AD-64: Village Voice Drops Bomb on Shelly over Seward Park

by: Roatti

Tue Aug 12, 2008 at 21:59:32 PM EDT

The Shame of Speaker Shelly Silver's Resistance to Seward Park Redevelopment

Just south of Delancey Street on the Lower East Side, near the bustling entrance to the Williamsburg Bridge, lies that rarest Manhattan commodity: vacant land.

This is not just a few buildable lots, but a huge swath of property, some five acres in all, every square inch of it owned by the City of New York. It is a fabulous parcel, the kind that developers-like those building theswanky new towers rising on the other side of Delancey Street-only dream about.

(snip)

But not here. These weed-strewn lots have stood for more than a generation, their grim chain-link fencing, topped with barbed wire, all that passes for a streetscape. No one has dared break ground here in decades. Every promise to do so, every initiative that might bring new construction, has been buried by the political masters who control this barren turf.

Just who might these "political masters" be?

Who has such clout? Who tells a mayor, an entire city, to simply buzz off?

Who else but that wily old pol, Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver. This strip-carried on zoning maps as the Seward Park Urban Renewal Area-is the northern edge of Silver's lower Manhattan district. And while he rarely leaves fingerprints, nothing moves here without his approval. In Albany, where he is the state's second-most-powerful figure, Silver is notorious for his often-obstructionist ways. On Seward Park, he has outdone himself. Under his watch, this territory has remained desolate and empty for more than 30 years, held hostage to stubborn prejudice and fear of change.

I'm gonna go out on a limb here, but Shelly just might be wary of allowing a huge population influx into his district- one that changes his electorate in ways he can't predict or control.

Regardless of his motives, the article is a greeat read that delves into the racial and generational divides of the area since it was leveled at the height of the misguided urban renewal era in 1967.  

Even more, it serves as a powerful metaphor of Silver's tenure in the Assembly- a huge, gaping vacant lot left to fester for over a generation because of an utterly bewildering fear of change and progress by one politician with more power than any single person should ever posess in a democracy. Go read the whole thing.  

Wayne Barrett on Bruno

by: phillip anderson

Wed Oct 10, 2007 at 11:41:32 AM EDT

The Bruno Files: Exploring the Record of the State Senate Leader Calling for a Spitzer Probe
The immaculate record of the state senate leader calling for investigations of Eliot Spitzer

As often as Bruno impacts our lives, we are rarely offered a glimpse of his world, which is crowded with donors and lobbyists, and are only vaguely aware of the facts surrounding the year-old federal probe of his business dealings. His son became a $50,000-a-month lobbyist whose clients prospered in the senate. His brother took a $127,500 post in the Pataki administration and got his state agency to pay $54,400 a year to the local Republican Party boss to rent an unnecessary office just a stone's throw from his house.

The senator, meanwhile, set up a consulting business in his sprawling farmhouse-and even though he neither advertised the firm nor even listed it in the phone book, clients rushed to his door. He still won't say who those clients are, just as he won't say whom he visited on his much-publicized recent trips to the city aboard state aircraft. But the names of a few of those clients have leaked out in occasional news coverage of the FBI probe, including a businessman he steered a half-million-dollar state grant to, and an investment firm that handled the millions he's raised for the senate campaign committee. In real-estate ventures unconnected to the consulting company, Bruno partnered up with two Albany lobbyists in one and purchased property from a state contractor in another. The lobbyists, of course, lived at the senate trough, and an investor in the second deal-personally recruited by Bruno to bail another son out of the deal-got two state grants with the senator's help.

...

While it's common for elected officials to dip into their campaign committees for an occasional personal meal or other perk, the filings for Bruno's three committees suggest that he may never pick up his own tab. In 2006 and the first six months of 2007, the committees have spent more than $92,000 on restaurant and country-club bills for "meetings" or "meals," not including any expenses that are listed for "fundraising" purposes. Calls to some of the restaurants confirm that Bruno eats there regularly, often with guests. It's not at all uncommon for multiple meals to be billed for the same day, or for the committee to cover virtually an entire week of dinners (including the weekend), usually in restaurants near the capitol and his home. It is possible that some of these meals are for staff, but one committee has no full-time staff, and it's the one with $38,000 in restaurant billings alone.

MUCH more on the flip...

death wail of an incestuous bipartisan combine

by: simonstl

Wed Oct 03, 2007 at 16:33:46 PM EDT

I don't think I could have expressed this any better than Wayne Barrett at the Village Voice. (Thanks, CapCon.)

...the first real challenge to [Albany's] insider-party game in modern history... Spitzer’s determination to take the senate away from the party that has controlled it ... is an electroshock to the state’s political culture—disturbing not just to New York’s Republican remnant, but even to the assembly Democrats, who, like prior governors of both parties, have protected and prospered from a divided legislature. What we are hearing in the high-pitched posturing over this scandal is the death wail of an incestuous bipartisan combine, threatened by a governor ... who knows ... what it takes to push his taut frame through a stiff Albany wind.

This sounds good, but I worry that Spitzer has done a weak job of dealing with the posturing, failing to explain basic civics to the participants and holing up against an investigation that seems to have nothing to find. I'm also not as optimistic as Barrett that this is a death wail - but it's certainly a wail.

(Barrett's piece leaves Andrew Cuomo in tatters, though, I think.)