The federal government shutdown could delay aid to New Yorkers still struggling after Hurricane Sandy. Nearly a year after the storm hit the city, Mayor Michael Bloomberg called on Congress to end the stalemate that has curbed federal government services, saying that critically needed block grants to communities affected by the storm could be delayed. "If, for example, you're a business owner in the Rockaways, this could mean a longer wait time to get grants and loans," he said in his weekly radio address. Critical infrastructure projects to make the city more resilient to storms could also be slowed.

Mayoral candidates Joe Lhota and Bill de Blasio agreed in interviews with NY1 that the shutdown was putting in peril much-needed storm aid to the city. "What has gone on in Washington is outrageous," said Lhota, a Republican who disagrees with his national colleagues but has battled to get that message across.

Other Stories We're Following

Some Hospitals Unavailable On State Health Exchange (WNYC)

New Casinos Could Contribute To Problem Gambling: Study (Albany Times Union)

Consumer Affairs Hired More Inspectors Instead Of Cutting Costs (NY Post)

Cuomo Freezes New Contracts Involving Jewish Organization (Daily News)

Atty Gen Demands Records Behind Sale Of WTC Naming Rights (NY Post)

Dogs Can Be Considered Weapons, Authorities Say (NY Times)

GothamVotes: Campaign Trails Weekend Update

Republican GOP mayoral candidate Joe Lhota battles "spillover effect" from Republican-led shutdown of federal government. (Newsday)

Lhota's plan for downsizing government. (Crain's New York)

Over the weekend, Democratic mayoral candidate Bill de Blasio labeled himself first as a "fiscal conservative" and then as a "fiscally responsible progressive." "I am a progressive, I am an activist, I’m also fiscally cautious,” de Blasio said. (The New York Post)

Business and real estate interests foresee battle with de Blasio over living wage. (Wall Street Journal)

De Blasio's fundraising soars. (The New York Times)

De Blasio and Lhota celebrated the Rev. Al Sharpton's 59th birthday with him at his organization's headquarters in Harlem on Saturday. De Blasio got a standing ovation; Lhota did not. (The Daily News)

Assemblyman Micah Kellner, who lost the Democratic primary for the 5th City Council District, filed papers indicating he intended to run in the general election on the Working Families Party line. (Politicker)

De Blasio's victory is "a reminder that through some inexplicable emanation, certain New York mayors have caught perfectly the gestalt of the city." (New York Review of Books)

Adolfo Carrion first came into public office in 1997 as a City Council member representing parts of the West Bronx, including Kingsbridge, Fordham and University Heights. After one term, he successfully ran for Bronx borough president. During his time in the office, he oversaw the construction of the new Yankees Stadium but was heavily criticized for not pushing the major league team to deliver on their community benefits agreement. He was appointed by President Barack Obama to head the newly formed White House Office of Urban Affairs Policy in 2009. A year later, the Obama administration named him regional director for New York and New Jersey of the US. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

Carrion stepped down from HUD in February of 2012 to run for mayor, eschewing his previous Democratic Party ties and forging ahead as an independent candidate. He secured a ballot line with the Independence Party for November’s general election, which helped him avoid a potentially punishing and crowded primary race. He also unsuccessfully attempted to win a spot on the Republican line. Carrion was born in Manhattan but has touted his family's migration from Puerto Rico to New York City in the 1960’s.

In an exclusive interview with the Gotham Gazette, Carrion spoke about housing issues, recovering from Superstorm Sandy, education policy and engaging Latino voters. The interview has been edited for clarity and length.

GG: A lot has been said about the New York City Housing Authority recently and their inability to deal with a major backlog of repairs. What would you do about the NYCHA situation and do you approve of the way Mayor Bloomberg has reformed the NYCHA board?

Carrion: Rather than going 30,000-feet level, I’m going to give you a personal experience I had 48 hours ago in the Lower East Side at the Wald Houses. I visited a resident who was going to tell me her story about her experience with Superstorm Sandy and being in darkness in her wheelchair for six and a half days with no heat and no water and — you know the conditions — and my experience was so disturbing because I walk in the building and the lobby reeks of urine and the floor is filthy and there are maintenance workers with brooms and mops dunking their mops into buckets of dirty water in a maintenance room eight feet away from where I was standing in this disgusting lobby. That is unfortunately the picture of NYCHA in so many places across the city and it is third world, it is unacceptable, so what do we need to do?

