De Blasio & Oddo on Staten Island (photo: Michael Appleton/Mayor's Office)
As Mayor Bill de Blasio’s week on Staten Island neared a close Thursday evening, City Council Member Debi Rose told a north shore town hall audience that “Staten Island can no longer use the moniker that we are ‘The Forgotten Borough.’” In opening remarks before introducing de Blasio at I.S. 27, Rose said that the mayor’s attention to the borough had negated that longtime, self-given nickname of neglect.
From Monday through Friday, de Blasio and his top aides are working out of Staten Island borough hall and holding events around the island, in what is the first of five such weeks in the mayor’s new “City Hall in Your Borough” initiative.
The week has included announcements of an expansion of neighborhood policing on the south shore; the proliferation of an electronics recycling pilot program that started mid-Island; and increased boarding options for the Staten Island Ferry. De Blasio held constituent office hours, participated in evening road repaving, visited a senior center, talked with a local family about their water bill, celebrated Passover at a synagogue, visited several top borough restaurants, and took in a concert.
“The mayor has shared our concerns and interests,” Rose said, calling de Blasio “responsive” and noting that people are apt to criticize but don’t give credit enough. Rose listed major concerns for her constituents: education, transportation, traffic, safety, recreation facilities, job creation, protecting the environment, and managing development and growth while maintaining Staten Island character -- most of which came up in the two-plus hours that de Blasio took more than 50 audience questions at Thursday’s town hall.
Rose, a Democrat, spoke just after Borough President James Oddo, a Republican, and state Senator Diane Savino, a member of the Independent Democratic Conference, who both stressed that Staten Islanders focus less on political party and more on getting things done. Oddo and de Blasio share a particularly close relationship going back to their days on the City Council, and they have appeared at a number of events together during the week. In his opening remarks the borough president briefly recounted how productive a week it has been and his appreciation that de Blasio immersed city government in Staten Island issues for the five days.
When he took the microphone, de Blasio noted his positive relationships with the borough’s elected officials and touted reductions in crime on Staten Island, thanking the NYPD, as well as a drop in traffic fatalities this year compared to the same period last year. He announced that a new Staten Island Ferry boat would be named after Sandy Ground, which was an African-American settlement dating back to the 1830s and a stop on the Underground Railroad. The mayor explained that his administration recently announced a new plan to combat the opioid epidemic and his ongoing focus on repaving streets, two very different but particular concerns for Staten Islanders.
Over the course of the town hall, de Blasio took a few general questions about city policy, but largely heard constituents’ local, specific concerns, from problems at a nearby elementary school to development along the north shore, a lack of transportation options, and police-community relations. He heard from constituents of diverse backgrounds and of all ages, including a high school student worried about protections for LGBT students and an elderly woman concerned about broken sidewalks.
The mayor, who at times was short and cranky with audience members who he wanted to ask their questions more quickly, gave frank answers, even when he disagreed with the questioner, and often called over different commissioners, NYPD representatives, and other aides to give more detailed answers after his general one. It was a similar scene to the dozens of prior town halls de Blasio has held all over the city during the past year and a half.
Thursday’s was de Blasio’s second Staten Island town hall -- he previously held one mid-Island with Republican Council Member Steven Matteo. De Blasio has promised to hold a town hall in all 51 City Council districts, leaving him one more on Staten Island, that of Republican Joe Borelli, who appeared with the mayor for the policing announcement on Monday.
Two themes among the wide variety of questions Thursday night were opportunity for community youth and development along the north shore. There were also a number of education and school-related questions. “[T]he youth, give them something to do,” one attendee said to de Blasio, and was met with applause from the audience. “I share that view so much so that...every middle school kid has free after-school,” de Blasio responded, touting one of his key education investments, though he told the audience that not enough families are taking advantage of the program.
“I can’t make a commitment to you tonight,” de Blasio said about a new community center for youth. “We’re making a benefit available exactly for that reason,” he added regarding young people not having enough to do. The mayor mentioned tutoring, homework help, recreation, and enrichment, but he encouraged audience members to spread the word about the program.
The north shore of Staten Island is home to much development -- as de Blasio decamped on borough hall, he was a stone's throw from ongoing construction of a new outlet mall, one of several changes that will remake the area. De Blasio insisted that the city will hold developers to their commitments and also previewed a rezoning of part of the north shore district that Rose represents, explaining that a ”rezoning offers the opportunity for a massive infusion of resources into a community,” including the types of amenities that some town hall participants were asking for, such as a new community center. He referenced the only community rezoning that has occurred during his administration, that of part of East New York, Brooklyn. It was not clear if the mayor was able to assuage the concerns of those who worry about new development and the loss of community "character."
