Politics on the Hudson

There was a time when raucous Yonkers City Council meetings were the best show in town. But what made for good for political theater, probably didn’t contribute much to good governance. Last night’s City Council meeting was a bit of a throwback. The meeting was enlivened by an unusual appearance there by Mayor Phil Amicone, who unsuccessfully called upon the City Council to enact a resolution urging the state Legislature to reform the state education funding formula and boost aid to Westchester’s biggest city. Read story.

It also featured a verbal dust-up between City Council President Chuck Lesnick and Councilman John Murtagh. Lesnick said Murtagh’s impassioned support for his fellow Republican’s request was more inspired by his run for the state Senate in the 35th District. (The Councilman won Westchester Republican Committee backing for the race last night.) That comment brought a low grumble of boos from the public and the call of “low blow” from one person. But if Lesnick started it, Murtagh didn’t let it die – though perhaps he should have.

“I resent any implication that I would play politics,” Murtagh protested, to which Lesnick said “Councilman Murtagh play politics? Never.”

Come to think of it, I had already seen the show.

It always seems that whenever Jeanine and Al Pirro start fade off the radar screen, something happens to bring them roaring back. Today’s its word that federal prosecutors are asking questions about Al Pirro’s role in the controversial Ridge Hill project in Yonkers.

In case you missed it, today’s Journal News has the story that investigators have subpoenaed records from Yonkers City Council members Sandy Annabi and Patricia McDow. They have asked for Annabi’s financial disclosure form from 2006 and all e-mails she sent and received from 2004 until March 28, the date the subpoena was issued to the city.

And City Council President Chuck Lesnick says investigators also asked him about his dealings with Pirro, served as a lobbying consultant to developer Forest City Ratner.

Read more about that here.

Here’s a couple of stories from the weekend that might be of interest to politics watchers.

First off, a story that’s being featured prominently on our Web page today, from reporters Jon Bandler and Jorge FitzGibbon:

MOUNT VERNON – A political committee run by city Democratic Party chairwoman Serapher Conn-Halevi paid her and her daughter $20,000 last year, campaign financial disclosure records show.
The money accounts for nearly 60 percent of all the cash spent by Conn-Halevi’s committee, the Chairwoman’s Trust, since July 2006 – while only 3 percent went to political campaigns or charitable causes, the records show.

Full story here.

Then there’s Len Maniace’s Sunday report on the hidden costs of development to Yonkers taxpayers:

YONKERS – Previously undisclosed losses from stumbling efforts to create a technology center from a one-time carpet factory will cost the Yonkers city government $4 million.
The losses for the n-Valley Technology Center on Nepperhan Avenue were detailed in a closing financial statement for Ridge Hill Development Corporation recently obtained by The Journal News. The report provides a glimpse at how the Yonkers Industrial Development Agency turned to the corporation, one of its offspring nonprofit development agencies, to help keep the faltering technology center plan afloat.

Read that here.

Finally, on a lighter note, Yonkers City Council President Chuck Lesnick had his hair sheared off to raise money to fight children’s cancer. Here’s the before picture; sadly, our photo archives don’t have the “after.”

The big surprise is not that Yonkers Councilwoman Patricia McDow held a fund-raising last-night event, even though she easily won re-election in November. Elected officials always seem to be in a money-raising mode. What was surprising, though, is the new website listed on the invite: www.mcdow2009.com. The Councilwoman’s term does not expire for nearly four years, so what’s the significance of 2009?

Only two positions seem likely for McDow to seek: the Yonkers City Council President’s post held by fellow Democrat Chuck Lesnick and the County Legislature seat held by another Democrat, Jose Alvarado. McDow rules out challenging Alvarado, who she says is a friend. That leaves the job held by Lesnick with whom McDow is not particularly happy with these days – especially after McDow was dumped as the Council’s Democratic majority leader in January.

McDow says she’s exploring her options and notes that she is person who might challenge Lesnick; Republican Council members Dee Barbato and John Murtagh also are frequently mentioned as challengers to Lesnick.

Yonkers Mayor Phil Amicone and City Council President Chuck Lesnick began the city’s lobbying effort to pry loose more money from Albany today, one day after Gov. Eliot Spitzer unveiled his new budget for the state. The two trekked to Albany to meet with representatives from the Governor’s Budget Office and also talked with state Legislators who represent Yonkers: Sen. Andrea Stewart-Cousins, Assemblyman Mike Spano and Assemblyman Gary Pretlow, all of them Democrats.

The Republican mayor focused on more money for the Yonkers Public Schools, enough to put it on a on par with the other ‘Big Five’ cities across New York. Democrat Lesnick said the 7 percent increase in state aid for Yonkers schools failed to keep pace with the state funding boost headed to the states other big cities. Both officials said yesterday’s visit was just the start of the effort. The mayor is scheduled to address a joint meeting of the senate and assembly budget committees on Monday, Amicone spokesman David Simpson said. The 7-member City Council is expected to travel to Albany sometime in the next few months to make its pitch for more state funding.

The mayor’s strategy is to tell Albany officials that the city’s need for additional funds will not go on indefinitely, Simpson said, a series of major retail and residential projects are expected to significantly increase Yonkers tax revenue, Simpson said, who referred to the request bridge financing that will allow the city reach that goal.

Yonkers City Council President Chuck Lesnick says Councilman John Murtagh dredged up the bad old days of the city’s desegregation battle in talking about a shootout that killed one man and wounded another in the city’s Colonial Heights neighborhood Monday night. The incident took place in front of the Raleigh Valentine Townhouses, a development built as part of the federal desegregation order.

