As you can imagine, it was not positive.

“I am very disappointed that the president has decided to support gay marriage,” Dias Sr. said. “But we are America. And in America you have the freedom to chose whatever you want.”

The Rev went on to say that he supports North Carolina’s vote yesterday to support a constitutional ban against gay marriage, noting that every time the question of gay marriage came before the electorate, the vote is always to reject it.

“In every state that people voted for gay marriage, people rejected gay marriage,” he said. “The only way to get gay marriage is through the Legislature, with lots of money.”

Not even Bill Clinton, who traveled to North Carolina before the vote to urge its defeat, could sway the people, Diaz Sr. said.

Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who successfully pushed for the legalization of gay marriage last year, told reporters today that he had not talked about gay marriage with the president during his Albany visit yesterday. And Diaz Sr. said that Obama’s change-of-hear most likely had to do with Vice President Joe Biden’s comments earlier this week than any conversation he may or may not have had with Cuomo.

“They had this planned already,” he said. “Cuomo had nothing to do with it.”

The senator, who frequently and loudly vocalizes his opposition to gay marriage and abortion, recently equating the later to the Holocaust (as well as a ban on Happy Meal toys), said that Obama’s final “evolution” on gay marriage will hurt him electorally.

“That will help Mitt Romney, that will definitely help Mitt Romney,” Diaz Sr. said.

[UPDATE] About 20 minutes after I got off the phone with him, the senator sent out a “What You Should Know” statement. Here it is:

To read the full article at City & State click here.

Hours after being re-hired by Councilman Ydanis Rodriguez, Segal was handed a letter from his boss informing him that he had been fired again. Segal was canned by Rodriguez last week after the New York Post revealed that the 26-year-old was arrested seven years ago for attempting to burn down an army recruitment center in the Bronx.

“Dear David, thank you so much for your hard work and dedication during your months of service in our office and to our community,” the letter to Segal reads. “This serves as notice that your services are no longer needed in my office. Best of luck in all future endeavors. Sincerely, Ydanis Rodriguez.”

Segal was handed the letter at 3 p.m. while sitting at his desk in Rodriguez’s legislative office at 250 Broadway. Sources say Rodriguez was “spooked” by a tweet from NY1 political commentator Gerson Borrero deriding the councilman for re-hiring Segal. “THE VOTERS OF THE 10 CD HAVE TO TAKE A 2ND LOOK THEIR CM,” Borrero tweeted at 1:08 p.m. after the Politicker reported that Segal had been rehired.

“Councilman Rodriguez rehired me to his office,” Segal said. “I reported to work at 9 a.m. at 250 Broadway. I worked during the morning doing writing for the office. And a little over five hours after I got there, Councilman Rodriguez fired me yet again.”

Segal said he would make a public statement about the situation next Monday. “It’s about to get interesting,” he said.

Earlier, we reported that Council Speaker Christine Quinn had advised Rodriguez to re-hire Segal, based on state law dictating lawful employment practices. Council lawyer Liz Fine told the Post that it would be a violation to fire anyone based on past incarceration.

To read the full piece at City & State click here.

The race for City Hall starts in the classroom

By Andrew J. Hawkins

Mayor Michael Bloomberg may not be running for reelection next year, but he will undoubtedly be playing a starring role in the race to replace him. The six Democrats expected to run next year are all supportive of the mayor’s efforts to take control of the school system, but differ with Bloomberg on most everything else—whether it’s school closures, co-locations with charter schools, relations with the teachers union or standardized test scores.

So if next year’s race is for the right to be the next education mayor, how do the candidates stack up? What are their qualifications, their accomplishments and their thoughts on some of the more controversial policies of the Bloomberg administration? David Bloomfield, a professor of education at CUNY and an expert on education policy in New York, was kind enough to offer his analysis of each candidate’s qualifications.
For their part, the Department of Education says that educational outcomes have never been better—and graduation rates and test scores never higher—than under Bloomberg.
“Our reforms have shown positive results for our students,” said Chancellor Dennis Walcott in an interview. “I’m a resident of New York City, and I’ll be paying close attention to what [the candidates] have to say.”