Multiple attendees asked de Blasio about policing or police-community relations and de Blasio gave similar answers each time: explaining that he has worked to improve those relations through the implementation of the neighborhood policing model while also reaffirming his commitment to "quality-of-life policing," which is also known as Broken Windows policing, though the mayor rarely uses that term unprovoked. He stressed that crime is down while arrests and negative interactions between officers and New Yorkers are also down.
One constituent asked de Blasio what, if re-elected, his top three second-term priorities for Staten Island would be. De Blasio declined to make the answer local, instead explaining his goals for the city: continuing to drive crime down and improve police-community relations; improving schools through his “Equity and Excellence” agenda; and making the city more affordable though more rent-regulated housing and better-paying jobs.
The mayor will conclude his five days on Staten Island Friday with one public event: a tour of the community center at Mariner’s Harbor Houses, a NYCHA property, where he will also "make an announcement about the Cornerstone Program," according to his public schedule. Prior to that, he'll make his weekly appearance on WNYC radio's The Brian Lehrer Show, as he did his Monday evening spot on NY1's Road to City Hall television program.
Still, de Blasio has been very limited in dealing the media this week. The mayor took press questions at his Monday mid-day event in conjunction with his policing announcement on the south shore, but held no other question-and-answer session with reporters all week. He held several events open to the press, but did not allow questions, ignoring any that were asked by members of the media who attended.
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by Ben Max, Gotham Gazette
@tweetBenMax @GothamGazette
Albanese, Carrion & de Blasio in 2013 (screenshot of NYTrue.com video from 2013 forum)
In 2013, when the mayoralty was up for grabs after three Michael Bloomberg terms, a large field of candidates vied for the top job running New York City. Candidates on both sides of the aisle engaged in an exhaustive schedule of debates and forums, crisscrossing the city to speak in front of a wide variety of civic, advocacy, and interest groups. They spoke in front of senior citizens, food policy wonks, animal rights activists, NYCHA residents, college students, members of block associations, political clubs, houses of worship, and many other concerned New Yorkers.
There were also the mandated, formal, televised debates run through the city’s Campaign Finance Board, open to qualifying candidates only.
On the Democratic side, a number of strong contenders emerged, including prominent citywide elected officials. It was an expectedly competitive race, with the candidates speaking about their policy platforms and priorities day after day, night after night. Christine Quinn, Bill Thompson, John Liu, Anthony Weiner, and Bill de Blasio headlined a deep field full of personalities, rivalries, and ambition.
Fast forward four years to the 2017 election, however, and there is little competition for Mayor Bill de Blasio, making for a more quiet candidate forum circuit and a Democratic debate stage that is sparsely populated, if there even are formal, CFB-sanctioned primary debates.
De Blasio is riding high on his signature accomplishments and strong support from his progressive base, having avoided any legal repercussions from dual investigations into his fundraising activities that recently closed down. Several potential Democratic opponents, who might have posed a strong challenge had the mayor or any of his aides faced corruption charges, have opted not to jump into the race, nearly clearing the field for the mayor’s reelection.
On the Democratic side, a few longshot candidates are making a go of it, but they will have to meet strict thresholds in fundraising, and to an extent name recognition, if they hope to meet de Blasio in formal, primetime primary debates. Whether the mayor participates in any forums put on by advocacy groups is to be seen, but unlikely given his comfortable status as the incumbent frontrunner.
The Campaign Finance Board sponsors two debates in each primary and the general election for mayor, and candidates who participate in the city’s public matching funds program are required to participate. That includes de Blasio, who has stressed his participation in the public matching funds system and is relying on it to fund his campaign, which has received significant small-dollar donations that get matched six-to-one by the city. Primary day itself is Tuesday, September 12. Based on the 2013 schedule, the first debate is likely to be scheduled in late August and the second one in early September.
To be included in the first primary debate, candidates must meet a minimum financial threshold in the latest filing prior to the debate, as well as additional criteria decided by the CFB and the sponsors of the debate, such as a minimum polling average. The criteria must be “nonpartisan, objective, and non-discriminatory,” according to the CFB’s 2017 debate law summary.
For this year’s race, participating candidates have to raise and spend 2.5 percent of the spending limit for the office, which makes the threshold $174,225 for mayoral candidates against the spending limit of $6,969,000 for the primary election. Candidates also cannot claim outstanding liabilities or loans against the threshold, a rule that was established after Jay Golub, a candidate for public advocate in 2005, used a loophole to qualify for the debates by personally lending his campaign the necessary funds.