“It proves that it doesn’t belong in a middle-class neighborhood,” Murtagh told our reporter Will David, referring to what he said was a housing development that’s long been plagued by crime.

In a release e-mailed to the press late this afternoon Lesnick, a Democrat, criticized Republican Murtagh, in whose district the shooting occurred. “For Councilman Murtagh to state that he doesn’t feel families and people of lesser means should be housed in a middle class neighborhood is unfortunate and harkens back to an ugly era in Yonkers past.”

Reached for comment, Murtagh said Lesnick was grandstanding. “I’m disappointed that Mr. Lesnick feels the need to pick a political fight,” Murtagh said this evening.

Murtagh said his criticism was not aimed at desegregation housing, three of which are in his district, but rather with problems at this particualr development. “I’m standing on my porch and if I walk 150 yards I literally will be standing in front of the Cross Street houses, which I’ve never heard one complaint about it.”

(note: original post edited for length and clarity)

Baseball fandom may the only arena more partisan than American politics these days, and few baseball rivalries are quite as nasty as that between the Yankees and the Red Sox.

That’s what makes Yonkers City Council President Chuck Lesnick’s campaign fund raiser at Xaviar’s on the Hudson in Yonkers set for next week, so interesting.

Democrat Lesnick has announced two bold-face names for the event: state Comptroller Thomas P. DiNapoli, for political junkies, and—presumably for baseball fans—Mo Vaughn, the first baseman, DH, and 1996 MVP winner for the Red Sox.

The Boston team is an anathema west of New Haven, Conn., though Vaughn did finish his career with the New York Mets following a couple of years in Anaheim. That might not make a difference in Yonkers, where fans of the Yankees easily appear to out number those of the Mets. And given Vaughn’s two injury-plagued years with the Mets, fans of the Queens team didn’t get much of a chance to warm up to the big guy.

Since leaving baseball, Vaughn has found a new career and become a New Yorker. He’s the managing director of OMNI New York LLC, a company that buys and renovates low-income housing to provide affordable homes in and around New York City. One of OMNI’s renovation projects is the 195-unity Whitney Young Manor apartment complex at 358 Nepperhan Ave.

Even so, with suggested donations of $500, $1,000 and $4,838 (the legal contribitution limit) the Jan. 17 event doesn’t seem aimed at the bleacher crowd.

After two years as Yonkers City Council Democratic Majority Leader, Patricia McDow was bypassed for another term this morning. Instead the Council picked Sandy Annabi to the post. Meanwhile, Liam McLaughlin was named to continue as Republican minority leader.

Though the City Council’s reorganization meeting following the November elections was set to begin at 9 a.m., the session did not begin until shortly before noon. In the interim, Yonkers City Council President Chuck Lesnick met with council members in small groups and individually, attempting to forge an agreement among Council members that also included the Council’s committee chair posts.

Annabi, who represents the Council’s Second District and previously did not caucus with Council Democrats, descibed the change in party leadership as “a passing of the torch,” while Lesnick said “we are rotating leadership” – terminology that McDow was not buying. McDow, who represents the Council’s First District, said she sensed something was amiss beginning in mid-December when, she said, she suddenly heard very little from her three fellow Democrats on the City Council.

McDow said she did not know why the change had been made, but Annabi said that the Council did “not want to be beholden” to Democratic Party leaders and others outside the city, without elaborating. That seemed to be a reference to Yonkers Democratic Party chief and County Legislator Ken Jenkins who is allied with McDow.

As proof that the Council – or at least its Democrats – was one big happy family, Lesnick pointed to McDow’s new appointment as co-chair of two Council committees and chair of a third.

Adam Sandler played it serious in the courtroom scene from “Big Daddy,” shot in the Yonkers City Council Chamber in the late 1990s. But it was another movie that City Council President Chuck Lesnick and supporters of a proposed living-wage law hoped to conjure up yesterday.

A “Mr. K. Kringle of North Yonkers� had signed up to testify at yesterday’s public hearing on the legislation. Nearing the end of the list of speakers, City Clerk Joan Deierlein seemed a little mystified as she looked around the room and called his name. Moments later, Kris Kringle appeared bearing a canvas bag stuffed with 1,000 letters supporting the bill, which he then presented to Deierlein. If you don’t know by now, it was reminiscent of another movie courtroom scene, this one from the holiday classic, “Miracle on 34th Street.�

In his Yonkers testimony yesterday, Kringle touted the law which would set a base hourly wage of $11.85 for those working in affected workplaces. And then, before returning to his home in North Yonkers, Kringle presented a lump of coal to Mayor Phil Amicone who has been skeptical about the law.

Today mayoral spokesman David Simpson suggested that Santa made a mistake with Amicone’s coal, however. “I wish he had checked his list twice,” Simpson said.

Yonkers City Council President Chuck Lesnick said today he’s setting up a campaign-sign recycling program and “calling for politicians and cities to recycle their left over lawn signs instead of buying new ones for each election.”

“Think of the thousands upon thousands of signs across America that can be reused,� he said in a press release. “Why deplete resources by buying new signs when these coroplastic (corrugated plastic) signs are built to withstand the elements and last a long time?�

Lesnick said in the announcement he thought of the idea on election night. He reportedly filled a minivan with leftover signs and drove them to a storage facility, and asked the Yonkers Department of Public Works to pitch in.

If the city administration agrees, Lesnick said he will ask residents “to put the signs next to, not inside, their garbage or recycle pails on their regularly scheduled pick up days.” If not, he’ll ask them to drop them off at his storage spot: the Metropolitan Life storage facility on 759 Palmer Rd.

Any unclaimed signs will be used for future races, he said. Guess that mean’s he’s running again?