City Hall - November 18, 2010

Parsing the case against John Haggerty, right, Page 6, John Liu pushes back on DOE contracts (Page 10) and

Vol. 5, No. 6

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November 15, 2010

Michael Grimm, left, puts together his plan for Washington (Page 23).

THE

GODFATHER

With the UWS-WFP-NYT axis dominating local politics, this is Jerry Nadler’s New York ANDREW SCHWARTZ

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November 17, 2010

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Percentage Gains Taking cue from 2001 parks campaign, cultural groups gear up for 2013 funding push

By Laura Nahmias

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uggested donations be damned!

Cultural groups across the city say they need more funding from the city’s budget and are mounting a fouryear grassroots campaign to increase their share from its current rate—$149.6 million per year out of a $60 billion city budget—to four times that amount by the year 2015 by getting 2013 mayoral candidates on board.

Most cultural groups and nonprofits receive money from the city’s Department of Cultural Affairs, but a growing number are grumbling that recent budget cutbacks ignore the contributions that those groups, including museums and zoos, make to the city’s emotional and economic well-being.

The city’s parks mounted a similar campaign in 2001 to increase city funding for parks to 1 percent of the overall $63 billion budget. Though they have come close, the parks have yet to get a full 1 percent, in part, because of setbacks caused by the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

The cultural groups’ campaign, called

“One Percent for Culture,” aims to do better, even with the shortfalls in the local and national economy.

Peter Vallone, Sr., former speaker of the City Council, is on the campaign’s steering committee and was a major figure in the parks campaign. He says the nonprofit groups, like the city’s parks, are an investment in which the returns are not immediately obvious.

“It’s really hard to predict anything anymore,” Vallone said. “But if I were still speaker, this would definitely get funded.”

Much depends on the political will of Council members who will be in office at the conclusion of the campaign, projected to last until 2013, Vallone said.

Jimmy Van Bramer, chair of the Council’s Cultural Affairs Committee, said one key to campaign success will be making funding for nonprofit groups an advocacy issue and holding legislators accountable for their positions.

“It’s smart for people to ask candidates and elected officials for their platform on the arts and for cultural institutions, just as all types of advocacy groups have questionnaires,” Van Bramer said.

Another challenge will be showing

the City Council that these groups create enough economic returns to deserve an increased payout.

“The best way to get increased funding is to have good specific programs you want to either start or enlarge,” said Chuck Brecher, a city budget analyst at the Citizens Budget Commission. “You have to show that they create economic benefits.”

But Brecher said a funding mandate was neither fair nor efficient.

This would be a pretty substantial increase for them, “he said” and at a time when the mayor is asking all agencies to reduce their budget by 5 percent or so, it probably isn’t realistic.”

Norma Munn, director of the New York City Arts Coalition and a member of the campaign, called the current budget process, in which an initial budget outlay is proposed, cut and then partially restored, “jerking us around.”

Changing that process and guaranteeing funding could allow groups to increase staff to help them grow endowments on their own, she said.

In the past years, budget cuts have crept in subtly, Munn said. The New York

CITY HALL Philharmonic and the East Harlem Music School keep losing staff, and the ones they have are working impossible hours to keep up appearances, she said.

The campaign wants 5,000 petition signatures in each City Council district by 2013, according to John Calvelli, chair of One Percent for Culture and executive VP of public affairs for the Wildlife Conservation Society. Those signatures will convince Council members to make arts funding part of their platforms for that year’s elections, Calvelli said.

A positive effect of extending the “grassroots” campaign over several years is the possibility that the city’s financial situation will have improved by 2013, he said.

“We’re going through tough times,” Calvelli said. “The amount of money we’ve gotten in operating support, in constant dollars, is less now than it was in 1986. There’s a whole host of reasons for that.”

The campaign wants 250 organizations to join by 2013 and has 84 signed on already.

Calvelli said the ultimate goal is to influence the 2013 elections.

“We will be spending two years building that momentum, and then in January of 2013, the support we’ve engendered will then focus directly on the candidates, very much like other campaigns,” he said. “We’re not going anywhere.” lnahmias@cityhallnews.com

“Our children should be absorbing knowledge, not hazardous wastes”

Congressman Joseph Crowley, October 8, 2010 .

The high standards and expectations for excellence in academics can only be accomplished if the same standards are set for the physical safety and environment of our schools.

Environmental tests have found dangerously high levels of toxic PCBs throughout the New York City public schools - in some cases over 2000 times the level considered toxic.

PCB contaminated window caulking and PCB containing lighting ballasts are creating toxic schools that are threatening the health of our children, teachers and parents.

As you assume your new position, Chancellor Cathleen Black, we urge you to hold the safety of our children’s schools to same high standards you set for academic achievement.

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November 17, 2010

CITY HALL

For Whom The

dismiss the idea that the Council race is an indicator of how a possible congressional race would pan out. They note PaultreBell was uneager to campaign or make fundraising phone calls, which led to tepid fundraising support from unions and potential donors. Even with a reluctant candidate who had no prior support in the district, Meeks and his allies propelled Bell to a fairly close second place finish.

Sanders said he retains ample support for a potential congressional run, though Comrie was also certainly helped by Wills’ victory.

“Were Council Member Comrie to consider a run for Congress, I’m sure some would say this would strengthen him,” Sanders said. “In the event that our esteemed current congressman is appointed head of the World Bank or ambassador to England, sure, I would also consider my options.”

He added, “And I am not without my own resources.” cbragg@cityhallnews.com

Paultre-Bell Tolls

Fallout from Queens’ special election starts conversation on Meeks’ seat

By Chris Bragg

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the borough’s delegation on the Council.

Comrie said he would consider running if Meeks stepped down or decided not to run for reelection, neither of which he has given any indication he would be willing to do. Comrie also dismissed the talk about running against Meeks as political chatter.

“Is being in Congress something I’m running around talking about? No,” Comrie said. “I don’t see myself running against him, and anybody who speculates about that is beyond my control.”

That does not mean all wounds from the Council race are healed, Comrie added. Meeks’ decision to back PaultreBell stemmed in part from lingering anger

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Paultre-Bell Support May Have Toll On 2013, Too

andrew schwartz

ate in the evening on election night, Council Member Leroy Comrie sat at a bar in Jamaica, Queens, sipping soda water and savoring a hard fought win by Ruben Wills in the Council race to replace Tom White.

During the race, a divide formed in southeast Queens between the area’s old political guard that backed Wills— Comrie, State Sen. Shirley Huntley and Assembly Member Vivian Cook—and the newer guard that backed Nicole PaultreBell, which included Rep. Greg Meeks and Council Member James Sanders.

Asked at Wills’ victory party if the wounds

jockeying for the community’s highest profile political post has already begun.

Some of Comrie’s allies have begun wondering about the councilman’s own congressional prospects. If Comrie could take down a candidate supported by Meeks, Sharpton, the Working Families Party, 1199, 32BJ and Public Advocate Bill de Blasio, they ask, why not transfer that momentum to a run for Congress?

Pre-term limits extension, Comrie was seen as someone who would likely get the short end of a deal to make Audrey Pheffer borough president, with him abandoning his own nascent campaign to be her deputy. Now, a few people close to Comrie believe he would have a good shot

The coalition of support Greg Meeks helped form behind Nicole Paultre-Bell was no match for what Leroy Comrie and his allies put together, and may soon put together again for Meeks’ seat. from the nasty race could be healed, Comrie lifted his cell phone in the air.

“Do you see any missed calls on here?” Comrie asked, pointing out that no one from Paultre-Bell’s camp called to congratulate him.

The fallout from the split may not end with the Council race. With Meeks’ business dealings reportedly being investigated by the House ethics committee, the U.S. attorney’s office and the FBI, his congressional seat may be in play in the not-too-distant future. Meeks seems enough under fire these days that at the big press conference he convened at the Municipal Building a week before the election, he arrived late and left early, deftly preventing reporters from getting a chance to ask him questions.

Even with all the moving parts,

at unseating Meeks, noting that during White’s prolonged illness, Comrie often effectively served as a Council member for two districts. That helped him build a wide base of support in the district where Wills eventually ran and won.

With Cook seriously ill herself and Huntley in her 70s, Comrie did most of the on-the-ground campaigning for Wills.

“If he went to a poll site in my district, he would win the poll site all by himself,” Wills said of the man he calls “the chairman of the board.”

As chair of the Land Use Committee, one of the Council’s most powerful positions, Comrie would be in a prime position to tap into a vast and wealthy donor base for whatever run he makes next. He is also close to the leadership of the Queens Democratic Party, as leader of

with Wills over his race against Meeks in 2008. Before Meeks asked Paultre-Bell to run, he also approached Tony Andrews, an administrator at York College, about running against Wills.

“Clearly, a few people were upset about the vitriolic and divisive stand [Meeks] took during this election,” Comrie said.

If Meeks’ seat were to open, though, the race to replace him would likely include both Comrie and Council Member James Sanders, whose district overlaps the congressional one. Through his support for Paultre-Bell, Sanders was able to solidify his support with progressive unions, Meeks and Sharpton during the race. Many in Comrie’s camp saw the move as a way for Sanders to position himself as Meeks’ natural successor.

Meeks’ supporters, meanwhile,

Public Advocate bill de blasio of brooklyn strongly inserted himself in the Council race to replace Tom White, lending not only his endorsement to Nicole Paultre-bell, but also his director of intergovernmental affairs, Kirsten Foy, to run Paultre-bell’s campaign.

The public advocate’s chief of staff, emma Wolfe, and another staff member in de blasio’s office also volunteered during the last week of the campaign.

An experienced operative himself, de blasio took an engaged role throughout the political planning for the race.

“This one is really personal to me,” de blasio said at a press conference, endorsing Paultre-bell outside his office.