The damn thing is broken and it has been broken for a long time. People are living in a city within a city. Forget about a tale of two cities — there are multiple cities within our city. There is the substandard city of public housing and there is another substandard city called the New York City public school system with 1.1 million children, with 94 percent of them relegated to less than the best performing schools. This will require independent thinking. That’s why I am running as an independent, that is why I have stepped outside of the gridlock of this broken system.

GG: What do you think mayor Bloomberg’s legacy will be on education? What do you want your legacy to be on education?

Carrion: I think the mayor’s legacy will be that he was the education experiment and modest innovation mayor in so far as he committed to charter schools, he committed to choice, he committed to putting competition in the school system. What I want my legacy to be is the transformation mayor, not the reform mayor, because reform is tweaking. I want a makeover the system. The standard for every neighborhood school must be world-class schools that really speak to a global economy. We need schools to put them on STEAAM — science, engineering, the arts, athletics and math. We need to go from STEM to STEAAM.

We do that by extending the life of the school building. We go from five days at seven hours a day to 14 hours a day, seven days a week so that they become community life and education centers. So the traditional classroom education continues — it doesn’t continue the class instruction time but we use the time to address family issues and other things that need attention. We do this by tapping into the funds we give to other organizations for after school programs, health care, wellness, the arts — all of that we already fund, we will impose a filter for the funding that says your funding has to include a relationship with the neighborhood school so now the local arts group uses the theater as a performance place, the neighborhood sports groups now play in the schoolyard.

{pullquote}Forget about a tale of two cities — there are multiple cities within our city.{/pullquote}

If the community chooses, it runs a community farmers’ market on Friday or weekends or whatever. The rooftop now becomes green roof or garden. We put a job training and business expo in the school yard. We can use it as a incubator for local home based businesses. We have to think outside the box. People have been talking about reform for a long time. We need more than that.

GG: Coming from the Bronx you have to be very familiar with the challenges the city faces when it comes to providing healthcare to its residents. With hospitals closing in Brooklyn and elsewhere what do you think can be done to take care of the problem?

Carrion: The Bronx is ground zero for asthma, diabetes and so many other maladies. So I know the problem well.

The gargantuan hospital encourages healthcare through the emergency room — just by default, not by design but by default. We know what works, we’ve tested it in the Bronx. The answer is the community health center. You need a system of robust health centers associated with specialties in large teaching hospitals. That is what makes sense. We have community healthcare providers rooted in the neighborhood who are not intimidated by the complexity of maneuvering in the system.

GG: You brought up Sandy when talking about housing. What do you make of the city’s response to Sandy and how would you handle the continuing threat of weather changes and monster storms?

Carrion: Well, you know, if there is something we quickly have to address and worry about besides global terrorism that could impact all of us very quickly — especially in New York — it is rising sea levels. The East Coast and West Coast jumps out first. We need to protect the power grid and power sources right away. What happened with Con Ed down there with the explosion and loss of power was a disaster.

We must have redundancy, we have to focus on raising the level of power sources and creating protective measures around them. We can’t have a city that gets paralyzed for days whenever there is a major storm. There are some places on the waterfront, on the edge of the city that — look, there are going to be places where we can no longer build. We have to come to terms with that, and there are places we can create natural barriers and buffers. I agree with the mayor’s plan. We have got it ¾ financed so we are almost there. We need to change the building code and also tweak it so that it is more environmentally responsible and also helps us with our resiliency, with our storms, but also allows us to reduce our carbon footprint.

Look, there are really sensible things that are achievable in the short run like being able to shut off a tunnel so that it doesn’t get filled with water — the technology is there. Obviously we need to deal with entrances to low-lying subway stations so that there aren’t inlets from the station into the shoreline — that is doable.

We need aggressive executive leadership on this.

GG: We are in an election year where we have heard a lot about progressive leadership but at the same time it looks like the new Council will end up being less diverse. As a Latino leader how do you plan to tap into groups of voters who may have been disenfranchised or overlooked in the past?

Carrion: There is only upside because the participation rate is so low. We have almost 900,000 registered Latinos and only 189,000 came out to vote. So only about 16 percent came out to vote, so more than eight in 10 staying home and not taking part in the political process. This is a crisis and an opportunity. People are passively boycotting or they don’t feel that it matters and don’t understand. If we can jump back to schools and education for a moment — one of things I will do as mayor is infuse civics into schools.

