2013 Primary election results

Good morning! I hope you all are happy waking up in a City that soundly rejected Christine Quinn last night. She came in with 15% of the vote. Bye-bye, Bloomberg lite!

The likely winner without a runoff is Bill DeBlasio. As of last night, he had 40.2% of the vote, with Bill Thompson coming in at 26%. Whether or not there is a runoff, however, let me point out once again that the political careers of Christine Quinn, John Liu and Anthony Weiner are DONE.

Scott Stringer bested Eliot Spitzer in the Comptroller's race and Letitia James and Daniel Squadron will go head to head in a runoff for Public Advocate.

Locally, Melinda Katz soundly defeated Peter Vallone, Jr. and even with the 9% or so of the vote that Tony Avella allegedly took away from Vallone, he still would not have beaten her. So much for Italian power.

In district 19, The latest numbers are Paul Vallone 2,723 votes to Austin Shafran's 2,579 votes with 98% of precincts reporting. Neither Huffington Post nor NY1 has called it for Vallone, although he claimed victory. So, in November, it MAY be Vallone and Republican Dennis Saffran. Will Saffran win because most Dems picked anybody but Vallone? Time will tell. (Apologies for previous mistake. Shafran got WFP endorsement, but NOT their line. He is challenging the election results.)

In the 22nd CD, Costa Constantinides handily beat John Ciafone.

In the 24th CD, Rory Lancman creamed Andrea Veras.

In the 27th CD, it's still a race between Daneek Miller (3,756) and Clyde Vanel (3,360) with 98% reporting.

In the 28th CD, Ruben Wills beat Hettie Powell.

In the 31st CD, Donovan Richards beat Michael Duncan.

And in the 32nd CD, Lew Simon beat William Ruiz.

Also, thankfully, in the 34th CD, which covers mostly Bushwick but half of Ridgewood, Antonio Reynoso sent Vito Lopez packing once and for all.

Sadly, because we are a one-party town run by a political machine, there were no primaries in the 20th, 21st, 23rd, 25th, 26th, 29th or 30th districts and all incumbents ran unopposed.

In kind of a surprise, in Brooklyn, 23-year incumbent DA Charles Hynes was defeated by challenger Kenneth Thompson.

UPDATE:

Tony Nunziato and Phil Ragusa were also reelected as GOP state committeemen.

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DeBlasio would be Bloomberg 2.0

From the Wall Street Journal:

Bill de Blasio has risen to the top of the polls assailing the Bloomberg administration, but if elected he could pursue even more aggressive policies than his predecessor on a crucial issue: creating densely packed new residential towers through land-use decisions.

Mr. de Blasio, the city's public advocate, would push for mandatory affordable housing and fewer tax breaks for developers. But he wouldn't differ from Mr. Bloomberg on a fundamental premise that building significant amounts of new housing is a top way to spur economic growth and control housing costs.

Mr. de Blasio's pro-development policies have helped allay fears in the real-estate industry that perhaps the most liberal Democrat in the race would, as mayor, be a fearsome opponent on big developments.

For some, however, Mr. de Blasio's support for new high-rise towers—even with more affordable housing—is dissonant with his campaign's theme of easing income inequality. As a City Council member in the Park Slope section of Brooklyn, Mr. de Blasio was a strong supporter of the three major Bloomberg-backed development projects, including the project known as Atlantic Yards, which critics say has hastened gentrification and helped deepen the economic divide in that area.

Some liberal community groups said they feel betrayed. "The whole thing is a joke to us that people are looking at this guy as if he cares about the community," said Marlene Donnelly, a member of Friends and Residents of Greater Gowanus, a group that pushed to get the Gowanus Canal designated a Superfund site—a goal Mr. de Blasio unsuccessfully opposed. "I don't find any step of the way that he's actually been on our side here."

Mr. de Blasio has met with developers, and his campaign has received some $460,000 in contributions from real-estate interests, including developers, brokers, architects and construction firms, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis.

From New York Magazine:

Democratic mayoral front-runner Bill de Blasio has styled himself as a scourge of slumlords and a critic of the Bloomberg administration’s policies to shelter the homeless, assailing the “failure of the strategy” in his first policy statement as public advocate. But at a time when he was considered a long-shot candidate, De Blasio found financial support from an unlikely source: one of his most frequent targets, a former Bloomberg administration official who now runs a network of homeless shelters leased from some of the city’s most notorious landlords.