He was not the only one. During his public advocate campaign, State Sen. Shirley Huntley and Council member Leroy Comrie broke with the Queens Democratic Party—which backed eric Gioia—to support de blasio. Comrie took de blasio around to black churches in his district. And both felt burned when de blasio decided to support Paultrebell over ruben Wills in the internecine Queens struggle. Wills and de blasio even got into a bit of a shouting match when they were campaigning adjacent to each other on election Day, according to Wills.

With both de blasio and Comptroller John Liu eyeing runs for mayor in 2013, de blasio may have cost himself a key African-American constituency that might have otherwise backed him again.

“Can you say ‘mayor John Liu?’” quipped one person close to Comrie and Huntley.

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November 17, 2010

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CITY HALL

Independence Expenditures Echoes of Bloomberg’s own CFB rebuttal and Nora Anderson in the Haggerty case

By Chris Bragg

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n Oct. 29, the Manhattan DA’s office submitted a motion revealing its evidence against John Haggerty, a political operative accused of stealing $1.1 million from Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

In a sworn affirmation, Assistant DA Eric Seidel stated that in an interview on March 12, Haggerty acknowledged that he “lied and misled” the mayor as to what he intended to do with the money—only about $30,000 of which was spent on its intended use of ballot security. Haggerty also purportedly said that he had created and sent three fake checks to supposed poll watchers.

The document was in response to a September motion filed by Haggerty’s lawyers seeking dismissal of the case. But Haggerty’s lawyers say the motion still does not disprove their central claim that the money was not Bloomberg’s to be stolen.

On May 20, 2009, Bloomberg signed a CF-16 form, swearing that all financial activity on behalf of his mayoral campaign would go through his authorized committee, “Bloomberg for Mayor 2009.” Violating the law is a Class A misdemeanor, which carries automatic jail time.

The $1.2 million of Bloomberg’s personal money was funneled through the Independence Party’s housekeeping account and then paid to a company set up by Haggerty. According to DA Cyrus Vance’s motion, Bloomberg even met personally with Haggerty on Oct. 28, 2009, to hear Haggerty’s budget presentation outlining his operation’s purported expenses.

Bloomberg’s spending outside his authorized committee was not necessarily illegal, it just had to meet certain conditions.

For one, housekeeping funds must be used for intended housekeeping purposes, which include ballot security operations.

The money also can be used to support a slate of candidates backed by a party, but

cannot be spent for the benefit of just one.

Independence Party chair Frank MacKay said that the party was careful to make sure they met these conditions when receiving the money. The party, for instance, gave its ballot line a number of Council candidates in 2009, though how much of the $1.2 million was supposed to support, or actually went to support, those candidates has yet to be determined.

“The vetting process was lawyer-heavy for all of these decisions,” MacKay said.

Haggerty’s attorney, former Attorney General Dennis Vacco, said that since

Bloomberg was spending outside his authorized committee, he could not have dispensed the money without busting contribution limits unless the money was expressly intended for the Independence Party’s housekeeping activities. And if the money was expressly going to the Independence Party—and was not simply a payment to Haggerty—then Haggerty cannot be accused of stealing from Bloomberg, Haggerty’s defense reasons.

Bloomberg’s own lawyers made a similar argument about housekeeping ac-

CITY HALL counts toward the end of last year’s race.

In a 2009 Campaign Finance Board complaint, Democratic mayoral candidate Bill Thompson accused Bloomberg of violating election law by not reporting $3.3 million in campaign contributions he had made to political parties as spending by his own campaign committee.

Bloomberg’s lawyers argued that $2.8 million of the mayor’s had been given out to housekeeping accounts, which by definition “could not be used for candidate support” and thus “could not have been for the support of his candidacy.”

Another possibility: Bloomberg’s payment to Haggerty was never intended to be used for anything other than for the mayor’s campaign. If proven, this could actually strengthen the prosecution’s case, since it could be more easily argued that Haggerty stole from Bloomberg by not using it for those purposes.

Vacco says that if Bloomberg’s payment really was not a housekeeping donation to the Independence Party, the mayor himself may have committed a campaign finance violation, since that would be campaign spending outside his authorized committee.

By doing so, the mayor avoided report-

www.cityhallnews.com Still, the Manhattan DA’s office under Robert Morgenthau did take up one recent case, though the circumstances and potential violations were different. Notably, Seidel, the assistant DA who led the prosecution, is also heading up the Haggerty case.

In 2008, Surrogate Court Judge Nora Anderson received a $100,000 gift and a $150,000 loan from attorney and mentor Seth Rubenstein that she put into her personal bank account. Anderson then shifted the money into her campaign, naming herself as both a donor and lender.

The trial, which was finished once Vance had been sworn in as Morgenthau’s successor, prosecuted Anderson for filing a false document with the Board of Elections, since she had stated that the money was her own, rather than Rubenstein’s. Anderson was acquitted, with her lawyers convincing the jury that the filing was accurate, because she had technically taken title to the money before she put it into her campaign.

The violation that Vacco is suggesting Bloomberg committed involved spending outside his authorized committee, which the mayor had pledged not to do on his CF-16 form. Anderson, meanwhile, was

In 2009, Bloomberg’s own lawyers argued that $2.8 million of the mayor’s had been given out to housekeeping accounts, which by definition “could not be used for candidate support” and thus “could not have been for the support of his candidacy.” ing the $1.2 million in spending until two months after Election Day. To that end, Vacco is urging the State Board of Elections or Campaign Finance Board to take up the case.

“It’s a dilemma in the prosecution’s theory,” Vacco said, “and someone on the Campaign Finance Board or Board of Elections ought to be looking into it.”

Vance’s office, meanwhile, briefly addressed the defense’s argument in the Oct. 29 motion, stating it was a distraction from overwhelming evidence that makes it clear Haggerty deceived Bloomberg into in a “larcenous scheme.”

Vance’s office declined further comment.

Campaign finance violations in New York are famously difficult to prosecute.

Even if an issue is found, there is little chance that it will lead to any real trouble.

Stay Informed

NOVEMBER 17, 2010

Our Perspective

When it Comes to Wal-Mart, Size Doesn’t Matter

By Stuart Appelbaum, President, Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union, RWDSU, UFCW

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etail behemoth Wal-Mart has tried and failed on many occasions to bring its superstores and poverty-wage jobs into New York City. Community groups, unions, and elected officials have so far succeeded in keeping Wal-Mart out, but now, the wolf is back, sporting new sheep-like clothing.

Last month, Wal-Mart announced that it would consider opening smaller stores in urban markets that it has found difficult to crack, such as New York City. These stores would be far smaller than the company’s trademark superstores, which are often close to 200,000 square feet. After seemingly giving up years ago, Wal-Mart is again aggressively pursuing possible expansion into New York City, contacting real estate companies about available sites and hiring New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s former campaign manager Bradley Tusk to lead the effort.

One thing is clear: While the proposed size of the stores may have changed, Wal-Mart’s anti-worker, anti-union, and anticommunity policies haven’t.

indicted under a different section of state election law, filing a false instrument in the first degree, among other charges.

The Haggerty case is complicated by the fact that Bloomberg’s money went through the Independence Party. Still, though the $1.2 million payment may have gone through an intermediary, that does not necessarily alleviate Haggerty from responsibility for spending the money as the mayor wished, argued one white-collar criminal attorney following the case.

“Even if there’s questions about the way Bloomberg gave somebody the money, he could still be defrauded,” the attorney said. “If you’re a subcontractor who is paid to do work on someone’s house, you can’t just keep the money for yourself.” cbragg@cityhallnews.com

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Wal-Mart still pays poverty level wages. Wal-Mart stores still cost communities jobs in the long run, while at the same time driving down wages where they operate. Local businesses still suffer when a Wal-Mart opens, and a lack of affordable employerprovided health care still creates a huge drain on communities when workers are forced to seek government assistance.

For these reasons and more, New York City has continually said no to Wal-Mart, defeating proposed stores in Rego Park and Staten Island.

It’s not the size of Wal-Mart stores that is the problem, it’s a corporate culture that seeks to lower the standards of all retail workers, and fights tooth and nail any efforts by its workforce to raise those standards.

Smaller Wal-Mart stores still mean big trouble for New York City.

Until the company is prepared to change the way it treats workers and communities, we need to continue fighting to keep this irresponsible corporate citizen out of town.

Visit us on the web at

www.rwdsu.org

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NOVEMBER 17, 2010

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Political Theater

CITY HALL

a banner drop on the Brooklyn Bridge, which was also postponed due to logistics.

On World AIDS Day, December 1, the group plans to substitute its usual sit-in of Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s annual On the streets and in bagel costumes, AIDS activists try to keep the government’s attention bagel breakfast with a protest in which all protesters are dressed as bagels. Chants may include, “Cut

BY LAURA NAHMIAS bagels! Not housing!”

This kind of activism is “hit wo full cycles of the traffic or miss,” said Sean Barry, a light was how long it took for spokesman for the New York police officers to start arresting City AIDS Housing Network, the 20 HIV/AIDS activists and one state which recently changed its senator blocking the road in protest in name to VOCAL (Voices of Lower Manhattan in early November. The Community Activists and Leadcops, having been forewarned about the ers) to reflect the changing protest, were ready with the plastic handagenda of AIDS activism and cuffs they typically use for the nonviothe disease’s spread in low-inlent. come communities of color.

But there is no indication dressing as bagels will get AIDS activists any more attenAbout eight minutes passed and the tion than they have gotten from crowd of approximately 100 people disBloomberg, who merged the persed. The activists and State Sen. Tom city’s HIV/AIDS Service AdminDuane were in and out of jail in about an istration into the larger Health hour and a half.

Department and has attempted What exactly they accomplished, to cut funding for AIDS-related though, is more difficult to track. programming, citing the necesAs HIV infection rates rise in pocksity of budget cuts in all city ets of New York, especially among the agencies. poorer, outer-borough communities, poli(“He sort of cherry-picks ticians seemingly are paying less attendata to make his administration to the groups that have traditionally tion’s response to AIDS look guided their hand on AIDS legislation. better,” Barry said.)

