Public Advocates Race- Who Is Running And Who Has Signed Our Defending Libraries Letter of Support (Plus, Very Important, Who Is Taking Real Estate Money!)

Who is running for NYC Public Advocate and more . . .

The whole race for NYC Public Advocate is sort of ridiculous at the moment.

There is no time for anyone to find out about the election (it’s on Tuesday the 26th of this month), figure out who is running, or to campaign and say what their positions are.  It is also for a stub term that will be over almost instantaneously.  The next election for the office basically starts as soon as this one ends.

Lastly, it is a shrieking advertisement for why we should have instant runoff voting.  With seventeen candidates (still) running it is a circular firing squad where candidates advertising similar positions will execute each other.  The winner could conceivable win with less than 10% of the vote (more likely it will be with a little over 20%).  A good Republican can be better than a bad Democrat (we don't want to be in any way prejudiced), but with only one Republican running, he may be the winner just because he is a Republican even though no candidate is allowed to run as either a Republican or a Democrat.

What may be more important is how quickly any winner of that office can do something that makes fireworks to set themselves up for the next election for that office.  That includes potentially doing something for libraries and doing the things that protects the city’s populace against the real estate industry, protecting the public realm, public places and maintaining a livable city with human dimension and scale for its residents.

We have written before about the importance of the office of NYC Public Advocate when our libraries are under threat.  Further, one of the prominent and obvious forces in the panoply of forces arraying to threaten libraries, is the real estate industry that spends so copiously to buy off our elected officials.  Information about which of the Public Advocates candidates are taking money from that industry and which of them are taking in the biggest and most troubling ways is available on an article in the Villager by Lynn Ellsworth of New Yorkers For a Human Scale New York (see- Wanted: Candidates who’ll fight big real estate, February 11, 2019) and in a related study she has published on the numbers (see- Follow the Money and the Voting Records:  Public Advocates Race . . .Candidates Who Participated in the First Debate  2/6/19- It uses cute little face icons as a guide to the ext and analysis).

In the Villager article Ms. Ellsworth says the race is lowering her expectations about what is in store for our future because the “race is rife with term-limited politicians, machine pols and recipients of real estate money.”

After a few curt remarks about the effect real estate money has already had on candidates in the huge field that is running Ellsworth says:

The sniff test of “who takes real estate money and who doesn’t” leaves a few candidates standing: David Eisenbach, Nomiki Konst, Dawn Smalls and Ben Yee — and to a lesser extent Kim and O’Donnell. The two women, Smalls and Konst, passed the first of the Campaign Finance Law’s funding thresholds and got into the public debate.

In the bad-news-might-be-good-news department, the most encouraging thing that can be teased out of this overall perplexing situation is that because very few people will vote and know about the election and the candidates, those who do may have significant extra sway over the results.  We encourage you to vote.  Just as important: Let the candidates you are voting for (and not voting for) because of their positions with respect to libraries and the real estate industry know about how those issues have directed your vote.

Right now a number of the candidates have signed the Citizens Defending Libraries letter of support:

Support and Sign-On Letter: Full and Adequate Library Funding, A Growing System, Transparency, Books and Librarians.

(We will be sending the information out to our multi-thousand list soon- plus potentially updating this post- so if you wish to exercise influence on any non-signers to tell them to get down to business please do.)

Public Advocate candidate signers are (roughly in order of quickness of response and enthusiasm):

David Eisenbach (who has written a letter about his support for libraries)
Nomiki D. Konst
Benjamin L. Yee
Jared Rich
Rafael L. Espinal

Non-signers are:

Melissa Mark-Viverito (She has actively ignored all our reach outs)
Yandis Rodriguez (Not likely to come around to signing since he secretly set up sale of Inwood Library)
Jumaane D. Williams (A front runner who should be signing and abstained on the City Council vote on the Brooklyn Heights Library sale as we recall)

And the others who have not gotten back to us:

Michael A. Blake
(Anthony) Tony Herbert
Ron Kim
Daniel (Danny) J. O’Donnell
Dawn L. Smalls
Latrice Walker
Eric A. Ulrich
A. Manny Aliccandro
Helal Abu Sheikh

Candidates who dropped out and are now irrelevant are:

Theo Chino
Daniel Christmann
Ifeoma Ike
Diane Savino
Gwenn Goodman
Michael Zumbluskas
Raphael Schweizer