CHatter
September 17th, 2007
Perry in the Race for Brooklyn BP
Assembly Member Nick Perry (D), who was briefly in last year’s heated Democratic primary to replace Rep. Major Owens (D-Brooklyn), has his sights set on a new race: the one to succeed Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz (D), whom term limits will force from office in 2009.
Perry, who said he quit the congressional race because he did not want to give up his safe Assembly seat in the quest for a seat he did not believe he could win, said that the prospect of running in an off-year race was more appealing to him. Plus, he said, he expects the 2009 Brooklyn race to be at least as crowded as the nine-way Manhattan borough president contest in 2005, and believes this will benefit him.
Other expected candidates in the race include Council Members Bill de Blasio (D) and Charles Barron (D), who officially announced his candidacy in July.
Perry said he expects to do well, by calling on a broad spectrum of support within and beyond Brooklyn’s black voters whom he thinks will shun Barron.
“Barron says if he’s the only black candidate in the race, the black candidate can win,” Perry said. “But if he’s the only black candidate in the race, the black candidate can’t win.”
Jersey City Looking for a Little Bloomberg and Quinn Love
Some Jersey City waterfront residents want to know why New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg (Unaff.) and City Council Speaker Christine Quinn (D-Manhattan) are not spending more time on Jersey City’s municipal issues.
That is the concern of a new committee at Our Lady of Czestochowa Catholic Church in Jersey City.
Mark Bonamo, a former political reporter and the committee’s chair, said he would often hear from young professionals moving into the waterfront that they believed the city was part of New York and wanted to know why Bloomberg and Quinn (and fellow Manhattan Democrat, former Speaker Gifford Miller) were not addressing potholes and crime on their side of the Hudson. Bonamo said much of this came because many waterfront residents worked in New York and moved to Jersey City in search of cheaper housing.
Bonamo said the church’s voter registration advisory committee will be seeking to register new parishioners as voters in Jersey City, along with providing them information on civic action. This will include meetings with local officials and information on how to address civic issues.
He said the committee will not seek to influence the political process but rather to educate parishioners. Bonamo noted that Jersey City already has several well-established neighborhood associations and hopes his group will serve as an extension of these.
“We want to create a sounding board for people to talk about these issues,” he said. “People want a place to voice their opinions.”
For the record, Democrats Jerry Healy and Steve Fulop are Jersey City’s mayor and waterfront councilman respectively.
Bye-Bye Bottled Water
Assembly Member Robert Sweeney (D-Suffolk) likes New York State’s tap water so much that he is calling for a ban of bottled water in state buildings.
The statewide ban would be a first of its extreme in the country, though similar bans have been placed in cities like San Francisco and Salt Lake City.
The Container Recycling Institute reported that less than 20 percent of single serving water bottles used in New York are recycled, helping lead Sweeney, the Environmental Committee chair, to declare the ban would make the state government “greener.”
Sweeney also noted the ban will conserve oil, which is used to make the plastic and powers the delivery trucks.
Paterson Promotes MWBEs
While minority- and women-owned construction businesses are prospering in the private sector, Lt. Gov. David Paterson (D) wants them to receive more public contracts.
Paterson delivered the keynote speech at a Sept. 5 panel discussion on the barriers minority- and women-owned construction businesses face in New York State.
“We’re not here to correct these historic problems,” Paterson said. “We’re here to ameliorate recent discrimination.
Paterson and members of the national Surety & Fidelity Association of America signed a memorandum of understanding stating that both parties will educate and assist minority- and women-owned businesses.
“We are not asking for affirmative action or any handout. We’re not even asking for a set-aside,” Paterson said. “We’re asking for business to be done with the standard procedures of standards and merit.”
Mastering Our Domain
City Council Member Gale Brewer (D-Manhattan) wants to carve out a corner for New York City.
The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, known as ICANN, has approved about 271 top level domain names such as .com, .net and .org. But about 250 of those are country suffixes such as .UK for England and .MX for Mexico.
In June ICANN is going to hear proposals from groups that want to create new names, such as .Berlin, .Paris and possibly .Google.
