City’s Greenways Get Another Boost as Officials Plot Expansion
NYC Greenway
New York City’s greenways are getting another lift. Greenways, paths for pedestrians and non-motorized vehicles exclusively, are viewed by supporters as boons for safe, environmentally-friendly alternatives to traditional transportation and opportunities for quality-of-life-boosting recreation.
Advocates stress that building these pathways, ideally in an expansive and connected network, has several benefits. Those include reducing car use and pressure on mass transit, offering venues for outdoor exercise, and creating green spaces that line the thoroughfares and prevent flooding and even mitigate excess temperatures caused by heat-absorbing concrete.
Yet advocates point out that the greenway system in New York City is severely underbuilt and what does exist is in disrepair or spread inequitably throughout the city along class and race lines.
But the new mayor, Eric Adams, who as Brooklyn Borough President worked to update Brooklyn’s Waterfront Greenway, has made this infrastructure a priority in his first term. And now, new federal money to support planning for greenway expansion is headed to the city.
Last week, the U.S. Department of Transportation awarded the New York City Department of Transportation $7.25 million for expanding greenways as part of a slew of nationwide grants from its Rebuilding American Infrastructure with Sustainability and Equity (RAISE) program, part of the massive Bipartisan Infrastructure Law passed earlier this year by President Joe Biden and Congress.
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York shared the news in a tweet two days before USDOT made it official.
“Big News for NYC: We secured $7.25 million in funding from @USDOT to expand New York City's majestic greenway system!,” Schumer wrote. “I love riding my bike down the waterfront, and I am excited to bring greenways to communities that deserve them all across NYC.”
The funding will help plan the expansion of greenways across the city. The goal of the mayor, city Department of Transportation, and some members of the City Council is to build out a safely navigable network across every borough, connecting hundreds of miles of trail.
The federal grant comes on the heels of a $47.6 million investment from the city funding improvements identified through the Destination Greenways study. The project is a collaboration between the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation and Department of Transportation and plans to fill gaps in greenway routes in central Queens and Brooklyn, while connecting the trails to the city’s larger park system.
In total, six projects will create new segments in Flushing Meadows Corona Park, Kissena Corridor Park, and Kissena Park. In Brooklyn, paths will be built in Leif Ericson Park and the existing greenway in part of Shore Road Park will see badly needed repairs.
Adams joined Schumer in celebrating the grant. “All New Yorkers deserve access to our beautiful greenways and we're making that happen with millions in federal funding,” the mayor said on Twitter, praising “strong work” from the city’s transportation and parks departments as well as the economic development corporation. He also thanked Schumer for advancing the greenways work and efforts “to make our city greener and more bike friendly.”
In 1993, the Dinkins administration outlined a 350-mile greenways plan for the city, and from the 10,000-foot-view of Google Maps, a smattering of greenways currently connects some neighborhoods, parks, and boroughs. But on the ground, the system is in places a patchwork of structurally unsound and incomplete paths, far short of the Dinkins era vision, and highlighted by a few crown jewels. According to the Adams administration, there are now just over 150 miles of greenway across the give boroughs. For years, people in and out of city government have signaled that the network is in need of repair, and outright neglects underserved communities.
Gaining public access to land is one problem facing the vision of a more cohesive greenway system. “There are some sticky situations, like difficult property rights, easements, issues like that that are difficult and challenging to solve,” said Brian Hedden, Advocacy and Greenways Coordinator for Brooklyn Greenways Initiative, in an interview with Gotham Gazette.
To build greenways, the city can acquire land through easements, a public access agreement that allows the city to build pathways through privately owned property. The federal RAISE grant, which DOT applied for in April, will help plan the use of potential easements and other strategies for greenway expansion.
Since the Dinkins administration, support has not been met by action. “The politically easy thing to do over the past 30 years is to simply then not try to solve them,” Hedden explained of the challenges.
Hedden and other activists point out that the areas missing greenway infrastructure coincide with low-income neighborhoods and communities of color. The Bronx riverfront along the Harlem River and the Hutchinson River waterfront are areas with inadequate pathways despite support by local activists like the Harlem River Working Group. “Those areas are not exactly lacking for people that are advocating for waterfront access,” Hedden said. “People have definitely been organizing and asking for that for a while.”
