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Mark-Viverito Identifies Successor for Council Seat


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Melissa Mark-Viverito (photo: William Alatriste)


City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito has endorsed her Deputy Chief of Staff Diana Ayala to replace her in 2017 as the councilmember from District 8, which covers East Harlem and the South Bronx.

Mark-Viverito, who will be term-limited out of office next year, announced her support for Ayala in a Facebook post on July 3. “Thinking ahead has never been a fault of mine,” she wrote in her announcement. "And now is no different.” She stressed the importance of promoting women’s representation in the City Council, which currently has 14 women out of 51 council members, a fact she called “outrageous.”

Taking note of strong women who have helped her through her life and political career -- including her mother Elizabeth Viverito and East Harlem activist Gloria Quinones, among others -- Mark-Viverito threw her support behind Ayala, invoking a sense of duty on her part. “There are many qualified, committed women who can represent their districts with great integrity,” she wrote, “[and] it is incumbent on us to force that conversation. To encourage women to run.”

Ayala, a Puerto Rican-born New Yorker, has worked with Mark-Viverito for nearly 11 years, serving as her deputy chief of staff since March 2014 overseeing constituent and senior services. Before that, she was the program director at the Casita Maria Carver Senior Center for six years. She is a graduate of Herbert H. Lehman College at the City University of New York, where she studied sociology.

“Diana is a woman of integrity,” said Mark-Viverito in her post. “She is intelligent. She is thoughtful. She is steadfast. She is committed. She is a hard worker. She is a daughter, a wife, a mother [and] grandmother. Diana is a reflection of who I fight for each [and] every day [and] what motivates me to do what I do. There is no better person to represent this district.” The speaker also posted an invitation to Ayala’s first campaign fundraiser which will be held Thursday evening. The campaign has yet to raise any money.

“A tireless champion for her community, Diana has dedicated her entire professional career to helping New Yorkers and is a staunch advocate for families, a leading voice against gun violence and a fierce champion for New York City's aging population,” said Ayala’s campaign in a statement to Gotham Gazette. The campaign also mentioned a few of her priorities if she is elected to the Council, including investing in public housing, ensuring safety and affordability in her district, strengthening public schools and ensuring access to green spaces for all school children.

Currently, only one other candidate, Edward Gibbs, has declared a run for the District 8 seat and has raised $2,795 for the race since 2015. He made headlines back in 2010 when he ran for State Assembly from Harlem. Gibbs is a community activist and a reformed convict who served five-and-a-half years in prison for manslaughter before being released in 1991.

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by Samar Khurshid, senior reporter, Gotham Gazette
     

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Campaign Finance Board Rules In Mayor’s Favor While Criticizing Him


 Campaign Finance Board RUles

(Credit: Rob Bennett/Mayoral Photography Office)


The New York City Campaign Finance Board sent a somewhat mixed message to Mayor Bill de Blasio on Tuesday over the nonprofit group set up by his allies to promote his progressive policies.

At a public meeting in Downtown Manhattan, the CFB issued a determination that de Blasio’s fundraising for the Campaign for One New York, a group established to promote universal pre-kindergarten, was not connected to the mayor’s 2017 re-election campaign and therefore did not violate campaign finance rules. The ruling resolved both a CFB investigation and a Feb 22 complaint by Common Cause New York, a government reform group, that alleged the mayor may have violated campaign finance law by soliciting donations for his nonprofit group and then transferring some of those funds to another nonprofit, United for Affordable NYC.

“The Campaign for One New York was formed to advocate for New York City’s progressive policy agenda,” said spokesperson Dan Levitan, in an email. “It never engaged in any election campaign activity for any candidate and shut down more than a year and a half before next year’s election. We are pleased with today’s CFB decision.”

But even as the Board absolved the mayor’s campaign, it criticized the mayor’s fundraising through the nonprofit, which they said “plainly raises serious policy and perception issues” and shows the limits of the city’s Campaign Finance Act.

CFB Chair Rose Gill Hearn stated that the board would continue to closely monitor the mayor’s campaign to ensure compliance with the law. “To the extent that tangible goods, services, or work product from the Campaign for One New York may be made available to the 2017 campaign, the Board does not consider this matter closed,” she said.