Latinos are going through college without registering to vote and that is tragic for the Latino vote. We are talking about a third of the city population that now has to be engaged. I feel as a principal I must engage that sleeping giant to awaken that sleeping giant and one way is running for office and saying there is one of you here. I am going to fight like hell to represent you. But we also need to do the important and unsexy work of organizing the community with other leaders. This is not about Adolfo Carrion making political moves and some master plan. My only plan is to awaken the political giant and get Democracy working.

GG: How the mayor’s office works with Albany has been a focus of this mayoral race because of Bill de Blasio’s proposal to raise taxes for pre-k. How do you plan to deal with Albany given how many important city issues are determined there?

Carrion: I base my expectations on my past experience. I will tell you that there was some disappointment when I was borough president but I put my nose to grindstone and put in the work that needed to be done to get their support for education and budget for issues. For instance, you take tearing down a decrepit old store and setting up a market like the Bronx Terminal Market with new stores, jobs and a beautiful waterfront park. That required a special kind of partnership with state officials. Yankee Stadium was a heavier lift. I took it on the chin on that but in the end the deliverable was a new neighborhood in the South Bronx, new parkland and a sense of pride of being a new destination as well as a new rail station. All of that came about from a master plan cooked up in my office. Then we went ahead and got the approval needed to move the project forward. The same principal applies to being the executive of the city.

We need the governor to understand that New York City is the engine of New York State’s economic footprint. It is determinative of how the state is going to do economically. The relationship of downstate to upstate is very important and we can be very creative in a number of areas whether it is research and development, a state university system that makes sense, upstate and downstate partnership to confront environmental challenges face as a state.

There is a lot of opportunity to exploit this relationship as a city but as a city executive I am also a realist. I don’t think Mr. de Blasio’s idea of raising taxes is going to fly with the governor, whatever he is positioning himself for. Whether the 2016 theory is valid, he has made a very important statement in the last 48 hours about ‘how do we lower taxes?’ In the wake of that, I don’t think any mayor is gonna come in and say, ‘How do we raise taxes here?’ especially when the governor is saying we need to get rid of them.

Likely voters support Democrat Bill de Blasio for mayor 68 to 19 percent over Republican candidate Joe Lhota according to a recent poll. But the same poll, conducted by The New York Times and Siena College, found that New Yorkers don't exactly agree with de Blasio's policies. The poll found voters want to keep Ray Kelly as police commissioner, want more charter schools and almsost half of them support the New York City Police Department's use of stop-and-frisk. The rest of the poll is good for de Blasio and bad for Lhota. Of those surveyed 58 percent had a favorable opinion of de Blasio where only 22 percent had the same feeling about Lhota. A recent Quinnipiac University poll found de Blasio leading Lhota 71 to 21 percent among likely voters. Lhota has recently stepped up his attacks on de Blasio. 

Other Stories We're Following

Moreland Commission Subpoenas Republicans But Not Cuomo or Democrats (Kingston Daily Freeman)

Teacher Union Faces Questions Over Undisclosed Robocalls (Gotham Schools)

City Marathon to Have Tighter Security (NY Times)

Cuomo's Quiet Push For Gambling (Wall Street Journal)

Opponents Decry De Blasio's Efforts to Halt Lhota PAC (Politicker)

Bratton is Interested in Old Job (Capital)

Cuomo's Tax Stance Rankes Liberal Groups, Again (Capital)

Hynes to Run On GOP Line For Brooklyn DA (Crain's)

Today's Report

Poverty, Chronic Stress, and New York's Youngest Children
(read the full report)

Gov. Andrew Cuomo's anti-corruption panel has faced increasing criticism as of late that it is unduly influenced by the governor and his aides.  The Daily News reports today that the Moreland Commission killed a subpoena requesting fundraising records from the Democratic Party that Cuomo heads. Sources told The Daily News that the subpoena requested information about the Democratic Party's use of "housekeeping accounts" that raised millions of dollars that fueled a campaign to support Cuomo's policies. The administration also reportedly exerted pressure to stop other subpoenas. A spokesperson for the commission declined to comment. 