Tom Allon

Tom Allon

Manhattan Media CEO*

Education: Stuyvesant High School; B.A. in history from Cornell University; M.S., Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.

Qualifications: Taught journalism and American literature at Stuyvesant High School, 1986–87; briefly a member of the United Federation of Teachers.

Mayoral control: Allon supports mayoral control and charter schools, believing they give parents more options and serve as laboratories for education reform. He takes issue with the mayor’s emphasis on test scores and the administration’s turnaround program, where failing schools are closed and reopened as smaller schools. “We have merely shuffled the seats on the Titanic,” Allon says. If elected, he says he would seek to repair the stormy relationship between City Hall and the teachers union.

Accomplishments: Allon says his proudest accomplishment is helping to create two public high schools: Eleanor Roosevelt High School on the East Side and Frank McCourt High School on the West Side. “I worked with elected leaders in each neighborhood, used my consensus-
building powers, tenacity and political adeptness to get these two schools off the ground,” he says. But as a nonelected official, Allon can claim fewer accomplishments, naturally, than his potential rivals.

Education in 2013: Allon sees education as “the most important issue in the 2013 mayoral race. The rest is commentary.”

Bloomfield’s analysis: “Allon’s accomplishments, such as they are, disproportionately favor white students—Eleanor Roosevelt student enrollment, for example, is over 60 percent white and less than 20 percent black and Latino. Further, he urgently needs to broaden his scope beyond the Upper East and West Sides of Manhattan.”

*Allon is CEO of Manhattan Media, which publishes this paper.

Bill de Blasio

Bill de Blasio

Public Advocate

Education: Russell and Peabody elementary schools; Cambridge Rindge & Latin School in Cambridge, Mass.; B.A. from New York University; Master of International Affairs from Columbia University.

Qualifications: School-board member, 1999–2001; member of City Council Education Committee, 2002–2009; Public Advocate, 2009–present.

Mayoral control: De Blasio supports mayoral control, but believes in more parent engagement, though he lacks specifics on what that would look like. “I can say without reservation, as a public school parent, that this administration has shut us out,” he says. “We have got to bring parents to the table and treat them like stakeholders if we hope to make more progress in our schools. Mayoral control shouldn’t mean you go it alone and stop listening.”

Accomplishments: While serving on his local school board, de Blasio helped cap class size at 20 students and redevelop John Jay High School. As a Council member, he supported legislation to improve school playgrounds, make child-care centers more transparent, webcast PTA meetings and keep autistic children with their peers. As public advocate, de Blasio has made the issues of school closures and co-locations with charter schools among his top priorities. He took some credit for helping prevent the closure of P.S. 114 in Canarsie, and helped preserve P.S. 4’s NEST program.

Education in 2013: De Blasio says he will likely emphasize parental engagement and a less data-driven environment at Tweed in his pitch to voters next year. “The department’s narrow focus on a rigid notion of accountability based on high-stakes testing is doing kids a massive disservice. Every student deserves a well-rounded education from early child-care straight through to college and career prep,” he says.

Bloomfield’s analysis: “De Blasio probably has the most grassroots education experience of any prospective candidate, not only as a public school parent but as a past community school-board member. His challenge will be to move from advocacy, where he has had the luxury of throwing darts at mayoral decisions, to operational authority, where he will have to take
action regarding greater rein for his Panel for Educational Policy appointees, hard choices on school closures and co-locations, and applying budgetary discipline to such issues as class size and special education.”

To read the rest of the mayoral candidate profiles (including John Liu and Christine Quinn) visit City & State by clicking here.