While statistics such as the overall death But the administration rate—1,200 people per year—are on the claims it is doing the best it can wane, infection rates among men who to treat HIV/AIDS, and has more have sex with men in parts of the Bronx work to do, said Monica Sweeand Brooklyn are on the upswing, accordney, assistant commissioner for ing to the city’s Health Department. But the bureau of HIV Prevention with money in short supply and crucial and Control at the city Health social services on the chopping block, acDepartment. tivists are tapping their inner dramatist to “We look at the evidence to fight back. decide what needs to be done.

Many are demanding more support Some of the advocates say, befrom city and state government for issues cause it wasn’t done this way such as housing, but they also concede the movement is at a crossroads, where HIV/AIDS activists and State Sen. Tom Duane protest Gov. Paterson’s veto of AIDS in the 1980s, we’re not going to change,” she said. the changing demographics of the AIDS housing funding Some advocates agreed that “Fear and urgency don’t get people’s organization, from staging regular diepopulation, and a shift in perception of the disease, from a death sentence to a attention anymore,” complained one frus- ins and costumed protests that make up a numbers-based approach to advocacy, a variety show of civil disobedience acts, focused, for instance, on the economic chronic disease, are making the kind of trated activist. benefits of providing cheaper housing This has not stopped groups such as with varying levels of success. activism that has worked in the past less “There’s still a role for people on the to people with AIDS, might go over well Housing Works, a 30-year old advocacy viable in the present. street, but part of the reason the activism with the data-driven Bloomberg adminiswas so effective in the ’80s was that a lot tration.

But King said the mayor and Council of powerful people were forced out of the closet,” said Charlie King, the organiza- Speaker Christine Quinn, who is openly tion’s executive director (not the state gay, have been “downright evil” on HIV/ AIDS issues. Until the speaker is termDemocratic Party executive director).

BuTLEr ASSoCiATES Last year, King collaborated with limited out, King says his group will conRick Warren, the pastor and author of tinue with what they have been doing all We know how to make news for our clients, The Purpose Driven Life, to auction along. because we know how news is made.

“What do you do? Do you change your off the right to cut his ponytail to raise targets?

Do you become more theatrical? money to support AIDS activists in HaiThe 2010 o'Dwyers annual ranking of independent national public relations firms named Butler Associates one of the top 5 ti. That event was obviously staged with Sure, let’s put them all in play,” he said. “It Public Affairs Pr practices in New York. a light touch, but others such as a sit- is an epidemic that is driven by racism, in where members would chain them- sexism and homophobia. Until you get selves together inside City Hall were people to recognize that, then you’re not 204 East 23rd Street, New York, NY 10010 undone by the inability of members to going to make the kind of progress you www.ButlerAssociates.com • info@ButlerAssociates.com get past the building’s metal detectors. want to make.”

Contact: Tom Butler - (212) 685-4600 Of course, the original intent was to do lnahmias@cityhallnews.com

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NOVEMBER 17, 2010

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CITY HALL

Contract Dispute

MARC ANDERSON

John Liu takes aim at Bloomberg through DOE contracts

BY ANDREW J. HAWKINS

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uch like his predecessor, Comptroller John Liu has focused on contracts with the city’s school system as a way to check Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s wide-ranging power.

The war began in early October, with news reports that the Department of Education was blaming the comptroller for delaying contract approval that would allow over $500,000 in profits from new health food vending machines from being transferred to schools. Liu’s office said it was probing possible “collusion” between the vending machine companies.

The dispute soon escalated over insurance contracts between the comptroller’s office and DOE, which still has the po-

tential to leave hundreds of school buses without insurance coverage after December.

Under the revised mayoral control law, DOE must register contracts with the comptroller’s office before finalizing them. But a contract between insurance broker Willis Group and DOE to insure city school buses expired June 30 and has yet to be registered by Liu’s office. Liu’s office is refusing to approve the contract, arguing that, as it is currently written, it “usurped” the comptroller’s responsibility under the City Charter to adjudicate insurance claims.

Cathie Black’s replacement of Schools Chancellor Joel Klein is unlikely to ease the tension between DOE and the comptroller’s office. If anything, some experts predict that Black’s ascendency to the top position could heighten the perception of

But a few months later, DOE and the DOE as an agency unchecked.

“Generally, executives like to keep the comptroller were back at it. With the power they think they inherited,” said Pe- vending machines, Liu’s office refrained dro Noguera, a professor of education at from approving the contracts, holding New York University. “She would see this up hundreds of thousands of dollars in as a power loss of some of her authority, healthy snack profits until concluding especially because she’s coming from the that there was nothing improper in how corporate world. With only the mayor for the contracts were awarded. But DOE her to report to, it really leaves no room installed the vending machines anyways, before the contracts were registered by for checks and balances.”

Bloomberg has always pushed back Liu’s office.

The flap over school bus insurance apagainst the idea of increased oversight by the city comptroller, arguing that DOE is pears to be more severe. Willis, the insurmore a state agency than a city one, an- ance broker, threatened to terminate the swerable to the State Education Depart- contract by Nov. 5 if it still had not been ment. This stance led to friction between approved by Liu’s office. The deadlock the mayor and then-Comptroller Bill would have left thousands of children Thompson, compounded by Thompson’s without rides to school had the deadline political ambitions to run for mayor him- not been extended at the last moment to self. Though this was exacerbated after Dec. 31 to allow added time to work out the term limits extension, which set the a claims protocol with DOE and, more two up to run against each other, Bloom- importantly, avoid a potential public relaberg aides felt even before the fall of 2008 tions nightmare.

Alan Van Capelle, deputy comptroller that Thompson occasionally hit the education record to help lay the founda- for public affairs, said that this is a systemic problem with DOE that needs to be tion for his own mayoral run.

Barring some massive change of addressed.

“We hope that the Department of Eduheart in the referendum electorate and another recalibration of the po- cation uses this increased time to work litical world from the mayor, Liu will with us and find a resolution to all the not be running against Bloomberg at any outstanding issues,” Van Capelle said. point. But he is seen as a likely candidate “But I think DOE needs a study hall on for the 2013 race, when having some bur- procurement. And they need to undernished credentials and additional expo- stand that mayoral control of schools sure would be important for sticking out does not mean they control everything.

There still is a procurement policy and of a crowded field.

“There’s always been tension, political they’re required to follow it.” and administrative, between the comptroller’s office and the may- “I think DOE needs or’s office,” said David Blooma study hall on field, an education professor at the City University of New York. procurement,” said “So it’s not unusual for the comp- Deputy Comptroller troller, in his role as auditor and Alan Van Capelle. “And oversight manager, to hold things they need to understand up, doing his due diligence, and take advantage in that situation that mayoral control of perhaps to bring the mayor up schools does not mean short, to not steamroll his pro- they control everything.” gram through the contracting process.”

A DOE spokesperson declined to anAfter the Legislature reauthorized mayoral control in the summer of 2009, swer questions about the status of the the city comptroller was given new pow- insurance contract, preferring instead to ers to regulate and manage DOE’s con- highlight the procedural issue between tracting process. Problems with the new the agency and Liu’s office.

“Yellow bus service will continue to protocol were evident almost right out of serve our children,” said DOE spokesperthe gate.

In July, Liu’s office got word that the son Margie Feinberg. “The comptroller Panel on Education Policy would seek has 30 days to register the contract and to approve a resolution that would allow the time period is not yet over. As we do DOE to make contract purchases with- with many of our contracts, we have had out the panel’s approval. Liu fired off a discussions with the comptroller during letter arguing that the resolution would the registration period, and we expect all not only be in violation of state law, but issues will be addressed and that the conwas also not put up for public review, as tract will be registered.” required. The panel eventually pulled the ahawkins@cityhallnews.com resolution from its agenda.

But America’s wireless companies aren’t sitting still. Last year, we invested more than $20 billion to strengthen our networks. Our handsets are the envy of the world. And Americans have the freedom to choose from among 400,000 apps and dozens of plans and providers. That’s what happens when innovation, competition and consumers, not regulation, drive the market.

LET FREEDOM RING.

America’s wireless companies

*Approval Rating Source: The Federal Communications Commission Consumer Survey, April 19 to May 2, 2010

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NOVEMBER 17, 2010

www.cityhallnews.com

CITY HALL

THE

GODFATHER

WITH THE UWS-WFP-NYT AXIS DOMINATING LOCAL POLITICS, THIS IS JERRY NADLER’S NEW YORK

BY EDWARD-ISAAC DOVERE

I

t was, as Eric Schneiderman said in his victory speech at the Sheraton on election night, an improbable journey. A year ago, after all, he had wavered about and then aborted a long-expected run for Manhattan DA. When he finally pulled the trigger on his attorney general run, Schneiderman stayed further to the left than anyone would have thought possible to win statewide in New York.

But really, November was not all that improbable for Schneiderman—as Tom DiNapoli’s election made abundantly clear, even a Democrat with pretty much the entire universe aligned against him will win in New York by being a Democrat and having the labor machine’s nomination, along with the surplus of Democraticinclined voters committed to not filling in a GOP bubble.

And the primary win was not so improbable either—Schneiderman is the latest candidate propelled by the new coalition that has taken control of New York politics. The axis spins through the progressive heartlands of the Upper West Side and brownstone Brooklyn on campaigns that now regularly connect the New York Times editorial board to the Working Families Party, and all the constituent parts of each. In recent years, to have the support of one of these is nearly always to have the support of them all. To have the support of most, if not all, is usually to win.

At the center is Jerry Nadler, the man Schneiderman identified in that victory speech as his mentor. Nadler was there for Schneiderman at the beginning, at the official kickoff of the attorney general campaign on the steps of City Hall in April. He was there a year earlier on a colder, wetter day for Bill de Blasio, preemptively sealing up the public advocate race. David Yassky tried desperately to get him there in last year’s comptroller’s race, calling him nonstop and even cornering him for some frantic arm waving after most of the others had left Charlie Rangel’s last birthday party at Tavern on the Green in August, but to no avail.

