Replacing Al Vann: the Race in Bed-Stuy/Crown Heights

This election will see significant change in Bed-Stuyvesant, where Al Vann has been in one office or another for over 40 years, most recently as Council Member for the 36th CD.

CM Vann was at one time the lion of black politics in New York, and there were high hopes for him when he entered the Assembly in the mid 1970s.   Known for a time in Brooklyn as “the Mwalimu” (“great teacher” in Swahili), Vann was the moving force behind a landmark 1982 Federal case that led to the expansion of minority representation in New York at the state and federal levels. 

Since that time, however, Al Vann has become a classic career politician, content to go along with the status quo.  In 2001 he switched places with Annette Robinson and moved to the Council, and his time there has been practically somnambulistic.  Voting to extend terms limits in 2009, Vann faced a vigorous primary battle that year, but he won his third term with less than 30% of the vote. 

Legislatively, Vann did demonstrate a return to form in 2010 when he pushed a bill restricting the sale of tax liens, a concern of his dating back to at least the early 1980s.  But basically he has been asleep at the wheel while his community has stagnated.  A measure of his inactivity is the fact that after twelve years in the Council, CM Vann wound up chairing the Committee on Community Development.  Senior Council Members typically jockey for powerful committee chairs, where they can help steer important legislation and run oversight hearings.  Community Development oversees no City agencies and in this current 4-year session has had two bills referred to it.

There are four serious candidates vying for Vann’s seat this year, and befitting their place in the City of Churches, each of them is either a minister himself, or the son of a minister.

District Leader Robert Cornegy Jr. is Al Vann’s chosen successor.  Son of a minister, the almost 7-foot tall Cornegy had a brief and unspectacular pro-basketball career and ran against Vann in 2009, endorsing him in the general after losing in the primary.  Cornegy then joined the Vann-controlled Vanguard Independent Democratic Association and succeeded him as president of the club in 2012.  

His official bio is sketchy on his experience, but in the last few years Cornegy has been working as a legislative analyst for the Council.  It is not a big stretch to imagine his rabbi, Vann, thinking the job would look good on Cornegy's resume and familiarize him with the not-quite Byzantine workings of 250 Broadway.  Cornegy is the favorite candidate of the Major Owens-Yvette Clarke faction of the Brooklyn Dems, and will surely offer a formidable fight.

Kirsten Foy, former de Blasio staffer, is the favorite of the unions and the “progressive” side of the Democratic Party.  Foy won a great deal of press attention and street credibility when he and Council Member Jumaane Williams were detained following a scuffle with police at the 2011 West Indian Day Parade.  He has since filed suit against the NYPD for injuries he sustained after he supposedly entered a “frozen zone” and was tripped and manhandled by the police.

Foy has a long history of organizing against police brutality and for economic justice in Bed-Stuy and Crown Heights.  He worked with Al Sharpton and honed his rhetorical chops as a spokesman for the National Action Network.  Foy worked for the de Blasio campaign for Public Advocate and was awarded with posts as head of Intergovernmental and Community Affairs.

At some point in the recent past Kirsten Foy, perhaps on the advice of his mentor the Rev. Sharpton, became a “licensed Pentecostal minister.”  I looked into what it takes to achieve such licensure, and it appears to vary, but typically involves submitting a questionnaire and a check to the licensing authority.  Well, just remember, Napoleon was self-anointed Emperor of France after all.

Reverend Robert Waterman is the pastor of the Antioch Baptist Church and the owner of Canticles Lounge, which is an alcohol-free Christian nightclub/cabaret.  Rev. Waterman has raised a significant amount of money, most of it apparently from his parishioners.  Unlike his main opponents Rev. Waterman does not seem to have much support outside the district, but when turnout is only 6000 voters, it is hard to predict what could happen.

Our last subject in the race for the 36th Council District seat is the Rev. Conrad Tillard, formerly known as Conrad Muhammad, formerly known as Conrad X.  Reverend Tillard first came to public attention as the chief youth minister of the Nation of Islam, and then the minister of Harlem’s famed Mosque No. 7, the former seat of Malcolm X.  Reverend Tillard made some conventionally controversial remarks against white devils and Jewish slave masters, etc. from that esteemed perch, was later stripped of his ministry under a cloud of suspicion, and then underwent a second Damascene moment when he left the NOI and returned to the faith of his fathers, receiving baptism by the Reverend Calvin Butts.