The college’s main campus newspaper, The Dartmouth, recently published an article highlighting that fact, and also asked several students to weigh in with some armchair political analysis. One Republican student said he would support Gillibrand over Long, citing the Manhattan lawyer’s conservative stance on social issues.

Republicans are not whole-heartedly supporting Long over Gillibrand, according to students interviewed by The Dartmouth.

“I would probably support Gillibrand,” Megan Hassett ’15, a Republican from New York, said. “She’s done a good job representing her constituents.”

Hassett said that she would not support Long because she feels Long will focus too much on socially conservative issues, such as limiting access to abortion and birth control, rather than on economic issues like job creation.

“Long kind of scares me,” she said. “I definitely appreciate her values, but what we need right now is not what she’s offering. I want to be able to go back to New York after I graduate and get a job — that’s what matters, not access to birth control.”

Wendy Long.

Another student said that Long could end up being a formidable opponent, given her professional background as an advocate and political staffer.

“Wendy Long is formidable in the sense that she’s good on her feet, can debate well and can push buttons that other people can’t,” he said. “She comes out of the advocacy world, so she knows how to play that game.”

One commenter criticized the article for being too slanted toward Gillibrand.

“Could anyone read this and think it is a fair presentation of the two candidates? Anyone? This is as close to an outright attack on Wendy Long as could have been written. If the writers can’t produce a decent column, could the editors please give them a little help?”

While at Dartmouth, Gillibrand was an active member of the sorority Kappa Kappa Gamma and the honors society Phi Beta Kappa, graduating magna cum laude. Long was a staff member of the Dartmouth Review, a conservative student-run newspaper that regularly courted controversy.

To read more visit City & State at www.cityandstateny.com.

State Sen. Adriano Espaillat

Espaillat vs. Rangel Inches Closer to Reality
By Andrew J. Hawkins
When the state Legislature was battling over redistricting lines earlier this month, State Sen. Adriano Espaillat, who represents parts of the Upper West Side and Northern Manhattan, was assuring reporters that he wasn’t planning to jump into a congressional race. Now it looks like he’s changed his tune.

Rep. Charlie Rangel

Since petitioning began two weeks ago, Espaillat has already collected enough signatures to qualify for the ballot in the June primary contest against long-serving Rep. Charlie Rangel, his spokesman said last Tuesday.
“There is tremendous enthusiasm for Senator Espaillat’s candidacy, which is demonstrated by the fact that he’s already surpassed the number of signatures necessary to get on the ballot,” said spokesman Ibrahim Khan.
Khan said that the campaign would continue to collect signatures in anticipation of ballot challenges. He estimated that 35-50 volunteers were out in the newly drawn 13th congressional district collecting petitions for the senator.
Rangel has said repeatedly in the past few weeks that he intends to run for re-election. The congressman was recently slapped with a $23,000 fine from the Federal Elections Commission for running his re-election campaign out of his rent-stabilized apartment. He has also reportedly been recovering from back surgery, which has kept him away from Washington and out of the public eye.
Espaillat has yet to officially announce his candidacy, but a post-redistricting increase in the district’s Latino population, as well as his option to run for re-election to the State Senate if he loses the June congressional primary, all but assure that he’ll eventually jump in the race.
But Rangel is hardly down for the count. He scored his first political club endorsement last week and has been endorsed for re-election by Queens Democratic Party boss Rep. Joseph Crowley and State Sen. Ruben Diaz Sr.
In response to rumors floating around the political and media worlds that Rangel plans to win the seat and then retire in order to pave the way in a special election for his designated successor, Assemblyman Keith Wright, Rangel’s spokesman, Bob Liff, released a statement explicitly denying such motivations on behalf of the congressman.
“I am not in this race so I could politically manipulate the system. The constituents I have long served know, and those who I now seek to represent will learn, that I am a straight talker. Any rumors that say I’m not going to serve out a full term are false,” Rangel said in the statement.
“Again, I am absolutely running for re-election. I intend to serve my entire term. There is no wiggle room.”
Wright, the chair of the Manhattan Democratic Party, is overseeing Rangel’s petition gathering. He told City & State that the process was going “extremely well” and that he expected the congressman to have “quadruple the number” needed to qualify for the ballot. As for Espaillat’s challenge, Wright offered his best of luck.
“Let me just say this: Obviously he thinks he has a good chance of winning, and good luck to him,” Wright said. “That’s all I’m going to say.”
The race is setting up a potential clash between Harlem’s dwindling African American population and its growing Dominican one. If elected, Espaillat would be the first Dominican-American member of Congress from New York.

