David Yassky, below, checks the meter on his future (Page 11),
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Nydia Velazquez fights for reform and her reputation (Page 6) and Errol Louis, above, is ready for his close-up (Page 23).
E IC T S U J F O T N E M T R DEPA On fighting public and financial corruption in New York, U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara takes the lead
ANDREW SCHWARTZ
Waging The maze of counterstudies and conflicts of interest on living-wage fight arrives in New York BY CHRIS BRAGG
I
n late October, the Fiscal Policy Institute and the National Employment Law Project released a report claiming that the two researchers being paid $1 million by the city’s Economic Development Corporation to study the effects of the living wage bill are biased. In particular, the two groups noted that one of the economists on the EDCbacked study is Dr. David Neumark of the University of California at Irvine, whom they accuse of having a long pattern of releasing reports slanted against workers for the Washington, D.C.-based Employment Policies Institute. That institute is led by D.C. lobbyist Richard Berman, who has set up a myriad of front non-profits that lobby for business groups.
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Though Neumark’s studies for the EPI were not on the living-wage issue, progressives have tarred Neumark with this association. “This is a put-up job to try and come up with arguments against the proposal,” said Council Member Oliver Koppell. Even some veterans of these battles have been surprised with how intense the discrediting effort has gotten so far in advance of the new study’s release, expected for the spring. The living-wage bill is gearing up to be the next major clash between progressives and the Bloomberg administration, following the death of the paid-sick-leave bill, which Council Speaker Christine Quinn shelved following a $100,000 study funded by the Partnership for New York City that showed the legislation would
cost the city $789 million annually. Similar battles over minimum-wage and living-wage laws played out in the late 1990s in San Francisco and Baltimore, each time with some Washingtonbased think tank jumping into the fray, releasing studies and counter-studies that inevitably managed to support the ideol-
ogy of the groups behind them. All the conflicts of interests have made it difficult to evaluate whether a truly objective study of the effects of a living-wage bill has ever been done, or is even currently in the works. And now the fight has come to New York City.
“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.
Greater New York Laborers-Employers Cooperation & Education Trust A jointly managed trust fund, charged with supporting and promoting the interests of 1,500 signatory contractors and the 15,000 members of the Mason Tenders District Council. Its four point mission: marketing and promotion; legislative and governmental affairs; research and business development; and prevailing wage monitoring. 266 West 37th St. Suite 1100, New York, NY 10018 Phone: (212) 452-9300 | Fax: (212) 452-9318 E-mail: lecet@gnylecet.net | www.masontenders.org
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The Fiscal Policy Institute and the National Employment Law Project, the two organizations that funded the report exposing Neumark, derive much of their own funding from union interests that support the living-wage bill. The campaign for the bill is being run from the offices of the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Workers Union. Meanwhile, in late November, the progressive Center for American Progress put out its own report showing that living-wage standards would have no negative effect on the city’s economy. The Council’s Progressive Caucus praised the results as fair and unbiased, even though one of the lead researchers on the Center for American Progress report is a former spokesman for a livingwage campaign in San Francisco. But supporters of the study say these ties in no way compromise the objectivity of its researchers or methodology. The Bloomberg administration, meanwhile, has its own credibility problems on the issue. The mayor is already on record against the living-wage bill. Even if Neumark’s study is conducted objectively, he will still be accused of bias if the result is not to the unions’ liking, said Andrew White, director of the New School’s Center for New York City Affairs. “It’s chronic in politicized areas that people create studies to back up their perspectives,” he said. “Nine out of 10 times, when something is published by an organization that has a stake in the issue, they get attacked. But the way to judge these things is looking at whether people who are experts in the field think there is a valid methodology.” But there is no study done anywhere on living wage that is universally agreed to be comprehensive—and that is part of the reason why the EDC says it commissioned Neumark’s study after suffering what it says were unfounded attacks during the Kingsbridge Armory battle. David Lombino, an EDC spokesman, said the organization competitively bid a handful of different vendors for the livingwage study before awarding it to a Boston firm, Charles River Associates, that has put six different economists on the project. (Neumark is not actually leading the study, though he is the only expert on living wage of the six.) Lombino argued that there is a fairly narrow field of people
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who have experience studying the livingwage issue to select from, many of whom have records that detractors can cast as biased. “This is an area of labor economics that is highly politicized at the national level,” Lombino said. Neumark, for his part, has termed his past work on living wage as “wishywashy,” according to a recent New York Times article. A 2005 study on living wage he conducted found that living-wage minimums did help low-wage workers, though they could have adverse effects on the least skilled workers because they were less likely to be employable after a mandated wage is increased. Neumark defended his past work to City Hall, noting that the living-wage study he put out in 2005 was not for the businessbacked EPI, but rather the non-partisan Public Policy Institute of California. And in 2006, Neumark said the EPI spiked one of his studies on minimum wage because it did not like the conclusions. Neumark said he has been taken aback by all the controversy surrounding his past association with the EPI, and Berman, its principal, months before his study is even set to come out. “It’s crazy to be arguing when the study isn’t done yet,” he said. Berman, meanwhile, has a complicated relationship of his own with Bloomberg. Even as Neumark—and, by extension, the EDC—is tarred with associations to Berman, Berman frequently criticizes the mayor through one of his other businessbacked lobbying front groups, the Center for Consumer Freedom. In one Nov. 9 post, Berman accused Health Commissioner Thomas Farley of “conspiring to cover up the truth about the nutritional content of soda in order to shamelessly scaremonger about sugary drinks.” In an Oct. 13 post, he called Bloomberg a “colossal hypocrite.” Berman said that he was simply being set up as a straw man by proponents of the living-wage bill here. “The amount we’re giving for people’s studies isn’t buying anyone’s results,” Berman said. “There are not that many good labor economists out there, and they’re inevitably going to cross over with organizations like mine.” cbragg@cityhallnews.com
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Our Perspective
Pay Cuts Among Wal-Mart’s Bag of Tricks By Stuart Appelbaum, President, Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union, RWDSU, UFCW
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al-Mart has made headlines with its renewed attempts to penetrate the New York City market, reaching into its new bag of tricks to find a way to finally open stores in the five boroughs. The retail behemoth is considering opening smaller “mini Wal-Mart” stores that aren’t subject to the same zoning restrictions as their trademark superstores, and also looking at using as-of-right sights, such as the Gateway II complex in East New York, that do not require City Council approval. Opposition to their plans to enter the city continues to grow, and New Yorkers remain firm in their belief that the city is not a Wal-Mart town. In fact, a New York City Council hearing planned for this month has been postponed until January 12, to accommodate larger crowds. Recent Wal-Mart-related headlines serve to remind us why. It was one of the oldest tricks in the corporate books that made news — good old fashioned greed — when Wal-Mart decided that the perfect holiday gift for its new workers is to cut the $1 per hour premium pay it gives workers for Sunday shifts. All workers hired after January 1, 2011, will have to do without the Sunday pay premium, which was one of the few meager perks doled out to Wal-Mart workers. As Wal-Mart announced its Scrooge-like holiday plans on premium pay, the historic class action gender discrimination lawsuit against the company was also in the news. The U.S. Supreme Court announced it would consider whether to keep alive the largest job discrimination case in U.S. history, a lawsuit against Wal-Mart that grew from a half-dozen women to a class action that could involve billions of dollars for more than a half million female workers. The news reminds all of us of Wal-Mart’s appalling record of gender bias and inequality. The lawsuit arose from data showing that while more than twothirds of Wal-Mart’s hourly workers were female, women held only one-third of salaried positions and made up less than 15 percent of store managers, despite having had on average longer seniority and higher merit ratings than their male counterparts. The data also showed women managers on average earned $14,500 less than their male counterparts, and that female hourly workers earned on average $1,100 less than male counterparts. Wal-Mart is employing new strategies and working on a new image, but it’s still the same old story when it comes to the retailer’s treatment of workers.
