report to nobody but the people. I want them to look at the little children and say, “He’s running for governor. He’s running for governor of the state of New York.” They have no one else to look up to but me. Now that I’m in a position, I want to serve them very well. CH: Who are your supporters? Who are the members of the Rent Is Too Damn High Party? JM: You are talking to him. And the people. And now I’ve got millions of people in the state of New York that’s going to get out and vote for me in November. I have a person that’s going to do video work. I have someone that will come in tomorrow to handle the e-mails. I have someone to come in and handle the media. I have to do

OctOber 25, 2010

this because right now, you are talking to him. It’s a oneman show. After today, it won’t be a one-man show. CH: So those are the people who help you collect petition signatures? JM: I sign all those petitions. There was only one man signing all those petitions and you are talking to him. CH: You collected all 15,000 signatures? JM: My signature is on every petition. On the street corners, the busy sections and in the subways, I get them by myself. The people turn out in huge numbers to give me that support, and I will not misrepresent them. Just like when the people turn their backs on me and ignore me. I can’t get no coverage from the press in this area when I was doing my thing, and now it’s too late. And now that the world is paying attention to me, they want to talk about “What he’s paying for rent,” and I’m not going to fall for it. They can talk all they want, but I’m not going to answer. CH: When Cuomo said he was with you and thought the rent was too damn high… JM: He endorsed my campaign. He beat himself up and knocked himself out the door. “Rent Is Too Damn High” is so strong that Andrew Cuomo agreed with me… that’s like me telling him, “OK, now hit yourself in the jaw. Knock yourself in the groin.” That’s what he did. He knocked himself out of the race. This is why it’s so important that people pay attention. Why I’m doing… I know what went on in the debate. I know what took place. They couldn’t answer the questions that represented the people. Not one person on stage except one guy. His name is Jimmy McMillan. And he represents the “Rent is Too…DAMN High Party.” CH: Should he win, do you think you should get an appointment in Cuomo’s administration? Like housing administration? JM: No, I’m going to win. I have a job for Cuomo to do. Not everyone is sitting up there, is saying anything that is representing the people. If they represent the people, I have a job for them. The people are not stupid. They are used to the political games that these folks been playing to get elected. My buddy, my brother [Carl] Paladino was a lieutenant captain in the Army for 11 years. I would never talk about him because we both belong to the United States Army. We’re both a product of that. When it comes to everyone else—there’s a lot of things I have faith even Paladino will do. We have veterans coming home homeless and they are getting evicted. He will help me make sure veterans will have a place to stay and to make sure the veterans from Vietnam who have been here all these years who have little children will no longer be ignored. My brother will help me. He told me that the other day. I know Paladino will help me. He means it. Because I am a veteran like him and I know he will do what he says he’s going to do. CH: If it doesn’t turn out your way and someone else wins… JM: No, no, my brother. Have you checked Google yet? See who’s No. 3 of all time? It’s me. One thing I will do when—if—I’m elected: I will go get me a pedicure and manicure and I’m going to get me a big salad—I love salad—because the people would have spoken and I’m here to serve the people. What is happening in the State of New York, David Paterson didn’t do. I respect him, but he still can’t see. I don’t mean that he’s blind, but he still can’t see. He wasn’t elected. People vote for someone to do what they need done, and I’m the person for that job. And they will not be disappointed. —Andrew J. Hawkins ahawkins@cityhalllnews.com

A special 3-part Speakers Series Presented by TD Bank, City Hall & The Capitol November 9:

December:

HOMELESSNESS

HEALTHCARE

January:

Commissioner, Department of Homeless Services

Speakers and date to be announced

Seth Diamond

HOUSING

Arnold S. Cohen

President and CEO, The Partnership for the Homeless

Location and Time for all Events TD Bank 317 Madison Avenue(corner of 42nd St) 8:00am Networking Breakfast 8:30am - 9:30am Program email: JChristopher@manhattanmedia.com or call: 212.268.8600