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Advocates Call For Reform of Runoff Elections (Gotham Gazette)

Lawyer Says State is Playing Word Games With With Casino Proposal (Gotham Gazette)

Unions Still Won't Have it Easy With Allies in Charge (NY Times)

Lhota Ad Touts Similarities With de Blasio (NY Times)

Mayor's Office Pushes Comptroller to Approve Verizon Contract (Daily News)

Scandalized Nonprofit Receives Federal Contracts (NY Post)

Cuomo Forms Tax Commission With Old Rivals (Capital)

Wide Open Race For Council Chief (Wall Street Journal)

Teachers Union Paid $370K to Fake Consultant (Crain's)

Five People Who Could Be Next Schools Chancellor (Gotham Schools)

Letitia James trounced Daniel Squadron in the Democratic primary runoff election for the public advocate's seat yesterday. She won about 60 percent of the vote. Since there's no Republican candidate, she will almost certainly take the position, becoming the first black woman to hold citywide office. She said her focus would be affordable housing and parents' education concerns. Squadron acknowledged that a negative robocall attacking James came from his campaign. Only about 6 percent of eligible voters cast ballots.

NEW IN THE GOTHAM GAZETTE

How Old Is Too Old To Serve? Voters will be asked to decide in a referendum on Nov. 5 whether to extend the age limit for state judges of the Supreme Court and the Court of Appeals to 80-years-old. By David Howard King. READ MORE

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City Could Recycle, Compost Over 90 Percent Of Commercial Waste (Daily News)

Lhota Decries GOP Extremists (Newsday)

Why Airbnb's Legal Victory Isn't The End Of Its Problems In New York (Businessweek)

ALBANY, N.Y. — Sidney Strauss, a state Supreme Court judge in Queens, isn’t ready to retire.

Sure, he has recently undergone back surgery and is recovering at home. But he does not want to abandon the bench. He has served for 13 years, a relatively short term compared to other judges, and wants to continue doing what he loves.

The problem is that, at age 74, Strauss has passed the legally required age of retirement for New York’s Supreme Court justices. By state law, most judges are required to leave the bench at age 70, though Supreme Court judges can seek two-year extensions up until the age 76.

“All I’m trying to do is get people on with their lives,” Strauss said. “No one wants to be in court. It isn’t pleasant, it isn’t like on TV. If I can make your life a little easier, why shouldn't I do it?”

The age limit for certain judges could soon be lifted by a decade. Voters will be asked to decide in a referendum on Nov. 5 whether to extend the age limit for state judges of the Supreme Court and the Court of Appeals to 80. The ballot proposal is among the most contentious in a list of six questions on the ballot this year.

Among the other questions: whether upstate New York should have casino gambling; whether the state should engage in a land exchange with NICO Minerals; and whether the Legislature can settle a land dispute in Long Lake.

Advocates for the amendment — prime among them being the state’s Chief Judge, Jonathan Lippman, himself near the age limit to serve — say passing the measure could alleviate the state’s overloaded judicial system, where there is a backlog of some 31,000 cases in state Supreme Court alone.

But the amendment has its detractors — and, so far, likely voters don’t seem to be impressed with the idea. A Siena College poll released on Monday found that 71 percent of those surveyed would vote against the amendment. There is also the question of whether voters will actually make it to the question on an already long ballot. They may also consider it a “silly” question.

“I worry it might not pass,” said state Sen. Neil Breslin, who is an active attorney, serves on the Senate’s judiciary committee and is an active member of the state bar. “This isn’t something a lot of people are paying attention to.”

New York is one of 15 states that has a law requiring judges retire at age 70.

The state’s courtrooms have seen a drastic increase in court cases over the years while the number of judges serving has remained the same. The waits in family courts are notorious and severely impact those whose futures depend on a speedy resolution.

The number of trial court judges is mandated by law and the Legislature has not acted to increase the number even while caseloads have skyrocketed. The number of family court judges has not increased for 23 years while the caseload has doubled.

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Dennis Hawkins, executive director for The Fund For Modern Courts, said 49 judges will face retirement in the next four years. He called the amendment to increase the retirement age of judges one of the most important on the ballot this year.

“This law was put into effect in 1869,” Hawkins said. “People only lived to 55, 65 years old, so it was a reasonable retirement age at the time.” No other public office in New York has a retirement age.

Lippman has promised that he would ask judges who stay on longer to help alleviate the state’s overburdened family court system.

Some legislators and lawyers alike are concerned that Lippman is basically forcing through his own term-limit extension. They say his push for extending terms exclusively for Supreme Court and Appeals Court judges is unseemly because it clearly affects him and other powerful and politically connected judges.