In both the primary and general elections, the first debate is followed by the second “leading contender” debate, for which candidates must again meet the minimum financial threshold and other additional criteria, which could possibly include a higher financial threshold and higher polling averages, as determined by the CFB and sponsors.
In 2013, the financial threshold for the first debate was far lower -- only $50,000 raised and spent by a mayoral candidate -- and candidates also had to hit 2 percent in polls conducted by the Marist Institute for Public Opinion or by Quinnipiac University. For the second debate, “leading contenders” had to have either spent and raised $250,000 or just raised $1,285,200, while getting 7 percent of the vote in either poll.
Mayor de Blasio has not seemed particularly worried about debating his opponents and senior campaign advisor Phil Walzak has even indicated that forums held in the run-up to the election will be favorable to the mayor. The mayor’s four Democratic primary competitors are State Senator Tony Avella of Queens; former City Council Member from Brooklyn Sal Albanese; Robert Gangi, a long-time police reform activist; and Kevin Coenen, a retired FDNY lieutenant.
At a news conference in late-December, when Gotham Gazette asked the mayor if he’d be willing to participate in more than the two mandatory CFB debates, he responded, “Speculative. Obviously, we’ll do the two for sure. I’m going to be participating in the campaign finance program. We’ll see as we get closer. It’s a long way off.”
Walzak, appearing on City & State’s Slant podcast in March, said that besides the required debates, de Blasio has been doing government town halls in reaching out to voters. “On the city side, you know for the past year and a half the mayor’s actually had a pretty robust town hall outfit,” said Walzak, who was de Blasio’s communications aide during his 2013 campaign, then served multiple roles at City Hall before moving to the 2017 campaign last year. “They’ve done I think one or two a month for about a year and a half, and that’s been very successful. We will do some level of the other kinds of forums that we talked about...what that looks like I’m not sure yet.”
He said the forums were a “very valuable tool to talk to people directly,” while also receiving media coverage. “So that is an opportunity to talk to a lot of people in a kind of unvarnished way so we’ll do something with that,” he added. “What that looks like precisely we’re still gonna hammer that out but we’ll have some component like that.”
For de Blasio’s opponents, those forums may be a lifeline for their campaigns as getting in the debates will likely be challenging. De Blasio has raised more than $3.7 million and spent $1.4 million for his reelection already, while his Democratic challengers are far behind in the money race.
Avella, a conservative Democrat from Queens, stands a better chance of raising the necessary funds and garnering the name recognition needed for the debates, given his status as a current elected official. However, he has only raised $34,854 and spent $3,005 as of the mid-March campaign finance filing. In a Quinnipiac Poll from February 28, he received 2 percent of the vote in a Democratic primary that included de Blasio, Comptroller Scott Stringer, Bronx Borough President Ruben Diaz Jr., and former City Council Speaker Christine Quinn. Avella’s campaign did not respond to requests for comment for this article. None of the potential challengers in the poll are likely to jump into the race at this point, given the results of the investigations into de Blasio and his associates.
Albanese, who ran for mayor in 2013 as well as in 1997, isn’t worried about reaching the financial threshold for the debates, although he was critical that there is such a threshold at all. “It’s a reasonable amount of money,” he said in a phone interview. Albanese raised about $56,586 and spent $2,658 of it as of mid-March. “If you’re running for mayor, you’ve gotta demonstrate financial support and donor support.”
Albanese is more worried that the required spending would put a too-early dent in his campaign coffers. “You should be husbanding money towards the end,” he said. “The [requirements], I don’t think they’re fair.” He insisted that instead of the two-tier litmus test of campaign funds and polling numbers, the only threshold should be 1,000 donors for a campaign. “If you have a thousand donors, you should be included in the debate. End of story,” he said. “It really goes to the core of campaign finance reform, showing grassroots support.” Albanese is participating in the public funds program and has made campaign finance reform a key platform issue.
Debate thresholds are also a particularly sore point for Albanese, since he wasn’t allowed to participate in the second primary debate in 2013 after falling short in raising funds. “I would like to see the process opened up,” he said, insisting that the mayor should actually welcome more competitors on the stage since it would help him. “A crowded debate stage dilutes the ability of the main challenger to make their case against the incumbent,” Albanese said.
Kevin Coenen, the retired FDNY lieutenant, said the CFB’s threshold is “good in some ways and it’s bad in others.” The threshold was necessary, he said, to weed out the less-serious candidates who enter the race. “I don’t know if $175,000 is appropriate but there’s a need to limit candidates,” he said. Coenen has only raised $2,100 so far but was confident that he would have enough to be invited to the debate. Currently, he’s more focused on getting enough signatures to be on the ballot.