Schneiderman won. De Blasio won. Yassky, left to campaign outside of Fairway by himself, never really had a chance.

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NOVEMBER 17, 2010

EDWARD-ISAAC DOVERE

CITY HALL

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So looking back on 2010, the improbable part was not that Schneiderman won.

The improbable part was that despite Andrew Cuomo’s concerted effort to box him out, Schneiderman stayed in the race at all.

No one needed a poll to know that Cuomo could have effectively ended things by coming out publicly for Kathleen Rice, or even, at the end of the campaign, for Sean Coffey.

Schneiderman’s supporters held him off, and then, once the nomination was secured, helped force that awkward endorsement in Columbus Circle almost two weeks after the primary.

That had a lot to do with Nadler, too.

The Harlem machine is waning. Unions are strong but not what they used to be. The Working Families Party, though now rebuilding, was clipped by the investigations and legal troubles of the last year. Vito Lopez is still strong in Brooklyn but threatened, and Joe Crowley’s grip is only a little looser locally in Queens, but no longer has the same sway over larger politics that Tom Manton’s did.

With his money and his popularity, Mike Bloomberg wins elections in New York. But as Dan Donovan and Harry Wilson showed again this year, Bloomberg’s power does not transfer. Nadler’s does.

He is the heir to the progressive mantle at a time when the New York electorate, especially in local primaries, has keeled to the left. He is a hero on the West Side, where there are more votes to be had in primary and general elections than in any other part of the city or state, and his sway stretches out to parts of Brooklyn he has never represented, but is full of his former constituents.

The Jews in the tip of his district, which goes into Boro Park, love him, and so do the Jews far beyond. Union leaders connect with him.

The New York Times editorial board always takes his calls. He may not be Boss Tweed, or really any kind of stereotypical boss, but right now, Jerry Nadler rules local politics.

Nadler professes not to notice the organization he has built up under himself or the sway he has acquired. He seems surprised by the suggestion. The furthest he will go is, “I think of myself as trying to advance certain things, progressive public policies, and people who will be effective in promoting those.”

Helping Chuck Schumer (the only person left who calls him “Jerrold”) win the 1998 Senate primary was the first big move, and being there for Scott Stringer’s borough president run in 2005 brought the West Side apparatus to the next level of power. But the first real test was the 2005 Council speaker race. Nadler’s backing was a signal to other powerbrokers for Christine Quinn and, crucially, a progressive stamp of approval.

“It would be a very hard race if I wasn’t able to make that point, and there’s no better way to make that point than with Jerry Nadler’s support,” Quinn said. “Before Jerry made the decision, I certainly heard, ‘Where is Jerry?’ So to be able to report back, ‘Well, Jerry’s with me,’ that made people say, ‘Oh wow. Okay.’”

Next up was Cuomo, running for resurrection in the 2006 attorney general’s race.

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NOVEMBER 17, 2010

Nadler came on early, bringing with him much of the progressive credibility that was Mark Green’s base. Green’s candidacy floundered while Nadler smiled through all those “big shoes to fill” Cuomo ads, foot measure proudly in hand.

Nadler’s support for de Blasio in 2009 showed again how much he could do by speaking up. His refusal to back Yassky showed how much of an impact he could have by staying silent.

Cuomo seems to have been paying attention. The governor-in-waiting never forced Nadler’s hand, never truly tested that progressive constituency. For Nadler and the people around him, this is gratifying: a recognition both of the role they played in past elections and the role they could play in standing by Cuomo as he gears up for fights with key elements of the traditional Democratic coalition and the inevitable wars with the Legislature to come.

The weekend before Election Day, Cuomo held a rally at the plaza in front of the 72nd Street and Broadway subway stop. Nadler joined Schneiderman and Schumer for a brief photo-op at Fairway before walking down to the Cuomo campaign truck and exhorting the crowd to send a West Side reformer to Albany.

Along the way, they picked up Linda

Rosenthal, then Stringer. One by one, they made their speeches to the crowd.

Just over 48 hours later, Schneiderman was the attorney general-elect.

“It’s not just about Fairway anymore, though Fairway will always loom large in all our lives,” Stringer said a few days later. “It’s gone beyond that.”

W

alking around the West Side, Nadler relates a story about a poorly located fundraiser for him featuring Carl McCall, Charlie Rangel and men in towels in the background at the gay bathhouse in the Ansonia that predated Plato’s Retreat.

Almost before he is finished, he starts running through the same game plan for a special small business tax cut he just gave Chuck Schumer for undercutting the Republicans on the expiring Bush tax cuts. Both, like just about everything else he says, pour out of him in a slightly amused, can-you-believeit/of-course-you’ve-got-to-believe-it tone.

CITY HALL

There is just enough distraction in his voice to make it clear he is thinking about the next three things and at least one topic from a conversation with someone else, while still engaging with the person in front of him.

Nadler is not the most introspective person, at least on display. Two years ago, while waiting for the inevitable hammer to drop on his doomedfrom-the-start dream of getting the Senate appointment (despite the work he had done to get David Paterson to the State Senate back in 1985), he almost never let the pain show beyond a winced smile. Only occasionally, maybe in the back of a cab in an off-hand conversation with a political friend, will he let slip how much he might actually want to be mayor himself.

Likewise, when he accuses Barack Obama of political negligence—as he did publicly two days after the midterms while the rest of the Democrats were trying to hold their heads defiantly high—it

was not to jockey for position in the House or bully the president into signing one of his bills. The stimulus should have been bigger, both for the sake of economic policy, and for politics—Nadler determined this back before the bill was passed, and started saying it. You can debate about it, and he is ready to go point for point, but really, he will just be waiting for you to catch up.

Nadler approaches politics the same way. When Kirsten Gillibrand called once, twice, three times a day asking for his endorsement, he held off for nearly a year, and when he did, he approved the press release knowing that he was effectively ending the possibility of a primary challenge from Gillibrand’s left. But by then, all the prospective alternatives he might have supported had already dropped out and Gillibrand had rocketed leftward on several key positions. His endorsement probably brought more with it than any other piece beyond Schumer’s.

This year, faced with Stringer’s mix of competing political needs, competitiveness, jealousy and paranoid anxiety about his own future that kept the borough president from endorsing Schneiderman until after the Times endorsement had effectively narrowed the field, Nadler did not force Stringer on board. He just helped bring Stringer to the inevitable conclusion, that moment when he put his hand on Stringer’s arm and said, essentially, “Look, Scott, in the end, you’re going to have to support Eric.”

“I think one of the points is: We are close, but you can’t always agree. And if you try to enforce discipline in some way—we’re not talking about political bosses here, you can’t enforce discipline,” Nadler said, explaining how he makes his

HE MAY NOT BE BOSS TWEED, OR REALLY ANY KIND OF STEREOTYPICAL BOSS, BUT RIGHT NOW, JERRY NADLER RULES LOCAL POLITICS. case “by talking, by logical reasoning, by explaining the reason why I think this is it. Sometimes that’s persuasive. I tend to think that I’m a fairly persuasive person.”

Nadler likes the term “close associates,” to describe his political allies. He also sometimes jokes about a farm team.

Others see a dynamic more like a family,

CITY HALL with all of its function and dysfunction.

Nadler is the head, not paternalistically but in the sense that he was in office long before any of them, and they all look up to him. Even when fighting with each other, they all still like him. Roughly, then, Stringer and Linda Rosenthal are the immediate family, with Schneiderman something like a stepbrother. Tom Duane, Quinn and the LGBT political activists function as one set of cousins, and de Blasio, Brad Lander, Daniel Squadron and the other Brooklyn progressives as another set.

Harlem, especially with some of the old powerbrokers on the wane and now Adriano Espaillat headed to Schneiderman’s Senate seat with some key West Side support, is an increasingly close family friend.

Nadler has known them for decades.

Stringer, then Rosenthal, joined him as aides back when Reagan was president.

Schneiderman first caught his attention for having a fundraising committee committed to putting Democrats in the majority in the State Senate back when he was a young staffer to then-Assembly Speaker Mel Miller in the mid-’80s. (Also, Nadler said, because Schneiderman is “one of the few people I know who really thinks about progressive economics.”) Quinn managed Duane’s primary run against him in 1994, the last time Nadler got a serious challenge. De Blasio has been in the orbit since roughly the same time, when he was chief of staff to a Brooklyn Council member dispatched to a diner for a one-on-one, hour-long dissertation on the cross-harbor rail freight tunnel.

All of them built deeper relationships from there. Nadler helped all of them get into office, but populating the government with protégés was not what he set out to do.

“I never thought in those terms,” Nadler said. “You do what you can when you see a race, and I think a lot of people are always looking to government to nurture political talent. It should be.”

R

osenthal, who worked for Nadler for almost two decades before she took over the Assembly seat in which Nadler had spent 16 years and Stringer had spent 13, remembers her old boss once mapping out for her how, in hindsight, he had determined that he would have ended up in the congressional seat, one way or another. Nadler himself does not recall doing this.

On the contrary, he says, there would have been no way to predict what had happened, especially given his history going into the 1992 race. In 1985, he lost 65-35 to David Dinkins in the Manhattan borough president primary, and in 1989, he pulled out of the city comptroller race two weeks before the polls opened

www.cityhallnews.com

Nadler On DC: Misery And Losses In The Short-Term, Judiciary Gavel Not Far Behind Of the 18 years that Jerry Nadler has been in Washington, 12 of them have been in the minority. So he has an idea of what to expect when he returns to the Capitol in January following November’s heavy swing of the House to Republican control.

Nadler will likely return to his role as ranking member on the House Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, a position he held from 2000-2006.