I suppose in another place we could speculate at length about the Rev. Tillard’s search among famous spiritual leaders for a father figure to take the place of the jazz musician who deserted his family when Conrad was young…but who cares really?  In 2002 Tillard weighed a run for Congress as a Republican against Charles Rangel, but he never got on the ballot.  Today Rev. Tillard has a pulpit in Brooklyn and is, along with Elizabeth Wurtzel, facing a lawsuit from Penguin Books for failure to deliver after receiving a substantial advance for his memoir.

In closing, based on recent pictures of Rev. Tillard, we can say that, though you may take the man out of the Nation of Islam,  you can’t take the bowtie off the man.

Pity the 34th Council District

The race for the 34th District City Council seat is one of those convoluted knots of lunacy, intrigue and stupidity that is so unlikely, it could only be true.  The cast assembled for this campaign belongs in a Greek tragedy crossed with a French farce.

The 34th includes a swath of northern Brooklyn encompassing part of Williamsburg and Bushwick, and a sliver of Queens.  Council Member Diana Reyna has represented the district for the last 12 years.  One of the more notable moments of her legislative career occurred in 2003 when she paraded in a Carnival “mas” during a working visit to Trinidad.  The picture of 29 year-old CM Reyna in a bikini has since vaporized down the memory hole, but it was apparently a spectacle in itself.

Diana Reyna got her start as the protégé of former Kings County Dem chair Assemblyman Vito Lopez, whose Ridgewood-Bushwick Senior Citizens Council is a legendary engine of political power and the recipient of hundreds of millions of dollars of local and federal money.  As Chief of Staff to Lopez, Reyna was hand chosen to take the seat in 2001, and won in a three-way race.

Eight years later however, Reyna and her former boss fell out over the development of the Broadway Triangle, a 31-acre industrial zone bordered by Williamsburg, Bed-Stuy and Bushwick.  AM Lopez had arranged for the city to hand over a sweet development deal to RBSCC in conjunction with United Jewish Organizations of Williamsburg.  CM Reyna opposed the no-bid deal and promoted Los Sures, a rival development organization which, like Ridgewood-Bushwick, originated in the early 1970s as a Latino tenants’ rights advocacy group. 

Lopez and Reyna both have deep interests in their respective favorite development organizations.  RBSCC produces thousands of voters loyal to Lopez, and employed his live-in girlfriend as Housing Director for a meager $330,000 annual salary.  Reyna’s mother-in-law on the other hand worked for Los Sures as head of its senior center, and the CM was questioned about the $40,000 discretionary funding she funneled there.

In any case, the once cozy pair feuded, and Lopez put up Maritza Davila, another of his protégés, to run against Reyna in 2009.  Davila lost.  This time around, Lopez himself, having been stripped of his Housing Committee and Kings County Democratic Committee Chairs following his groping scandal, has decided to run for the very Council seat that his former Chief of Staff is vacating.  Though Ridgewood-Bushwick has lost a lot of its city funding and Lopez could face federal handcuffs any day in the current storm of corruption arrests, he still has his followers on the ground.

The favored candidate for the 34th CD seat is Antonio Reynoso, current and long-term Chief of Staff to Diana Reyna.  Starting in early 2012, he has been endorsed by the entire Democratic establishment, who were presumably hoping to forestall Vito Lopez from jumping in. 

Reynoso is an inoffensive candidate, if you think that being a City Council staffer as one’s entire qualification for office is not offensive.  Here we have again the phenomenon that City Council Watch has long identified as the signal marker of a decayed political culture: the election of Chiefs of Staff to succeed their bosses. 

One doesn’t have to agree with the Bloombergian technocratic principle that a businessman will always make the best elected official to find it weird that so many people run for office on the basis of having carried water for other elected officials.  It exemplifies machine politics for politicians to promote their staffers as their successors.  Like a monarchy or a fungus, the system divides, spawns and replicates itself perpetually.  Lopez begat Reyna begat Reynoso.  How can we seriously see Reynoso as a reform candidate when he is the spiritual grandson of his opponent?

Tommy Torres is the third candidate in the race to become the honorable member from the 34th Council District.  Regular readers of the Daily News will recall that Mr. Torres was in the news last September when it emerged that he was the boyfriend of since-defeated Assembly Member Naomi Rivera in the Bronx.