This story first appeared on the City & State website at cityandstateny.com.

“Say ‘Hi’ to Vinnie for me”

Those were the parting words of Judge Matthew Sciarino to Council Ydanis Rodriguez after dismissing charges of obstruction of justice and resisting arrest stemming from the councilman’s November arrest.

Sciarino, a criminal court judge who was transferred to Manhattan from Staten Island after posting revealing details about his life on Facebook, may have been referring to Jimmy Oddo and Vincent Ignizo, Rodriguez’s two Council colleagues from Staten Island. But Rodriguez couldn’t say, focusing his public comments more on the need for the City to respect the constitutional rights of Occupy Wall Street supporters like himself.

“Today, with the dismissal of my charges, I am calling on Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Commissioner [Ray] Kelly to spend those resources as is needed to protect our city from terrorist attack, keep our city safe, but also to defend our constitutional rights,” Rodriguez said outside the courthouse.

Rodriguez was arrested in the wake of the November 15 police sweep of Zuccotti Park that ended the first phase of the Occupy Wall Street movement. Rodriguez claims he was traveling to the park to observe the police action in his capacity as a Council member, but was detained and beaten by several police officers.

In court today, prosecutor Michele Bayer from the Manhattan district attorney’s office said that she doesn’t buy the councilman’s recollection of the events, but lacked the testimony, specifically from one female police officer, to try and convict him.

“As we don’t have the testimony of this specific female officer, we cannot prove the charges against this defendant beyond a reasonable doubt,” Bayer said. “Therefore, the People move to dismiss this case.”

Rodriguez’s lawyer, Andrew Stoll, said Bayer’s comments in court about finding “no evidence to corroborate” the councilman’s story were extraneous and unwarranted.

“This wasn’t the arena for them to make those comments,” Stoll said. “Those were gratuitous comments.”

Here’s the transcript of Bayer’s full comments from court:

To read the full article at City & State click here.

Given that Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s proposal this year raises education spending by 4 percent, an $805 million bump over last year, all the activity seemed a bit superfluous. But a brief glance at the fiscal woes of school districts across the state suggests otherwise.

Take the Haverstraw–Stony Point school district in northern Rockland County. It has lost $10 million in state aid over the last three years. It has laid off 118 staff members, and will lose another 17 teachers this year.

Two of the five elementary schools have closed, as well as one middle school. Ninth graders are being pushed from middle school into high school to save money. And $11.6 million of the district’s annual budget is tied up in an ongoing court settlement with a local utility company.

Students there can expect fewer sports programs, advanced-placement classes and music classes—and ongoing struggles to educate high-needs children.

“We have in a year’s time undergone an entire transformation,” said Deborah Gatti, president of the North Rockland Central School District. “We’re operating under an austerity system.”

And North Rockland isn’t alone. Dick Weisz, president of the Guilderland school board in Albany County, said his district has eliminated 40 teachers and 40 staff positions over the last two years, and they are still looking at a $2.6 million budget deficit.

“It’s a sobering time,” he said. “Fewer adults means less education.”

Many school districts are chafing under the 2 percent property tax cap Cuomo signed into law last year, as well as a host of mandates they say drive up costs for localities and force layoffs and other cutbacks.