(He was chairman of the committee for the last four years.) He expects to play a similar role as he did the last time Republicans controlled the House.

“I was the first line of defense for all kinds of crazy initiatives on anti-choice initiatives and anti-civil liberties initiatives, and anti-gay rights,” Nadler said. “That will be a large part of my time and effort, just fending off idiotic, terrible things—probably not being able to stop them, but laying the groundwork to try to stop them in the Senate.”

Nadler does not expect the Republicans to try a full repeat of the last time they were in the majority with a Democrat in the White House. “They can do havoc enough without impeaching the president,” he said, but he is girding himself for two years of fights over economic policies he believes are the wrong way out of the continuing recession.

And while committed to winning back the House, he is far from optimistic. Nadler has called the president politically negligent for not pushing for a bigger stimulus package or managing a better public relations effort about its benefits. And going into 2012, Nadler says he wishes the president had not originally relied on the rosy projections that said unemployment would hover at 8 percent.

Without any sign of improvements as Barack Obama gears up for reelection, along with 23 Democrats in the Senate and a battered House conference trying to get back the power they so briefly held, Nadler believes there is reason to worry.

“If the economy continues limping along and doesn’t get better, the odds are that we lose the next election,” he said.

But things might be looking up for Nadler if the Democrats take back the House.

John Conyers, the Judiciary Committee chairman, is 81 years old and unlikely to serve many more years—especially in the minority. Rick Boucher, a Virginia congressman who was the third most senior Democrat on the committee, was a victim of this year’s Republican wave. That leaves only Howard Berman of California ahead of Nadler for seniority, and he is likely to return to his post as Foreign Affairs chairman if given the chance, clearing the way for Nadler to take the gavel of one of Congress’s most important committees.

But first, he will have to survive the next few years of Republican control of the committee.

“It’s going to be unpleasant,” Nadler said.

—EIRD

because he ran out of cash. Nor did his stamp of approval work so well back then: In the race for the West Side’s open City Council seat, Stringer got less than half as many votes as Ronnie Eldridge, kicked to the curb just like Nadler.

Those were dark days. Rosenthal talks about feeling smothered, a sinking feeling that they had been outdone. Nadler does not like to think of it much, and so he does not. All he will say before moving on is, “That was not pleasant.”

Unexpected opportunity took three years. Ted Weiss, who had held the seat since Bella Abzug gave it up to run for Senate in 1976, died the day before the primary. He still won, leaving it up to the county committee to fill the nomination.

Abzug, along with Weiss’s widow, State Sen. Franz Leichter and Assembly Member Dick Gottfried all got into the race, but in that marathon weekend of backroom campaigning in the classrooms of a local school, Nadler left them all in the dust.

“It’s symbolic of Jerry Nadler’s precise, pragmatic approach that he was already reaching out to district leaders while others were sending ‘Get Well’ cards,” said

Ralph Andrew, Weiss’s former chief of staff. “By the time Weiss died, Jerry was well on his way to having a large quantity of votes of county committee members, and a commitment of a large number of votes for subsequent ballots.”

Gottfried agrees. The race was over before it even started, just like the races he watched Nadler dominate when they were in high school together in Stuyvesant.

“He was just a terrific vote-getter,” Gottfried said. “It helped that we were in a high school where you didn’t have to be a student athlete to be popular, since our little band of friends were all a bunch of nerds.”

Nadler’s time in Stuyvesant student government, along with Gottfried and a then much less conservative Dick Morris, led to canvassing for Eugene McCarthy in the 1968 presidential campaign. They were the West Side Kids, a cadre of political prodigies whose ’60s activism took the form of tenant organizing, canvassing and dominating district leader races.

That mix of magnetism and nerdiness still defines Nadler. Told that he has been called the “Bono of Fairway,” to describe

November 17, 2010

15

his popularity at home, Nadler says quickly that he had Bono on his committee in Washington. This is a joke. Nadler means Sonny Bono, but by the time he has explained it, his mind is on to something else.

Gottfried remembers sitting next to him in a particularly boring meeting in Albany one day while they were both in the Assembly together. Some people were sleeping. Other people were doodling.

Nadler drew a chart and filled it in from memory with the turnout numbers from every election district covered by his Assembly seat.

Nadler still works out charts of numbers based on history and voting patterns in his ballpoint pen, though on election night, he graduated to a staffer’s iPad and sat in a corner of the Schneiderman suite constantly refreshing and reassuring the nervous room that the numbers coming in early spelled victory.

He can also draw a perfect outline of the continental United States, freehand.

Nadler also works out some more straightforward political calculations.

When Rosenthal started telling people at Stringer’s borough president victory party that she was thinking about getting into the race for his Assembly seat, Nadler and Stringer soon swung into action to deliver her the county committee vote. Among the people shoved aside was Marc Landis, a district leader and former Stringer campaign treasurer who had been waiting patiently for the seat to open. But Nadler and Stringer worked the phones and the county committee meeting itself to make sure the deal was done, and then several months after, backed a supporter for an almost unheard of primary for a state committee spot occupied by a woman who had refused to budge on her support for another one of the candidates.

Nadler becomes the boss when he needs to be. Or when he wants to be. A couple of calls to judicial convention delegates have sparked scattered complaints about his heavy hand. More than one black robe over the years has gone to a Nadler friend—all of them qualified, respected and supported more widely, certainly. But the congressman’s preference has not gone unnoticed.

The day after the county committee selected Nadler for Congress in 1992, it gave Stringer the Assembly nomination, beginning what has been an extremely orderly succession of power on the West Side, and generally resulting in the election of Nadler allies. If not for the term limits extension, Micah Lasher—now the mayor’s state legislative affairs director but then a Nadler staffer who had joined the office with his eyes on 2009—would have been the next priority for Gale Brewer’s Council seat.

When Nadler endorses, he starts by interrogating candidates, gauging their support, testing their relationships and viability. Then there are discussions with staff and with the larger family. They pro-

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ceed strategically, guided by operatives like Amy Rutkin and Rob Gottheim, two aides who combined have spent almost 30 years working for Nadler.

None of it happens in a vacuum. Last year, for example, he capped a list of nearly every elected official in Manhattan backing Richard Aborn for district attorney. Rosenthal and Schneiderman did too, but Stringer sat on the sidelines until the New York Times endorsement went to Cy Vance and he was shown an internal poll that suggested Vance was going to win. Two weeks before the primary, Stringer endorsed Vance. The West Side got a piece of the win.

In the city comptroller race, Nadler was stuck: The Working Families Party had engineered a deal backing Liu so that he would quit the public advocate race and clear the way for de Blasio. Nadler has been one of the party’s top advocates—on a flyer that was distributed around Brooklyn this year, he is quoted saying that no one works harder than the WFP, and urging people to vote on that line.

Looking back at 2009, Nadler insists that he could not see the separations that nearly every voter in town saw, and were more pronounced on substantive policy than in some of the other races in which he has spoken up over the years.

“I like David, a like David a lot. I like John Liu. There was not that much difference that I could really tell people, ‘You’ve got to vote for this one, you’ve got to vote for that one,’” Nadler said.

As close as he is and was with the WFP, he could not go against Yassky. So he stayed silent, while Stringer, Schneiderman and Rosenthal all backed Liu. The West Side got a piece of the win.

The players insist that they are all just coming from a common philosophy, and what appears to be arrangements is really happenstance.

“No one goes in there and says, ‘Well, what are you going to do? Because I’ll do what you do,’” Rosenthal said.

Occasionally, Nadler maneuvers directly against the public positions of the family. This year, for example, Schneiderman, Stringer and Rosenthal all came out early behind Adriano Espaillat in his run for Schneiderman’s State Senate seat.

Nadler made no endorsement, but he quietly urged the Times editorial board to look at Mark Levine, Espaillat’s main primary opponent.

The resonance he has with the decision-makers at the Times is one of the greatest assets Nadler brings to a campaign. As with the rest of his political power, Nadler downplays the significance of his influence.

“They ask my opinion, I give my opinion. Sometimes I call up and give my opinion when they don’t ask,” he said.

On Aborn, the Times went a different way, and for Schneiderman’s State Senate

seat, the paper of record went with Espaillat. But most of the time, and for the races where the Times nod means the most, if Nadler supports a candidate, that candidate is in good shape to get the endorsement.

“The Times endorsement matters a lot in this district, and I don’t think it’s any secret that the Times was going to look at what Jerry said,” said Council Member Brad Lander, an ally whom Nadler endorsed early last year and coached on his interview. “His weighing in, I know, made a big difference.”

Nadler acknowledged that there was not much coincidence to the fact that he and the decision makers usually agree.

But “not on everything by the way,” he added quickly. “They’ve been much more hawkish on Afghanistan than I am.”

L

setts accent—feasible, but Twilight Zone odd. If Stringer runs, it will be with that endorsement. If he runs. But Stringer is planning to run, and he wants to drive the point home: Together handing out Schneiderman flyers early in the morning of Election Day, Stringer paused just long enough to put his hands possessively on Nadler’s shoulders and said, “He’s mine.”

De Blasio had Nadler deliver his oath of office in January.

Though the public advocate, like all the rest, will not talk much about 2013, he will talk about the key supporter he would want for whatever race comes next.

“I can’t think of a person who anyone would rather have on their side more than Jerry Nadler,” de Blasio said. “In between the respect that people have for him, and what he means substantively and what he’s achieved and the way people listen to him, of course, Jerry’s one of the most respected political figures in the city.”

Quinn too, in another made-forpaean impromptu statement.

“Jerry Nadler is a force in every local, borough, city and statewide race in New York, and anyone who runs for any office wants Jerry Nadler. Doesn’t matter what it is, where it is,” Quinn said.

The family is hoping to work out an arrangement: Stringer runs for mayor, de Blasio takes advantage of his three terms to stay public advocate until 2021, Quinn goes for Manhattan borough president.