Queens information technologist Thomas Lowenhaupt, director of the newly formed Connecting.NYC Inc., wants a .nyc for local stores, government and residents.
Brewer, who chairs the Council’s Committee on Technology in Government, likes the idea and is planning to meet with Lowenhaupt and Commissioner Paul Cosgrave of the city Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications, but has not set a date as yet.
“I like to buy in New York,” she said, and the .nyc could be used to identify local merchants. “From many perspectives, it makes sense.”
However, when it comes to her technological endeavors, Brewer ran into some trouble with her August email newsletter. As she wrote in her September newsletter, “Dear friends, Last month, I included an article ‘AFTER YEARS OF TELLING PEOPLE CHEMOTHERAPY IS THE ONLY WAY TO TRY AND ELIMINATE CANCER, JOHNS HOPKINS IS FINALLY STARTING TO TELL YOU THERE IS AN ALTERNATIVE WAY’ and it turns out that the article is NOT presented by Johns Hopkins and is a hoax. I apologize…”
Judgment Day
Former Gov. George Pataki’s (R) new firm is suing his old lawyer—or, at least, the lawyer who once had to represent him in court, Eliot Spitzer (D). Chadbourne & Parke, the law firm which now calls home, announced a pro-bono lawsuit against Spitzer, the Assembly, the State Senate and the State of New York. The firm is representing four lawyers who not only want to force the state to raise judicial salaries, but want to be awarded back pay through 2000. Will the case prompt a Pataki-Spitzer courtroom drama to inspire this generation’s Inherit the Wind? Only time will tell.
Schuler Promoted
Thomas Schuler, most recently the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s manager of government affairs, has been promoted to be the institution’s chief government affairs officer. Schuler is a former chief of staff for State Sen. Eric Schneiderman (D-Manhattan/Bronx), and held positions in the offices of then-City Council Member Thomas Duane (D-Manhattan) and State Sen. Franz Leichter (D-Manhattan/Bronx).
—by John R.D. Celock, Edward-Isaac Dovere, Adam Pincus and Dan Rivoli.
Assembly Member Nick Perry (D), who was briefly in last year’s heated Democratic primary to replace Rep. Major Owens (D-Brooklyn), has his sights set on a new race: the one to succeed Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz (D), whom term limits will force from office in 2009.
Perry, who said he quit the congressional race because he did not want to give up his safe Assembly seat in the quest for a seat he did not believe he could win, said that the prospect of running in an off-year race was more appealing to him. Plus, he said, he expects the 2009 Brooklyn race to be at least as crowded as the nine-way Manhattan borough president contest in 2005, and believes this will benefit him.
Other expected candidates in the race include Council Members Bill de Blasio (D) and Charles Barron (D), who officially announced his candidacy in July.
Perry said he expects to do well, by calling on a broad spectrum of support within and beyond Brooklyn’s black voters whom he thinks will shun Barron.
“Barron says if he’s the only black candidate in the race, the black candidate can win,” Perry said. “But if he’s the only black candidate in the race, the black candidate can’t win.”
Jersey City Looking for a Little Bloomberg and Quinn Love
Some Jersey City waterfront residents want to know why New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg (Unaff.) and City Council Speaker Christine Quinn (D-Manhattan) are not spending more time on Jersey City’s municipal issues.
That is the concern of a new committee at Our Lady of Czestochowa Catholic Church in Jersey City.
Mark Bonamo, a former political reporter and the committee’s chair, said he would often hear from young professionals moving into the waterfront that they believed the city was part of New York and wanted to know why Bloomberg and Quinn (and fellow Manhattan Democrat, former Speaker Gifford Miller) were not addressing potholes and crime on their side of the Hudson. Bonamo said much of this came because many waterfront residents worked in New York and moved to Jersey City in search of cheaper housing.
Bonamo said the church’s voter registration advisory committee will be seeking to register new parishioners as voters in Jersey City, along with providing them information on civic action. This will include meetings with local officials and information on how to address civic issues.
He said the committee will not seek to influence the political process but rather to educate parishioners. Bonamo noted that Jersey City already has several well-established neighborhood associations and hopes his group will serve as an extension of these.