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DECEMBER 13, 2010
3
Food Fight BY LAURA NAHMIAS
A
t the Church of the Holy Apostles on Manhattan’s West Side the Tuesday before Thanksgiving, Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer, Public Advocate Bill de Blasio and Rep. Anthony Weiner (making a surprise appearance) were standing awkwardly on the altar, a few steps higher than a throng of cameramen and reporters. The sound was not so good, mostly because the sanctuary was filled with hundreds of men and women eating, the church’s high ceilings amplifying the clatter of forks and cups. Anyway, these people did not come to watch politicians talk about hunger. They were too hungry themselves. But that did not stop the talking. Politicians serving soup and making speeches with the hungry as a backdrop is as much a Thanksgiving tradition as cranberry sauce. This year, though, the backdrop was more than cut-out turkeys or brown-and-orange bunting on the walls. The day before, Council Speaker Christine Quinn released her 59-point report outlining a comprehensive food policy strategy for local, state and federal governments. And so, while Quinn captured the news cycle on the issue, the three other prospective 2013 mayoral candidates pushed themselves into the shot for hunger coverage too. “The nice thing and the convenient thing about food is that everyone can relate to it,” said Kate Mackenzie, communications director at City Harvest, a non-profit that gathers leftover food from restaurants and redistributes it. Both Stringer and Quinn have recast the issue to draw ties between local food production and regional economics that can be plainly understood by most voters. The result: a message that feels new, strong and positive. “What better thing is there to do in times of economic crisis than to help people who may need real bottom-line help? What better thing to do than feed people?” said political consultant Hank Sheinkopf. The only way it could backfire for those with mayoral ambitions for the next time around, Sheinkopf said, is if nothing gets done. “After all, talk is not a steak,” he said. Quinn’s widely-praised speech at Food and Finance High School Nov. 22 was a dollars-and-cents-based argument against
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DECEMBER 13, 2010
conventional wisdom that hunger and food justice are just social issues. The city, which is the second largest distributor of food in the country behind the U.S. Army, can be a powerful lever for change, Quinn said. “There are some who think that food is a fringe issue, one that doesn’t matter to average New Yorkers,” she said. “There are those who say we can’t afford to talk about food when we’re still reeling from a recession. To that I say, we can’t afford not to talk about food right now.” The audience was receptive, though some hecklers interrupted her speech with questions about protections for community gardens against developemnt. Stringer’s food policy, outlined in a report issued last February, focuses less on sustainability and more on the economic impact of improving food policy. He notes that while many have pointed to biotechnology or life sciences as industries that can diversify our economy, the city must also invest in expanding its food economy and use it to create good jobs. The money-and-jobs angle of both reports is compelling. It is meant to draw attention from the city’s data-driven mayor, who loves quantifiable problems. It has succeeded in captivating an unusual alliance of business interests, anti-poverty advocates and farmers. Governor-elect Andrew Cuomo has weighed in too, calling for increased agricultural production and better access to healthy food as a significant part of his policy platform. The moment has never been riper, as well-placed New Yorkers embrace calorie counts and pictures of Michelle Obama planting kale on the White House lawn splash across lifestyle magazines. Quinn can more easily draw a direct line to her accomplishments, because the Council can create policy, unlike the borough president’s office. Quinn’s report has 59 specific policy initiatives, some of which could come to the Council floor as soon as January. Other potential mayoral candidates de Blasio and Weiner also have backgrounds on the issue. De Blasio spearheaded a public relations campaign to increase food stamp participation while he was still in the City Council, and has made public health a platform of his office as public advocate. Weiner’s office has focused intently on revisions to the U.S. Farm Bill and drawing subsidies for New York, which is one of the nation’s agricultural production leaders but lags in federal money.
JERRY MILLER
Quinn, Stringer and other potential 2013 candidates explore food policy as a recipe for success
Notable recent moments in food policy Jan. 2007: Speaker Quinn and Mayor Bloomberg create office of Food Policy Coordinator, tying food production to health issues. May 2007: ex-Gov. Eliot Spitzer creates New York State Council on Food Policy. Feb. 2008: Quinn advances Green Carts bill, to increase fruit and vegetable sales in low-income neighborhoods. Feb. 2008: Scott Stringer edits the Go Green East Harlem Cookbook, a positively received compilation of local recipes intended to encourage healthy eating in the neighborhood. April 2008: NYC Department of City Planning releases Food Policy Report. Summer 2009: Bill de Blasio makes increasing food-stamp enrollment a priority of his term as public advocate. Summer 2009: Stringer convenes New York City Food and Climate Summit. Late 2009: Quinn begins work on comprehensive food policy report. Feb. 2010: Stringer’s office releases FoodNYC report, an outgrowth of the summer food summit. Oct. 2010: Bloomberg asks for federal ban on use of food stamps for soda purchases. Oct. 2010: Anthony Weiner announces legislation that would discount vegetables purchased with food stamps. Nov. 2010: Quinn releases FoodWorks report.
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For now, none of the prospective candidates are actually throwing food at each other. The only slinging has been at the mayor himself, who has drawn criticism from each for requiring fingerprinting of food-stamp recipients—a measure designed to prevent fraud that hunger advocates say is “archaic.” The rhetoric from Stringer and Quinn, at least, has impressed political insiders with their scope and vision. After Quinn’s introductory press conference on the policy, reporters speculated the speaker would skip a run at the mayor’s office and head straight for the governor’s mansion. Food will not be enough to circumscribe an entire campaign, but in a Democratic mayoral primary, the issue’s appeal not just to liberal sentiment, but to initiatives that create jobs for union workers, can help, said Pat Purcell, spokesman for the Local 1500 Grocery Workers Union. Whether a candidate’s strong stance on composting and community gardens translates into new votes, though, is less clear. Like bike lanes, food politics may be one of those much-discussed, muchhyped issues that lack a clear, voting constituency. But that has not stopped advocates who have spent years pushing the issue from hoping it will get the political attention they think it deserves, said Joel Berg, executive director of the New York City Coalition Against Hunger. “A lot of strands are coming together at the same time that really make this the right time to deal with these issues,” he said. “We’ll see whether it lasts.” lnahmias@cityhallnews.com
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Pension Shortfall is Wall Street’s Doing By Michael Mulgrew President of the United Federation of Teachers
New York’s professional hand-wringers are leading the public fight against union pensions and benefits, calling them major causes of the city’s fiscal distress. Tabloid editorialists belabor worker pension “abuse” and conservative think tanks beat the drums for reducing worker benefits. The facts about the pension system tell a different story. First, city pension benefits are generally modest; second, the reason the city’s contributions to pension funds have risen has everything to do with the global economic crisis that cost state and city pension funds more than $100 billion in lost value. Let’s start with the myth that city workers’ pensions are unsustainably generous. The average pension for a member of the city’s Teachers Retirement Fund in 2009 --and this includes the pensions of many principals and upper-level administrators who started out as teachers-- was $42,235 per year. Retirees from the city’s other large civilian union, District Council 37, collect average pensions of only $18,000 a year. Like many employers, the city makes contributions to the pension funds of its employees, most of whom make required contributions from their salaries. (In addition, many employees also make voluntary contributions to 401K-style supplementary plans.) The amount the city contributes varies by year, but in the past has been as low as 4.3% of payroll for the teachers’ system. Annual contributions have climbed to 30% to make up for investment losses, but as the stock market recovers in future years, that level will diminish. In order to help the city meet its obligations, the United Federation of Teachers stepped forward last year and negotiated a change in pensions that the city said would save it $100 million a year.