During 2011 and 2012, a small group of property owners and contractors who do business with the city’s Department of Homeless Services donated more than $35,000 to De Blasio’s campaign, according to records on file with the city and state campaign-finance boards. (See the full list at the bottom.) Most of the money came from landlords of single-room-occupancy hotels and slum apartment buildings that operate as shelters under the aegis of Housing Solutions USA, run by Robert Hess, formerly Mayor Bloomberg’s commissioner of homeless services. Though Hess’s organization is a nonprofit, the landlords he works with have reaped millions in public funds by turning their rundown properties into shelters, collecting sky-high rents from the city.

Hess has contributed just $400 to De Blasio, the maximum that campaign-finance law allows for contractors doing business with the city, but in May 2012 he held an intimate fund-raiser for the candidate at his Long Island City apartment. Among the handful of attendees were two hotel landlords who gave generously to De Blasio's campaign, including Alan Lapes, one of the largest and most controversial players in the for-profit shelter industry.

Hess declined to comment on the event when reached by phone yesterday. “That’s a personal matter,” he said. But other attendees described an informal living-room dialogue about De Blasio’s campaign and his plans to care for the city’s homeless population, which has risen to record levels under Bloomberg. Providing shelter beds can be lucrative for landlords — the city typically pays rents of more than $3,000 a month — and one attendee recalls that, prior to the event, Lapes was frank about his reasons for giving. “This is the guy who is going to win,” he recalls Lapes saying. “This is the guy to bet on.”

In February, after the Times reported that Lapes had exploited an obscure loophole in the city’s campaign-finance rules to give De Blasio twice the legal limit, the candidate returned nearly $15,000 in donations from the landlord and his wife. “I’ve just made the decision to return the money, and that’s all I have to say,” he told the Post. But the broader pattern of giving — which ramped up as Housing Solutions USA, formed only in 2011, was pressing forward with controversial multi-million-dollar city shelter contracts in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and the Bronx — has not previously been reported.

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Candidates want to be anybody but Bloomberg

From the NY Times:

Michael R. Bloomberg is a data-loving, health-enforcing nonpartisan who defined what it meant to be a mayor over the past 12 years, mentoring big-city chief executives from New Orleans to Philadelphia.

But closer to home, the major candidates vying to succeed him at City Hall in New York are not pleading for his pointers, or pressing for a place in his photo ops: none of them, Democrat or Republican, have even asked for his political blessing in the primaries next week.

They instead describe polls showing that Mr. Bloomberg’s endorsement, once deemed a coveted prize, would now dampen their appeal to the party faithful, not burnish it, and they fret over lashing themselves to his divisive policies on policing, not to mention his soured relationship with municipal unions.

It is a humbling and alien experience for the relatively popular mogul turned mayor, who is unpracticed in humility: in the race to lead a post-Bloomberg New York City, there is profound wariness of being viewed as, well, too much like Mr. Bloomberg.

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DeBlasio tried to help slumlord in return for campaign cash

From the Daily News:

Public Advocate Bill de Blasio made a name for himself with his Worst Landlords list, trumpeting the names and sins of city slumlords for all the world to see.

But for one building owner with a rash of code violations, he took another tack — he went to bat for him days after the landlord began steering donations his way.

Michael Shah owns two buildings on Staten Island that have racked up more than 200 code violations. The buildings’ elevators break down so often, the city Buildings Department made one of them No. 3 on its Top 10 Elevator Offenders list. But instead of targeting him for scrutiny as he has some of the city’s worst slumlords, de Blasio aides say the public advocate invited Shah to meet with him in his office on July 27, 2011, as Shah sought help reducing taxes on some of his buildings that house low-income tenants.

Weeks before that meeting, Shah — who’d never given a dime to any city candidate before — donated the maximum $4,950 to de Blasio. He then began acting as an “intermediary” to raise more money — $11,850 in all, including six checks delivered 16 days before the July 27 meeting.

When the two met, Shah brought along his hired lobbyist, ex-Sen. Alfonse D’Amato’s son Chris, and asked de Blasio to push the city to reduce his taxes so he could continue to afford renting to lower-income tenants. After the meeting, de Blasio called Finance Commissioner David Frankel to explain the situation. It’s not clear how Frankel responded.