In some of these cases, privately-owned industrial property, even public infrastructure like highways and railroads, exist right up to the prized waterfront.
One such example is the west Bronx waterfront along the Harlem River. Any potential greenway there would need to pass through “a real hodgepodge of jurisdiction and ownership,” according to Jon Orcutt, Director of Advocacy for Bike New York, in an interview with Gotham Gazette. Greenways are a particular focus for Orcutt, a former Bloomberg administration transportation official. In the west Bronx, the Hudson line of the Metro North and the Oak Point Rail Lines, and other private property run alongside the riverfront, at points extending over the river itself, creating a right-of-way headache that has stalled progress, Orcutt explained.
On the other side of the Bronx is the Hutchinson River waterfront that runs alongside Pelham Bay, New York’s largest park. While the Hutchinson River has a greenway network, it needs plenty of TLC according to Orcutt. In many places it is interrupted by highways and highway ramps. The greenway may require bridges or underpasses to improve navigability and safety. It’s also disconnected from other existing greenways. And in already problematic spots, according to Orcutt, another five years of use and weathering without repairs will take its toll: “it’s going to be terrible,” he predicted.
The federal RAISE grant also coincides with a greenways-related legislative push in the City Council. Carlina Rivera, a Democratic Council member representing Manhattan’s District 2, introduced a bill in April that would mandate the creation of a greenway master plan for the first time since the Dinkins administration 30 years ago.
The bill, Intro. 291, introduced in the Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure with co-sponsorship of its chair, Council Member Selvena Brooks-Powers, calls for the city to identify thoroughfares that can be developed into greenways. It would also require a map of currently available, proposed, or under-construction greenways to be updated by a cohort of city departments. And it would require an annual report on the state of maintenance, sections of greenway that are a priority for upgrades, plus cost and timelines for such projects. Government entities overseeing each project would be shared as well.
Council Member Rivera emphasized that robust transparency will be vital in ensuring historically underserved communities are part of the process. “Intro 291 ensures the funding process will be transparent, so as the vision and planning stages come to fruition, we will be owed detailed explanations of the funding allocation — and as a City Council, part of our job is to oversee that and hold all involved to account in that process,” in a statement to Gotham Gazette.
The bill quickly accumulated 30 sponsors in the 51-seat Council.
Intro. 291, Destination Greenways, the Adams administration funding, and the federal grant excite advocates about the future of climate resiliency and recreation. “When you look at health disparities in the Bronx and other parts of the city that don't have access to the greenways it could make a huge difference for folks to have a safe place to recreate, to get to places where they participate in other sports and recreational spaces,” said Chauncy Young, Coordinator for Harlem River Working Group.
The South Bronx is a case in point of the consequences of lacking green infrastructure. Last year, when Hurricane Ida caused an underground creek called Tibbetts Brook to flood the Major Deegan Expressway, greenway advocates were the first to say the damage could’ve been avoided by their calls to add greenway and bring the creek to ground level, a process called “daylighting.”
In tandem with heat-mitigating greenery, paths for biking, walking, and running made from porous material would help absorb water runoff caused by extreme weather events and climate change.
New York once pioneered greenway infrastructure. In 1868, the city of Brooklyn purchased land from Prospect Park to the Coney Island Boardwalk to build Ocean Parkway, designed by Central Park and Prospect Park architect Frederick Law Olmstead. In 1894 the pedestrian path was retrofitted for bicycle use just as cycling was becoming a popular form of transportation in the city. It is considered America’s oldest bike path.
Today, that five mile greenway is considered in poor condition.
While the RAISE funds will not go directly into laying paths or planting trees, it will be vital for planning the city's greenway efforts. The investment, for advocates like Young, is long overdue. When the city began developing its greenway network in 1993, the Harlem River waterfront was in fact part of the design. Yet thirty years later, the inaccessible industrial waterfront is not only an obstacle for greenway infrastructure but a reminder that communities in Harlem and the Bronx have long been forgotten when the city invests in recreation.