Hearn stressed that more than 95 percent of the funds received by the Campaign for One New York would have been illegal contributions if they were made to a candidate since they largely exceeded contribution limits and included contributions from corporations, Limited Liability Companies and people with business before the city. She also pointed out that the city’s campaign finance system, with its public matching funds program and contribution limits, helps candidates run for election without the backing of wealthy special interests. “New York City’s system depends on reasonable contribution limits that reduce the appearance that influence can be bought or sold through campaign contributions,” she said. “It defies common sense that limits that work so well during the campaign should be set aside once the candidate has assumed elected office.”

The CFB also issued an accompanying advisory opinion relating to candidates’ cooperation with issue-advocacy organizations. The Board put forward seven criteria for determining if expenditures by such a group are connected to an election, most importantly the timing of expenditures. Any coordinated expenditures after Jan 1 in an election year, they said, would be presumed to have been made in connection with the election and would be subject to campaign finance rules and regulations.

Government reform advocates were disappointed with the CFB’s determination, which they saw as a narrow interpretation of the city’s campaign finance law. “The onus is now on the city council to close this gap and on the mayor to sign a bill if it’s passed,” said Susan Lerner, executive director of Common Cause New York, after the meeting, referring to the apparent loophole that allows elected officials to raise unlimited funds for an issue-advocacy organization as long as it doesn’t promote their campaign.

Criticizing the mayor, she told reporters, “If you’re gonna be the champion of the little guy and run as he did, to his credit, with the largest proportion of small dollar contributions of any of the candidates, then stick with that. Stick with the people. Don’t even give the appearance that you’re selling out to large unions, large real estate developers who are cutting you $250,000, $350,000 checks.”

Dick Dadey, executive director of Citizens Union, said the CFB “clearly felt constrained by the law” and he put forth a proposal for new legislation that would create stronger regulations for nonprofits affiliated with or created by elected officials. Under the legislation, such groups would have to register with the Campaign Finance Board, would have limits on contributions from people who have business with the city and would be required to disclose all donations and expenditures, similar to the CFB’s regulations for transition and inauguration committees for elected officials.

“We saw with the activities of the Campaign for One New York, the re-emergence of a pay-to-play culture that would breed corruption in the city of New York if it is not stopped,” Dadey said.

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by Samar Khurshid, senior reporter, Gotham Gazette
     

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De Blasio and The Complications of Vetting Campaign Donors


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Mayor de Blasio, 2014 (photo: Rob Bennett/Mayor's Office) 


In the early stages of Mayor Bill de Blasio’s run for office in 2013, thousands of small donations flooded in but big donors were rare. “I will admit to you there was a time early in the mayoral campaign when a maximum donation was a very unusual thing in our campaign, so it certainly got attention then,” the mayor said, at a June 15 news conference.

As the situation changed and bigger donations became more “typical,” the mayor said his campaign was careful about vetting big donors. His instructions were “to look carefully at every donation, and there was a thorough vetting process, and whenever there was a feeling on behalf of the lawyers and others who looked at it that a donation did not make sense to accept, it was returned,” he said.

Even then, however, questionable donors, some of whom may have flouted the rules, slipped through the cracks.There were the two businessmen, Jona Rechnitz and Jeremy Reichberg, who donated and raised large sums of money for the mayor and are now at the center of a federal investigation into the bribery of top NYPD officers. Just last month, Reichberg and three high-ranking police officers were arrested in connection with the case.

In a June 10 radio interview with WNYC’s Brian Lehrer, when asked about Rechnitz, the mayor said, “We try to vet things very, very carefully but even with careful vetting you can’t always pick up what someone’s intentions are.” Earlier, in April, a spokesperson for the mayor’s 2013 campaign said that they would return the $9,900 donated by Rechnitz and his wife. Following that, in May, DNAinfo found cases of possible straw donations -- in which a person illegally contributes another individual’s money under their own name -- made to the mayor in 2013, which prompted the mayor’s campaign to refund $32,200 to seven donors. Individuals can donate a maximum of $4,950 to a citywide candidate in an election and can only donate from personal funds.