However, opponents of the measure have largely kept out of the spotlight because challenging New York’s chief judge is not considered a bright career move. Others say allowing older judges to stay on the bench will keep the higher positions on the court occupied by elderly white men, thereby discouraging diversity on the court.

Opponents also note that just about every judge who applies for an extension to serve past 70 has been approved. Lippman has pledged to improve the certification process so that it is more rigorous and allows testimony from those who have dealt with the judge.

Critics also point out that retaining more judges will inflate the court system’s budget. Cuomo has asked all agency heads to keep their budget requests down to zero growth. So no agency is flush with cash and it isn’t clear how the court system would deal with what is estimated to be a $14 million increase in payroll and costs associated with paying the judges who stay on and their court staff.

Currently no major group in the state has come out against the measure. The State Bar plans to abstain from weighing in, while the city Bar is expected to announce its position in the next few weeks.

Both houses of the state Legislature passed the amendment two years in a row, putting the question to voters. Gov. Andrew Cuomo did not have to sign off. However, during session this year, Republican state Sen. John Bonacic began promoting a different version of the bill that would have asked voters to extend the terms of a wider swath of state judges. Eventually the Senate passed the same measure it had passed the year before. Bonacic said he supports the current amendment.

“I would prefer a broader bill that increased the retirement age for all judges, but this is the bill the Assembly would pass,” he said. He added that he does not think criticism of Lippman is appropriate. “I do not think it’s fair to single out any particular judge.”

A number of prominent judges have been forced into retirement in recent years, but continue to serve in successful legal practices as well as on prominent public commissions. One noteworthy example is former Chief Justice Judith Kaye, who is of counsel at Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom, and was named special counsel to investigate Gov. David Paterson by then Attorney General Andrew Cuomo in 2010.

Strauss, who before becoming a judge worked as a lawyer “chasing after clients for payment,” said he wants to be able to make the call about when and whether to retire.

“Let me make the choice,” he said, adding: “At the end of every year the public is deprived of competent people with real experience and talent because of an arbitrary number.”

Bill de Blasio's father, who had incurable cancer, committed suicide when he was 18-years-old. His father had a long history of smoking and alcoholism. He rarely saw him after his parents separated when he was 8. De Blasio started the process of taking his mother's surname before his father died. He revealed the incident through a press release yesterday in anticipation of a story about it by the NY Post.

Today is the Democratic primary runoff election for public advocate. Click here to find a poll site.

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Mayor And Deputy Used Private Email Addresses For City Business (DNAinfo)

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A Techie Bid For Mayor (Wall Street Journal)

De Blasio's Rent Plan Makes Charters Anxious (WNYC)

NYPD Adds Five Investigators To Collision Squad (Daily News)

Tomorrow's Democratic primary runoff for public advocate is expected to cost taxpayers $13 million. Less than 4 percent of eligible voters may turn out to cast ballots. Government reformers and some elected officials say the cost of such elections could be avoided if the city were to implement instant runoff voting, where voters rank candidates by order of preference. The practice has been instituted in other jurisdictions, and it may not be long before it becomes law in New York City. A bill to implement instant runoff voting has been introduced in Albany and City Council members have also pushed their own legislation. Both candidates in the runoff primary for public advocate, City Councilwoman Letitia James and state Sen. Daniel Squadron, say they support the idea.

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Sources: Cuomo Aides Intervening In Moreland Commission Decisions (Daily News)

Cuomo Vetoes Bill To Create Pay Raise Panel (Albany Times Union)

Moreland Commission Issues Subpoenas To Political Entities (Associated Press)

Jobs For New York PAC Eyes Albany In 2014 (Crain's)

NY Senate Dem Leader Urges Transparency On Outside Income (Daily News)

Tips For A Rough Metro-North Commute (WNYC)

Developers Rush To Finish Projects Before Bloomberg Leaves (New York Magazine)

Tappan Zee Revamp Cost Could End Up Paid For By Taxpayers (Associated Press)

Police Say Elevator Crimes Persist (NY Times)

GothamVotes: Campaign Trails Weekend Update

Republican mayoral candidate Joe Lhota needs to "persuading an overwhelmingly Democratic electorate to pick a leader who cites Barry Goldwater and Margaret Thatcher as his intellectual forebears." (The New York Times)

Lhota criticized the plan for an Upper East Side waste transfer station. (The Daily News)

Republican comptroller candidate John Burnett is "a dose of the real thing." (New York Post)

More than two weeks after the primary, the Board of Elections finishes counting the ballots. (NYT)

This is an updated version.

