The Manhattan Times

The race for public advocate

by Daniel P. Bader

New York City government is full of red tape. It’s such a big city that its citizens have little hope of ever having a one-on-one conversation with their mayor.

The city’s office of the public advocate was created in 1993 as a conduit for New Yorkers to address problems with their government.

The public advocate has official roles on the City Council, including the power to introduce legislation and cast tie breaking votes. The public advocate is also next in line if the mayor is removed or dies in office.

On Sep. 15, registered Democrats will vote in the primary for their candidate for the position. New York City voters are so overwhelmingly Democratic that the primary will all but decide who will take the office in November.

There have only been two public advocates since the position was created: Mark Green and, currently, Betsy Gotbaum. Despite the opportunity to run for a third term, Gotbaum decided not to run again.

Those lining up to take her spot are Mark Green, Queens Council Member Eric Gioia, civil rights attorney Norman Siegel, and Brooklyn Council Member Bill de Blasio.

Bill de Blasio

Bill de Blasio started in politics during the campaign to elect David Dinkins as mayor in 1989, and served as an aide in his administration. In 1997 de Blasio was appointed regional director for the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development for New York and New Jersey. He was elected to the District 15 School Board in 1999 and helped establish pre-kindergarten for nearly all the children in the district.

De Blasio is a supporter of mayoral control of the city schools and wants to use the public advocate’s office to further reform schools. According to his Web site, he points to his involvement in the City Council effort to “restore 125 subsidized childcare classrooms across the city, and to prevent $3 million in potentially devastating cuts to child welfare personnel.”

On housing de Blasio said he wrote a city law that prevents landlords from discriminating against Section 8 tenants – those who receive vouchers for housing from the federal government.

“My priorities as public advocate will reflect my values: a belief in efficient and transparent government,” he said.

Mark Green

Mark Green, who served as public advocate from 1993 to 2001 and then narrowly lost the race

for mayor to Michael Bloomberg, is running again. Since losing the mayoral race, Green has served as president of the Democracy Project, a policy institute he started in the 1980s. He also served as president of Air America Media, a progressive talk network that is broadcast on satellite radio.

Among his numerous plans, Green wants to shrink healthcare costs by allowing small businesses to buy into city health insurance plans, adopt “green” lighting for all city-owned buildings, create an independent budget for the public advocate’s office and make 311 information available on the Internet in “real time.”

Eric Gioia

Eric Gioia might be best remembered for living on the typical one-person allotment of food stamps, about $28 for one week in 2007, to call attention to hunger in the city.

Like de Blasio, Gioia’s Web site does not list any plans for office once elected but instead points to his accomplishments in City Council.

As examples of his speaking out, he mentions protesting against the Metropolitan Transportation Authority when 7-train service was shut down and when it raised fares. He also holds up his work revitalizing Queens

and the Hunters Point South plan that will, once completed, be the biggest middle class housing development in the city.

Norman Siegel

Norman Siegel has a long history of fighting against the government. When he graduated from law school in 1968 he joined the New York Civil Liberties Union’s Southern Justice and Voting Law Project and served as the NYCLU’s executive director from 1985 to 2000.

“What I say to people is: ‘when it comes to the race for Public Advocate, I’m ‘The Natural,’” Siegel said, referring to the Robert Redford baseball movie of the same name.

Not being an elected official is his biggest advantage, he said, and what’s really needed for the office is to make it more relevant to every day citizens.

“I think the office has never reached its potential,” he said.

Siegel has a 14-point plan for the office if he wins – one that leans heavily on NYCLU tactics of press conferences to garner media coverage of issues. One of his more notable ideas is the decentralization of the public advocate’s office. He wants to open one office in each borough.

“It doesn’t cost a penny,” Siegel said. His plan calls for locating the staff in each of the borough presidents’ offices in return for the added constituent services his office could provide.

“What borough president would say no to that?” Siegel said.

The biggest reason people should vote for him, he said, is because he has no higher ambitions – even though the office is seen as a stepping stone to the mayor’s job.

“I don’t want to be the mayor. All I want to be is public advocate,” he noted.

The Manhattan Times is the bilingual newspaper of Washington Heights and Inwood.