The city’s pension funds could recoup millions of dollars more if they were permitted to sue the Wall Street firms whose trading mistakes and criminal actions caused the massive losses. The Legislature should modify the Martin Act--the law that allows the state to pursue wrongdoing on Wall Street–to let pension funds bring such suits. Taxpayers, particularly those in higher brackets, should also be part of the solution. During America’s great expansion from 1950 to 1980, the wealthiest 1% of Americans collected about 10% of total income. As of now, the nationwide percentage is 23.5% and in New York City, the top 1% of earners take in nearly half–an astounding 46% – of all income. Yet a large piece--$4 billion annually--of the huge deficit New York State is facing is due to the planned expiration of income tax surcharges on the highest earners. The attack on city employee pensions is just the opening salvo in a campaign to “balance” the budget by reducing the services important to the great majority of the people who live and work in this city, from schools to sanitation and health care. Working and middle class New Yorkers who make this city their home can’t afford to let this attack succeed. This article first appeared in Crain’s New York Business
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The mysteries of Nydia Velázquez and her powerless ascension By Laura Nahmias
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ver the course of nine terms, Nydia Velázquez has quietly consolidated her power in New York City politics, both as a significant voice in the Latino community and as a counterweight and opponent to Brooklyn Democratic Party leader Vito Lopez. When most politicians have the kind of year that she did, between her position with Andrew Cuomo’s campaign and her role with a few key local reformer victories, people start chattering about what they want, and where they might be headed. With Velázquez, there are still a lot of people who are not even sure who she is. In a world where politics is often about press hits and relationships, her underthe-radar maneuvering, in Congress and back in Brooklyn, may have clipped her effectiveness. But her supporters say her role in the Brooklyn reform movement, which seeks to undermine Lopez’s grip on the borough’s political machine, cannot be underestimated. “It’s important to think about the landscape in north Brooklyn. Most of the other elected officials are linked intimately to Vito Lopez,” said Lincoln Restler, an anti-Lopez state committee member whom Velázquez helped get elected this year. “She is one of a couple of independent leaders.” But because Velazquez makes few waves, others were less certain about her efficacy as a politician. Many elected throughout Brooklyn declined comment when asked for their thoughts on the congresswoman, each citing a lack of a working relationship with her. Much of Velázquez’s clout in the reform movement stems from her seniority in Washington and the respect she commands among the state’s political leader-
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ship as the senior Latina official in New York. This year, Velázquez pushed for passage of the DREAM Act, legislation she sponsored to provide conditional legal status to undocumented students. She took quiet control of the House Committee on Small Businesses, passing the Small Business Lending Act, while earning a reputation for bipartisanship. And along with former city Comptroller Bill Thompson, she was a co-chair of Andrew Cuomo’s campaign, taking a more active role than expected for someone in that ceremonial job and then as co-chair of Cuomo’s transition team. When she arrives back in Washington in January, though, her status in Congress will be much diminished, along with the rest of her Democratic colleagues. And as for building up more power in Brooklyn, Velázquez’s is never among the names floating as potential successors if and when Lopez’s troubles force him from the county leadership. She wouldn’t want the job, said one Brooklyn Democratic operative. “It’s too much politics.” Because while most people in local politics know her as an icon for Latinos, few seem to actually know her, even though she has represented a district that is now split between slivers of Brooklyn, Manhattan and Queens, as long or longer than nearly everyone else in the city’s congressional delegation. “I honestly have no idea about her style as a politician,” said Lew Fidler, a one-time Lopez loyalist who has since broken off from the county chair. “You couldn’t get farther away from my world.” Luis Garden Acosta, founder of El Puente, a community group within
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Velazquez’s district, said she is not a selfpromoting legislator like Anthony Weiner or Peter King. “There aren’t a lot of press releases from Nydia Velázquez,” said Garden Acosta, who has known Velázquez since before her time on the City Council, when she worked for Rep. Edolphus Towns. “Frankly, [she’s] too busy, too focused on the campaign at hand, to be putting much time into even publicizing the fact that she’s doing it.”
“I am physically and emotionally drained,” she says, drawing out each syllable of the words. “You don’t know what it took… Oh my god, you don’t know what it took.” Acosta described her passion about issues relating to reform and social justice, but not necessarily harboring any desire to be in charge. “She’s got one speed: intense,” he said. “She’s absolutely rare, an activist that just happens to be a politician.” That passion comes across the day after the passage of the DREAM Act, as she takes a moment before boarding a plane back to New York to discuss her career. “I am physically and emotionally drained,” she says, drawing out each syllable of the words. “You don’t know what
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it took… Oh my god, you don’t know what it took.” Her genuine sense of relief, of exhaustion, of dire feeling, allows her to create relationships in Washington, she said. But in a few weeks, she will see much of her leverage disappear: her chairmanship of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, as her two-year term expires, and her chairmanship of the Small Business Committee. Her new responsibilities are within the state—as an advisor to Cuomo’s transition team, and mentor to a new slate of reform candidates in Brooklyn politics. Her ideas for Cuomo’s administration are not small-bore. “He has to open the doors, and make government an institution that not only serves the different communities, but also that is willing to recognize that among other ethnic groups like Asian and Latino groups, that there is so much talent, and new blood, that can help him and serve him well,” she said. “He needs to put together a government and administration that reflects New York.” Velázquez worked with Cuomo when she was on the housing subcommittee in Congress and he was the head of HUD. Her push against Lopez could benefit from a strong relationship with Cuomo, who has his own complicated relationship with the Brooklyn boss. Meanwhile, Velázquez has also become the highest-ranking mentor of the anti-Lopez reform candidates trying to slowly seep into Brooklyn county politics. Velazquez took Lincoln Restler as her guest to a state dinner, and provides vocal support to Council Member Diana Reyna, another Lopez opponent. “I think the burden for me is to know that a lot of people who didn’t feel they have a voice, that they look up to me,” she said. “That I have a role to play in people connecting the dots, that it is important to be engaged, important to believe that we cannot allow for cynicism and disillusion in the political process to take hold.” This is an important mission for her. She was reportedly offered Hillary Clinton’s Senate seat in 2008, but declined largely in order to prevent Lopez from installing a loyalist in her Congressional seat and to continue acting as a foil to Lopez’s political machine. When asked whether that was the case, the congresswoman laughed. “I do not want to spend my time discussing Vito Lopez,” she said. “I do want to use my time and my energy to address the dire needs of my community.” lnahmias@cityhallnews.com
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Learning To Live With It
Energy for Cathie Black opposition fades as advocates come to terms with being ignored By Laura Nahmias
T
hree lawsuits have been filed against Cathie Black’s appointment, two of which have been consolidated, and a third expected to be rolled in with the others. Those suits, which allege State Education Commissioner David Steiner erred in granting Black the waiver to serve as chancellor, are expected to be heard by a judge in Albany Supreme Court on Dec. 23. There is not much hope for the lawsuits, nor for persistence on the wider pushback against the new schools chancellor. Education advocates assumed Mayor Bloomberg was paying little attention to the lawsuits, or parent outrage. “I assume that the mayor thinks [advocates] will eventually get over it, and if they don’t, they can’t do anything anyway,” Diane Ravitch wrote in an e-mail. “I have no idea what they plan to do or if they will eventually accept their powerlessness.”
Others were more blunt in their appraisal of the current fight. “How do you fight a dictator?” said Class Size Matters executive director Leonie Haimson, a note of exasperation threading her voice. Black’s appointment, a clear statement of the mayor’s preference for corporate managers over educators, is also widely seen as a cold rebuff to education advocates, parents and legislators who have opposed mayoral control of the schools since it was instituted in 2002. Black still has not met with UFT director Michael Mulgrew, a tea leaf being read as indication that the stand-off between the administration and incensed advocates could continue into the new year. But even some of the most incensed say there is a limit to how long the fight can continue. “For me personally, I really think the
lawsuit is the end of the line,” said Council Member Jumaane Williams. “I’m 100 percent in favor of the lawsuit, but Jan. 3, we should at that point rethink how much we actually want to fight. After that point, it’s going to affect our kids.” Attorneys announcing the lawsuit also said they had not thought of a suitable re-
replacement could be found, a notion that would have seemed ridiculous two months ago given the extreme dislike many anti-mayoral-control activists have for the chancellor. None of the parents or educators seemed to have considered just who would take Black’s place. Defiance, though, is almost second nature to some of those who oppose Bloomberg’s management. And administration aides have long said that no matter how many improvements are made to the school system, there are those that will always disagree with the mayor. Always. Until then, the fight goes on. “Just because the mayor acts like it’s a done deal, don’t buy that,” said Norman Siegel, the lawyer and three-time public advocate candidate who has taken up the cause. “The state has the power and the authority to nullify it.” lnahmias@cityhallnews.com
“How do you fight a dictator?” said Class Size Matters executive director Leonie Haimson, a note of exasperation threading her voice. placement for Black, should her appointment be nullified. One parent suggested the chancellor could be Shael Polakow-Suransky, the deputy chancellor whose appointment as chief academic officer was part of the deal to win the waiver for Black. Some even suggested that Joel Klein himself could hang around a little longer until a
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Taxi Stands
With more than just an annoying in-ride commercial, David Yassky tries to remake himself and the TLC By Chris Bragg
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andrew schwartz
F
or weeks, anyone who hailed a cab in New York City was assailed by a 40-second infomercial featuring Taxi and Limousine Commissioner David Yassky declaring, “Hi, it’s me again,” before launching into a pitch about a survey on the new taxi design. Cast your vote, and you could win free taxi rides for a year, he promised. To the endless frustration of so many New Yorkers who mashed their fingers on the screen, Yassky could not be switched off. Sitting in his office a day after the much-complained-about campaign was discontinued, the real-life David Yassky, a former City Council member who also ran for Congress and comptroller (and almost for Brooklyn DA), seemed a little put off by the accusation that the survey promotion had been more about self-promotion. Still, when asked if he felt famous now, he smirked. “Very temporarily,” he said. Yassky, a wonk who has been in government ever since he took a job at the New York City Office of Management and Budget out of college, has always seemed better at making policy than at campaigning. No one would have blinked if the mayor had made him the new Finance commissioner or put him in charge of the Department of Environmental Protection to give him a soft landing after last year’s loss. Running the TLC was more of a surprise—though his appointment was certainly less controversial than Cathie Black’s, it followed a similar line: Yassky’s experience with taxis was limited to taking them and taking the lead on the green taxi legislation while in the Council. Though he is still relatively new, Yassky says the main way he has tried to put his own stamp on the agency is bringing a collaborative approach, which he says characterized his work on the City Council, especially as chair of the Small Business Committee. (Of course, a tendency to overanalyze infuriated Yassky’s critics, especially his vote to extend termlimits hours after introducing a late-game amendment to put the matter before a public vote.) And though they have not always agreed, those who work with Yassky say a collaborative approach has characterized his work, regulating an industry that acutely feels the effects of every government regulation. “There has definitely been a new level
of openness to the needs and concerns of the industry, and everyone gets to have a say,” said Steven Bulatowicz, operations manager for the League of Mutual Taxi Owners Incorporated, a group that represents taxi drivers who own their own vehicles. Yassky has assumed leadership of an agency that he says was already in good shape, with taxi usage increasing even as the rest of the economy faltered, in large part because of a modernization effort that installed credit card machines and GPS in many cabs. He rarely misses a chance to credit his predecessor, Matthew Daus, or the mayor, who nominated him to the position. He kept Daus’ senior staff almost entirely in place. A copy of Bloomberg by Bloomberg sits prominently on his office coffee table. With the final details of the city’s contract to extend those new technologies all but finished, Yassky is now turning
his focus to the city’s “Taxi of Tomorrow” project, which will introduce an entirely new fleet of taxis for the city as early as 2013. The commission is currently weighing three different final proposals. A decision, which is expected soon, will be based on five criteria, he says: comfort, performance, handicapped accessibility, sustainability and aesthetics. Just as the checkered cab defined the look of the city in the 1970s, and the Crown Victoria for the decades after, so too will the new fleet remake the look of the city, he believes. Yassky stressed the importance of having a single vehicle rather than a hodgepodge of different cabs prowling the streets. “Consumers can’t hold this cab or that cab accountable,” he said. “It’s not like a restaurant, where if the service isn’t good, you don’t just go back. If someone has a bad experience in a car, they’re going to hold that against the whole industry.”