“Every New Yorker deserves access to open space, transportation options, and parks — and greenways are the key to making all that a reality,” Mayor Adams said in May when announcing the $47.6 million for greenway expansion. “This investment of more than $47 million will connect communities that have historically been underserved by our existing system to bike paths and New York’s 520 miles of shoreline, building a greener and more connected city for all.”
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by Dean Kopitsky, Gotham Gazette
@GothamGazette
'Mixed Signals': New York City's Precarious Economic Recovery
There has been a strong return to in-person entertainment in NYC (photo: Michael Appleton/Mayor's Office)
The New York City economy has rebounded significantly from the depths of the covid recession but volatile economic indicators have left the city in a precarious position.
As of June, New York City’s unemployment rate reached 6.2%, down from 10.5% in June 2021. The city gained 298,600 private sector jobs from June 2021 to June 2022, reaching 3,951,000 jobs, according to the New York State Department of Labor. Tourism to the city has bounced back significantly, though not fully to 2019 numbers.
But questions persist about recovering all of the jobs lost during the pandemic, depressed subway ridership and office occupancy, the challenges of record inflation and stagnant wages for many workers, the strange combination of low employment and a slowdown in economic growth, and more.
There are also widespread concerns that other than the significant changes of the work-from-home revolution, the city is largely reverting back toward a pre-pandemic economy, perhaps even with exacerbated inequities, in part the result of the bifurcated reality of which jobs can be done remotely.
The city economy is showing “mixed signals,” according to New York City Comptroller Brad Lander, during a recent appearance on Gotham Gazette’s Max Politics podcast.
While the comptroller’s latest Monthly Economic and Fiscal Outlook, released August 8, shows “really good business and job growth data,” inflation has continued and “is eating so badly into people’s paychecks,” Lander said during the podcast.
In June, consumer prices in the New York City area rose 6.7% from a year ago and about 22,000 private jobs were added, according to the comptroller’s office.
Rents across the city have skyrocketed, according to the monthly report, as median asking rent reached $3,500 in June, a 5% increase from May, and a nearly 35% increase from June of 2021. Apartment vacancy rates in the city are extremely low, especially so for those renting at $1,500 or below, according to a recent study from the city’s housing department.
On the positive side, not only are new businesses being opened across the boroughs, but new kinds of businesses are emerging. For a two-year stretch from late 2019 to late 2021, 2,285 establishments opened that did not fit an existing classification from the Bureau of Labor, according to the July comptroller’s office report.
“Hopefully we are going to see an era of new business generation, of creativity in technology, in healthcare, in a range of new fields,” Lander said on the podcast, referencing that new data point.
Still, inflation continues to threaten the economy’s well being, hitting New York City’s most vulnerable workers especially hard.
“If you’re a minimum wage worker, inflation has eroded your purchasing power,” Lander said. “That’s really hitting people in the pocketbook.”
Many of the 201,800 New York City jobs still lost since the start of the pandemic, as of the end of June, were in industries that “disproportionately employ Black and Latinx workers, women, young people, and those with a high school education (or less),” according to a new economic update from economists at The New School. Those industries include education, retail, and restaurant service. Unemployment rates among Black and Hispanic New Yorkers – 10.3% and 6.7% respectively – were significantly higher than the 3.1% unemployment rate of white workers, according to the city’s comptroller’s office.
“Slower economic growth could bake in the disproportionate impact of the pandemic for these workers, who already face discrimination in the labor market at large, like having a harder time getting hired or making equal pay to white, male counterparts with the same credentials,” says The New School’s August report, issued regularly from the team at the school’s Center for New York City Affairs.
The report explains why slower economic growth is expected to continue, and how the city should be responding to that and other challenges.
It noted that while there was substantial national growth in terms of consumer spending and jobs, inflation continues to be pervasive. Gross Domestic Product – the monetary value of all goods and services produced – declined for a second quarter in the April-June period.