Much of that anger boiled up during a meeting between school board representatives and Budget Director Robert Megna in early March. Board members complained it would be “political suicide” to submit budgets that exceeded the 2 percent cap. Megna encouraged them to negotiate concessions with their local unions.

Tim Kremer, executive director of the New York School Boards Association, said he apologized to Megna after the meeting.

“I just don’t think he was in his element,” Kremer said. “They were not appreciating his responses.”

The message, though, was loud and clear, Kremer said: “Now we’re in deep. And it does not appear anything will change for us in the near future. In fact, a lot of districts talk as if this is a permanent feeling, this particular recession. It feels like we’re not going to recover from it. As some of these smaller, poorer, rural school districts say, ‘There’s just no way out of this hole.’ ”

In a statement, Megna acknowledged that times were tough for schools around the state.

“The last few fiscal years have been difficult for all levels of government, and we are pleased to have offered a long term sustainable solution to school finance by pegging aid increases to personal income growth,” Megna said. “This will result in a School Aid increase of $805 million next year and more than $1.5 billion over the next two years, in addition to significant relief through pension reform.  Working together, we can direct more resources to where they are most needed – the classroom.”

Cuomo is pushing a $250 million competitive grant program as a way to spur cash-strapped school districts to explore cost savings and shared services as a way to reduce expenditures.

But school boards are urging the Legislature to scale back the performance grants, arguing many of the hardest-hit school districts lack the skills and staffers—like grant writers—to compete for that pot of money.

But other groups say the grants are the only way to encourage districts to take the necessary steps to consolidate back-office operations and save real money.

“There’s a status quo out there that’s done things traditionally the old way. This is a more innovative and newer program that, quite frankly, awards school districts based on merit,” said Elizabeth Ling, New York State director of Democrats for Education Reform.

“That can be threatening to the status quo,” she said. “Even though the amount is relatively small, it’s easy to focus on that, rather than making the system better.”

Both the Senate and the Assembly stripped the grant program from their one-house budget bills. But Ling said she is confident that the governor can convince lawmakers to restore the funding.

“There’s a lot of moving parts right now,” she said. “We’ll look to see how it works out.”

Speaker Quinn hugs Patricia Smith, daughter of Police Officer Moira Smith, who was killed on 9/11. Madison Square Park playground was renamed in honor of the fallen officer. Photo Credit: William Alatriste

Photographer William Alatriste sees the City Council in a different light

Photographing a politician behind a podium can be about as exciting as watching paint dry. Which is why the City Council’s official photographer, William Alatriste, tries to avoid those shots at all costs.

“Propaganda—I don’t do that,” Alatriste says. Alatriste started out at the City Council writing proclamations in 2002 and shifted to photography four years later. After years of watching the Council at work, he has launched a new project—online at nyccouncil.tumblr.com—to document a day in the life of each of the Council’s 51 members.

That can take him from the City Hall steps to a sidewalk in any neighborhood, where he has a rare ability to fi nd compelling human moments amid the endless hearings and news conferences that make up a politician’s day—catching the instant that makes a scripted event come alive.

“It’s my hope that some of my images reach beyond the often prosaic, one-dimensional ways that politicians are seen,” he said, “and show them in ways that are a bit more unguarded, engaging, and sincere.”

To read more from City & State click here.

By the end of next year, the outlines for the city’s much-touted high-tech campus will begin to appear on Roosevelt Island, a two-mile-long spit of land in the middle of the East River.

But before that can happen, the two institutes building the school—Cornell University and the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology—will need to build a curriculum, hire faculty, begin classes in temporary locations elsewhere and, perhaps most important, attempt to establish a relationship with residents of the so-called “small town” of Roosevelt Island.

Toward that end, Cornell officials are planning an April town hall meeting to present local residents their vision for the future. That vision is filled with sloped, glittery buildings, thousands of friendly geek neighbors, maybe the occasional river ferry and a less isolated community better integrated into the rest of New York.