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But his plan has raised red flags among taxi industry groups, who say that signing an exclusive decade-long contract with a single vendor could be disastrous if the model cannot handle the rigors of New York City driving, or if that company runs into financial trouble and cannot make good on its commitments. Michael Woloz, a lobbyist for the Metropolitan Taxicab Board of Trade, said the highly regarded Crown Victoria fleet (which is being discontinued this year by Ford) became predominant primarily because market forces propelled taxi owners to buy them, rather than the TLC mandating that they be bought. He suggested the same process should occur in purchasing the new fleet. “What incentive does the winner of this bid have once they have an exclusive 10-year contract with the city?” he said. “How can we compel the winner to do anything?” Yassky said he is attuned to such concerns, but said he believes the rigorous process the city is going through now to select a winning vendor will mitigate such risks. He also believes that rather than 13,000-plus taxi drivers negotiating over 16 different models, the city can do a better job on their behalf negotiating for just one. “We’re having competition—the competition is at an earlier stage,” he said. “What we’re having here is the city aggregating the buying power of the entire industry, so the industry can get a better deal than it has in the past. To me, it’s a no-brainer.” Given Yassky’s history, the idea that he would again run for office someday seems reasonable, though Yassky dismissed most questions about his political future for now, saying only that he will almost certainly serve out his term at least through the end of the Bloomberg administration. If John Liu runs for mayor in 2013, as many expect, that would open up the office for which Yassky faced him in the run-off a year ago. Still, it remains unclear how helpful a perch at the Taxi and Limousine Commission could be politically. “This has traditionally been a patronage position, and I’m not sure it’s necessarily the best place to park,” said political consultant Joe Mercurio. “The association that most people have with taxis really is not that positive. It’s one step up from the Board of Elections, but it’s not like being the head of the Red Cross or something.” Yassky does not seem to have given much consideration to whether he will serve until his term expires in 2017. He was unsure of the fact that his term was indeed seven years long, until informed of that fact by a reporter. “I think it is a seven-year term, is that correct?” Yassky asked his press aide, before pivoting. “I know it’s a seven-year term. I guess maybe I thought it was the middle of the term. But yes, it’s a sevenyear term.” cbragg@cityhallnews.com
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December 13, 2010
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Department of
JUSTICE
ON FIGHTING PUBLIC AND FINANCIAL CORRUPTION IN NEW YORK, U.S. ATTORNEY PREET BHARARA TAKES THE LEAD By EDWARD-ISAAC DOVERE 12
DECEMBER 13, 2010
I
n the U.S. Attorney’s press room at the federal courthouse in White Plains on Dec. 3, Preet Bharara kept saying “no.” Yes, Vinnie Leibell, the longtime state senator and Putnam County executive-elect, had just pled guilty to obstruction of justice and tax evasion charges. Leibell had sensed he might be under investigation in the spring, and his cloakand-dagger conversation on the street with the lawyer who was supposed to have been giving him kickbacks—from the legal fees for a senior housing non-profit he founded with his member items—had been captured; Bharara pointed to a few choice Leibell remarks, blown up in big blue and red bubbles. (Among them: “Since you and I are in agreement, it didn’t happen.”) He only reluctantly admitted that there was video of the exchange in addition to audio, and only when another lawyer pointed out that this fact had just come out in court. He would not say how they had managed that feat, or on which street in Carmel they had managed it. Would not say the name of the non-profit. Would not say how they started looking in the first place. Would not say who else might be charged.
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“I hate to disappoint so many of you,” Bharara joked. What he did say was this: “There is no prosecutor’s office in the state that takes more seriously the responsibility to root out public corruption in Albany and anywhere else that we might find it, and I think our record speaks for itself.” Bharara ticked off some of the better-known names: Assembly Member Brian McLaughlin, Assembly Member Anthony Semenerio, State Sen. Efrain Gonzalez. A fuller list was provided on a helpful hand-out of the biggest public corruption cases his office has made since he took over the top job last spring. In roughly chronological order: Council Member Miguel Martinez, Council Member Kendall Stewart’s chief of staff, four city Department of Education employees, a former police sergeant and two separate police officers, Bernie Kerik, a group of Administration of Children’s Services employees, the COO of NYC-TV and Assembly Member Carmen Arroyo’s chief of staff—and that does not even include Larry Seabrook or Hiram Monserrate, two men long suspected of criminal activity who have recently been the subjects of their own press conferences with Bharara’s tight-lipped rundowns of the charges and presentations of facts, also handily sketched out in blue-and-red blow-ups. As things stand in New York, the attorney general has very little power to prosecute public corruption. Though Eric Schneiderman was among the candidates who campaigned on getting the governor to sign over more via executive order, he appears to have deferred for now to Andrew Cuomo, who has been cool to the idea. Instead, the governor-elect wants to weave new prosecutorial powers into an ethics reform package, but he acknowledges the inherent difficulties of getting the Legislature on board. The district attorneys around the state can make some cases, but not as many as they would like, and the bill Schneiderman sponsored with the heavy support of Manhattan DA Cy Vance disappeared into oblivion almost as soon as it was announced in May. Perhaps not coincidentally for a city and state with such a rich history of graft, local laws provide very little room for a prosecutor to move. The U.S. Attorney does not have any of those problems. Locally focused, but nominated by the president and empowered by federal law, Bharara, who is now just past the one-year anniversary of his installation in the job, has a lot of options and a lot of laws. Even something in the arsenal so basic as the special penalty for lying to a federal employee can change the game. An hour after Bharara walked out of the room in White Plains, his office sent out a release announcing charges against a Brooklyn man who had been selling counterfeit glasses on the Web. That evening, the office announced a 97-month sentence for a New Jersey man who had capped off a 20-year fraud career with a workat-home scheme that ripped a million dollars off from people around the country. Just another day for the man who is probably the most powerful, almost entirely unknown government official in New York. “I never say I have too much work,” Bharara said, “I say I never have enough time.”