Being Naomi Rivera’s boyfriend may show questionable taste, but that isn’t enough to disqualify Torres from office.  The fact that he has worked outside of politics for 13 years as a high school gym teacher and coach could actually work in his favor.  Except it appears that Torres accepted a position on his girlfriend’s staff as a fulltime community liaison, at the same time he was working for the Department of Education, also fulltime, including after-school coaching duties. 

Nobody has yet explained how he managed to do two hands-on jobs in Brooklyn and the Bronx, simultaneously.  Sounds like fraud to me, but I think the US Attorney’s office has its hands full at the moment.  Let’s wait and see!

Quinn Fights for Designers

As election season gets into gear, all the candidates are staking out their turfs.  John Liu continues to give his monthly State of the City addresses and listen for the footfall of federal agents at his doorstep.  Bill DeBlasio is cementing his hold on the bisexual/interracial marriage community and promising to walk the dogs of every animal lover in Brooklyn.  

And Christine Quinn has come out swinging for one of the “untapped,” “underpromoted” New York City constituencies: designers.

According to the Times, Speaker Quinn has helped coordinate “a 12-day celebration of design this spring extending over all five boroughs.”

The paper adds:

Pronounced “NYC by Design” and interdisciplinary in scope, it will present the work of local designers and architects in museum exhibitions, conferences, studio tours, showroom displays, pop-up stores, art installations and a design film festival.

The goal is greater visibility for an industry with untapped economic potential, said City Council Speaker Christine C. Quinn, whose office is leading the project with a steering committee of more than 30 design leaders from business, civic and cultural groups. “We have more designers in New York City than any other U.S. city, but we do a terrible job promoting them in their totality,” she said.

Promoting designers…fair enough.  Why not.

Christine Quinn’s aspirations to be mayor have no greater cheerleader than The New York Times.  For years now the Times has promoted the Speaker of the City Council as the presumptive heir to Bloomberg’s glorious reign.  Everything is ready, and everyone on the editorial board and all their friends are ready to salute our first woman Mayor.

One problem remains: getting her elected.

Are we at City Council Watch the only ones who have noticed that Ms. Quinn’s electoral experience is rather limited?  Unlike any of her opponents, she has never been elected to anything beyond the confines of the 3rd Councilmanic District.  Moreover, in 2009, when she ran for her third term, she scarcely won a majority in the Democratic primary, taking less than 7000 votes in total.

Larry Seabrook, now penitentiary-bound, won his 2009 primary by a greater margin than Chris Quinn.

It is easy to make the mistake that Chris Quinn wants everyone to make, which is to see her standing next to Mayor Bloomberg at handshakes and press conferences for the last decade, and to see that physical proximity as a sign of her spiritual proximity to power.  But in fact, becoming Speaker of the Council requires only 25 votes other than her own.

The Speakership is a significant role within a largely ceremonial body.  More than 95% of the municipal budget process is controlled by the Mayor.  The schools are controlled by the Mayor.  The police are controlled by the Mayor.  The Council’s legislative purview is curtailed by the State.  The Speaker of the Council is the dictator of a closed circle with a small diameter.

Chris Quinn’s main primary opponents have all won City-wide races.  They have strong outer-borough support, which she lacks.  Labor, which is vital to winning a Democratic primary, is not favorable to Quinn’s dithering on living wage and sick leave legislation.

And all those years of standing next to Mayor Bloomberg, getting the image of her proximity to power imprinted in the brains of New Yorkers, are going to gall those many voters who do not forget that she is the person who forced through the antidemocratic term limits extension.

So how does Chris Quinn win?  To follow her press one would assume that she has the gay vote tied up, though that can’t be taken for granted, given her primary challenge last cycle from two out lesbians.  Marriage equality plays well in some communities and less well in others.  It’s probably a wash.

So now she is pushing herself as the pro-business candidate…perhaps a successful general election strategy, and one that the Times will applaud, but of limited appeal to union and minority voters.

So now we see the Times pushing hard to fight her corner, pretending that a Design Week in May is a brilliant innovation on Quinn’s part, rather than just another in an endless sequence of trade shows.

Well, you play to your base.  And in Quinn’s case, it appears that her new underrepresented constituency is designers.

Splitting the Yenta Vote: the Race for Manhattan Beep

Of all the municipal races this year, are any less significant than the ones for Borough President?  Ever since the Board of Estimate was declared unconstitutional 25 years ago, the role of the “Beep” has become quaint and almost vestigial.  Like “Master of the Horse.”