There is a unique opportunity now to reimagine the city’s economy to better serve all New Yorkers, the report argues, echoing prior sentiments from the Center for New York City Affairs team as well as many other experts, advocates, and elected officials, including Mayor Eric Adams. But time is marching on and the recovery is unfolding.
“The possibilities for a continued, more equitable economic recovery for New Yorkers who have borne the brunt of the pandemic are emerging,” says the report, written by Lauren Melodia, Deputy Director of Economic and Fiscal Policies at the Center for New York City Affairs at The New School. “It is imperative that we work collaboratively and strategically to design active labor market policies and programs – from vocational training to networking to public works programs and wage subsidies – that can match dislocated workers and low-income households to these opportunities.”
The New School report cited two factors leading experts to anticipate continued slow economic growth: inflation increasing the prices of necessities and leaving people with less disposable income and the Federal Reserve’s policies to combat inflation, namely raising interest rates.
“The Fed’s goal is to curb inflation by slowing economic activity, but the pathway to lower prices via higher interest rates is through higher unemployment and a potential recession,” the August New School report states. “Raising interest rates raises the costs of new borrowing and discourages investment. That will have the effect of slowing the return of pandemic-affected jobs and other job growth.”
Because higher interest rates will lead to stagnant or increased unemployment, according to the report, household incomes will decline overall, contributing to lower demand for goods and services and lower prices.
“There’s good reason for anxiety that we’ll hit an economic downturn and that job growth will slow, and that has big impacts on the city’s tax base, on job creation, on home purchase,” Lander said on the podcast. “A lot of uncertainty we’re facing.”
Although the city’s 2022 fiscal year, which ended June 30 of this year, saw “very strong” tax revenue, Lander said the stock market drop of this calendar year will negatively affect New York City’s income and capital gains tax collections, which rely heavily on Wall Street firms and people’s earnings from stock investments. (Despite the unfavorable economic outlook, Lander assured that pensions are solid and the system is well funded - when pension fund returns are down, the city is forced to put more dollars into retiree payouts through the operating budget.)
“We did finish the year very strong, but here too there are really some dark clouds on the horizon,” he said. “I don’t foresee tax revenues continuing to be strong at anything like those levels in the years to come.”
Similarly, at the state level, the State Division of Budget recently released its first quarterly update on the fiscal year’s enacted budget financial plan. It reports favorable June economic results but those have been overshadowed by unfavorable adjusted projections going forward.
“I think we all have recognized that we are in a very volatile time,” New York State Comptroller Tom DiNapoli said during his own recent appearance on Max Politics. “I think the update reflects the fact that the economy certainly, broadly, nationally, is slowing. New York is going to be impacted by that.”
DiNapoli said taxpayer migration – most prevalent among upper-income New Yorkers – has not dramatically affected the state’s tax revenues because many who have moved out of the city have stayed within the state. However, he warned that any net migration among high-income taxpayers could negatively impact the city’s revenues generated by personal income taxes.
And DiNapoli again raised concerns about how many wealthier New Yorkers may have left the state altogether for lower-tax places, though he added that some may still be required to pay New York income taxes.
Meanwhile, The Center for New York City Affairs report laid out actionable policy ideas to protect New York City’s most vulnerable workers and revive the city’s economy.
“As underlying macroeconomic conditions become less favorable for growth, City and State government must now play a more active and expansive role in upgrading the skills of dislocated workers to prepare them for better jobs when economic growth resumes, and ensuring that community college enrollments rebound,” the report argues.
City, State, and non-profit partners should work together to ensure that the many billions of dollars coming from the federal government for manufacturing and renewable energy industries are translated into good jobs and job training for New Yorkers, the report continued.
At the federal level, the CHIPS and Science Act -- just passed by Congress and signed by President Joe Biden -- provides subsidies and tax credits to companies that manufacture semiconductor chips in the United States. New York is one of the largest semiconductor-producing states in the country, according to the report, and leaders are hoping to grow it significantly. In anticipation of the federal law championed by New York’s Chuck Schumer, the Senate majority leader, state leaders passed a champion bill to provide state subsidies to companies that bring semiconductor job growth to New York.