ANDREW SCHWARTZ
T CITY HALL
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he Southern District runs from Manhattan up through the Bronx, into Westchester, and then Dutchess, Orange, Putnam, Rockland and Sullivan counties. Most of the world’s money flows through it at some point, in some form. Outside of Tel Aviv or London, there is no collection of square miles as full of terrorist targets and terrorist fears. And outside of Trenton or Cook County, there is no place that can compete for corruption. Bharara’s main office is at the Southern District’s southern edge, at 1 Saint Andrew’s Plaza, a short building distinct only for being non-descript governmentDECEMBER 13, 2010
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ANDREW SCHWARTZ
ugly. It is the only building on that street, tucked between the Municipal Building and One Police Plaza. Wall Street and the Financial District are close. Ground Zero is even closer—from the right angle, the tops of the Twin Towers would have poked into view. And right across the street is City Hall, home of slush funds and politicians who have been investigated for how they ran their campaigns and are now investigated for how they are running their offices. In other words, it is a neighborhood watch. Bharara spent a good chunk of his first year in the car, reemphasizing the office’s relationships with various agencies and district attorneys by visiting them in person. Organizationally, he has been overseeing a shift in office management, consolidating the international narcotics and terrorism units, while launching new units to address complex criminal and civil frauds. The Times Square bomber, who struck just short of a year after President Obama formally nominated Bharara for the job, occupied much of his summer. And there has been no shortage of other intricacies for him to delve into, from overseeing the first RICO prosecution of a vor (and learning what a vor, or the Armenian equivalent of a mafia boss, was) to deciding not to pursue charges in the Working Families Party investigation. Bharara met one of his best friends, Viet Dinh, through a freshman dorm argument at Harvard over whether the people who wrote the Federalist Papers believed that men were inherently good or inherently evil. Dinh, who went on to be an assistant attorney general under George W. Bush and helped write the Patriot Act, thought evil. Bharara said no. Twenty-five years later, Bharara is still honing his philosophy. Now he is focused on institutions that betray people, going wrong and shaking their beliefs. The word “corruption,” he believes, is not just for government and politics, but for stockbrokers and traders and others in the financial world, too. The games and the size of the scores might be different, but the betrayal is fundamentally the same. “While the elected politician who trades on his power to enrich himself undermines the integrity of our democracy and diminishes faith in our political system, the business professional who relies on his special skill to defraud others undermines the integrity of our economy and diminishes faith in our financial system,” Bharara said, laying out his philosophy in a speech in February. The threads have begun to come together in recent weeks. Politicos in Westchester and Putnam are convinced that Leibell is the beginning, not the end, of a string of prosecutions and plea deals
Preet Bharara has forged strong working relationships with many others in his jurisdiction, including Manhattan DA Cy Vance, whose office was a key partner in landing the biggest Medicaid fraud case in history. for local power players. Frenzied rumors are whipping around Wall Street of a coming insider-trading case, unlike anything seen before, that will portray traders, bankers, analysts and consultants feeding off each other and passing information around a nationwide network of reverberating returns. Speaking to the Bar Association in late October, Bharara laid out an argument that the line between street crime and white collar crime was getting blurry, that insider trading and other financial crimes were on the rise,
the investigators and prosecutors were changing along with the criminals. Wiretaps were probably going to be used, as were undercovers, sources, stings and anything else they could justify—“every legitimate tool should be at our disposal,” Bharara said. Leibell picked a random sidewalk in Carmel for his private conversation with the lawyer and ended up on videotape. The rest of the crooked politicians, staffers, bankers and traders—take note. Cy Vance, whose jurisdiction overlaps with the prime areas in Bharara’s neighborhood watch, says he has had a productive working relationship with the U.S. Attorney’s office over the past year. The feelings are similarly warm from Cuomo’s office. But while Vance has been building up the bureaus in his office since taking over in January, and Cuomo has, as attorney general, been going as far as his mostly civil jurisdiction has allowed him in pursuing public and corporate corruption, Bharara has been racking up indictments, pleas and convictions. During a slow moment just before Thanksgiving and the December rush of prosecutions began, Bharara sat down in his office to describe an approach that is animated by a sense of the public’s betrayal. “People’s faith in various American institutions has been challenged, and I think that’s an unfortunate thing,” Bharara said. Chasing inadvertent errors holds little appeal. He wants the principals, “not people who have come close to the line, but people who have galloped across it.” “We are not about trying to figure out ways to criminalize things that are in a gray area. We are about creatively using
“THERE IS NO PROSECUTOR’S OFFICE IN THE STATE THAT TAKES MORE SERIOUSLY THE RESPONSIBILITY TO ROOT OUT PUBLIC CORRUPTION IN ALBANY AND ANYWHERE ELSE THAT WE MIGHT FIND IT,” BHARARA SAID, “AND I THINK OUR RECORD SPEAKS FOR ITSELF.”
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while the volume of information mushrooming on the Internet was making the crimes increasingly difficult to track. But his speech came with a warning as well:
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the tools that we have and the resources we have to go after people who have clearly broken the law,” Bharara said. “We are, as a group, people who think outside the box, but within the constraints of the law. And I think that’s not a paradox.”
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he Southern District office is older than the Department of Justice, home base for perhaps the longest-running collection of top legal talent in the country. Bob Morgenthau and Rudy Giuliani are the best known recent names to have run the place, but even the former assistants range from Felix Frankfurter to Charlie Rangel, Tom Dewey to Louis Freeh. Bharara had his eye on the office for almost as long as he was interested in being a lawyer, tracing it to the class he took with Michael Mukasey—former AUSA, then a federal judge, and future Bush attorney general. Bharara’s is one of those stories that seems ripped from some kind of American dream promotional packet: his father, a Sikh, and his mother, a Hindu, were forced from what was then Pakistan to India after the countries were partitioned in 1947. They brought him to New Jersey as an infant, where he grew up a Bruce Springsteen fan (the only Boss he recognizes, Bharara says, to prove his independent prosecutor credentials), and then went to Harvard and then Columbia Law School. After graduating, he landed first in private practice at one of the city’s top firms before starting his publicservice career by being accepted to the U.S. Attorney’s office on his first try, was recruited to go work for Schumer on the Judiciary Committee and then nominated by Schumer to one of the most prestigious legal jobs in America, at just 40 years old. Along the way, he married a woman who is the daughter of an Indian Muslim fa-
CITY HALL
ther and a Jewish mother whose family landed in Palestine after fleeing the Nazis ahead of the Holocaust. They have three children, who helped form what Bharara often describes as the Norman Rockwell-type scene from his installation ceremony: his father, never a crier, had tears streaming down his face, while his mother, always a crier, sat stoic. Meanwhile, his oldest son looked bored, his middle daughter was being tended to by his wife, and, without fail, the punch line: his youngest having his finger “so far up his nose I started to worry about brain damage.” Bharara has a few choice lines like this—memorable, legitimately funny, conscientiously calibrated in wording and timing. He has one about stuffing his face with samosas while his wife fasts on Yom Kippur and his father-in-law fasts on Ramadan. He has one to describe the complex, technology-enabled financial fraud that his office investigates, about how the modern bank robber, the “cyber Willie Sutton,” needs only a mouse and a keyboard. And he even occasionally improvises, as when a reporter flipping through the materials at his announcement of a Medicaid fraud case that looped in 42 people and 118 clinics in 25 states, pocketing upwards of $100 million. The people had been hauled away to court, the evidence collected and fake medications locked in storage. “In the indictment, there’s a mention of counterfeit Viagra,” the reporter said. “Does counterfeit Viagra work?” Bharara focused his surprisingly blue eyes, his mind working. “No comment,” he said. His temple throbbed through the deadpan stare until a smile finally cracked. “Want to come to our vault?” he said. Bharara, who sometimes gets talked about by fans as a potential U.S. attorney general prospect, is good at the publicperformance part of his job when he wants to be. At press conferences, there are always the prepared lines, the prepared blow-ups, the prepared wireless microphone clipped to his tie so he can step away from the podium to walk reporters through the bullet points of the prosecution. He wants to put the cases in a context to let people know what he and the other people getting paid out of tax money are doing with their days. Putting cases in context is important, he said, especially when that context has his staff pulling in about $570 million annually from its prosecutions, on a budget of $50 million. “We’re doing better than most of corporate America in terms of return on investment,” he said. Though Bharara is in constant conversation with other agencies and his AUSAs, and he is a boss who takes the time to put together a hand-written letter to every member of his staff who has a child, he is closely guarded, sometimes to the point of coming off stiff. As the financial world waits anxiously for Bharara to move forward with the ru-
CITY HALL