“He (de Blasio) looked into the matter, he was very responsive,” Shah told The News. “We were able to get to where we needed to go, and I really liked him. Bill gave me his email, his cell phone number.”

De Blasio spokesman Wiley Norvell said Shah did not mention the donations during the meeting but he couldn’t say whether de Blasio knew Shah was one of his money-raising “intermediaries.” Norvell denied the donations influenced de Blasio in any way, stating, “We advocate aggressively for any tenant, business owner and everyday New Yorker alike that needs help navigating city bureaucracy. That’s our job.”

At the time of the meeting with Shah, two Shah buildings on Staten Island, 195 and 231 Steuben St., had accumulated more than 200 open housing code violations for broken windows, busted locks, rampant mice and chronically malfunctioning elevators. The number of current violations in those buildings exceed those at two of the top three “Worst Landlords” on Staten Island that are currently singled out on de Blasio’s site.

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Will the real Bill DeBlasio please stand up?

From The Daily Beast:

In 2004 de Blasio was a paid adviser to John Edwards’s presidential campaign. And in this year’s mayoral race, his rhetoric about “a tale of two cities”—a line he has used to critique growing income inequality—has echoed Edwards’s rhetoric from 2004 about the “two Americas.” Yet while serving on the City Council, he frequently found himself on the wrong side of progressives in his district (admittedly not hard in ultraliberal Park Slope) and was sometimes blasted for favoring developers and real-estate interests over community concerns about congestion and quality of life.

For example, he sided with a developer in opposing the designation of the Gowanus Canal as a Superfund site—even as nearby residents said that the city was ill equipped to carry out the cleanup on its own. He pushed to allow luxury housing in Brooklyn Bridge Park. And he was one of the primary backers of the controversial redevelopment of Atlantic Yards into a basketball arena for the Brooklyn Nets—a nearly decade-long fight that pitted local residents against powerful real-estate interests.

De Blasio’s most important maneuver has been to capitalize on liberal frustration with Mayor Mike Bloomberg.

“He said that it was necessary to stop the tide of gentrification, but everyone knows this was the most gentrifying thing to ever happen to Brooklyn,” says Lucy Koteen, a local political activist who backs current City Comptroller John Liu. “He is not wrong about the ‘tale of two cities.’ But look at his record. Did he help level the playing field, or is he on the side of developers who have gotten rich displacing people?”

From the NY Post:

The City Planning Commission rep appointed by Public Advocate Bill de Blasio — a critic of big developers — voted with the administration 93 percent of the time, records show.

One of those votes was to approve Extell’s West Side tower that includes a “poor door” separating subsidized tenants from those paying market rents.

A de Blasio spokesman said the rep actually fought “the poor door,” but Extell found a way around her objection.

De Blasio’s rep has voted in favor of 554 out of 595 projects since 2010.

Capital New York has a good wrap-up of his development stances in the past.

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Astoria candidate doesn't play by the rules

Astoria attorney John Ciafone is running for City Council District 22 (Astoria) to replace outgoing Peter Vallone, Jr. He has run previously for the council as well as for the assembly. He dropped out back in 2010, and he may have dropped out this time around as well since there are no CFB filings from his campaign on file.

What you may not know is that Ciafone currently appears on Public Advocate Bill DeBlasio's slumlord list. To his credit, he is on the "most improved" list, having reduced his violations from 195 to 2. He tried to donate to DeBlasio, but it was returned. Local council member/Vito Lopez protege Steve Levin and Queens BP candidates Peter Vallone and Melinda Katz apparently have no qualms about keeping his money, however.

Ciafone currently has ads on residential buildings in the Williamsburg-Greenpoint area.

They appear on 202 Franklin Street, 119 Freeman Street, and 199 Green Street, among others.

No permits are on file, so far as I can tell, that allow commercial signs on these buildings.

It's all about who you know, and who you give money to.

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Ok, Queens. Can we top this one?

From CBS 2:

One look at the abandoned house in Riverdale and you know exactly why the neighbors are so upset. The shingles have fallen off. You can see holes in the roof. A tree is actually growing out of the house. And garbage and machinery is strewn all over the yard.

Public records show the house was purchased in 2006 for more than $3 million. The property is owned by a real estate company called 620 Blackstone, LLC, run by Josh Neustein.

Neustein owns several rental properties in the area and lives only a few miles away from this home, also in the fancy Riverdale section of the Bronx.