“New York agencies and workforce development organizations must work together to develop a strategy and set of guardrails that brings this [federal] money into the State as meaningful job growth and not simply as corporate tax breaks with no strings attached,” the New School report contends.
According to Governor Kathy Hochul, New York’s “Green CHIPS” law “will help New York capitalize on a historic opportunity to attract chip manufacturers to the state, generating at least $3 billion investment, creating 500 new jobs per project, and lowering greenhouse gas emissions related to chip production.” It also “positions New York State to greatly benefit from the federal CHIPS and Science Act to increase domestic semiconductor manufacturing” and “will help the State to conform to the requirements of the federal program, enhancing its competitiveness against other states looking to attract chip manufacturers, all while ensuring this expansion of advanced manufacturing is environmentally sustainable.”
The Inflation Reduction Act, just passed by both houses of Congress and headed to Biden’s desk, is set to funnel hundreds of billions of dollars into renewable energy across the country, including in New York.
“The manufacturing and construction jobs that could result have the potential to meet the needs of the same workers displaced by and disproportionately burdened by Covid job loss and job recovery,” the New School report says in reference to the Inflation Reduction Act. “New York agencies and workforce development organizations must now work together to push for passage of this bill, and design policies and programs that prepare workers and consumers to take full advantage of the jobs that will be in demand in the near future.”
Meanwhile, New York is also expected to see a major influx of federal funding toward infrastructure projects as a result of the prior Bipartisan Infrastructure Law.
***
Lindsay Shachnow, Gotham Gazette
@GothamGazette
‘I’m Not a Sidelines Person’: Elizabeth Holtzman Runs for Congress in the New NY-10
Elizabeth Holtzman (photo: Liz Holtzman for Congress)
Former Rep. Elizabeth Holtzman, the first and only woman ever elected Brooklyn District Attorney and New York City Comptroller, has ended her decades-long hiatus from political campaigns to run for Congress in the crowded field for the new 10th district.
“I said to myself, ‘I'm not a sidelines person — this country is in danger,” Holtzman said about why she joined the race during a recent appearance on the Max Politics podcast from Gotham Gazette. “And I have the background, the skills, the know-how, the guts to take these dangers on and try to defeat them.”
Holtzman, who was at 31 the youngest woman ever elected to Congress at the time when she first won in 1972, is campaigning alongside roughly a dozen candidates to represent a diverse set of neighborhoods in Lower Manhattan and Brooklyn.
The new 10th district, which has no incumbent running, includes the East and West Villages, Soho and Noho, the Lower East Side, Chinatown, Battery Park City, the Financial District, parts of Downtown Brooklyn, Gowanus, Park Slope, Red Hook, Sunset Park, Borough Park, and more.
It is among the congressional and state senate primaries that will conclude on August 23, with early voting preceding from August 13-21, as well as absentee balloting.
Holtzman represented parts of Brooklyn in Congress from 1973-1981, then won her race to become Brooklyn District Attorney, followed by Comptroller. She narrowly lost her 1992 bid to become New York’s first female U.S. Senator.
When asked by Gotham Gazette editor Ben Max about why she decided to run for Congress, Holtzman, who said she lives in the geographic center of the new 10th district, said the conservative majority of the Supreme Court is “trying to take our rights away,” former President Donald Trump is likely to run another campaign based on “fraud and deceit,” and “MAGA” Republicans are threatening the economy, climate, and more
Holtzman emphasized that she differentiates herself from the other contenders in having the background and courage to take them on.
Holtzman cited her experience as a member of Congress in the ‘70s, in which she helped pass a plethora of legislation and was one of the first members on the House Judiciary Committee to call for the impeachment of then-President Richard Nixon during the Watergate scandal.
“If we were in normal times, I wouldn’t be running for Congress now, I’d be on some kind of vacation,” Holtzman said. “But the fact of the matter is, I don’t want to look at myself in the mirror as we go downhill towards authoritarianism and worse, and say to myself ‘I did nothing about it.’”