NEW YORK — The public advocate’s office was almost designed to grate on a mayor’s nerves.

Created as a check on the mayor’s powers, the advocate operates as a spokesperson for New Yorkers to hold the powers-that-be accountable. In practice, that has often meant being a perch for what may be the most prominent gadfly in city government.

It is estimated that less than 4 percent of the city’s voting population will decide who will be the next public advocate in tomorrow's runoff election between two Democratic candidates. With no substantial rival in the general election on Nov. 5, either City Councilwoman Letitia James or state Sen. Daniel Squadron will become the de facto officeholder.

The public advocate is still next in the line of succession if something were to happen to the mayor, and is one of only three citywide elected offices. But the office’s small budget and limited power, as well as a historically tense relationship with the mayor, continue to define how the public advocate decides to operate.

“Whether the mayor tries to obstruct or cooperate will determine the public advocate’s M.O.,” said Mark Green, the city's first public advocate.

It doesn’t hurt either James or Squadron, however, that one of the two leading mayoral candidates — Democrat Bill de Blasio — is not only an ally to both but also the outgoing public advocate.

DYNAMIC DUEL

Much of the public advocate’s powers were granted by the 1989 city charter revision. Besides succeeding the mayor, the office has some appointment powers. He or she can also introduce legislation into the Council. Different advocates have used the soapbox for specific agendas.

De Blasio, the outgoing advocate and Democratic nominee for mayor, for example, created a database on the city’s worst landlords and has used the last few months to push hospital reform in Brooklyn.

The agenda pursued by the public advocate has often been limited by a budget that tends to fluctuate according to the office’s relationship with the mayor.

As the city’s first public advocate, Democrat Green was highly critical of Republican Mayor Rudy Giuliani. The mayor cut Green’s budget by 22 percent. Green's successor, Betsy Gotbaum, saw her budget slashed to $1.7 million from $2.8 million after she opposed the extension of term limits favored by Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

De Blasio, who has had a frosty relationship with Bloomberg, has a current budget of $2.3 million, which is $400,000 less than even the first advocate’s back in 1994 — 0.00285 percent of the city’s overall $70 billion budget.

If today’s budget for the office of public advocate were to be adjusted for inflation, it would look more like $5 million.

Doug Muzzio, political science professor at Baruch College, argued that even without a large budget, the office of public advocate does provide a bully pulpit so long as the person in office knows how to use it.

"It's a what-you-make-of-it type of office," Muzzio said. "If the public advocate wants to make their bones, in some sense it has to be made at the expense of the mayor."

James, who has been on the Council for a decade, is convinced she can bring more money to the office. In a March forum in Harlem, James said a number of her Council colleagues had already committed to giving the office more money if she were to win the race.

“I am currently a member of the City Council and right now have about 15 to 20 members of the City Council who have indicated to me that, ‘Tish, if you're the next public advocate we'll work with you to make sure your budget is increased to a level you can provide services and that office can become relevant again,’” she said.

Squadron, a three-term state senator serving the 26th district, hasn’t made any explicit vows to increase funding. He has proposed an ambitious re-imagining of the office that would operate within the current budget. In his policy book, Squadron admits the office “cannot take on every issue, not if it hopes to be thoughtful and constructive.”

Instead, he wants to prioritize the office into four areas: an “Advocate for the Most Vulnerable,” a “Children’s Advocate,” an “Accountability Advocate” and a “Housing Advocate.”

James is often praised for being a loud voice in some of the hardest hits on the Bloomberg administration. She voted against term-limit extensions that passed the Council in 2009 despite public referenda opposing the move.

As chairwoman of the Council’s contracts committee, James also led the body’s charge against the CityTime payroll system that cost the city $500 million and led to the indictment of 11 individuals, two of whom fled the country for India.

RUNNING AGAINST A MAYOR

James has explicitly defined her campaign as the panacea for the Bloomberg era. To that end, she has tried to link Squadron as much as she can to the Bloomberg years to varying degrees of success.

In a recent mailer, James called Squadron a strong supporter of Bloomberg's education agenda, including Albany's approval for mayoral control of schools. She also hit Squadron for staying silent in the term limit debate and the 2009 mayoral race.