“We want to create a sounding board for people to talk about these issues,” he said. “People want a place to voice their opinions.”
For the record, Democrats Jerry Healy and Steve Fulop are Jersey City’s mayor and waterfront councilman respectively.
Bye-Bye Bottled Water
Assembly Member Robert Sweeney (D-Suffolk) likes New York State’s tap water so much that he is calling for a ban of bottled water in state buildings.
The statewide ban would be a first of its extreme in the country, though similar bans have been placed in cities like San Francisco and Salt Lake City.
The Container Recycling Institute reported that less than 20 percent of single serving water bottles used in New York are recycled, helping lead Sweeney, the Environmental Committee chair, to declare the ban would make the state government “greener.”
Sweeney also noted the ban will conserve oil, which is used to make the plastic and powers the delivery trucks.
Paterson Promotes MWBEs
While minority- and women-owned construction businesses are prospering in the private sector, Lt. Gov. David Paterson (D) wants them to receive more public contracts.
Paterson delivered the keynote speech at a Sept. 5 panel discussion on the barriers minority- and women-owned construction businesses face in New York State.
“We’re not here to correct these historic problems,” Paterson said. “We’re here to ameliorate recent discrimination.
Paterson and members of the national Surety & Fidelity Association of America signed a memorandum of understanding stating that both parties will educate and assist minority- and women-owned businesses.
“We are not asking for affirmative action or any handout. We’re not even asking for a set-aside,” Paterson said. “We’re asking for business to be done with the standard procedures of standards and merit.”
Mastering Our Domain
City Council Member Gale Brewer (D-Manhattan) wants to carve out a corner for New York City.
The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, known as ICANN, has approved about 271 top level domain names such as .com, .net and .org. But about 250 of those are country suffixes such as .UK for England and .MX for Mexico.
In June ICANN is going to hear proposals from groups that want to create new names, such as .Berlin, .Paris and possibly .Google.
Queens information technologist Thomas Lowenhaupt, director of the newly formed Connecting.NYC Inc., wants a .nyc for local stores, government and residents.
Brewer, who chairs the Council’s Committee on Technology in Government, likes the idea and is planning to meet with Lowenhaupt and Commissioner Paul Cosgrave of the city Department of Information Technology and Telecommunications, but has not set a date as yet.
“I like to buy in New York,” she said, and the .nyc could be used to identify local merchants. “From many perspectives, it makes sense.”
However, when it comes to her technological endeavors, Brewer ran into some trouble with her August email newsletter. As she wrote in her September newsletter, “Dear friends, Last month, I included an article ‘AFTER YEARS OF TELLING PEOPLE CHEMOTHERAPY IS THE ONLY WAY TO TRY AND ELIMINATE CANCER, JOHNS HOPKINS IS FINALLY STARTING TO TELL YOU THERE IS AN ALTERNATIVE WAY’ and it turns out that the article is NOT presented by Johns Hopkins and is a hoax. I apologize…”
Judgment Day
Former Gov. George Pataki’s (R) new firm is suing his old lawyer—or, at least, the lawyer who once had to represent him in court, Eliot Spitzer (D). Chadbourne & Parke, the law firm which now calls home, announced a pro-bono lawsuit against Spitzer, the Assembly, the State Senate and the State of New York. The firm is representing four lawyers who not only want to force the state to raise judicial salaries, but want to be awarded back pay through 2000. Will the case prompt a Pataki-Spitzer courtroom drama to inspire this generation’s Inherit the Wind? Only time will tell.
Schuler PromotedThomas Schuler, most recently the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s manager of government affairs, has been promoted to be the institution’s chief government affairs officer. Schuler is a former chief of staff for State Sen. Eric Schneiderman (D-Manhattan/Bronx), and held positions in the offices of then-City Council Member Thomas Duane (D-Manhattan) and State Sen. Franz Leichter (D-Manhattan/Bronx).
—by John R.D. Celock, Edward-Isaac Dovere, Adam Pincus and Dan Rivoli.