Wall Street and the Financial District are close. Ground Zero is even closer— from the right angle, the tops of the Twin Towers would have poked into view. And right across the street is City Hall, home of slush funds and politicians who have been investigated for how they ran their campaigns and are now investigated for how they are running their offices. mored insider-trading investigation, quiet advance criticism has been seeping out from people who worry that he might be on the verge of overreaching. To date, though there are a few scattered complaints of occasional grandstanding, even the people who might have reason to criticize steer clear of calling him out—either because they do not have any complaints, or because they know how extensive his office’s reach can be. Murray Richman, a defense lawyer from the Bronx now representing Larry Seabrook against the $177 bagel charges, has gone up against quite a few Southern District U.S. Attorneys in the last 50 years and seen his fair share of blind crusades. Bharara’s approach is one of the better ones, he said. “I can’t argue with him,” Richman said. “It’s rational. It’s reasonable.” What makes Bharara bristle is any suggestion that the few weeks he spent volunteering as a driver for Mark Green’s 1993 public advocate campaign while studying for the bar tags him as political, or any suggestion that working as the chief counsel to Schumer, the uber politician, on the Senate Judiciary Committee when he was investigating the Bush administration’s U.S. Attorney scandal, might have led to someone accusing him of bias. “Can you name one of those people?” he responded in a clipped tone, cutting off the idea. “You can’t.” Bharara owes much of the respect and notoriety that positioned him for his current job to his work in Washington on that scandal. Over two years, he helped run an unprecedented inquiry into the unprecedented politicization of the Justice Department under George W. Bush with no shortage of potential pitfalls for Bharara. But he earned rave reviews from just about everyone involved, even though Schumer was already publicly calling for Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez to resign. By the end of the investigation, Gonzalez was gone, and seven U.S. attorneys from around the country had been dismissed. He rarely makes a speech without mentioning the scandal, and though he often alludes to how much the experience shaped his thinking, he always notes that he has yet to publicly explain how it did. Even when pressed, he wiggles around without saying anything too specific. “It doesn’t inform my way of thinking in the sense that it’s making me do any-
thing different,” Bharara said. “It was a searing experience for a lot of people, and it called into question a lot of things and assumptions that people had which I thought at that time was unfortunate.” Just as important, he believes, is listening to, but not being defined by, the public. More cases than most people would expect start with news reports or tips to their hotline (a lot of the calls are about who killed John F. Kennedy or where Jimmy Hoffa is buried, but some of them focus on a contractor or an agency the office was not aware of before), but prosecutors who try their cases with a media jury endanger the process as well, he said. “If justice is going to be done, and is going to be seen to be done, you can’t worry about what other people who are not aware of the facts want to have happen,” Bharara said. “Independence does not only mean independence from the political branch, which it means first and foremost, but it means independence from the political winds, and it means independence from public pressure.” This can be especially difficult when tackling public corruption. For example, by the time charges were brought against Hiram Monserrate in October for funneling cash to his 2006 State Senate campaign from a member item-funded non-profit, he had already dodged conviction for slashing his girlfriend in an incident he maintains was an accident, bolted the Democrats in the Senate coup, been kicked out of the Senate by his colleagues, and then lost the special election for his old seat in the spring and his local Assembly seat in November. “There’s always a tension between wanting to make sure you have identified every bad act, every bad bit of behavior, every bad actor in a criminal scheme, so that you are holding accountable to the fullest extent possible the people who are responsible for some criminal behavior,” Bharara said. “There’s no magic to that, other than thinking when the appropriate time is to strike.” But especially with his history in Washington, the political corruption cases are the ones that resonate with Bharara most personally. At Saint Andrew’s Plaza, his office is at the far end of the eighth floor, next to his top deputy and close friend from the days when they worked at Gibson Dunn together, Boyd Johnson, who stayed at the office while Bharara went to D.C. and led the public corruption unit that took down Eliot Spitzer and the Em-
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peror’s Club. That unit is the only one located with them on the eighth floor, and both Bharara and Johnson spend a lot of time walking by, checking in, sitting down to get briefed on progress and suggest ideas. “Preet gets very animated by these cases,” Johnson said. “There is little that he finds more galling than public corruption.” Being a former Southern District AUSA makes Bharara a member of an informal fraternity that gave him the contacts in the Justice Department to move the firing scandal investigation forward, and it gives him an automatic relationship with other alumni now scattered across other agencies and defense firms. Then there are the personal relationships from working alongside others while an assistant in the office—Johnson, but also among them Richard Zabel who heads up the criminal division now overseeing the financial prosecutions; or Cuomo’s special assistant in the attorney general’s office, and soon to be the governor’s chief-ofstaff, Benjamin Lawsky; or City Commissioner of Investigations Rose Gill Hearn. Gill Hearn has worked with five U.S. Attorneys since Mayor Michael Bloomberg hired her to run the city’s internal investigations department in 2002. Bharara’s appetite for moving cases that start with her office has been intense from the outset, and has actually been increasing over time. Or, as she put it sitting in her office on the Friday after Thanksgiving, “I saw him twice this week, and it’s been a short week.” There is not, after all, a shortage of opportunities to work together in trying to flush out government employees’ schemes and scams. “We’re not the Maytag repairman,” Gill Hearn said. “There’s more than enough to do.” Though he will not, of course, name names, nor drop hints, Bharara agrees. His message to people who think that, like Monserrate, enough time has passed since then that no one seems to have noticed, is simple: they might very well be wrong. Though he says he remains committed to walking away from cases that do not work, Bharara said the year ahead was going to be full of cases that will. That is true for all the things his office can touch, but especially for corruption. “At the moment, business is not slow,” Bharara said. “And you can infer from that what you will.” eidovere@cityhallnews.com
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December 13, 2010
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ISSUE SPOTLIGHT:
CONSTRUCTION AND DEVELOPMENT
Point/Counterpoint
The building and construction industry took a serious hit during the economic crisis. Projects stalled, money was hard to come by and thousands of jobs were lost. There is some optimism to have for the coming year. City Hall asked Erik Dilan, chair of the City Council’s Housing Committee, and Robert LiMandri, commissioner of the city Department of Buildings, to talk about their upcoming priorities to see how their interests stacked up against each other. Robert LiMandri: Enforcement is really important to make sure that New York is protected, and we have done a very good job doing that. A lot of the things people don’t always see are the other things we are doing. One, we’re working with quality-of-life issues. We have taken some new directions in several areas. And the quality-of-life area, making sure that we have a positive impact on New Yorkers’ environment, is one of the major things we are doing. Second, I would say one of the major things we are doing is making it easier to build in this town. People see the department only as an enforcer, but we’ve done and we’ve continued to work on making it easier to build.
Erik Dilan: I think that one of the main things is that I’m right now interested in taking a look at all the current laws on the books that maybe are not as effective as maybe they could be and cost the city a lot of money. So I think the one thing is, I intend to be cost-conscious. I certainly don’t intend to pass any legislation that’s going to cost the city a lot of money, and we’ll look at some ordinances that are on the books right now that could potentially save the city some money. I got no specifics on that right now, but I’ll have them in a matter of two weeks.
Robert LiMandri
LiMandri: One of the things people have complained about and we are exploring is how to branch out online to allow people basically not have to come down to the department to interface with the department. So, one, allow people to get permits completely online without ever stepping foot here. It allows them, in the business model, to be much more efficient, and it allows us to react much more quickly, so that getting the permit more quickly is really important. The other piece is that we are exploring the idea of working with them online with reviewing plans, the idea being that you are going to be doing some sort of extension or some work. There’s a plan that’s appropriate that you need to do, so instead of coming here with a roll of documents and rolling it out on the table with someone here, we’d like you to be able to upload those documents virtually. Dilan: The biggest hurdle they are going to have to challenge, and I think the biggest hurdle before the Buildings Department, is the effective use of technology. I think in the past four years, we have done a good job of looking at construction and passing laws, whether it be around crane safety, contractor registration, or scaffolding safety, I think we’ve done a good job in making construction overall safe in New York City, and obviously accidents have gone down, but I think accidents have gone down because the amount of work has gone down. What’ll be the true test of how effective these laws were is when the economy recovers and more building starts to occur.
LiMandri: Certainly the Council has thought about withhold-
funds get to pay those funds. And that’s something that’s a very interesting concept that we expect to see evolve over the next couple of months. If you basically owe the city a certain amount of money and you haven’t paid or if you haven’t come into a payment program, we might withhold those permits. And that is something we’ve never done before and something the City Council is interested in doing. So that’s something that will be at the top of real estate and construction companies’ minds.
Dilan: We’ve passed a few initial bills, and the next set that will be coming to us for consideration will be setting forth regulations on using solar panels and regulations, or more guidelines, on how to use more water-efficient plumbing fixtures as it relates to toilets and other items in the buildings. And the one thing I do like that’s good about the recommendations from the U.S. Green Buildings Council is that they affect only new construction, so it’s not costly to the existing housing stock. So they won’t retroactively have to go and fix anything. If they make major alterations on the new bill, then they do have to come into compliance. So that’s one item that we will, you know, be dealing with. Another item that I think we’ll be dealing with in the coming years, and I currently don’t have an opinion on it yet but I’m interested in the topic because it’s a good one, is discrimination ordinance for applicants who apply for co-ops and condos. I’ve been meeting with a group of realtors and along with some of my other colleagues—Council Member Fidler is a sponsor of the bill—and I think they made an interesting case.