Ask anyone what his Borough President does and you will receive a blank look.  When my daughter graduated from fifth grade, Manhattan Beep Scott Stringer showed up and gave a three minute speech, congratulating the students for living in “such a diverse city.” And he apparently stands outside Fairway sometimes and shakes hands.

Marty Markowitz probably is the Beep par excellence with his incessant boosterism of Brooklyn.  Eating Junior’s cheesecake, praising the Nets, basically being a clown.  When you consider that Markowitz’ predecessor as Brooklyn Borough President was the legitimate powerbroker Howard Golden, one sees how completely diminished the position really is.  It is almost like a Carnival celebration where the town idiot is crowned king for a day.

Ok, maybe the role isn’t as vacuous as it seems.  The Beep has a small amount of capital funding to dispense every year, and can appoint members of local community boards.  Borough Presidents can also introduce legislation to the City Council, though this rarely happens.  And they do have influence over land use decisions.  But mostly the position is a post for either the superannuated (Helen Marshall, Marty Markowitz) or the ambitious (Ruben Diaz, Jr., Scott Stringer).

In any case, the role pays well, provides a staff, and requires limited work, so if you are already used to living on the public’s dime, why wouldn’t you run for it?

This year’s race for Manhattan Borough President is intriguing in that the candidates are relatively respectable, and also because they represent such distinctly identifiable areas of the borough.  Council Members Gale Brewer, Jessica Lappin and Robert Jackson are from the Upper West and Upper East Sides and Uptown respectively.  Julie Menin, president of CB 1, is the candidate of Tribeca and downtown.

Jessica Lappin from the Upper East Side was former Council Speaker Gifford Miller’s chief of staff, and she has long been considered a potential candidate to fill his spot after Speaker Quinn moves on to her well-deserved retirement.  Alternatively it is said that she has her eye on Carolyn Maloney’s House seat in the famed silk stocking district, but the Hon. Maloney isn’t going anywhere soon, so CM Lappin has decided to try for Manhattan BP in the meantime.

Lappin has been a faithful Council soldier, serving competently this last term as chair of the Aging Committee.  Her legislative history is respectable: she has persistently filed intros regarding food allergies and newspaper boxes, twin obsessions of her UES constituency, one imagines.  And she has succeeded this year in getting restrictions passed on those electric scooters that restaurants rely on to buzz around the sidewalks.

Meanwhile, Robert Jackson has represented sections of Harlem, Washington Heights and Inwood for 12 years.  He is known as a committed advocate for public education, and co-founded the Campaign for Fiscal Equity, which won billions of dollars for city schools from the state, though most of that money has never materialized.  As a black man running against three white women, CM Jackson could capitalize on a possible split vote below 125th Street and win by capturing the black and Latino turnout.  Also, Jackson is a Muslim, which though little remarked upon, would be a significant first if he were elected to a borough-wide office.

Here is a funny video where CM Jackson shows his annoyance with a heckler.

Gale Brewer is known for her vigorous, Jane Jacobs-style advocacy for a livable Upper West Side.  One recent zoning item she pushed for limits the expanding street frontage of banks and drugstores, which have turned entire blocks of Manhattan into glassy swaths of nothingness.  She has also tried to penalize landlords who turn residentially zoned units into illegal hotels.

CM Brewer has saved her considerable wrath for her (perhaps quixotic) war against bedbugs.  No one has fought more persistently, some might say obsessively, to eliminate their scourge from our city.  CM Brewer has announced on separate occasions that she has ceased going to the movies because of bedbugs, and that she crosses the street to avoid walking past chairs or couches that are being thrown out.

The thing about Gale Brewer’s candidacy is that, although she claims that she is serious about running, she hasn’t raised very much money.  More significantly, she hasn’t spent very much money either.  Her three opponents have each spent over $100,000 so far according to the CFB, while CM Brewer isn’t on record as having spent a dime.  So what’s her game?  We will see.

The final candidate for Manhattan BP has never been elected to anything, though as our Mayor has shown us, this isn’t a disqualification for office anymore.  Julie Menin is the chair of CB 1, and has pushed development projects in TriBeCa and SoHo.  She brings a little glamour to the otherwise unsexy Borough President race in the form of her intimidatingly famous supporters, most notably Robert DeNiro.  Ms. Menin has raised more money than anyone else in the race, and will surely run a formidable campaign.

Keep posted to City Council Watch for more info and news about this race and others.