With the future of the office still very much in question, though, Gotbaum says she has much to be proud of—and a few things to regret. While trying to conclude some leftover business, Gotbaum took a moment to discuss her time in office, failing her fingerprint test and the hair issue.
The following is an edited transcript.
City Hall: What are your feelings about leaving civic life? Is it bittersweet?
Betsy Gotbaum: Well, I think it’s going to be bittersweet to leave people. I feel like my office is great and I like everybody almost equally here, and we had a really good time and I think I’m going to miss people a lot. I’m not going to miss the politics. I’m not going to miss the fighting. That’s the bitter part, but I’m not bitter and I’m not a bitter person. I think it was a wonderful run and I learned an enormous amount and I contributed a great deal. When I make a decision about something, I move on and never look back and I don’t say, “Oh, maybe I shouldn’t have left the Historical Society and run for office.” I basically said, “You know what, I’d done what I could do there and I made a decision to move on.” I think that’s the way I feel now. I’m very excited about what I’m going to do next, which I don’t know. I need to know. [Laughs.]
CH: How do you anticipate spending your first day as a private citizen?
BG: I haven’t got anything lined up yet that’s full-time where I’m going to hop out of bed on the third of January and into an office. At first, I was panicking a little bit about that, but actually, I’m not now. I wouldn’t mind having the flexibility of not having to get up in the morning every morning and race to an office and get dressed and all that, so the first couple of weeks for sure, I’m going to organize my office and my life. The governor has appointed me to the parole board, and I don’t know when that’s going to happen. I put all my paperwork in; in fact, I failed my fingerprint test this morning. It didn’t work. The thing didn’t work for me.
CH: You don’t have any fingerprints?
BG: No, I do, but the machine wouldn’t register. So they had to do it the old way.
CH: What are some of your proudest achievements as public advocate?
BG: The overriding theme would be, I think, I defined the office, because sometimes people want to know what the definition of this office is, to be available and be there for the most vulnerable New Yorkers who have no place else to turn. And that was a focus that I had. It started with the Food Stamp program in 2002, which raised almost $1 million in private money to increase the accessibility to food stamps, all the way through getting Costco to provide food stamps for customers in New York. That’s been a theme … helping New Yorkers who have nowhere else to turn.
CH: How concerned are you about the survival of the public advocate’s office?
BG: Well, I was really concerned up to the election because we were cut 40 percent in the summer. I went through the dance that I’ve gone through for seven years with the mayor and the speaker, and always the speaker had restored, when it was Gifford Miller, except for one year, and Speaker [Christine] Quinn had always restored, but for some reason she didn’t do it this year. That was very upsetting to me, because I knew I wasn’t going to run again, I wasn’t going to fire people from this office, and I wasn’t going to lay anyone off. I was going to spend the money judiciously, but I would be leaving Bill de Blasio with very little money, and the good news was when the mayor had lunch with him, the mayor gave him back the $850,000, which he had not done for me and neither had the speaker. I was much more worried than I am now. Bill de Blasio will be very good and he will be a very good spokesman for this office. He’ll be terrific. I’m not worried at all about that. I would hope that someone will take up the cause of getting this office an independent budget, because it’s just not fair that whoever is sitting here has to fight constantly to run an office that I believe is essential.
CH: You helped introduce a bill to the City Council to establish an independent budget for the office. Do you have any sense of how that’s going to go?
BG: I have. I doubt it very much. The bills only go when the speaker wants them to go. I don’t have a lot of hope that it will go anywhere. I think the best hope is that there will be a charter commission and that it will be a fair charter commission and it will be possible to put on the commission the independent budget issue, as opposed to putting it on the elimination of the office.
CH: With you stepping down from office, there will be a lack of citywide female officeholders…
BG: I think it’s really too bad. It’s very difficult for women to be in elected office and run for elected office. It’s much harder, I believe, for women than it is for men because we don’t have wives, so we don’t have partners that can do the things—like what I do in my house. There’s a question of time with people who have children or have to take care of older parents. Women are the primary caregivers and it is difficult, not to say nothing about the hair issue.
CH: The hair issue?
BG: You always worry about how you look, much more worried than men. You worry about how you look; you worry if your makeup looks right, if you have enough lipstick on, and if your hair isn’t falling all over your face. I do think women bring a different perspective to elected office, and I think it’s too bad, but I don’t think it means that women won’t run. Three or four years from now, women will run for higher office and I hope they will run—and I’ll be right up there to give them advice.
CH: During the race to replace you, there was some criticism from some of the candidates that maybe you didn’t run the office as aggressively as you could have. What did you think about some of those comments?
BG: Well, I think those comments are actually true. Mark [Green] had a mayor who was very aggressive, loud, and shut the door on lots of people—and you needed a foil for that mayor. Mark was very effective at that. He was very good with the press, he spent a lot of time fighting for things that he felt the mayor shouldn’t be doing, and that was his emphasis. My emphasis was quite different. My emphasis was more on helping the vulnerable people who didn’t have any place else to turn. I upgraded the ombudsman service in this office. I put a lot of focus on a lot of attention, making sure our people had the capacity to do intake and do the calls to the agencies. I found a mayor that was more accommodating than Giuliani was for helping people with nowhere else to turn—what was I going to fight with him about?
CH: Were you also surprised by the mayor’s election results?
BG: No. I won a lot of bets.
CH: Really?
BG: I’m getting two dinners next week. I said it would be single digits, and people said I was crazy and didn’t know what I was talking about.
CH: What sort of advice would you then pass on to Bill de Blasio going forward into his first term?
BG: I don’t think he needs any advice. I think he got $850,000 just by waking up.
CH: Do you have any regrets?
BG: I regret not getting a better handle on the press in the beginning. I didn’t have a press secretary for the first six months so I felt that, I think, things got away from me and I couldn’t establish what I just told you about helping vulnerable people and being less of an attack dog on the mayor. I think my failing was that I didn’t really figure out how to handle that.
Yatming