LiMandri: When you go online, you require people to participate. Papers don’t get lost. People take responsibility for certain things. There’s a trail and a track record. When you said you were going to do something, you submitted documents to us, we scanned those documents. We have those signatures. All of the sudden, I’ve built a trail so that if I need to prosecute, or take away your privileges, I have what lawyers might consider a dream. I have all the documents for them, they can build the trail, and a judge can decide whether they truly did know what they were doing and that they were trying to deceive the department. Now, that’s a pretty big step in the right direction.
Eric Dilan
Dilan: I think overall the buildings inspectors and the Buildings Department do a good job and there are very few—considering how many buildings there are in this city—there are very few collapses, but it’s clear that one building collapse is one too many, and I think the only way to protect that is to have effective building inspectors to go out there and look at the sites, and for the general public to inform the city and the Buildings Department as soon as they possibly can to make sure that unsafe conditions get reported as expeditiously as possible.
ing permits to make sure that New Yorkers who are owing the city
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DECEMBER 13, 2010
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ISSUE SPOTLIGHT:
Sound-bites Lou Coletti, President & CEO, Building Trades Employers’ Association I think that the unionized construction industry needs to find a way to reduce construction costs if we want to be competitive in the market place. We are developing strategies of negotiation
CONSTRUCTION AND DEVELOPMENT to make these goals happen. I think that financing transportation and infrastructure projects is something that needs to be discussed. I know that the state is very busy, but these projects are important to promoting growth in the future.
Richard Anderson, president, New York Building Congress One of the major issues I see is the continued funding for the Metropolitan Transit System. There is a huge gap for the year 2012 that needs to be discussed by the Legislature. Among other things, we will be encouraging the state Legislature to fund the gap and seeking to encourage other organizations to
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do the same. Most things that need to be discussed are luckily on the agenda. In terms of what will be discussed in the next session, I see the budget and the MTA as huge issues on the agenda, and they will be playing out with a lot of agony for everyone.
Michael McKee, Tenants Political Action Committee Affordability. Government needs to invest in affordable housing rather than luxury housing, like they have done with 421-a legislation. We will be promoting the construction of affordable housing in New York. We must renew the Rent Protection Laws to protect tenants. This is something that will most certainly be a big part of the agenda next session.
Margaret O’Donoghue Castillo, incoming president of the New York Chapter of the American Institute of Architects A redundant and bureaucratic regulatory system, a stagnant economy and a general desire to reduce construction costs—even before capital markets froze—are pressuring architects to limit creativity and quality in design. We need to address these challenges by creating a more efficient review process, and to advocate for creativity and sustainability in design without sacrificing public safety.
Stay informed
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It’s not just for breakfast anymore
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DECEMBER 13, 2010
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CITY HALL
Working With: • NY City Department of Transportation • NY City Metropolitan Transit Authority • Triboro Bridge and Tunnel Authority
• NY State Department of Transportation • The Port Authority of NY/NJ • NY State Bridge Authority
Kieran Ahern • President • Dan O’Connell • General Counsel
issue spotlight:
ConstruCtion and development
mega-Project rundown AtlAntic YArds After a slew of lawsuits over the state’s use of eminent domain and cash flow problems, the Atlantic Yards project in downtown Brooklyn overcame its final legal obstacles in November 2009. The first phase—construction of the Barclay’s Center Arena—is already underway and has a slated completion date of 2012. The second stage of the project, consisting of 16 commercial and residential high-rises, has no scheduled completion date.
FAr Westside Hudson Yards, the area between 30th and 42nd streets, Eighth Avenue and the Hudson River, has been undergoing development and rezoning to make the “underutilized” section of the city the new hub for commerce and traffic. The Bloomberg administration has also suggested a plan for the No. 7 subway line to travel beyond its current extension from the Far West Side, tentatively scheduled for 2013, to Secaucus, N.J.
Willets Point redeveloPment PlAn What was once a 60-acre ash dump of automotive fluids and petroleum in Queens will soon be transformed into what the city bills as “New York City’s next great neighborhood,” though it was not approved without some controversy in a Council concerned about local businesses in the area. Right now, developers are working on improving offsite infrastructure such as better vehicular and bicycle access to the neighborhood. Expansion of residential buildings, retail and construction for this ambitious project will not be completed until the year 2017.
columbiA universitY exPAnsion After acquiring a contested block of land through eminent domain, Columbia lost no time in planning the development of the area that extends from 125th to 133rd streets and
from Broadway to the Hudson River. Currently it is preparing for the first stage of development by implementing utility improvements to update the 19th-century sewage systems, as well as vacating and demolishing buildings in the area. This stage is expected to be finished in 2015. The second phase of the plan has a target completion year of 2030 and includes buildings for research, a school of international affairs and graduate student housing.
second Avenue subWAY The Second Avenue Subway, which will travel along the eastern drag from 125th Street all the way to the Financial District, is scheduled to be built in four stages. The current first phase of construction includes massive underground work, with aboveground sidewalk and street lane closures along Second Avenue from 96th to 63rd street. Businesses along the stretch have complained about the project’s impact on their customer base. The project has a tentative completion date for 2017.
Make sure New York’s key policy makers know the issues that matter to you in 2011.
SPECIAL LEGISLATIVE PREVIEW ISSUE Issue Date: January 10 - Advertising Deadline: January 3
This special issue will preview the outlook for some of these critical areas: ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT EDUCATION ENERGY ENVIRONMENT HEALTH LABOR/PENSIONS TRANSPORTATION For advertising information, please contact 212-284-9735 or advertising@manhattanmedia.com 20
December 13, 2010
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CITY HALL AD OUTLINES.pdf 12/6/2010 10:19:48 AM
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Discretionary Spending
The distance between the Bronx and Brooklyn can be $300,000 in economic development over postage
TOTAL NONPERSONNEL OFFICE EXPENSES: SPENT:
387,000
Bronx
529,000
Brooklyn
382,000
Manhattan
376,000
Queens
198,000
Staten Island
300,000 296,000 62,000 72,000 36,000 11,500 39,500 60,000 47,000 22,000 13,500 66,000 22,000 4,700 13,000 Bronx Overall Economic Development Corporation
Postage
Connect Inc.