Asked if there are lessons that the country learned during the Nixon era that have been forgotten today, Holtzman said that both Nixon and Trump were “out of control,” but noted that the U.S. Department of Justice through a special prosecutor investigated Nixon while there has been no such investigation of Trump beyond the Mueller report and now the special committee on the insurrection of January 6, 2021.
Holtzman said she is frustrated by the lack of action based on the evidence.
“The smoking gun tape came from a grand jury subpoena,” Holtzman said in reference to the indictment of Nixon. “Where are those subpoenas today? [U.S. Attorney General] Merrick Garland has to wake up.”
Speaking further about how she differentiates herself from her opponents, Holtzman said experience in Congress is not the same as her opponents who are in the City Council and State Legislature, an apparent reference to Rivera, Niou, and Simon. She added that Jones, without stating his name, is in his first term in Congress and does not represent the city, while she has a record of legislative accomplishments during her eight-year congressional career.
She cited a lawsuit to stop bombing in Cambodia, legislation to end Nixon’s State Secrets Protection Act, and successful efforts to uncover and oust Nazi war criminals in the United States.
If elected back to Congress, Holtzman said one of her top priorities would be to combat gun violence. She said she would support bans on assault weapons, large magazines, and excess handguns, noting how one of her first areas of focus as city comptroller was to hold gun manufacturers liable. Holtzman also said that she would call on state and federal governments, which she said buys billions of dollars in munitions, to pressure gun manufacturers to end the sale of assault weapons and illegal guns by halting their business.
“You just need someone who has that smart idea and says, ‘Let's do something about this,’” Holtzman said. “And so let's use our power, the leverage of all these purchases, to get gun manufacturers to change their behavior.”
Holzman added that another top priority would be affordable housing, and she pointed to helping finance tens of thousands of units using the city’s pension funds while serving as comptroller, and noted she hopes to secure funding to repair the existing housing stock and build additional affordable housing.
Holtzman also said she would work on issues related to the climate, mentioning rising sea levels and being a frequent kayaker. She said that she would try to make the president take action, as well as advocate for legislation to reduce subsidies for fossil fuel companies and investigate whether they are paying the federal government a fair share of royalties.
When asked about her view of national Democratic leadership and the Senate filibuster, Holtzman said Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer of New York, who was elected as her congressional successor in 1980, has been “trying to do a good job” in the Senate, and emphasized how he cannot end the filibuster or do much else without having the votes. She also said that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi is “a very effective, very savvy person” and lauded her leadership in helping pass the Affordable Care Act under then-President Barack Obama.
Holtzman also called President Joe Biden a “very decent” and “caring” person and noted how they both were elected to Congress at the same time. While she said Biden had saved the country from facism by defeating Donald Trump during the 2020 presidential election, she emphasized that he could have acted quicker on some issues since being elected, mentioning that the U.S. Supreme Court majority draft opinion overturning Roe v. Wade was leaked well prior to the decision coming down, giving him time to prepare more executive action than he appeared ready with.
“The president's got a lot on his mind,” Holtzman said. “He's got a war going on in Ukraine. He's got China breathing down his neck, and Taiwan, and he's got [Senator] Joe Manchin saying first he's going to help on some bills and then changing his mind. I mean, it's been tough.”
Asked about Biden and Schumer not at the time being able to get Manchin to a deal on major climate legislation, Holtzman said, “It's very easy to sit on the outside and poke holes in what people are doing, but you don't know all the offers that have been made —he’s a very slippery person,” Holtzman said of Manchin. “It seems to me, some people might even say, he's trying to get publicity every time he turns the president down.”
She said she was sure that Biden and Schumer were working on getting to a deal, and they were indeed, with a package soon announced on the Inflation Reduction Act, which incorporated big pieces of Biden’s much larger Build Back Better agenda.
Holtzman emphasized that the real problem in Congress is that Democratic voters did not deliver on electing lower ranking officials during the previous presidential election. “It's one thing to attack Biden, but if you really want to do something about it, elect more Democrats to office, make contributions,” she said, in something of a departure from some Democrats who criticize current leadership for not doing enough with what they have.