Experts agree that the size and volume of donations in most modern day elections makes donor vetting a daunting but necessary task. It’ll be particularly important for de Blasio as his 2017 re-election operation ramps up amid scrutiny at multiple levels around his fundraising practices, which originally stemmed from the probe into the NYPD and expanded to include allegations of pay-to-play relationships with top donors.

At the June 15 conference, de Blasio also told reporters that his lawyers have clear instructions for campaign staff ahead of 2017 and “the bottom-line, which I’m certainly aware of, is vet before you deposit,” he said. “So a check can come in, and you have no idea it’s coming in. It can come in the mail, it can come in at an event, but you have to vet it before depositing and be very careful and make sure that everything is proper.”

That’s a rule that former political consultant Cynthia Darrison lived by. Darrison, who now teaches campaign fundraising at New York University, has worked for campaigns at the city, state and federal level. “If we got a check from someone we don’t know, we wanted to know - why is this person giving to us? Who is this person?,” said Darrison, in a phone interview, referring to her time working for late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s campaign. “My basic motto is: paranoia is usually good and warranted,” she added.

She pointed out some clear red flags that campaigns should look for to avoid what she calls “dicey spicy” contributions. For instance, when a campaign receives sequential money orders at a fundraiser, in multiples of the admission price.

She laid out the dos and don’ts of fundraising. The first step is a simple online search of the donor to check for any possible news stories or negative headlines. Another resource, she said, is LexisNexis, a massive online database for public records often used by journalists and legal researchers. For citywide candidates, she collected employee and employer information and ran names against the city’s vendor tracking system, VENDEX, and against the Doing Business Database which lists companies and individuals with business before the city. She also checked for any possible investigations of a donor by the Department of Investigation. Online contributions are trickier, however, since they’re automatically accepted and deposited. “You still need to vet them and refund if necessary,” she said.

Daniel Bright, a lawyer who worked for President Obama’s New York campaign in 2008, doesn’t think there’s any one standard practice for vetting donors. “It’s almost impossible to have a foolproof system,” he said, especially considering some campaigns, like de Blasio’s, can get thousands of donations. “When you run for citywide office, lots of people come to fundraisers and you don’t know who they are,” he said. “I don’t really know how you could vet everybody who writes you a check…. Everyone wants to be friends with the mayor and other public elected officials.”

He said campaigns should be wary of suspicious behavior and patterns that suggest impropriety, such as the same handwriting on multiple checks. “One obvious flag is large checks from people with jobs who don’t usually write large checks,” he said. Darrison raised the same concern. “If you see that they’re a factory worker or a beautician and they’re giving a $10,000 donation, you have to wonder, what’s going on here?” she said, “Is this credible?” This was apparent in the donations exposed by DNAinfo, where they found that two commercial drivers who were employed by a wholesaler donated about $10,000 each to Mayor de Blasio’s campaign and transition team.

It’s unclear whether the mayor has dedicated more resources to vetting donations for his 2017 campaign. Multiple requests for comment to a campaign spokesperson went unanswered. Last week, the mayor’s senior advisor Phil Walzak, appearing on NY1, gave host Errol Louis a sense of the process. Walzak said, “We look at people. We look at their backgrounds. We look at the public documents and records that’s available about someone’s past and we try as hard as we can to intercept any potential problem at its core. If there are circumstances where someone may have gotten through the screen, we move swiftly to repair that.”

Costas Panagopoulos, director of the Center for Electoral Politics and Democracy at Fordham University, said, “My sense is that campaigns take the money first and then ask questions later. There’s no specific vetting process that happens systematically in most campaigns and if campaigns discover that a donor is problematic or a contribution is problematic for any reason they’ll usually send it back.” He also stressed that campaigns have to work quickly to raise significant sums of money in a short period of time, making it difficult to vet every contribution. Sometimes, he said, the monitoring happens “after the fact, after they’ve already accepted the contributions.”

Often, that monitoring is done by the media or by political opponents, said Bright. He said contributions are usually returned either in response to a news article or revealed through opposition research done by the person running against a candidate. “That’s a standard practice,” he added.

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by Samar Khurshid, senior reporter, Gotham Gazette
     

Read more by this writer.



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