Many City Council members are wary of endorsing candidates in the 2013 mayoral race until after budget season because they're afraid a vengeful Speaker Christine Quinn will cut their share of $50 million in discretionary funds, DNAinfo.com New York has learned.
The funds, which are controlled by the speaker, are dished out to members each summer to fund constituent-pleasing services, such as community centers and seniors programs. While Quinn’s office has long insisted that the money is allocated based on districts' needs, it’s no secret that members on Quinn’s good side tend to profit — while those who cross her get their budgets slashed.
And many Council members now worry that endorsing a rival in the mayor's race, where Quinn is widely perceived as the front-runner, will result in the same fate.
“I definitely think that discretionary funds will be wielded as a weapon in the fight for endorsements,” said one Democratic Council member, who, like nearly a dozen others who spoke to DNAinfo.com New York, asked for anonymity to avoid angering Quinn.
“Certainly, that is the elephant in the room,” another member said.
“It’s a legal form of blackmail," still another member said.
To avoid retribution, some Council members are weighing postponing their endorsements until July, after the budget is adopted and Quinn no longer has sway over the money.
Quinn must be humiliated by the unrelenting protests because, in order to avoid us, she has navigated through piles of garbage bags, entered buildings through basements and used her security detail and handlers to divert our attention so that she could scurry past us without being noticed.
On December 2nd, the Human Rights Project at the Urban Justice Center released its annual NYC Council Human Rights Report Card. Christine Quinn received a D+, the second to lowest score in the City Council. In addition to voting against human rights bills, Quinn used her power as Speaker to kill bills that had a veto-proof majority of supporters.
As the NY Times reported in October, "A year ago City Council members tried to push through a living wage in the Bronx and to mandate a few sick days for workers. Christine Quinn ensured each effort ended up baled, tied and set by the BQE for early sanitation pickup."
One of the most powerful weapons in Quinn's arsenal as Speaker is the discretionary funds -- tens of millions of dollars that Quinn 1) doles out to reward campaign donors and loyal Council Members or 2) withholds from Council members who challenge her political or legislative agenda.
In March, Christine Quinn strong-armed the City Council members to vote in favor of renaming the Queensboro bridge for former NYC Mayor Ed Koch. Several months later, Mayor Ed Koch endorsed her for Mayor -- two years before the election.
It was noted in this space last week how well Brooklyn Democratic boss Vito Lopez fares in City Council Speaker Christine Quinn’s annual tax-dollar giveaway.
There have been developments.
Lopez, a state assemblyman and the subject of a federal corruption investigation, needed a front-end loader to haul away the so-called member-item cash lavished on him in the new city budget by Quinn — who used four pliant council members as cutouts.
But it turns out that Quinn took a fire ax to Queens Councilman Peter Vallone’s share of the boodle.
Vallone is a truly singular council member, in the sense that he has thus far managed to avoid attracting the attention of federal prosecutors, and it seems unlikely that he ever will.
But he irked Quinn by vocally opposing the renaming of the Queensboro Bridge in honor of former Mayor Ed Koch — so the speaker slashed his member-item take by 42%, or roughly $600,000.
Let’s be clear: Nobody should be getting member-item money.
These are lump-sum appropriations that corrupt the political process by giving incumbents cash to curry unfair favor with constituents; simultaneously, these cash goodies give bullying council bosses undue leverage over their underlings.
And Vallone — who apparently irritated Quinn and had his cash yanked as an example — proves the point.
Yet Quinn is cool with Lopez, who attracts the FBI like overripe pork attracts flies. Quinn channeled $4.4 million this year to his Brooklyn power base — the Ridgewood Bushwick Senior Citizens Council — through Brooklyn council members Domenic Recchia, Erik Dilan, Stephen Levin and Elizabeth Crowley.
While some $3.75 million is earmarked for alleged “capital construction,” the rest neatly covers salary and benefits for:
* Chris Fisher, Ridgewood executive director/Lopez campaign treasurer ($607,000).
(Quinn also managed to find $2 million for the United Federation of Teachers’ academically shaky charter school — but that’s a tale for another day.)
One final note: Quinn is many things — brash, personable, ambitious, maybe New York City’s next mayor.
But we’ve never thought her to be petty.
Until now.
Because she wasn’t content with punishing just Vallone for his temerity. She also took it out on the councilman’s father — former Council Speaker Peter Vallone Sr., arguably the last person to perform the office’s duties with decorum and dignity.
Cut from the budget was $6 million for a City University public-policy program named in his honor.
That’s the Vallones’ loss, to be sure.
But mostly it’s the city’s.
Christine Quinn should be ashamed.
Meanwhile, check out what other blogs are saying about this latest disgraceful turn about Speaker Quinn's slush fund scandal :
Op-Ed Bonus ! What a disgrace. How does Christine Quinn find hundreds of thousands of dollars for an indicted political slime ball, and millions in aggregate monies for member items, but she could not find $1 to save St. Vincent's Hospital in her very own city council district? This is sick and twisted. When are the over-taxed, over-fined, over-ticketed, over-tolled, over-run people of New York City going to wake up and vote Christine Quinn out of office? I realise that LGBTQ people want to rally around a leader, but damn, can't we pick one with a little bit of integrity? How about just a minimal standard of integrity? Is there a lowest common denominator of integrity we can demand out of LGBTQ leaders? How about a lowest expectations of integrity? If we scraped the bottom of Christine Quinn's diluted soup pan of weakened integrity broth, would we find any integrity sediment at all?