Or de Blasio runs for mayor, Stringer runs for public advocate and Quinn runs for borough president. Or de Blasio and Liu against each other for mayor, Quinn for public advocate and Stringer for comptroller. Or Quinn runs for mayor as Bloomberg’s preferred choice, and de Blasio or Stringer go up against her as the progressive pick.

Any of these would avoid the showdown, if someone could only seal the deal. Nadler acknowledges that if anyone could, he would be the person who could make it happen.

“Yeah, but I’m not the king of politics in New York,” Nadler said. “I can’t do that. It would obviously be much more comfortable if people you liked always only ran against people you despised. The world doesn’t work that way.”

Between now and 2013, Nadler has a national election to worry about and what he fears is going to be an onslaught of Republican policies that he will have to try blocking as a ranking member on the House Constitution Subcommittee.

For now, Nadler and the political axis he controls are the determining force in New York politics. He will get to how that will probably all fall apart if the family goes to war with itself.

“We’ll jump off that bridge,” Nadler said, “when we come to it.” eidovere@cityhallnews.com

“It’s not just about Fairway anymore, though Fairway will always loom large in all our lives,” said Scott Stringer. “It’s gone beyond that.”

ast year, the night of the runoff, de Blasio and his supporters gathered at the conveniently named Union Bar, just north of Union Square. Mark Green’s last fans were across the street, in a small office on the 19th floor of one of his brother’s buildings. The drinks were flowing at de Blasio’s party, but at Green’s, no one was even touching the Styrofoam bowls of pretzels and Hershey’s miniatures on one of the desks.

They turned the volume up on the small TV playing NY1 just in time to hear Stringer, down at the de Blasio bar, talking about what a great night he expected it to be.

Lew Fidler, Council member and de Blasio detractor, snorted.

“You’re going to regret the day you brought him onto the West Side, Scott,” he said, half to the TV, half to Jerry Goldfeder, the election lawyer who ran against Stringer both for Council and Assembly.

Goldfeder smiled.

Schneiderman’s win, like de Blasio’s, was possible because the coalition agreed. There was no contest for the progressives, there was no division between what the Upper West Side wanted and what the Working Families Partyled Brooklyn progressives wanted. The gay political leaders, for the most part, backed them both.

Schneiderman’s election might represent the cementing of a new reality.

It might also represent those moments when everything comes together perfectly one last time before crumbling completely.

Fast forward to the 2013 mayor’s race.

Stringer is putting together cash to run.

Disclosure: 14 years ago, the author spent several weeks as an unpaid high school intern for Rep. Jerrold Nadler.

CITY HALL

The City Charter almost requires de Blasio to run as part of his job description.

And Quinn already pushed back her own ambitions once with the term limits extension.

According to the progressive family tree, this would mean a mayor’s race pitting Nadler’s son versus his nephew versus his niece. Nor would he be the only one torn: Up against each other, Stringer, de Blasio and Quinn crisscross bases in so many different ways that a race with all of them would probably mean a race with none of them as serious contenders.

Another problem: De Blasio and Schneiderman both got to be the blacksupported candidates in all-white fields, which helps explain why Sharpton endorsed them, enhancing their credibility with another key chunk of primary voters. Hard to see how that would happen if there is a black candidate in the race, either through Bill Thompson or, if he skips the race, through an already impatient Eric Adams. If Liu gets into the race, that would scramble things even more, exposing more fault lines among progressives, minorities and unions.

And none of this even begins to account for Anthony Weiner, who would no doubt draw support from both the Upper West Side and his old Park Slope neighborhood if he is in the race.

At this point, most of the candidates and the people around them can explain why each prospective opponent is not going to run. What the members of the Nadler family can agree on, though, is that they would not want to be in the race without the congressman at their side.

Imagining Stringer in the mayor’s race without Nadler’s support is like imagining Mike Bloomberg without his Massachu-

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The Nuclear Option

NOVEMBER 17, 2010

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One Cuomo’s plan to close Indian Point charged with memories of another’s move on Shoreham

BY ISMAIL MUHAMMAD

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here was yet another incident at Indian Point in early November, but the real focus for the three-unit nuclear power plant just south of Peekskill is on the future: Amid the details of Andrew Cuomo’s energy policy book is a renewal of his commitment while attorney general to close the facility.

The Power NY book does not get much into details on this proposal, stating only that “Cuomo has long been a supporter of closing the Indian Point nuclear power plant in Westchester and has argued that the federal government should not renew the plant’s operating license when it expires in 2013. We must find and implement alternative sources of energy generation and transmission to replace the electricity now supplied by the Indian Point facility.”

For energy market experts in New York, the proposal has a familiar ring to it: In 1994, former Gov. Mario Cuomo closed the Shoreham nuclear facility, leading to skyrocketing electricity rates in Long Island and the creation of the Long Island Power Authority.

Mario Cuomo decommissioned Shore-

ham due to safety concerns, noting that before the plant was even completed in 1984, local and state officials had ruled that the area could not be safely evacuated in the event of an emergency. Added to that, the Three Mile Island meltdown in 1979 and the disaster at Chernobyl fueled a general distrust of nuclear facilities.

By 1989, Cuomo and the Long Island Lighting Company, which built Shoreham, agreed to decommission the plant, but not before a $6 billion building cost was passed on to taxpayers through a 3 percent surcharge on electric bills.

Ken Klapp, senior communications specialist for the New York Independent Systems Operator, said that Andrew Cuomo’s plan to close Indian Point could have similar consequences. Removing Indian Point’s 2,000 megawatts of power, which provides up to 30 percent of the power used in New York City and Westchester County, would create a ripple in energy supply and prices.

“The most likely fuel source for replacement is natural gas,” Klapp said.

“Replacing a relatively low cost facility like Indian Point with natural gas will lead to price volatility and could lead to higher prices.”

The ISO recently published a report that argued closing Indian Point would be disruptive to New York’s energy supply, resulting in a “loss of power supply and transmission voltage support affecting the New York metropolitan region.”

Indian Point spokesman Jerry Nappi echoed that sentiment.

“If Indian Point were shut down, there would be energy reliability violations,” Nappi said. “That’s a way of saying that it would be a challenge to keep the lights on without Indian Point.”

State Sen. George Maziarz, who chairs the Energy and Telecommunications Committee, predicted a more dire consequence of closing the plant.

“I think we’d have a disaster,” he said.

“I don’t know that there are any viable alternatives to replacing 2,000 megawatts of power downstate, especially in the timeframe they’re talking about.”

Maziarz said that he did not foresee Indian Point closing down in the future, because there are no alternatives to replacing the plant’s power without increasing costs. But he said the Indian Point situation is different from what happened with Shoreham.

Backers of Cuomo’s plan say that the

circumstances at the two nuclear facilities could not be further apart. Assembly Member Kevin Cahill, who chairs the Committee on Energy, argued that Mario Cuomo was concerned about safety in the Shoreham decision, while the new governor-elect is more focused on the state’s energy future.

“I don’t see a similarity there,” Cahill said. “What we had at Shoreham was a plant that was inherently dangerous, where there was no means of egress should there be an emergency. Mario Cuomo addressed the safety issues of a runaway construction project. What Andrew Cuomo is doing is addressing our energy issues for the 21st century.”

Cahill also refuted the idea that the cost of closing the plant will be shifted to taxpayers.

“In the case of the Shoreham power plant, it was going to bankrupt the Long Island Lighting Company, and the Long Island Power Authority had to be created to absorb the bankruptcy. Indian Point is owned by a private entity,” he said. “If it goes offline, it goes offline, with no cost to the public.

“It’s apples and potatoes,” Cahill said. editor@cityhallnews.com

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CITY HALL

TD Bank “Speaking Socially” S Homeless services: Moving from crisis management to prevention and community support On November 9, TD Bank and City Hall kicked off a three-part speaker series, “Speaking Socially,” to shine a spotlight on some of the more complex social policy issues of our time: homelessness, health care and housing. The goal was to bring together a senior government official and a prominent advocate to facilitate a public dialogue on the histories, challenges, solutions and outlook on each topic.

The first event in this series, focusing on homelessness, featured Seth Diamond, the commissioner for New York City’s Department of Homeless Services, and Arnold Cohen, the president and CEO of the Partnership for the Homeless. The following are selected excerpts from their discussion, which was moderated by Edward-Isaac Dovere, editor of City Hall and The Capitol.

Seth Diamond, commissioner for New York City Department of Homeless Service

When we talk about homelessness, what is it that we should be talking about? And when we think about solutions or methods of dealing with homelessness, what are the things that you think should be in the conversation?

Seth Diamond: We believe that shelters should be a short-term intervention, that’s its best for families and individuals in shelters to move out as quickly as possible, but to do that in a way that ensures their success when they get back into the community. The best way we can do that is to link them with employment to provide economic support but also stability and grounding, and then to arrange other kinds of support that the city offers, including child care, child support, food stamps and other forms of support that are helpful to people of the low-income population.

We think that this combination—supporting work, helping get them stabilized in the community and working with them to stay there—has been very effective and we’re very happy that the shelter population, while it faces challenges from the economy, has been going in the right direction. Overall, it is 5 percent lower than it was a year ago, and 10 percent lower for the families they serve.

Arnold Cohen: The important thing is putting homelessness on the radar, and the reason I think it’s important is because the public perception of homelessness, not only here in New York City but across the country, is that it’s just an inevitable part of our urban landscape.

We have come as a city and a country to accept homelessness. What does that mean? That means we accept people living in the street or in the shelter. What does that mean for New York City? Right now as we sit here, close to 15,000 children will be waking up in a shelter.

In terms of prevention, the prevention programs are a great idea. Prevention is absolutely right. It’s much too costly to focus on homelessness after someone is already on the street or in the shelter. But what has the mayor done? The mayor has taken some baby steps in terms of prevention. His programs are largely focused, or at least initially focused, on averting people from the shelters.