The latest entrant in the Democratic race is Gangi, who officially launched his “grassroots campaign” on Wednesday, April 5, outside 1 Police Plaza. A veteran reform advocate but first-time candidate, Gangi was unaware of the financial threshold until Gotham Gazette asked if he’d be able to meet it. He laughed with incredulity when posed with the question, given the numbers involved, and took it as a challenge to his longshot candidacy. “Oh I love it,” he said.
“I didn’t know about that but hopefully that can help us raise money,” he added. On Friday, Gangi’s campaign sent out its first fundraising appeal, using the debate threshold of $175,000 as a target. “That's not much money by the standards of mainstream candidates like Bill de Blasio who has all too easy access to wealthy donors,” the email blast reads. “It is a high bar for us, but one that I'm certain we can reach with the support of regular NYers from across the city who want to help advance our campaign's vision of a more fair, safe, affordable and inclusive town for all people.”
Gangi’s nascent campaign has not posted any fundraising numbers with the Campaign Finance Board, but he said Wednesday that he had raised about $46,000 already.
In a follow up phone call, Gangi admitted that the CFB’s criteria are “daunting” for small campaigns like the one he is running, which currently has two undergraduate students from Hunter College working part-time as campaign coordinators and the candidate himself as campaign manager. “Some of these criteria are favorable to incumbents and candidates connected to well-to-do people,” he said.
But, he is inspired to hit the mark, insisting that if he doesn’t meet the threshold for the debates, he may just resort to debating a “Red Sox hat on a stick,” an apparent reference to de Blasio’s support for his hometown’s, Boston-based baseball team. “We’re not gonna be deterred by whatever characteristics of our campaign are seen conventionally as disadvantages,” Gangi said.
The CFB plans to announce the sponsors for their sanctioned debates in June. In the meantime, candidate forums have already begun taking place, though Mayor de Blasio has not participated in any, yet.
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by Samar Khurshid, senior reporter, Gotham Gazette
@samarkhurshid @GothamGazette
Mayor de Blasio (photo: Edwin J. Torres/ Mayor's Office)
Although it was recently announced that Mayor Bill de Blasio and his aides would not be charged in two separate investigations related to their fundraising activities, both cases prompted widespread calls for reform of campaign finance laws and closure of holes that allow, even encourage, a pay-to-play political culture.
The two parallel investigations, at the state and federal levels, exposed vulnerabilities in the law that allowed the mayor and his associates to skirt contribution limits that would have otherwise applied to their activities, both at the city and state levels.
In the federal case looking at city-level behavior, the mayor and his team raised unlimited donations, in support of his political agenda, from people who do business with the city. These donations would have been capped had they been made to the mayor’s campaign, but they instead went to a nonprofit the mayor’s allies established soon after his election.
In the state-level investigation, Manhattan District Attorney prosecutors looked into how the mayor and his allies directed donations to Democratic state Senate candidates, using county committees to avoid state election law contribution limits.
The response to these investigations, which both ended without criminal charges but widespread opinion that the mayor and his allies had blurred or crossed ethical lines, has been remarkably different on the city and state levels.
The federal investigation into the Campaign for One New York, the mayor’s now-defunct nonprofit that was the mechanism of unlimited fundraising and spending, led to local reforms late last year. The City Council passed and the mayor signed legislation that regulates the activities of nonprofits set up by elected officials or their allies, such as CONY. The new law places the same restrictions on such groups as those imposed by the city campaign finance law on election campaigns, including a $400 limit on donations from entities with city business.
In essence, the legislation prevents anything like the Campaign for One New York from operating ever again.
[Related: City Council Rushes Through Campaign Finance Bills]
At the state level, however, there has been no movement on tightening the loophole that allowed the mayor and his team to funnel donations to individual candidates, a practice that Manhattan D.A. Cyrus Vance criticized even as he announced the closure of his investigation.
Vance said in his letter to state Board of Elections enforcement counsel Risa Sugarman, who had originally referred the case his way for a criminal investigation, that the BOE could still take civil or regulatory action, that the BOE should issue advisories to define which activities are permissible. Vance also wrote that “legislation may be necessary to clarify the Election Law and to prevent any workarounds that might undermine the purpose of the contribution limits.”
That sentiment is hardly new. Good government advocates have for years been calling on the state Legislature and Governor to modernize New York’s election laws, with contribution limits being an important aspect of that conversation.
“The election law is riddled with loopholes that allowed the mayor to engage in this level of activity that violates the spirit of the law,” said Dick Dadey, executive director of Citizens Union, a government reform organization. “It’s been done by people before but he really pushed the envelope on this in a way that others have not.”