On her path to victory in the crowded field, Holtzman said “given the expected lower turnout in this district,” she “might be able to win just with the people who voted for me in the past.” While the district has several very high-voter turnout areas, the August primary, with many residents out of town, could see quite low participation.
Holtzman said she has been surprised and energized by the response of voters on the street, mentioning how “sometimes people even scream” when they meet her and lauding her endorsement from feminist icon Gloria Steinem. But Holzman said she needs to ensure that all residents in the district actually know that she is running.
She added that she needs to expand her base and make sure people know her record, pointing to having been the only district attorney in the country who called on the Supreme Court to ban racial discrimination in jury selection, as well as her efforts to deport Nazi war criminals from the United States, and fight the plan to build nine new municipal incinerators, which eventually led to the closure of all polluting incerators in the city.
“If people want someone who knows how to get things done, is prepared to stand up to no matter who, and is prepared to take on bad guys — that's me,” she said.
Asked about potentially blocking the ascension of someone from the next generation of Democratic progressives, Holtzman pushed back, asking “Why should they block me?” and saying that her opponents are blocking each other by running against one another. She emphasized that she is “bringing something different from all of them” in the race and that voters should have a choice, adding how the country is coming closer to facism and needs a leader who has experience.
“As soon as people see that I've got the energy and the guts, the intellectual ability and the physical ability to do this job, then they're not going to judge me on the basis of how many years pass by chronologically, how tall I am, how much I weigh, the color of my eyes,” said Holtzman, who is 81. “No, they're going to try to assess, am I someone who's going to fight for them? When the chips are down, am I going to fight for them? And is anyone going to buy me off or stop me from doing that? And am I going to fight for them, not just stand up and fight for them, but fight in a way that's going to produce results?”
Since Holtzman left elected office at the end of 1989, after losing her comptroller reelection bid amid a scandal, she said she has been practicing law and working on various commissions. She was appointed by then-President Bill Clinton to serve on a panel overseeing classified documents about Nazi war criminals, and she was asked more recently to serve on two panels about sexual assault in the military and other matters. Holtzman also mentioned that she served on the transition committees for New York Attorney General Letita James and former Brooklyn District Attorney Kenneth Thompson.
On local issues in the new 10th district, Holtzman said she will prioritize the cleanup of the Gowanus Canal, which is one of the most polluted areas in the country. She said she would meet with the community, environmentalists, and local activists to ensure the cleanup is thorough and environmentally friendly.
During the final speed round of questions, Holtzman said it is long overdue for the federal government to take over the Rikers Island jail complex, but said the new mayor and the New York City Department of Correction are trying to act in good faith.
“It's an emergency situation when people are dying unnecessarily, so I don't know what the city government is doing about it,” Holtzman said. “Maybe they ought to be taking some more action with the City Council and state government — where were they in all of this?”
On funding for much-needed New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA) repairs and upgrades and if there’s a strategy she favors to generate revenue for public housing that is not simply tens of billions of federal dollars in grants, Holtzman said it is important to examine how the current funding is being spent, especially when it comes to building maintenance. She said public housing used to be a “gem” not only in the city, but across the country, and the units have been neglected for too long. She did not offer support for any of the several strategies underway or proposed, or any other.
When asked about former Mayor Bill de Blasio’s unsuccessful congressional bid for the district, Holtzman declined to comment on his candidacy and said she wants to focus on the issues that need to be addressed in the neighborhoods. But she did reference the East Side Coastal Resiliency project passed by de Blasio and supported by Rivera. An initiative funded by the city and federal governments to reduce flood risk and improve resiliency along parts of the east side of Manhattan that includes major upheaval for East River Park, Holtzman indicated a lack of full familiarity but asked why so many trees had to be cut down.
Asked if she was under the impression the project could have been done without moving many trees, Holtzman said she is unsure, but if she was in Congress, she would deeply review the project if it involved cutting down 500 trees. “I'd look at it not once and twice, I'd look at it 100 times before I went ahead with something like that,” she said.
[LISTEN to the full conversation: Max Politics Podcast: Elizabeth Holtzman on Running for Congress in the New NY-10]
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