They were not designed to create a robust community support to set up the systems to prevent homelessness and to work on the community issues that often are the drivers of homelessness. It’s a good first step, but it needs those significant investments that right now the city hasn’t actually made.

What do you make of the critique that the mayor didn’t have a great sense of the groundwork needed for dealing with homelessness and housing; and what does it mean for dealing with homelessness in the third term and going forward?

SD: I really think that’s a misconception of what’s happened in the administration. If we had this breakfast a decade ago, before the mayor came to office, we would have been greeted by newspaper articles talking about how many families had slept in the EAU the night before.

I would have been pulled away from this meeting by some crisis that was happening with a family that had been staying at the EAU in the entry point to the shelter for a few days without having been served. A whole stream of day-to-day issues overwhelmed the department and prevented their ability to focus on what’s important, which is moving families out of the shelter into the community…

www.cityhallnews.com

CITY HALL

Series Kicks Off

NOVEMBER 17, 2010

City Hall, The Capitol and TD Bank present

SPEAKING SOCIALLY A special 3-part Speakers Series on Homelessness, Healthcare & Housing

Tuesday, Dec. 14th Arnold Cohen, president and CEO, The Partnership for the Homeless AC: We agree on that, we agree on not only the prevention, but on the strides your administration has made in respect to the entry point to shelters.

SD: …You can’t do everything at once. But it was a major investment in the early years into making sure that the shelter process was more humane and fair, and provided families with what they needed—stability and shelter—and set the stage for what we’re doing now, which is lift families, moving them out, providing them with greater stability in their community and focusing on things other than shelter.

You can’t get away from the crisis if you have to worry everyday about how many families are going to survive in a difficult incubating process. Once you clear that up, you pave the way to be able to focus on a much broader range of issues. And that’s what the Bloomberg administration has done, is move beyond day-to-day crisis management… We’ve not accepted that people have to stay in shelters for long periods. We’ve placed an emphasis on moving them out and reduced their stay by over 20 percent AC: I think it’s no doubt that we’re pretty good at providing shelter. We’re effective at that. The shelter population has its ups and downs, sometimes it’s seasonal. Last year in terms of family shelter populations, we saw the highest in probably a decade. I think it’s too facile to suggest that it’s because of the economic crisis, because if you take a look at the demographics of the young moms in shelter, they’re largely from communities that have been suffering under a great recession for decades. Homelessness today is really very different than it was when we first saw the large number of men on the street in the early ’80s and late ’70s. It was often a function of mental illness issues or drug use issues. Today, 70 percent of the shelter population is families. And what do those families tell us? That population tells us about the challenges we face as a city that perhaps cannot be solved by thinking in terms of the functions of the DHS.

In New York, one out of every three people is in a shelter. In Los Angeles, it’s one out of every two. Is the homeless situation a different kind of problem in New York?

AC: We cannot define homelessness simply by the shelter population. We have to take a look at the countless thousands of families living on the [immediate] family’s couch or the friend’s couch. We have become a city in which thousands and thousands of families are living like that. When that becomes untenable, as a last desperate out, they try to get into the shelters. So I don’t think the numbers themselves of families and children living in shelters alone are representative of the homeless population.

What’s different about us, if you look at the stats nationwide, they show that 37 percent of families represent the population of folks in shelters throughout the nation. Here it’s worse. So it does present a different picture here, and it’s the result of housing costs and sections in this city that have been mired in poverty.

SD: Those things are true, but New York does benefit from a couple of things. First, New York invests far more in serving people in low-income communities than any other city, and those investments work. They provide support for working families, particularly entry-level families. They help stabilize them, whether they’re former shelter residents or people entering the job market, and they help people advance.

The economy is also one of New York’s assets. Even as the difficult economy continues, the entry-level economy in New York has remained remarkably strong, and has been able to take people in even as other sectors have been closing down. The investments that the city makes in prevention, shelters and subsidies are really unprecedented in the country.

In other places, there isn’t the consensus that there is in New York to make these investments.

HEALTH CARE

Richard Ravitch, Lt. Governor of the State of New York

Stanley Brezenoff, President and CEO Continuum Health Partners

Location & 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

January

HOUSING

Speakers and date to be announced

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TECHNOLOGY Let’s Help Grow The Innovation Economy ISSUE

CITY HALL

FORUM

BY STATE SEN. GEORGE MAZIARZ

N

ew York is in the midst of an unprecedented economic crisis that increases the need for a framework to guide policy choices and investment priorities.

Our economy is undergoing a profound structural adjustment and facing new global realities. Businesses need to

be focused on the technologies and markets that will grow in the future to create jobs, raise living standards and finance necessary public services.

I will be promoting good public policy choices in Albany—policies that encourage job creation and investment in communities throughout our state by helping to grow the state’s “innovation economy.”

New York’s innovation economy is

based on our strengths—a well-educated workforce, a strong higher education sector, a commitment to research and development, and a robust telecommunications infrastructure. These assets are the key to our success in the global economy today and for our children in the years to come, because they facilitate growth in emerging arenas.

Western New York is a good example

of where we’ve worked together to secure new telecommunications industry investments. Last year, Yahoo! opened one of the world’s most energy-efficient, environmentally friendly and cost-effective data centers in Lockport, helping to fuel the innovation economy. This timely investment has helped grow our local job base.

Verizon is also considering Western New York for a state-of-the-art data center due to our unique cool climate that helps keep their electricity usage down— as well as their electric bills.

New York has the tools to succeed in a number of key innovative industries— strong educational institutions focusing on life sciences, clean technology and nanotechnology. We also rank among the nation’s leaders in science and engineering, patent development and alternative energy use. We need to build on our strengths by showing the investing community that we are working to improve the business climate.

In January, when I return to Albany, I will push for legislation and policies to promote competition and innovation in the telecommunications and high technology sectors. This will not be done by promoting new and burdensome regulations but by freeing companies from the shackles of governmental overreach to allow them to grow and prosper.

To that end, I will support legislation to ensure that the Public Service Commission will not interfere with the growth of the telecommunications industry by regulating VOIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) services. This will encourage and promote the growth of broadband technology to rural areas where it is currently unavailable.

Furthermore, I will support and promote legislation that will encourage public-private partnerships to work toward universal broadband access throughout the state of New York, so all can share in the benefits of the innovation economy.

The formula for success is simple: Innovation will lead to investment, which will help grow good jobs. This, in turn, will enable our children to stay in New York and raise their families here, rather than having to seek opportunities elsewhere.

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George Maziarz, a Republican representing parts of Monroe, Niagara and Orleans counties, is chair of the Senate Committee on Energy and Telecommunications.

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Verizon: connecting systems, machines, ideas, and people worldwide for altogether better outcomes. verizonbusiness.com/utilities

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NOVEMBER 17, 2010

ISSUE FORUM

TECHNOLOGY

CITY HALL

Path To Success: Real-Time Info, Bottom-Up Innovation, Affordable Broadband

BY COUNCIL MEMBER GALE BREWER

A

fter eight years as chair of the Council Technology Committee and as chair of Governmental Operations, I still enjoy Tech Meetups for thinking “out of the box” about government information on the web.

On the day of a recent Meetup, I spent hours untangling paperwork for a senior center facing a funding deadline. Couldn’t the city offer real-time web help when contracts are involved? Next was a new pizza restaurant dealing with the Buildings Department. Why can’t we offer one online resource for all business permits and start-ups? Business Express, on the city’s website (nyc.gov), is an excellent beginning, but it’s no place for problem solving. I know we can do better.

I’ve learned that people want three things from government online: No 1. Real-time info on the status of their project or operations; No 2. Bottom-up involvement in innovation and applications; No. 3. Affordable broadband access for underserved neighborhoods and businesses.

How are we doing? Right now, the New York City Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications (DoITT) operates 24/7, and NYCWIN, the city’s wireless network, connects 22 agencies using 40 applications, including mobile de-

vices, Automatic Vehicle Location systems, police car modems and wireless water meters. But we could do a lot more. Neighborhood problem solving would be faster if community boards had real-time access to 311 data and SCOUT (the Street Conditions Observations Unit), and city agencies with older legacy systems need upgrades to open up and operate in real time.

The mayor’s Big Apps competition is a positive step in making city data available and encouraging innovative thinking. I’ve sponsored an open data bill, Intro. 292010, to open more city databases to web developers and allow them to create apps for innovative uses.

Making city tech policy serve businesses is key to New York’s success. I am

pushing for “.nyc,” a unique domain like proposed domains “.paris” and “.berlin,” for businesses to identify their New York City affiliation and better compete on the web. DoITT is reviewing CaesarPizza. nyc, for example, before its submission to ICANN, the international body governing web domains.

While the dream of a free, citywide municipal Wi-Fi network is on hold, recent negotiations with cable providers and Verizon offer hope for Wi-Fi in the parks. But allocating them city funds is worrisome— only their subscribers will have free park Wi-Fi, and for my money, the nonprofit community can develop a fairer plan.

Broadband connectivity—fast, cheap and universal—is essential to open and efficient government, business growth and vibrant democracy. In New York City, broadband coverage is almost 100 percent through cable, but major deficiencies remain. We lag in access speeds, for example.

To investigate, I sponsored local law 125-2005, creating the Broadband Advisory Council, which took testimony in all boroughs. Its pending report recommends improved access, coverage and reliability, and includes a needs assessment by Diamond Consultants on cost, computer ownership, digital literacy and a surprising “recognition gap” on the economic and social value of broadband access.

To respond, New York City was award-

ed $22 million in stimulus funds under the Broadband Technologies Opportunity Program to reduce the digital school-tohome divide, and provide free home computers and training to middle schoolers; $6 million for transfer student training; and $14 million for public computer centers like libraries and senior centers.