As Dadey pointed out, the mayor’s mechanism was not new. Even Laurence Laufer, the lawyer who helped the mayor’s team in directing the state Senate donations, said as much last year in a letter to BOE’s Sugarman about her prosecution referral. (A confidential memo sent by Sugarman had leaked to the press, bringing the investigation into the public eye.)
“There is nothing novel about the 2014 Democratic Party campaign to elect Democratic candidates to the State Senate, other than your attempt to selectively criminalize it,” Laufer wrote to Sugarman, referencing instances of similar contributions made through county committees in the past, including by former Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who contributed a large amount of money to help keep the Senate in Republican hands.
“[The mayor] still was within the law according to the district attorney, but the law is porous and provides too much opportunity for mischief and collusion,” said Dadey of Citizens Union. “So there needs to be some updating of the laws to reflect this activity that should not be permitted.”
As Vance’s investigation documented, the mayor’s team funnelled massive amounts of money through county committees to candidate committees. Candidate committees can only receive up to $10,300 from individuals, unions and LLCs. County committees on the other hand can receive maximum individual contributions of $102,300. The mayor’s team solicited and directed funds to mutilple county committees, which are allowed to make unlimited contributions to candidate committees.
In one such case, in October 2014, the Ulster County Democratic Committee received $364,000 in four contributions. The most contributions the committee had received in the previous five years was in 2009, and only about $50,000. The UCDC then transferred $330,000, within a matter of days, to a committee associated with Cecilia Tkaczyk, a Democrat. The committee paid $320,000 to AKPD, a political consulting firm that has close ties to de Blasio.
Common Cause, another good government group, similarly called for reforms after federal and state prosecutors announced their decisions to not bring charges in the de Blasio investigations. "As the U.S. Attorney and the Manhattan D.A. have found, New York State's election law is deliberately vague and prone to conflicting interpretations,” said Susan Lerner, executive director of the group, in a statement. “That's why Common Cause/NY has consistently advocated for many of the recommendations that the D.A. has made, including clarification of the law itself. Strict guidance is necessary to improve our civic life so that no one, least of all the public or elected officials, should have to parse the difference between ethical and legal.”
Election lawyers also agree that it is high time the state government updates laws that have remained stagnant for decades. “I think there’s a lot of room for improvement there,” said Sarah Steiner, an election attorney. “The election law is a collection of old statutory plans and cobbled-together changes over the last 30 years or so. It needs to be updated in so many ways including this,” she added, referring to the county committee loophole that de Blasio’s team exploited.
Questions about the election law and monetary contributions to political committees and campaigns are part of the larger discussion that has sort-of been happening in Albany for a number of years, with little to show for it. This debate includes the call to close the infamous LLC loophole, which allows virtually unlimited donations to candidate campaigns, and the possibility of instituting strict doing-business limits on donations, or even a public campaign financing system, akin to what New York City has. There has been limited appetite for such reforms, especially from Senate Republicans, while Governor Andrew Cuomo remains the biggest beneficiary of the LLC loophole despite calling for its closure.
This year, the governor announced a fresh push for government and ethics reform -- an agenda that includes campaign finance reform -- but his proposals failed to gain traction in budget negotiations and he did little to put his weight behind them.
[Related: For Cuomo, Ethics Reform Forgotten as Budget Lurches]
Jerry Goldfeder, another election attorney, said the need for campaign finance reform is perennial. “The state ought to create a public matching funds program like we have in New York City in order to reduce the role of money in elections,” he said, echoing the sentiment of many reformers who believe the state would be better off adopting the city’s program, which incentivizes small-dollar donations by matching them with public funds. The program, considered a national model, tends to level the playing field, especially for first-time candidates who may not necessarily be able to muster the larger campaign donations incumbents can.
New York City also has strict doing-business donation limits, which de Blasio went around through the Campaign for One New York, and term limits for elected officials, which do not exist on the state level.
City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito and other Council members have been praised by reformers for moving on the legislation to limit groups like Campaign for One New York, though few spoke up while the nonprofit was in the midst of its work. Still, the reforms are now on the books for good, save some kind of rollback by future lawmakers, which would undoubtedly be a politically unpopular move.
The state is another story. Steiner isn’t optimistic that the Legislature will act on contribution limits, or even on a broad range of common-sense electoral reforms that have been proposed in the last few months by Gov. Cuomo and Attorney General Eric Schneiderman.
“I think the chances that the Legislature will work together in order to get to an improvement on [election laws] are minimal at best,” she said.
She later added, “What’s happening is very little, if anything.”
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by Samar Khurshid, senior reporter, Gotham Gazette
@samarkhurshid @GothamGazette