Cathy Dove, newly named vice president of the tech campus and current associate dean of Cornell’s College of Engineering, said there was no time like the present to begin that process.

“You’re talking to the newest community member,” said Dove, who just moved to the Riverwalk building at the island’s southern end—though at first she mistakenly referred to her new home as “Rivergate.”

Dan Huttenlocher, the tech school’s new dean, said community outreach was an essential piece of the entire $2 billion development.

“Community relations is extremely important to us,” Huttenlocher said. “It’s something we view as part of our institutional DNA.”

Like all development projects big and small, the tech campus will need to traverse the city’s land-use process, where community board members and local officials will vet the project and determine its environmental impact.

Residents say they have many questions for Cornell and Technion, such as how much money the institutes are willing to spend to upgrade infrastructure and what they will do to help revitalize the island’s flagging retail sector. Most residents are excited to welcome their new neighbors but are wary about how the campus will affect their self-described “small town” community.

The president recently tapped the West Sider to co-chair a new joint mortgage fraud investigation unit, giving him access to more resources and more ground troops to go after fraud and abuse on Wall Street.
Schneiderman spoke to City & State about his new responsibilities, his predictions on a final settlement and his fluctuating relationship with Cuomo’s office.

City & State: Were you surprised by the president’s announcement?
Eric Schneiderman: We had been talking about the possibility for a joint collaboration for a long time, so I wasn’t surprised in that sense. I was pleased to be asked and honored to be asked, and [I’ve been] working very hard with my colleagues ever since.

C&S: Why now?
ES: From my point of view, when I took over as attorney general, I learned that there was a multistate investigation by a fairly large group of AGs, and that they were attempting to negotiate a settlement with a bunch of banks over abuses in the foreclosure process. I also learned that the banks, understandably enough, wanted as broad of a release as possible that grants them immunity from all of their alleged misconduct. Stuff that had nothing to do with foreclosure abuses, things that created the bubble in the housing market and brought about the crash.
I took a hard line that we shouldn’t release that sort of conduct and we shouldn’t release claims that haven’t been investigated, and started my own investigation. Over the course of going back and forth with my federal counterparts about our investigation and their efforts to negotiate a settlement, it became clear that there were some areas that we could do a lot of really good work on if we collaborated.
The goals of the effort really are to establish accountability and hold people accountable, those who caused this harm—make sure we get relief to the millions of people who are injured. In New York, one in 10 homes is headed toward foreclosure. Nationally, there are 15 million families that are underwater. That means their homes are worth less than the mortgages they’re trying to carry.

C&S: Does this change the dynamics of the negotiations for a settlement?
ES: I think the settlement has been steadily improving since this process started. Most significantly, the releases have been narrowed to give us the ability to pursue the investigation and accountability and relief for those who were injured, both borrowers and investors, people who bought these bad securities, which included a lot of pension funds and mutual funds.
This was caused by human conduct. This was caused by reckless deregulation and some people just being too greedy for their own good. Brought down the economy, threw millions of people out of work. We intend to hold them accountable and get the facts out, so history doesn’t repeat itself.

C&S: Why the shift from the White House on mortgage fraud?
ES: I can’t say why they’re doing what they’re doing. Maybe they got fed up with their attempts at bipartisan collaboration with people who refuse to collaborate. It certainly made sense as our conversations emerged, just on the merits, that a joint investigation was the right way to proceed. I do think the president is reacting partly to the overreaching on the other side. That’s really what the debate is about, if you boil it down, in Washington. This is a debate over whether we should have the same set of rules for everyone—everyone should pay their fair share, get a fair shot, which is really what the president said in his speech.

C&S: Are you optimistic about the outcome?
ES: We’re still working out details of the settlement. As far as the releases go, I do feel comfortable that the final releases will enable our joint investigation to proceed.

—Andrew J. Hawkins
ahawkins@cityandstateny.com

This first appeared in City & State. For more local politics, visit cityandstateny.com