To become a truly digital city we must embrace the public to solve challenges in concert with government. The administration’s Big Apps initiative, online Finance Department rolls, the Building Information System, VENDEX, and My Neighborhood are great data tools. But we must go further, beyond the “e-gov” to a “we-gov” model, tapping the innovation and energy outside government to create new tools for the digital city. My latest favorite is “Betaville,” an open-source, multi-user 3D modeling system for actual cities in real time. A street corner, a vacant lot or our city can be reimagined by residents, visionaries, techies and those with the levers to make things happen.

The lesson here is that a new and digital city is possible, and it awaits our imagination, skills and commitment to tomorrow.

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Gale Brewer, a Democrat representing parts of Manhattan, is chair of the Council’s Governmental Operations Committee.

Finding A Peaceful Solution To The Cable Wars

BY COUNCIL MEMBER DANIEL GARODNICK

T

he Fox blackout on Cablevision lasted 14 days and deprived 3 million local customers of two games of the World Series, a New York Giants football game and all the other regular programming ordinarily available to them.

Welcome to the new normal.

On the same day that Fox came to its agreement with Cablevision, it also brought its programming back to the Dish Network—after a month off the air.

Just eight months earlier, ABC went dark for 3.1 million Cablevision subscribers—a 21-hour outage that included part of the Academy Awards broadcast.

And this summer, an ABC blackout on Time Warner was narrowly averted.

Another blackout soon appears inevitable.

Without a new set of ground rules for working out these disputes, customers stand to keep getting caught in the middle of these corporate firefights—and keep getting hit, either with blackouts or everhigher cable subscription rates happily passed down to us to cover the broadcasters’ do-or-die demands.

The latest disagreement was over how much Cablevision should pay to carry Fox’s signals, including local television stations

like Fox 5 and My 9, over its cable system.

Broadcasters have a right to seek a fair price for “retransmission fees,” but that should not entitle them to deprive viewers of programming from the public airwaves.

Federal regulators can sort this out before the next blackout if they are willing to flex their muscle—and if Congress is willing to protect consumers who are inconvenienced by a dispute between private parties.

The case for action is clear: Popular programs like the World Series and the Oscars are increasingly being held hostage as broadcasters and cable companies engage in down-to-the-wire dealmaking.

In the last 10 years, at least 22 million cable subscribers nationwide have had one or more channels blacked out due to retransmission disputes.

In many industries, these high-pressure bargaining tactics—how badly do you want your customers to see the shows they’ve been waiting for?—might be appropriate, but broadcast television is different.

Broadcasters enjoy free licenses from the federal government that give them exclusive rights to deliver certain content, like local sports, to their market. In return for these privileges, Congress meant

to ensure that everyone had access to the local programming that broadcasters provide. (Cable channels, in contrast, do not enjoy these protections.)

When a broadcast channel like Fox is pulled off the air, viewers lose that access—after all, for most of us, cable is our only practical way of receiving network TV broadcasts—and broadcasters breach their duty to the public.

The chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, Julius Genachowski, stated during the Fox-Cablevision dispute that the matter was out of the FCC’s hands and would require changes to the laws regarding retransmission. If that’s the case, Congress should take on the responsibility of creating a new framework for resolving these disputes. Experience shows that we can’t always rely on the corporations alone.

In fact, at a hearing this year of the City Council’s Technology Committee, which I chair, a senior official of the National Association of Broadcasters refused to support, oppose or even be neutral on the notion of a dispute resolution process for breaking deadlocks between cable companies and broadcasters. It is no surprise, then, that he did not recognize blackouts as a problem for consumers. As an alternative to a blackout, he suggested that cus-

tomers could buy a $25 set of rabbit ears.

My colleague Lew Fidler and I have each put forth resolutions calling on Congress to step to the plate. There are different approaches to this problem, but inaction is not an option.

Customers don’t often hold much leverage in negotiations between corporations. But in this case, we have a major bargaining chip in the form of the public airwaves themselves. It is time for broadcasters, cable operators and Congress to recognize that and quit allowing these disputes to leave us in the dark.

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Dan Garodnick, a Democrat representing parts of Manhattan, is the chair of the Council Committee on Technology.

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CITY HALL

November 17, 2010

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Blue Jay Grimm Assessment W

hen Michael Grimm, also known as “Mikey Suits” from his days as an undercover FBI agent with the agency’s Gotti Squad, beat freshman Democrat Michael McMahon, many of the city’s political circles were shocked. McMahon had the backing of Michael Bloomberg and a reputation for centrist politics, but Grimm had tea party anger, an unflappable persona and a made-for-campaigns biography on his side.

As the only Republican member of the city’s congressional delegation, Grimm has his work cut out for him. Between a rapprochement with Bloomberg and gearing up for the rest of his trip to Washington, Grimm spent a few minutes in his campaign office talking about bailouts, repealing Obamacare, fixing Staten Island’s GOP and finding the right girl to settle down with.

What follows is an edited transcript.

City Hall: How do we know you’re still not undercover for the FBI? Michael Grimm: I guess you don’t.

CH: Is this a sting against Nancy Pelosi?

MG: They probably would have put in a Democrat. How do we know? I’ve done a lot of undercover work. Nothing this grueling would be worth it. I would have to tell the FBI they’re asking too much.

CH: What skills at the FBI do you hope to use as a congressman?

MG: I think the No. 1 skill that will be relevant is the ability to find commonality with opposite ends and build those bridges.

CH: So in the days after the election, has Congressman McMahon called to concede, have you spoken to him at all?

MG: Oh yes, we had a great conversation.

He was extremely gracious. The night of the election, he called—it was late but that’s because, the night of the election, it was a long time to get the numbers. But he called and conceded and wished me well, and since then my transition team has worked with his team. I’m expecting to meet with him any day now, we’ll grab—we say a cup of coffee, but I’m a tea drinker.

&

CH: It was a nasty campaign for a while. There was the whole issue with

him bringing your ex-wife to the debate. No grudges, no hard feelings?

MG: No. Do I think it was wrong? Yeah, I do, but at the end of the day, I’m not the type that harbors ill will. He has served this community for many years, and I respect that.

CH: Have you thought ahead to details like committee assignments? What are you requesting?

MG: Financial Services for one, as the main committee. And because it’s an A committee I don’t know if I’ll be able to get a B committee. But the reason for that is that I have a lot of experience as an accountant, as someone that worked on Wall Street, someone that investigated Wall Street, and I feel I can bring the most to the table on Financial Services.

CH: The main area of disagreement between you and McMahon was on the stimulus.

MG: Where he and I disagreed was the bang for the buck argument. In other words, did we get some jobs? Yeah, 400 and some odd jobs in Staten Island. For the amount of money that was spent… I would consider that a complete failure.

You can build a house for $500,000, but if you got the same exact house for $4 million, would you think you were successful as a builder? I would say no. So I think that the stimulus package, for the amount of money that was spent, what it ended up doing was growing government.

andrew schwartz photos

CH: Some people think there may be a need for future bailouts. Do you agree?

MG: No, I don’t, but I want to put a caveat in there. When you look at some of the talk, for example, if the government didn’t cause it in the first place, I would hold a pretty firm no, we don’t bail out, we let the free market be. And sometimes that’s going to be a pretty hard pill to swallow. But if the government is going to get in there in the first place and create part of the problem, then you may need government intervention to fix it, because it’s not a correction at that point. I’m specifically looking at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. They’re the real culprits of the problem. Not everyone in America can own a home. That’s a fact of life. Some people don’t make enough money, and some people are not responsible enough to own a home. It’s that simple.

CH: Are you open to cuts in military spending, like some tea party candidates?

MG: It depends. There’s one thing we have to be clear about. We’re at war with Islamic extremists, global terrorism. I do not want to do anything that is going to weaken our defense. Now more than ever we need to be vigilant. But at the same time, like the rest of our government, there are inefficiencies with our military.

I believe we can cut back by reducing those inefficiencies. We can spend less but spend smarter, allocate resources more efficiently. If that means a reduction in spending, then great, but not at the risk of reducing our ability to defend this nation.

CH: What’s your take on the Republican Party in Staten Island right now?

MG: Going into this election and going into this campaign, the party was fractured, no doubt about it, the party was broken. We had virtually no party here in Staten Island. This campaign evolved from a campaign into a movement. And I say that because the hundreds of volunteers that I received, who had never been involved in politics, were the heart and soul of my campaign. They’re energized, and I think they’re going to want to

remain involved in Republican politics. I think you’re going to see a rebuilding of the party.

CH: So you’re willing to work with Guy Molinaro and his faction, and John Friscia?

MG: Molinaro, yes. I think Friscia should step down. He has not been an effective leader of the party, and if he really cares about the party, he should step down.

CH: A lot of Republicans, including yourself, talk about repealing Obama’s health care reform. What is the real likelihood of that?

MG: There’s the option of repeal, and there’s the option of defunding. A lot of it has not been implemented yet. So as elements of this bill come up for funding, the funding will not be there. I will not vote for it, for sure. So if the president realizes that it can’t be enacted, maybe as a sign of good faith that he is moving to the center, maybe he will allow it to be repealed. That’s what I’m hoping for, that he will work with the Congress to show that he is flexible and that he has heard the will of the people loud and clear. So I think there is a possibility there. But as the left hand is repealing and defunding, the right hand needs to be writing legislation, because we do have a health care problem.

CH: You were quoted describing yourself as a romantic. Does taking this job make starting a family more difficult?

MG: Having a family is extremely important to me. It’s my No. 1 personal goal. I gave up on two opportunities because of my career in the FBI. At 40 years old, it’s a serious concern for me that I want to have a family, and taking on this endeavor and going to Congress jeopardizes that. I struggled with it at first. But I also knew I wouldn’t be happy with myself if I didn’t step up. I had to do it. I felt like the country was calling. This is a calling for me, and serving this country is something that, sometimes, I don’t want to do, but I have to.

—Andrew J. Hawkins ahawkins@cityhallnews.com

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