Staples
Manhattan Legal Services
Economic development
Rental payments to New York State
Design Presentation Assoc. (engineering firm)
Computer Service Contracts
Xerox Corporation
Staples
July 4 Ever (4th of July Parade)
Xerox Corporation
Hyatt Cards and Gift
Books
BY CHRIS BRAGG
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f the city’s five borough presidents, two of them—Manhattan’s Scott Stringer and the Bronx’s Ruben Diaz, Jr.—are seen as headed for bigger things, probably as soon as 2013. The other three—Queens’ Helen Marshall, Brooklyn’s Marty Markowitz and Staten Island’s Jim Molinaro—are closer to the ends of their career and likely to have made their final appearances on ballots last year. That is not the only difference. When it comes to staffing, the five borough presidents have fairly similar costs, with their budgets ranging between $3 million and $4 million. The salary ranges for various positions are roughly the same. But their use of discretionary funds for office expenses varied wildly over the course of the last year. Out of the $387,000 that the Bronx borough president’s office has spent on discretionary expenses this year, $300,000 went directly to the Bronx Overall Economic Development Corporation, the office’s economic development arm. The money has gone to hire staff for the group, which in turn has leveraged its funding into $25 million in micro-loans for businesses in the Bronx, according to Marlene Cintron, the corporation’s president. During his first two years in office, Diaz, Jr. has stressed an anti-poverty agenda. The Bronx borough president’s of-
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fice, meanwhile, has cut many other expenses to the bone in order to fund the corporation, spending only about $200 on postage by relying almost entirely on email and social media, and only $1,300 on computer contracts. “We understand that anytime we don’t spend money on something, we can use that money to help another small business,” Cintron said. Rather than putting any discretionary spending money toward economic development in relatively well-to-do Manhattan, Stringer’s office has directed $50,000 to a vendor called Manhattan Legal Services, which helps low-income residents with legal problems, and $62,000 to Connect Inc., a group “dedicated to preventing interpersonal violence and promoting gender justice,” according to its website. A spokeswoman said this was part of the office’s emphasis on combating domestic violence. Of the $382,000 total spent by Manhattan, one of the biggest expenses, $66,000, went to rental payments to New York State for its northern Manhattan office in Harlem, as well as $50,000 on miscellaneous office equipment. The Bronx borough president’s office may not have been spending much on postage, but the Brooklyn borough president’s office was: $296,000, or over half of Brooklyn’s overall spending on officerelated expenses, went to postage. A spokesman for the Brooklyn office said that much of that went to fund the
distribution of Markowitz’s quarterly newsletter Brooklyn!!, which goes to about 400,000 registered voters in the borough. Out of the borough’s $529,000 in total spending, an additional $39,500 was spent at Staples and $13,500 on economic development. In Queens, $72,000 of the borough’s $376,000 in office expenses was spent on computer consulting services, nearly $50,000 had gone to rental agreements with the Xerox Corporation and another $24,000 to Manhattan Ford Lincoln-Mercury, a West Side car dealership. The only economic-development-related spending appears to be $1,200 given to the Farmers Boulevard Community Development Corp., though another $45,000 went to two community groups, Elmcor Youth and Adult Activities Inc. and the Woodhave-Richmond Hill Volunteer Ambulance Corps. A spokesman for the Queens office did not return a request for comment about this year’s expenses. Last year, Marshall was criticized for spending $103,000 on office furniture, including $3,000 chairs. The largest single office-related expense for the Staten Island borough president’s office appears to be $36,000 spent with a vendor called “July 4 Ever,” which manages the borough’s July 4 parade every year, representing about a fifth of the office’s total spending of $198,000. “That’s an event that gets 40,000 or 50,000 people out for it,” explained Stat-
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en Island Borough President James Molinaro. Molinaro’s office spent $22,000 with the Xerox Corporation, while $4,700 was spent at Hyatt Cards and Gift. There do not appear to be any expenses for economic development from this pot of money. Other major expenditures included $30,000 given to various community groups, such as the Staten Island Employment Education Consortium and the Fisherman’s Conservation Association. Each borough president’s office budget is a fraction of what it used to be, having endured years of cuts by the City Council and the mayor’s office, with most of the funding they receive going to the capital budgets. In 1989, the City Council was given greater authority over functions previously assumed by the borough presidents’ offices. With the formal powers of the offices reduced, the differences in how the offices spend the money they do have sharply depends on the person at the top, said Baruch political science professor Doug Muzzio. “You have two young guys who are politically engaged who are trying to promote a policy agenda in various ways,” Muzzio said. “And then there are three other, chronologically older politicians for whom this is their last job—and are going to spend less on a political agenda, and more on what might be called more frivolous, or less central things.” cbragg@cityhallnews.com
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adio host and Daily News columnist Errol Louis, a veteran political commentator and journalist, was a natural for taking over hosting duties on “Inside City Hall,” having logged serious hours on radio and as a guest on many CNN shows. Before taping a show at the end of his second week on the job, Louis took a moment on set to talk about his approach to the job, the death of old-school journalism and the end of the “Cuomo clock.” What follows is an edited transcript.
Hall: What was your reaction to the offer? Were you excited, nervous? Errol Louis: Oh boy, well it’s not like they called me out of the clear blue sky. My agent had contacted them months ago. She opened up some lines of communication and my agent—as it happens, they had some relationships. They used to represent, well, they still represent, Brian Taff, who was my counterpart up in Albany. He had the job before Liz [Benjamin]. He’s out in Philadelphia now, but they, you know, they understand that stuff happens in this industry. So I’ve been talking with them for months. So when it finally happened, it was a relief. CH: Are you coming into this with any new ideas for the show? EL: Yeah, the format is very strong. A very strong brand. So, you know, there are two categories of changes that you bring to it. One is working the existing elements in a different kind of way, asking different round questions at the roundtable and at the interviews. And then the other is to try out new formats. And they’re open to all kinds of new stuff. And even in my first—this is day eight—even in my first seven outings, we’ve done some stuff that’s a little off the beaten trail. I think it was the second day, I had Mark Ruffalo on. That’s not par for the course. But then even with existing elements, I don’t know what other people do, but the way I do book interviews is I read the book. I’m going to bring my own questions and my own perspective to a lot of the existing elements. Viewers are going to see some new faces around the table. So that doesn’t mean we’ve, say, changed the reporter’s roundtable or changed the consultant’s corner, but there will be some people there that maybe viewers haven’t seen in a while or haven’t seen at all.
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CH: Are you going to keep doing radio and writing columns? EL: I am strictly here. I gave up my—I resigned from both jobs at the newspaper and at the radio. We did have some conversation about whether or not I’d be able to stay and keep either or both as an additional job. And that conversation was going on at the same time as the Juan Williams controversy broke out. A couple of weeks ago, back and forth, I realized it wasn’t going to happen, it wasn’t going to be in the cards.
CITY HALL
andrew schwartz
City HallJay Blue Insider andrew schwartz photos
CH: There is a lot of cross-platform journalism going on today—blogging and going on air. Do you see opportunities like that for you in the future? EL: Yeah. I guess if I wanted more work, I could fight for the opportunity to do more work. That is to say, our jobs are a little bit different. Liz is doing a lot of reporting and blogging. I’ll probably be doing less of that, in part because I think I’ve got a busier schedule. CH: In your columns, your opinions are out there in plain view. Are we going to see some of that on the show? EL: It’s not an opinion show and my role as anchor is not to present or offer opinions. Anybody’s who’s read the 700-plus columns I’ve written over the last few years would probably know the interests that I have, the topics that I’m interested in. I think that will probably be the most noticeable connection with the columns that I wrote about, is that if something comes up about Brooklyn, people know that I live in Brooklyn. And I’ve written a lot about my neighborhood.
you can always back off if you want to. CH: What’s your current take on political journalism in New York? EL: The two complaints that I hear the most are that we don’t go in depth enough and that we don’t get into areas that real people care about. And we spend a little too much time on what is essentially a closed conversation among the political elite, the celebrities and the very wealthy in our town. I think all of those criticisms are valid. And what I have not done over the last decade or so is complain about it publicly, because I have been fortunate enough to have a really high-profile platform. And my feeling is, the only rational response if you have a platform is to lead by example and to do the work you think ought to be done instead of complaining about what’s not getting done.
“The difference between being a guest on television and being the anchor of a television show is like the difference between eating in a restaurant and running a restaurant.”
CH: Is it difficult to keep your opinions to yourself? EL: No, not at all. In fact, someone called me the other day and asked whether or not I support Wal-Mart coming to East New York. And I told him, I am specifically paid not to have an opinion about that. I was joking, but the reality is, at some point, you let people know that it is a job. It is a job. People think I wanted to do this even if no one was paying me, but I wanted to write controversial 600-word essays that would get everyone upset. I hate to disabuse them of this notion. It was a particular job and now I have a different job.
CH: You’ve been on “Inside City Hall” as a guest. How is it different being the host? EL: Yeah, it’s like night and day. Some friend suggested to me—yeah, in 2008, I did over 100 appearances on CNN during the presidential campaign. A similar number the following year. I have told people, and it’s true, the difference between being a guest on television and being the anchor of a television show is like the difference between eating in a restaurant and running a restaurant. Very different. Just because you like to eat food doesn’t mean you are ready to run a restaurant. I mean, if you’re a guest, you’re on for 10 minutes. You can pick your mood, you can pick the point that you want to make,
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CH: Then how do you bring more people into the political conversation? EL: Well, it’s not just that. Let’s take last year as an example, in the mayoral race. Much of the coverage, in particular the misinterpretation of the polling data, really affected the outcome of the race. And a lot of people, I think, understood by the end what it was that I was talking about and even writing about, which was that they just completely got it wrong. I have a Masters degree in political science and I know how to read polls. I know that stuff. But, there was—it was just
a failure. A failure. CH: Are you going to keep the Cuomo clock ticking? EL: We did not announce the Cuomo clock last Friday. In fact, that’s a scoop. You are the only one who will know that. We did not have it run on Friday. And you know, we called the Cuomo camp and let them know. It was the result of what little political capital I had in my first week. We used it all up. … I said look, I’m going to try to get him on, but you have to give me something to work with and you have to be able to let me have that conversation with him. And I won. But that’s not a permanent sensation, mind you, and I ended up having a brief conversation with the governor-elect afterwards just to let him and his folks know, it’s like, look, there’s a reason we call them guests, whatever beef you have obviously predated me— if we could start over again, that would be great. —Andrew J. Hawkins ahawkins@cityhallnews.com
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$221,427,522.” - PLA Post-Audit, Hill International (2005, SCA Project Labor Agreement)
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quality • safety • opportunity bUilDitUNioN.CoM