Responding with the hashtag #tishgoesnegative on Twitter, Squadron's camp disavowed those links to the mayor and argued he defied City Hall during its slow response to Superstorm Sandy and certain school co-locations in his district. Instead, Squadron linked James to Bloomberg, indicating that her Council votes fell in line with Bloomberg 159 times.

“The truth is I did speak out against term limits,” Squadron told James at the last debate before the runoff. “The truth is Council member James has stood with Mayor Bloomberg 98 percent of the time. And that’s not right.”

As senator, Squadron has pushed bills on ethics and campaign finance reform, as well as extending protections to transgender New Yorkers. His push for an assault weapons ban earned him a key TV spot with his former boss, Sen. Chuck Schumer. Squadron, often credited for his work on gun control in Albany, did offer praise for Bloomberg’s initiative against illegal guns.

James — who has also publicly disagreed with Bloomberg on a range of issues including Atlantic Yards development, emergency management during the 2009 snowstorm, the controversial stop-and-frisk police tactic, the ban on large sugary drinks and more — dismissed the accusation with a smile.

“To charge me with Mayor Bloomberg's agenda is actually laughable,” she said.

LOOKING AT 2014

Running against the mayor’s agenda is nothing new. De Blasio did it in the mayoral primary, but also spent most of his time as public advocate trying to advance the relevance of the office.

When the Charter Revision Commission met in 2010 — following the City Council’s vote to overturn term limits — Public Advocate de Blasio weighed in. He suggested creating a budget for the office independent of the yearly process between the mayor and the Council. He also suggested expanding the office's constituent services and organizing work, as well as granting the public advocate subpoena power.

The de Blasio campaign declined to comment on whether a Mayor de Blasio would commit to expanding resources for the office, but indicated he stood by the ideas he laid out as public advocate.

The campaign of rival Republican candidate and former transit chief Joe Lhota did not respond to repeated requests for comment on how he might work with the public advocate's office.

Green said he’s had little interaction with the former Giuliani deputy, but said, "It's hard to imagine he'd bring the same level of disdain that goes with being a former prosecutor and an autocratic good Samaritan.”

Beyond how either de Blasio or Lhota might interact with the public advocate, the outcome of the race for public advocate may ultimately play into the upcoming fight over the next City Council speaker given the likely racial makeup of the city’s next executive branch given that the top contenders are white.

In the mayor’s race, Adolfo Carrion, a Latino candidate on the Independence Party line, is running far behind Lhota and de Blasio. Scott Stringer, the Democratic candidate for comptroller, is expected to win against a person of color in the general election, Republican John Burnett, who is black.

If James, who is black, were to become public advocate she would be the first woman of color elected to a citywide office. A James win might also decrease pressure on city lawmakers to pick a candidate of color to be the next City Council speaker.

The city has only had three minorities elected to the executive branch: Mayor David Dinkins; Comptroller Bill Thompson, who ran and lost in the Democratic primary for mayor; and John Liu, the current comptroller.

Whoever should win tomorrow, James and Squadron have advocated the idea that the public advocate should be an independent watchdog for New Yorkers, even though both have endorsed de Blasio — with James already calling him the mayor-elect.

“I'm not afraid to go up against powerful interests including the mayor of the city of New York, a Mayor Bill de Blasio, and would challenge particularly if he does not keep his promises to New Yorkers to change the direction of the city after 12 years of a Bloomberg era,” James said during last week’s NY1 debate.

Squadron has been more tempered in his statements about his vision for the office.

“The job of the public advocate isn't to be a thorn in the side of the mayor just to be a thorn,” Squadron added. “The job of the public advocate is to take on issues for the people who desperately need it and don't have anybody else.”

With time running out on Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s lame-duck term, a number of his staffers are looking to his longtime rival Gov. Andrew Cuomo for job security. The last few weeks have seen a steady stream of press releases from Cuomo’s office announcing the hiring of ex-Bloomberg staff.

Cuomo and Bloomberg are notorious political rivals and the tension between the two administrations has been more than apparent whenever they have to work on anything. Perhaps the most obvious example of that was their differing responses to Hurricane Sandy. And who could forget how both camps took a recent Adirondack rafting competition a little too seriously? Now Bloomberg is stuck watching as key staff from his administration walk out the door for Cuomoland.

“This is smart on Cuomo’s part,” said Baruch College professor of political science Doug Muzzio, pointing out that Cuomo is picking up experts in specific fields who are already used to working in government.