A woman inside the home told Leitner she was at the wrong address, but neighbors and public records confirmed the residence owned by Neustein.

He was named to the city’s worst landlord list in 2012 by Public Advocate Bill de Blasio, with 753 open hazardous violations on five buildings.

What's with the zoning here?

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Weiner didn't stop being a perv after resigning

From WPIX:

It was just a matter of time before something surfaced, and today it did. A gossip website quotes a 22-year-old woman as claiming she had a six-month relationship with the disgraced former Congressman who is now running for Mayor. Weiner has warned that more texts and lewd pictures might surface, but the shocker is that the new action occurred after he resigned from Congress in 2011.

The website “The Dirty” contends communications between Weiner and the woman continued as recently as August of last year—well over a year after he left office.

Weiner has acknowledged the new revelations, saying that while some of the assertions are true, others are not. PIX11 will have a full report at 10. Meanwhile, two of his Democratic opponents, Bill DeBlasio and Sal Albanese have called on Weiner to withdraw from the campaign. De Blasio said simply, “Enough is enough.”

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Silly electeds prefer tweeding to budgeting

Here we have State Senator/Public Advocate candidate Daniel Squadron promoting the idea that not only are public-private partnerships good, but that we should fund our entire park system off the back of the Central Park Conservancy. Peter Vallone has endorsed the idea in the City Council.

And then there's NYC Public Advocate and mayoral candidate Bill DeBlasio shilling for the same thing over the weekend at the Unisphere.

No morons, we shouldn't rely on money from charities. We should stop the corporate welfare and tweeding programs and use that money to fund park maintenance, as required by law. You guys also realize that forcing a charity to fund other charities is most likely unconstitutional, right?

Here's former Parks Commissioner Adrian Benepe, his biggest defender, Holly Leicht of New Yorkers for Parks - a partner group with the NYC Parks Dept, and a landscape architect who reaped the benefits of working for the Central Park Conservancy, defending having charity pay for necessities, vs. Geoffrey Croft of NYC Park Advocates, who wants the city budget to allocate adequate funding.

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Whoever we vote for, the city is screwed

From City Journal:

Listening to some of the candidates to succeed Mayor Michael Bloomberg, you’d think that New York City’s biggest challenge was how to spend billions of dollars in spare revenue. Bill Thompson wants to put 2,000 extra cops on the street at a cost of $200 million a year. One of his rivals, Public Advocate Bill de Blasio, pledges to introduce universal pre-K in the city’s schools, a project with a $530 million annual price tag. Thompson, de Blasio, and another candidate, New York City comptroller John Liu, want to build at least 60,000 units of new subsidized housing over the next four years. The bill for that could dwarf the cost of the police and school proposals.

But no matter how big the spending dreams of the city’s would-be mayors, one of them is going to wake up to a fiscal nightmare in November. New York’s budget has grown hugely over Mayor Bloomberg’s 12 years in office, and it may finally have outstripped the Wall Street–generated tax revenues that have made such profligacy possible. The next mayor won’t have the luxury of expanding the government; instead, he’ll have to figure out how to pay for one that’s already dangerously bloated.

If Bloomberg’s goal was soaking up revenue and leaving his successor as little to spend as possible, he seems to have pulled it off. Spending from city revenues rose from $28.9 billion when Bloomberg took office to $47.5 billion in fiscal year 2012 and will be an estimated $50.2 billion in 2013—a staggering 70 percent increase per resident. Inflation rose only 29 percent over the same period. Had Bloomberg held Gotham’s budget increase to the growth rates of inflation and population, the city would currently be spending $12 billion less a year.

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Too much info!

From the Daily News:

Is this the mayor’s race? Or the Oprah Winfrey show?

On Monday, Democrat Bill de Blasio shared intimate details of his life, releasing a campaign ad in which he revealed that his troubled childhood and father’s alcoholism led him to doubt that he’d ever have a committed relationship.

The disclosures followed City Council Speaker Christine Quinn’s revelations that as a young woman she suffered from alcoholism and an eating disorder.

Anthony Weiner has discussed the state of his marriage in interviews apologizing for the sexting scandal that forced him to resign from Congress two years ago.

The confessionals might seem like cries for help — but what the candidates really are seeking is love from voters, political analysts said Monday.

“No one knows them. This is how they introduce themselves to a disinterested public,” said Christina Greer, an assistant political science professor at Fordham University.

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